The Joe Rogan Experience - #1320 - Eric Weinstein

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and economist, and he is also the managing director at Thiel Capital. He is the host of the podcast "The Portal" available on Spotify.

create but without bullshit it's very important when you recreate you have no bullshit so it's eric weinstein not weinstein yeah i think it was originally weinstein weinstein stain oh weinstein yeah german yeah but uh ja it was uh we we came from a uh town between Odessa and Kiev called Uman, and that's where the Weinstein family came from. We talked about how many people mispronounce Weinstein instead of Weinstein. It's epidemic, and yet nobody ever says Albert Einstein. Yes. Strange, right? That is a weird one. nobody ever says Albert Einstein. Yes. That's, yeah. Strange, right?

That is a weird one. The Einstein is, no. Is there a guy named Mike, oh, Mike Einstein. No, no, no. Einstein. Is there a guy like that? Do you remember the old, what was it? Blazing Saddles with- Sure.

Mel Brooks. Yeah, Mel Brooks. And Harvey Korman's character was it was hedley lamar and everyone would call him heady lamar and it was like the running joke in the picture well that's right i fucking loved mel brooks movies you remember the yiddish speaking indians that that had to be the best oh yeah that's right he had some great movies man there's fun fucking movies man just silly fun outrageous movies yeah i mean Just silly, fun, outrageous movies. Yeah.

I mean, he was transitional, right? I guess it was the Borscht Belt being updated for the modern era. Yeah. Into film. Yeah. But it was also, it was, you know, for the time, much more contemporary, but with that sort of Borscht Belt sort of sticky sort of. Right. but with that sort of borscht belt sort of sticky sort of.

Right. And the writer's room, I guess, from Sid Caesar's show of shows was this legendary factory before Saturday Night Live for all of these kind of crazy talents behind the scenes. I think he came out of that with Carl Reiner. Oh, that makes sense. How old is Mel Brooks now? I don't want to ask the question because maybe something will happen. I know, right?

It's one of the, I think I saw recently that he turned 93 and I thought, shit, is he dead? Like Mel, you know, because they were saying all these great things, Mel Brooks. I'm like, fuck, did we lose Mel Brooks? But it's like one of those things where is it, it's going to happen. I mean, he's 93. I know, but every time it does i know i mean i guess uh who betty white is another one of these people right right and so we need these very exotic links to our past um and they become more important as time goes on if they're still

vital because you know we want desperately to be connected to something before our current era, given that I think a lot of us sort of don't believe in anything that happened before Google. Imagine kids today. Imagine trying to describe to kids today what it was like to grow up without the internet. Yeah, or not being able to reach people. You have to make extensive plans, backup plans. If you're not there at this time. Yeah, you used being able to reach people. You have to make extensive plans, backup plans. Well, if you're not there at this time.

Yeah, you used to have to yell. Open out your window and yell for your friends. I remember when I first got an answering machine. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. When I was in high school, my family got an answering machine. And I was like, this is incredible. And you would leave stupid music to let everybody know you were cool. Like you have some cool music.

Like, hey, it's Joe. Not here right now. But if you leave a message, I'll get back to you. Probably. And then you've got old people who are, I think someone in my family still has one of these cutesy messages from the late 80s. Really? Yeah. On their voicemail.

But then who leaves voicemail? And the thing that marks me as an old person is that I actually call people. But that's, I like that. I've been doing that more lately. Yeah. I call a lot of people now. I just feel like it's just, it's better.

The texting thing, the problem is, it's very interesting how we separated ourselves into this uh the this electronic communication world where i will during the day be in communication almost constantly with a stream of people the only thing that stops it is a podcast podcast is my my rest for three hours i'm not talking to anybody other than you so all all those texts that come through, I'll get to the end of the podcast. I'll go and look at my phone. There'll be 40 texts sometimes.

Like, this is madness. If I had to make 40 phone calls, it would be impossible to manage. It would be calls would constantly be coming in. You'd never really be able to say anything. So we're feeding into this weird loop where we just have these short- things right like hey dinner tomorrow sure what time how about nine i can do seven okay let's do it you know what i mean it's like these weird little bursts of information you ever see uh remember this program california and what was it called uh was it californication that's that wasn't show with the yeah with the david dukovny right

so there's the scene where he's having some really hot intergenerational sex and this gal says like lol and it kills it said it out loud she said it she says lol and he loses total interest there's no amount of of heat in the moment that can compensate for the fact that she's using verbal emojis. Hmm. Well, he needs to fucking get over that. It depends on how hot she is. And it also depends on how you say it. If she's really funny, she's like, LOL.

And she's being silly. You know who I learned that from? I learned that from Jim Norton. Jim Norton will always say, LOL. He'll say something really ridiculous will always say, LOL. He'll say something really ridiculous and then say, LOL. But he's just mocking himself. Pete When you're over 50, it's intrinsically ironic. Pete Right, right.

Pete But in terms of this weird thing about islands of time, one of the things that we do is we have Shabbat dinner. And every Friday, no matter how atheist and militant people are against any kind of organized religion, they will leave us alone if we say we're going into Shabbat. And so there's this thing about like people will pester me in all sorts of situations, but if I invoke something that is vaguely religious, even Sam Harris probably wouldn't call me during that period of time. So I find that very interesting. Could you create a religion that was simply there to make sure that you had some time offline?

Yeah, I know if I text Ben Shapiro, I'm not getting a text back on Saturday until it's dark. Yep. But when it's dark, he texts you back. No, as soon as there are three stars in the sky, there's Ben on Twitter. He's like, what did I miss? That's so weird. It's so weird that people buy i mean in on one hand i think it's probably a really good idea to just take a break from all that electronic shit and just connect with humans in a very old school type of way i I think it's probably very good for you. Or connect with yourself. I had this experience.

I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years, and we landed in this Orthodox-run hotel, and on Friday night, everything shut down, like the textbook. And I then moved into an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood right on the boundary of a place where the secular and the Orthodox met. And what was really fascinating to me is I started telling people, you know, you'd never think that it's great not to be able to find a restaurant or a nightclub. But it's amazing that this is enforced downtime.

And about a month in, somebody said, oh, you're in the wrong place. Of course you can go out on Friday night. You just go to the Russian compound and everything's hopping and you can go dancing and drinking and all these things. After I knew that, I went dancing and drinking and I was much less happy

than believing that somehow Israel actually shut down on Friday nights. And so very weirdly, I appreciated the constraint. As soon as I knew you could break the constraint, I was less happy and I would never actually obey it anymore. Yeah, I think having a rigid rule, even though it seems like counterintuitive in that like it would provide you some freedom by having restrictions, but it does. It gives you some freedom like okay like now we

don't have to think about all these other things so now we have the freedom to just be alone now we have the freedom to be relaxed now we have the freedom to just talk to human beings you know i think constraints and it's like do you know jocko is jocko willing totally everybody knows jocko um discipline equals freedom discipline equals freedom it doesn't seem like that makes sense like this motherfucker's up at 4 30 in the morning throwing heavy weights around grunting and acting like a savage running goes out to the beach and he earns the sunrise every morning goes out and takes photos you know takes a photo of his fucking watch at 4 30 hits the gym like a savage and then takes a

photo sometimes of the sunrise earning the sunrise and like but you would think god is like a prison to like force yourself into that but no no he knows there's freedom in that because he knows he doesn't have to make any decisions at 4 30 he knows what he's gonna do knows what he's gonna do you just you just go do it and that way i mean you look at the guy he's a fucking tank why is he a tank because he's always up at 4 30 fucking throwing weights around it just doesn't he never stops he never never takes never takes self-indulgent time to lay in bed and beat off and pick his nose and and then fucking check his text messages listening to this right now and thinking maybe i do a little bit of that i don't think he does really no total discipline yeah well did you i think i remember reading um his inner dialogue about going to a birthday party and breaking down and having a scoop of

ice cream or something or slice of pie and it's like you know the drama of, there it was. Temptation. I held out for 45 minutes. But eventually, I became weak. Yeah, I don't fuck with that. I just do it. If I'm in a party, I just eat that cake. I mean, I just feel like I do enough. I'm all right. I'll be fine.

There's this story about Jackie O that she got this cancer diagnosis. And apparently, her first words upon finding out that she had metastatic cancer was, then what did I do all those sit-ups for? Isn't that an interesting comment? That's an interesting comment. She thought if someone needs to talk to her, JFK was keeping her in the dark. Is that right? Yeah, it must be.

What's happening over there, Jamie? Something up with the TV? Yeah, like telling her that sit-ups you want you want no cancer sit-ups that's the way to do it I guess I don't know I mean I think I think we all we have so many days of our lives that we build this pattern that this is going to go on forever and there's some first moment I think I recall it where the phrase popped into my head I can see my death from here and it has has to do, you know, there's like this weird thing when you hit 40, you start to be able to have analytic thoughts that are

uninterrupted by sex. Really? Yeah. I don't know. When I turned 40, I found that some aspect of thinking too much about sexuality definitely decreased. And then you start to realize, like, when your testosterone starts to go down, you don't feel like yourself. Yeah, you become a different thing. Yeah. Yeah, when your chemical composition changes, the way your body feels changes, the way you interface with the world changes. Like, I wasn't feeling all that great yesterday,

and I was sort of clowning around with the person behind the bar at starbucks and she said oh why are you down i said i don't know just tell me something nice about my hair you know and she says she looks at me she says oh it's i love salt and pepper i thought damn oh really worst is that what you barely salt and pepper i can barely see any she's there. Yeah, she's talking about the salt. She's bullshitting you. No, she just didn't want me flirting with her, so she just shut me down by saying, you want me to talk about your hair? Okay, you crossed the threshold. Here it comes.

That's all right. Yeah, as soon as someone says, say something nice, that could get ugly for a girl. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and she was in a captive situation. It wasn't being fair to her. Oh, yeah, right? That was the worst when someone stuck

behind a bar we'd established a rapport before that actually i actually think she thought it was a kind and sensitive comment but but i don't see any salt i'm looking now i'm just fishing john there's some believe there might be a few in there but not like somebody's gonna screenshot it and they're gonna count all the hairs with arrows This is something I've learned when you come on your show, that your audience is so large and active that they will pinpoint every timestamp. Yeah, there's a lot of people in cubicles right now wasting their employer's time. To those people, we salute you. Cheers. I should say for the folks at home That before we started this

You asked me Did I want Laird Hamilton coffee And I said Laird Hamilton coffee What's Laird Hamilton coffee And you gave me something Laced with turmeric Yeah

Which may turn our lips funny colors So if Nah it doesn't No I drink it every day Alright It's fine Alright It's really good though

But it does give you a little phlegm A little A little bit of that. Because it's got all sorts of MCT oil and all sorts of great stuff in there. Laird Hamilton's a real freak. Really interesting guy. What a pioneer. Yeah.

Just talking to him and hanging out with him and seeing how his brain works. You got to do that. Yeah, I'm on the podcast. Yeah. It was really, really fun. So did you, what is he okay this is something i'm totally curious about i don't surf but because surfing is in my estimation going through some kind of a renaissance right now i'm super keen to understand what the series

of innovations are given that lots of other things aren't innovating at anything like the surfing innovation rate well the big one is that new type of surfboard. What the hell is that called? It's like a sail? The foil? Foil. Yeah, foil. That thing is amazing.

And it's so weird looking. If you look at it, you're like, what are you standing on? Why is it elevated? What is that? It's a magic carpet of the sea. Let's be honest. That's what it is. And I am obsessed.

I was asking you before. Yeah. sea let's be honest that's what it is and i am obsessed i was asking him before yeah um there's this guy kai lenny who for me is just redefining surfing by taking these monster waves and he's turning them into his private little skate park and doing tricks off the top of skyscraper waves and i'm just thinking do you even know what you're doing or where you are? And he keeps saying this one phrase, which is I'm just scratching. What blows my mind is I'm just scratching the surface. He knows that he's making that discontinuous jump.

And if you think about sport from the perspective of when did things just change like almost overnight, Bob Beeman arguably is one of the great moments in all of sporting history. And it happens in the long jump just because you have an incremental sport that suddenly, you know, somebody jumps a foot more than anyone's ever jumped before or something like that. So it's really interesting when somebody changes the game. It is. And when you find out that there's stuff that you can do in other sports, like skate sports, like different crazy flips and stuff, and someone figures out how to do that on a wave, the consequences are so fucking grave. If you make a mistake and you're on an 80-foot wave and that bitch comes slamming down on you.

But part of the innovation is safety, right? Right. With these vests. Inflatable vests, yeah. is safety right like with these vests inflatable vests and with these water water safety courses for big wave surfers um i think that what's fascinating is you think the innovation is in the tricks maybe but maybe the innovation is actually in hey you can afford a two-wave hold down in a way you couldn't before or you're going to survive all sorts of things that might have been fatal right right so you have this open area to innovate yeah that makes i mean

surfing's fascinating to me i don't do it i haven't done it but i went snorkeling when i was in hawaii last uh a couple weeks ago and i'm such a pussy i'm just i'm snorkeling with my kids right so of course like i'm trying to figure out how to be the the mama duck and like corral everybody so if the sharks come and it gets me i'm just trying to i'm just looking around because some guy got he got jacked um i think snorkeling in maui just a couple months ago, like right off of a resort. Tiger shark, probably. Yeah, probably. Yeah.

Just. Yeah. Well, so, yeah. Some lady got it yesterday. Not yesterday. A couple days ago in, was it the Bahamas? Three sharks. One took her arm off and the other two just ripped her apart in front of everybody.

College kid from yeah from california well i'm very interested in situations that change with sharks like reunion for example in the indian ocean off of madagascar used to be a surfing hot spot and they had a bull shark problem where the bull sharks just sort of learned how to eat humans or attack humans but the great thing is we have got some weird thing going on with the true apex predator of the seas, which is the orca. We have one recorded bite in the wild ever. Now, how does this make any sense?

Like great whites are not apex predators because orcas will just take them out. And I had this poll on Twitter the other day, which is orcas, colon, best species ever was number one. Then the other possibility was the dicks of the deep because they're such assholes. I didn't know that there was a recorded bite of anyone in the wild. I thought it was all in captivity. No, there was a surfer who got a bite. Really?

Yeah. But, you know, on the other hand, how are you going to make contact if you're an orca? You don't have opposable thumbs. It might be, for all I know. I mean, look. Well, it has to be a joke because otherwise the guy would be dead. I mean, if an orca wanted to kill you and you're in the water, that's like if you let an ant go. Okay, but why have orcas never attacked us?

There's so many recorded instances of swimmers, paddleboarders, surfers running into orcas. Some weird thing is going on, and we have to work this out, Joe. Yeah, let's try. And a big fucking shout out to Canada because Canada mostly probably through the noise that my friend Phil Demers has created in trying to get marine land shut down. Canada has banned all orca and all dolphin captivity. It's amazing. And I hope the United States does it as well. I hope it goes worldwide. I think it's slavery. I really do.

I think it's a different kind of slavery. They're almost us. They're like a cross between us and wolves in the ocean. Well, they just don't have the ability to manipulate their environment. But they have a cerebral cortex, a dolphin does. It's 40% larger than a human being's. What is going on there? The cerebral cortex, there's thinking happening there.

Really complex, high-level thinking. Am I right that they have menopause? Like they're essentially the only other species with menopause. And you're only going to get menopause likely if females are contributing some sort of like intellectual labor past their reproductive horizon. How is that? Because I thought menopause was just a shift in the hormonal balance of the female. What is the purpose evolutionarily

of continuing life beyond the ability to reproduce? That's a good point because that's not the case in mammals. In mammals, deer in particular can breed deep into their old, old age.

Well, if you have a resource that's limiting, you'd be better off in terms of systems of selective pressures of shifting something that is continuing past that point. You know, this is the old point about, I think it was Henry Ford who used to go to the dump to see what broke down on the cars and what was still working. And it would transfer materials and resources from things that were dependably found to work to the things that would be the limiting feature that would break so that the cars would all break down sort of uniformly at the end. And you see this like with salmon, where salmon disintegrate because it's a discretized reproductive strategy. No salmon is going to make another run. So you might as well go out in a blaze of glory.

Right. Yeah. That's interesting. They also have a massive infanticide. That's the horrible thing about dolphins. They're ruthless. They kill their babies. The male dolphins will kill female dolphins' babies in order to force them into estrus.

And the strategy that the female dolphins have acquired to mitigate that is that they become sluts. Because the male dolphins don't know whether or not the female's baby is theirs. Because they don't have 23andMe under the ocean. So what happens is the female will have sex with as many males as she can yeah so that way she's protected and her child is protected because then all the males think it could possibly be their baby they don't want to kill their own baby which is really interesting that they differentiate because many mammals that also participate in this don't like bears don't differentiate between their their babies and

someone else's babies so the females and you know if she's carrying around cubs the male will try to kill and eat the cubs so to force her back in the estrus and perhaps just even for food because they're so ruthless and cannibalistic right but dolphins who we think of as our beautiful charming wonderful little buddies in the water, they kill babies. They kill baby dolphins. Well, and killer whales are, of course, dolphins. Yes, they're a type of dolphin. So, you know, the issue is, you know, I think about why do we not get attacked?

It's like professional courtesy. Assholes recognize assholes. I don't know, man, but every time I go to Hawaii, we swim with – we either not swim with dolphins, but if you're in a boat and you go fishing, the dolphins find the boat and they swim with the boat. I've never done that. Oh, dude, it's – here, I'll show you a little video. It's kind of wild because what they do is they literally go and they hang out with the wave of your boat. So as your boat is tuning along they they they ride the wake they figure out a way how to do that they figure out a way to get in front of the boat and

as the boat is pushing the water they just sort of it like helps them along almost like reverse drafting like because they're kind of in front of it so as you're pushing the water let me find it here it's really interesting man They're an incredible Little animal I mean it's so Here it goes See that's us In the boat That's way cool

Yeah Isn't that wild It's just wild They just hang out with you I mean wild Fucking dolphins Middle of the ocean They don't know you

You could be an asshole They trust you enough to They're trying to get Our technology Joe They want ocean. They don't know you. You could be an asshole. They trust you enough to. They're trying to get our technology, Joe. They want the boats. I don't think so. You don't think so? They think we're trapped by that shit. They're laughing at us.

Hey, watch this. We can do this. Yeah, they don't have to carry anything. We're carrying everything. By ourselves, we're almost useless. Naked, useless. We have to have clothes. You have to carry the clothes.

You have to have shoes. That's how we roll, man. We're extended phenotype guys. Yes. They think we're fools. We have to have clothes. You have to carry the clothes. You have to have shoes. That's how we roll, man. We're extended phenotype guys. Yes. They think we're fools. They think we're fools. Yeah. They're out there with free food.

They don't have to worry about carrying credit cards and Bitcoin and all that nonsense. They're out there in the ocean. I bet they have Bitcoin. Bitcoin or the deep ash. I don't think they do. I think they're probably pretty pissed that we've killed all the fish, though. Yeah? I think that the orcas figured out how to use our fishing boats and just wait for us to get stuff on the line.

And then they're like, oh, cool, thank you for organizing my dinner. Well, some orcas are not that smart because they're not adapting. There's a particular pod in the Pacific Northwest that relies on Chinook salmon. Oh, yeah. And they're trying to figure out a way because the salmon population is massively depleted due to a bunch of different factors, including they put dams up and they've done a bunch of stupid shit that they didn't. They did a long time ago and they didn't really understand the consequences of it. It's really been devastating to the salmon population up there, and Chinook salmon in particular, because this is what these orcas eat. Now, they also have this migratory pod that comes in that relies on marine mammals, and the migratory pod is doing great.

They're doing great. They're eating all the seals, and they're having a good old time. But for whatever reason, the pod that stays in that area doesn't want to eat marine mammals. They only want to eat Chinook salmon. So they're fucking literally starving to death. You know, I think they read this book on fix versus growth mindset. And the transitory transient pods are like, hey, every day is a new day. We could do something different.

The other ones are like, no, I'm kind of a creature of habit. You know, they're maybe the salmon are coming back. They just have a very specific diet that they just won't deviate from which i think i find to be really weird what is it that pod's missing right now because they're probably all dead they haven't they haven't been seen in over three weeks which is the longest they have been gone for oh washington's resident orcas go missing oh yeah i remember remember that no new babies had been born in the Puget Sound area. I hope they're not dead. Man, that's horrible.

I don't know. It's just sad because they can't figure out a way how to teach them to eat marine animals. There's all these different strategies. They've tried to figure out a way to teach them to eat seals, but they're not interested. And they've also decided to try to figure out a way to farm-raise Chinook salmon and reintroduce them to that area. But then again, you have to, like, how do you designate those salmon specifically for the orcas and not for fishermen?

Like, what do you do when people, you know, they catch fish? What do you do? Do you tell them, put it back? It's for the orca? Hmm? Yeah. Joe, I don't have any actual expertise in this area me neither i'm just talking well you know we went down to uh hearst castle and there's this elephant seal colony there and my family decided that this is the worst species ever of mammal elephant seals oh man they're horrible like first of all in terms of sexual dynamics you know one beach master he's got a couple

lieutenants who are trying to take over his role and the the lieutenant seemingly can have sex with one or two of the females like not too much but this is enough to keep him happy yeah yeah right and then the beach masters have to fight each other and they're all these dead babies all over the beach because the giant bulls just trample them on their way to fights. Oh. Right. And so then you have like the females, if they lose the pup, they've got to get rid of their milk so they steal somebody else's baby so the whole thing if you transpose like human if you anthropomorphize you just think these people are horrible this is a crack house on the beach and there's no way how do we get some great whites in and remove these mammals immediately they're making the family look bad yeah maybe we could get the orcas to start eating them that's right yeah because orcas are we have a deal yeah and it's a big animal so it's a good meal

look at those dead babies that is so fucked up i don't know if they're all dead but they might be yeah and they are lazy they are not an industrious i mean they are when they're in the sea but when they're just on land oh they're just laying there oh they're not dead they're just chilling yeah they're chilling look how many of them there are Well you've seen when Orcas do beach themselves To get those things right It's wild Yeah

It's wild It's right on the edge They hydroplane onto And then they waddle back in Look how like scratched up they are From the ground and everything It's a weird looking animal too What a weird fucking thing that is

William Brandoff Hearst Was a real piece of shit he really was you know he's the reason why we have wild pigs in california that dipshit imported wild boars and released him on his property so you can hunt them yeah okay so we're driving down the highway and my son says look dad wild zebras i said haha son that's very cute he says no no really and i look up and there's a herd of wild zebras what hearst castle has they closed down the zoo they let the zebras out we have a herd of wild zebras in california that no one told me about shut the fuck up are you serious i've won the

joe rogan experience i finally told you something you don't know anything about especially about invasive wildlife yeah that's crazy so zebras in california does that change your mind a little bit on mr hearst uh no he's a piece of shit all right he well that he's he's one of the main reasons why marijuana became illegal was he smoking too much? composition for nylon and when it was a combination of several factors and the decorticator was invented decorticator was a way that they could effectively process hemp fiber without the use of slavery see the reason why they switched over from hemp clothing and hemp sales and canvas canvas which is actually

comes from the word cannabis all canvas was made from hemp yes I did not all that stuff is made from hemp it's i did not all that stuff is made from hemp it's far superior to uh cotton far superior in terms of strength in terms of its durability better than jute i don't know what jute is jute is what burlap bag like oh yeah jude is way better than that stuff okay no hemp is a alien plant it's. If you had a piece of hemp, like the stalk of hemp, and you cut it into boards like this table, it would be as hard as this oak, but as light as balsa wood. It's incredibly strange. I've seen the actual stalk of a hemp tree when it gets really big,

and you'll have it thick around like like a man's shoulder right but it weighs like nothing it's really strange it's a strange strange plant not like any other plant it has all the essential amino acids it contains protein you can cook with the oil the oil can sustain you it's got essential fatty acids no wonder we have to ban it oh it's a fucking amazing amazing plant all right but anyway um they came out with this decorticator and the decorticator because the the way they used to do it it was like a very labor-intensive process of breaking down the hemp fiber and turning it into something that you can make clothes with and paper so popular science magazine in see if you could find the cover of this in like the 19 early 1930s had a

cover that said hemp the new billion dollar crop and because they had this decorticator right so william randolph hearst on top of having hearst publications right he also had paper mills because you know he had a he wanted to make his own paper So he had these forests and he had paper and he would make paper out of wood. There it is. Well, does it say, there's a cover of it though that says hemp, hemp the new billion dollar crop.

That's just the inside part of it. See if you can find it. Anyway, so William Randolph Hearst would have had to have shift over because hemp paper, I don't know if you ever played with it. No. It's incredibly durable.

It's crazy. It's hard to tear. It's really fucking strong. It's a fucking alien plant. There's nothing like it. It's so weird. You see a piece of paper, you think, oh, look at this light piece of paper. I could tear it.

No, no, no. Fucking really durable. So they were saying this was going to replace all paper that's made out of wood and william randolph hearst was like slowly roll bitches i got an idea so he starts putting together all these stories about mexicans and blacks that are smoking this drug called marijuana and they're raping white women and when congress made marijuana illegal they probably didn't even understand that it was hemp because it was the same goddamn thing marijuana was a mexican slang for tobacco for a wild tobacco so they repurposed this name and called it this this plant called

this marijuana like it was this gigantic conspiracy so that this fucking piece of shit could save money. All right. That's really what it was, because he had access. He was like the YouTube and the Google of, you know. He belonged with those elephants. The 1930s. He did belong with those.

He had access. He was the one who could decide what gets distributed. And so he, and that was a big part of the whole reefer madness film campaign and all that shit all that stuff was all about economics the whole thing was about economics american farmers are promised a new cash crop with an annual value of several hundred million dollars all because of a machine has been invented which solves problems more than 6 000 years old it is hemp a crop that will not compete

with other american products instead it will displace imports of raw material and manufactured products produced by underpaid peasant and cooley labor cooley labor wow what does that mean i don't even know what that means let's not talk about it 2019 no no it will provide thousands of jobs for american workers throughout the land so this was all in february 1938 they thought they were gonna they were gonna change the world with this shit and then you had all these people that were a part of the whole prohibition for alcohol they just shifted those motherfuckers over to hemp i mean think about it's like over the period of you know 10 15 years if you had 10 15 15 years ago, we're talking about 2004, you had a bunch of people

from the Bush administration that were really into banning certain drugs and you still have them hanging around, a la that dipshit that was the Attorney General for a while.

What the fuck's his name? That little weasel? The little weasel that Trump got rid of? Sessions? That piece of shit? That guy. Same thing.

Same thing. These little weasels. Good people don't smoke marijuana. Well, you you know he's a viper he's a viper isn't that what they used to call people who smoked weed back in the old days yeah he's not smoking any weed look anytime i see somebody who's really against homosexuality oh yeah i said a clock yeah right yeah and you you have to ask yourself who in the modern era like i found it astounding that when elon came on this program and had a blunt that like it was an issue yeah and can you imagine if like elon had had a glass of chardonnay well he did yeah i know but the

just the fact that our language and our thought process around this. Right. I see what you're saying. I had a dinner at our house a while ago where we took some of the most knowledgeable people on psychedelics and related substances to just have a discussion about what is the state of Schedule I pharmacology. And we asked a question. Of the interesting substances, what are the three that you find were most informative in terms of self-revelation, changing your understanding for the better, et cetera? I was astounded that of the people who seemed to be very knowledgeable about mind-altering substances, almost everyone put cannabis in the top three. Why? Because it's so... Well, I thought it would be sort of commonplace. I wouldn't have guessed.

Somebody would say 5-MeO-DMT, somebody else would say ketamine, somebody else would say would say um you know lsd or dmt or ayahuasca um but the common thread throughout all of these people who were many of them were researchers um was that they felt that cannabis was a miraculous substance well it certainly is well the the the deal is it has two different forms right it has a smokable form which you know you can get fucking high, or it has the edible form, which is like a psychedelic. Yeah, but it's like a psychedelic. It's very much so. It actually is more psychoactive. There's something called 11-hydroxymetabolite that is only present when you eat it.

I see. It's processed by the liver. There's something called a one-pass. present when you eat it i see it's processed by the liver there's something called a one pass and when it goes through the liver it produces this 11 hydroxy metabolite that's somewhere between four and five times more psychoactive than thc and it's responsible for people thinking that they got dosed like a lot of times when people eat edibles they go oh my god this isn't pot something's in there well it's just the 11 hydroxy metabolite that's what it is it's not about it yeah it's way different it's way different like that Well, it's just the 11-hydroxymetabolite. That's what it is. It's way different.

It's way different. That's why it's confusing to people. Like, oh, I can't fuck with edibles. It's a different drug. It's a different drug. Because 11-hydroxymetabolite is not present in psychoactive form when you smoke it. So when you eat it, that's when you get that really fucking weird body high and interdimensional relationship is it better worse is it more interesting well for the tank it's bueno it's

the best for the isolation tank that's my favorite my favorite is a good stiff dose of an edible of an edible and then you know wait about 45 minutes and then get in the tank so because 45 minutes it's like the way i describe it is like with certain psychedelic drugs, and I do consider edible marijuana psychedelic, especially when you get into the 100 milligram, 200 milligram doses, it's very psychedelic. And especially in the tank, because in the tank, when in the absence of any visual stimulation,

when your eyes are closed, you have wild almost like neon visuals like i start you start seeing these strange dancing cartoons and like weird weird shit unrelated to other substances you can get similar situations on other psychedelics especially in the tank the tank is a really unique way to experience anything even even normal psych like the the normal state the normal state of consciousness that you have without any drugs at all inside the tank it transforms right because in the absence of any sensory input and you don't have anything coming your way you don't feel your skin your brain starts really getting free and loose and you start you it gets very confusing as to what's reality and what's not what are the boundaries of of vision and interpretation and just creativity like how much of this is your imagination how

much of this is not well you How much of this is not? When you add any sort of psychedelic to that tank experience, everything gets ramped up. It's like you add some drugs. When you mix them with other drugs, they become way more potent. That's what happens in the tank. The tank in and of itself

is some kind of a drug or it produces some kind of profound drug-like effects like can it be banned the tank no i don't think you can have you how much experience you have with the tank uh not much how many times have you done it i've been in once and it was when i was a teenager god man you should have one you really should it's just a great way to relax too it's a great way and you as a mathematician you think of you think of things and you're spending a lot of time contemplating things. And you have to realize that any other input, whether we think about it or not, is chewing up some bandwidth. Yeah, although I actually have a kind of ambient level of distraction, which is most helpful.

Look, when I get out there, I get way the hell out there. So you like an ambient level of distraction, which is most helpful for, look, when I get out there, I get way the hell out there. So you like an ambient level of distraction? Sometimes, for example, I'll go to an all night cafe at like two in the morning and there'll be just enough human, I mean, I have very ambiguous feelings about humans. Don't worry, I don't consider you one. What are you? What do you consider yourself?

We'll talk about this one off the air. No, I really think in many ways I've left this planet. Really? Yeah. I think that there's a way in which I've checked out. How so? Well, I think that when you get deep enough into your own mind and you start dealing with abstractions and then you check in with the real world to say does that abstraction actually govern the world that i'm in you start to prefer

living in the abstractions that's interesting like do you feel the same way about like a crowded nightclub like if you go to a bar do you do you find that that stimulates thinking well it depends i mean if i'm in a stimulating conversation, I'm very present. If I'm in an unstimulating conversation, I have to make my own fun. Right. And so I will start to sort of play. I mean, at times I'll just make up a story and see how it flies. You know, if I don't think I'm hurting anybody.

And sometimes I'll sort of experiment with people. I think we're all doing. You experiment with people? Well, sure. Like you say something to someone to see if they bite? Well, let's imagine, for example, you were going to move to Austin. OK.

Are you going to just be the same old you? You're not going to take the opportunity to perhaps reinvent yourself. So for example, you know, if I suddenly change, if I start wearing glasses and I wear like a really fashion forward pair of spectacles.

You should wear aviators with yellow lenses like Hunter S. Thompson. I would like that. I'd like that with you, with your crazy hair. Yeah. You with some yellow aviators and don't even address it.

Don't even. Wear them in public. Yeah. Wear them indoors. But if I do any sort of alteration, like maybe I've never seen what I look like with a bald head. So if I were to move. Shave that bitch. Yeah.

If I was going to move cities, when's the best time to try it? Try something new. Right. And so at our age, Joe. Yes. How old are you? 53. Yeah. That's our age. Yeah. Yes. How old are you? 53. Yeah, that's our age.

Yeah. I'm 51, almost 52. So the great danger is complacency. And so I'm terrified about becoming complacent. So I always want to experiment, change. Like what is it that I could continue to do to grow. And if you can't play and experiment, imagine you wanted to go by Joseph just to see whether it worked. Whatever it is, we get so locked in.

And if we change anything, people get angry. And I've always looked at Madonna and David Bowie as like genius squared. Not only did each iteration of them do something that was kind of artistically interesting, but they habituated their audience for change. And so the idea is that every time you met a different David Bowie, he would effectively say, do you like this incarnation of me? Because it's only here for one year. And then I'm going to do something new the next time. I just had a conversation with Sean Lennon in which we talked about how his father, John Lennon, always kept changing.

And yet people want to plug in with the idea that John Lennon was just the guy who wrote Imagine, let's say. And that's a great danger is that if you think about like your output, somebody will say, well, you know, didn't you in 2014 tweet X? Gotcha. It's like, well, you know, maybe you have 10,000 tweets and maybe you changed. Maybe new information came in. Yeah, that is a weird thing about pulling up thoughts that you had from a decade or more ago and trying to put them on you today. Yeah. And if you say, I don't think that way anymore. People don't want to accept that.

Because it's a disingenuous conversation. They're not really trying to find out what you think. They're trying to get you. It's more interesting. For example, there's been a ton of pressure, we can get to this in a second, for me to address the question of the IDW. Is it still alive? Is it in trouble? What's going on?

The international dork web? Yeah. Is that what it is? The intentional dirt bag web. Let's come back to that. When Cher did this remake of I Got You Babe with Beavis and Butthead, she took this, remember, because she had this duet with Sonny Bono, and then she got into a bad thing with Sonny,

and so she said, I'm going to re-record the song, and I'm just going to torch it. Now, the problem is somebody'm just going to torch it. Right? Now, the problem is somebody had that as their wedding song. With Beavis and Butthead? No, no, no. With Sonny. I mean, somebody probably did it with Beavis and Butthead, but they're so punk, they don't care.

People from Florida use that one. Right. Florida man uses it. The problem when you change things is that other people wed themselves to where you were. And so when you pull up and you say, yeah, I don't think that. That's just wrong. I was confused. Man, I was going through a dark time and I probably was saying stuff I shouldn't.

If you do that, then anybody who sort of invested in that version of you and integrated that into their lives is now angry. They're upset. Wait a minute. You pulled the rug out from under me. And so in part what Bowie and Madonna did is they said, look, these are stages. And if you like that stage, that stage is yours. But I'm not staying there. And I think that that's sort of the more responsible way of doing it is that you're allowed your evolution, but you have to let people know I'm going to do something totally different from time to time.

And I like the idea of doing things that are different. Or just do it. Just do it. Yeah, don't try to explain yourself constantly. Well, they didn't explain themselves. They just – they did it in a clear enough way that people could understand the pattern and so you know for example and this is something that i think would be kind of interesting to talk about um everybody is losing their mind at the moment in the space that you and i sort of co-inhabit of ideas and trying to figure out how do we remain

sane and plugged in and open-hearted and open to new things but also rigorous and fair like all of these weird pressures the ideas behind the intellectual dark web that you coined this this concept of having a bunch of people that have different ideologies but yet share this common theme of wanting to have real honest communication and honest conversations and try to figure out instead of looking at things from an ideological perspective, look at things from an honest, objective point and try to see the way the other people view things. Open-hearted, not trying to destroy each other. Yes, yes, yes.

And effectively trying to become the adults in the room as we watch the kids run riot. Right. And not always achieving that. Now, because I refused to actually say what it was or who was in it, because there was a lot of pressure to codify it. I knew that if I codified it, it would die. I want a membership card. You have one. But if I don't get one.

You have one. There's a clubhouse. We just don't tell the members where it is. Every time there's an article about the IDW that doesn't mention me, I'm like, yes, I'm sneaking away. I'm slipping away. You're like Pacino in three. They're always going to drag you back. There's been some discussion about certain members and certain people that are losing their fucking marbles.

Yeah. I think it's the internet and the or just celebrity in general which i think the part of the culprit is especially if you're reading comments and articles that are written about you which i do not recommend if you are doing that i'm doing that don't do that if you're doing that you are subject to a massive amount of pressure. Yeah. It's a lot of pressure. And sometimes people, they apply that. Sometimes that pressure can help you, like if it's a good friend or someone who you trust, and it's done with intellectual honesty, and they just really think that there's maybe a flaw in your thinking, or maybe this could help you, or maybe this is help you or maybe this is an issue and then you

realize that and you self-correct that's great but there's a lot of people that are bending to the will of the masses and they also are responding to the pressure of the masses i don't even think it's the masses i think one of the reasons i read my comments is because i want to know what russia is thinking i'm not kidding listen to me to me, Joe. Here we go. Let's go down the rabbit hole together. Well, for sure. And we talked about this recently. Let me just say this before you get going.

We knew that something was going on years ago. I used to have a message board. And on my message board on my website, it became problematic for legal reasons. People were putting a bunch of illegal shit up there, and I was kind of responsible for it. And a few issues came up where I was like, oh Jesus, I'm going to get in real trouble.

We had an influx. And by an influx, I mean thousands and thousands of Russian emails signing up from my message board. I mean thousands with really similar email addresses. And they would post and pretend they're from fucking Cleveland or post and be mad that we don't have enough Nazis on or whatever the fuck it would be. You know, right? It would just be the same thing that the IRA was doing, the Internet Research Agency was doing with Facebook and Google and Twitter. We were seeing this like four or five years ago.

That this stuff was kind of happening where they were recognizing that there's these large portals of discussion and so they're trying to manipulate that discussion and turn certain discussions toxic and certain and you know and come up with preposterous conspiracy theories and attack people for nonsensical reasons well this is the thing i keep seeing the same message modified a hundred different ways from a bunch of accounts that have suspicious similarity not one of these accounts usually is followed by anyone i care about and then they have a few high value accounts with blurry photographs of a person that like i i think somebody's like putting real money into that account to create a fake person who just doggedly follows you and is constantly trying to talk to you in your ear, that account.

But how do you know that that's what that is? And how do you know it's not just some person with schizophrenia that really is really interested in Eric Weinstein? Well, a couple times I've tried to, like, talk to the person. Oh. And suddenly the thing vanishes. It's like, you're so disgusting. I would never talk to you. It's like, goodbye.ishes it's like you're so disgusting i would never talk to you it's like goodbye click well maybe they just panicked could be just a person well that's the thing we you never know on the other hand um you remember when we took that

photograph at that dinner yeah um there was this huge number of jokes about ben shapiro and a booster seat that were all slightly different versions of the joke and all of the accounts were like strikingly similar. I was thinking like, well, I could imagine a little bit of this, but it's way too many. And this is part of what I believe. I believe that we are in a new world in which a lot of the grassroots stuff is astroturf. And if you start to listen to it, you start to get pushed. And I start to watch certain tactics and I make models of the tactics. You know, like one of the tactics is, gosh, Eric, I once thought that you had a lot of integrity and now I know the X. If you don't address this situation,

uh, I'm done following you. It's like, Oh really? Goodbye. Click. But, uh,

I believe that, um, I believe that there are sophisticated players who are engaged in trying to either boost our signal or start to alter the signal. Somebody will be up, somebody will be down. And then there's like really weird dynamics. I think that there's a very strange thing going on, not with Dave Rubin, but with the crowd of people that is just trying to eat Dave Rubin

and blind him and confuse him. And there's this guy, Sam Seder, who- Do you think he's a Russian? I hope he is. Well, I don't know. I don't think he's Russian, but I do think that his- I think he has a grassroots following. I don't think this is inauthentic, that just loves to-

Dunk. Harass. Well, dunk, drag. I hate this language. I just can't- I like dunking. I like the word dunking. just loves to harass. Well, dunk, drag. I hate this language. I like dunking. I like the word dunking. Oh, really? Yeah, it's fun. No, I'm not a fan.

No? No. No, because it cheapens all conversation. Oh, you got dunked on. You got dragged. It's just like, oh, this is that thing in third grade that I never figured out. Well, they found out that he won't engage with them. And so they think it's cute he won't engage with them.

And so they think it's cute to just constantly shit on him. And they also think it's cute to take anything that he says and interpret it in the worst possible way possible. And not think of it as him just being a guy who's trying to talk about things on the fly. And maybe isn't even prepared about the subject at hand like one of the things that comes up on this show like you know we we were talking before we were going to go on there we're going to talk about i'm like come on let's just talk yeah and so when you do that come on let's just talk thing yeah you never know what the fuck is going to come up and you might have a piss poorly formed idea of what a subject is and you just start rambling yeah that's what i've

done my two previous appearances not but it seems you know it's easy to think that you did that but with dave um you know there's enough moments where he's misstepped where they just feel like okay we got a wounded antelope yeah yeah they're trying to pick him off and you know i think there was probably a move to do shapiro and there was a period where you were seemingly in the crosshairs but you're hard to kill and you know i have no doubt that i was in the crosshairs i wasn't even noticing see that's the that's the benefit of not paying attention and this is something that i've been pretty rigorous about over the last six months, a year or so. You, Sam Harris, and Dave Rubin have all given me versions of this advice.

And I worry about it because I'm not large enough yet that I've been the target of a steady campaign. But what happens is you see people's feedback loops interrupted. And in part, to course correct, you kind of want to know, was I too harsh with that guy? Like when I went on with Jordan Peterson on Dave's show, I was more aggressive because I think I'd seen Jordan and Brett on your show together. And I come from an ethnic family. We interrupt each other. That's normal. And Jordan is an interrupter. And so what I found is that I probably was intuiting that I had to be more forceful.

A lot of the comments said, wow, Eric, I haven't really seen you this aggressive. Was there three of you on the conversation? It started off Dave, Jordan, and myself. And then Ben Shapiro came in for an hour and i think sam harris might have been uh scheduled to come in i don't remember there's an issue always with more than one person there's a reason why i do one-on-ones almost exclusively yeah like even when i had uh bob lazar with jeremy corbell uh just just having a third person that wants to chime in like oftentimes interrupts the flow of conversation.

Like in that case, it was because I wanted to lock in on Bob Lazar. Right. I wanted to get all my feedback. I want to find out, is this guy full of shit? Like what I want to, I want to lock in with them.

And there's another one. And, and also, and also there's another person, even if they have a good thing to say, it's a distraction. It becomes a problem. Well, you never know when one of these is going to work. And when one of the good thing to say, it's a distraction. It becomes a problem. Well, you never know when one of these is going to work and when one of them – when it works, it can be magical.

Yes. And when it doesn't, you know, it's a little bit like jazz guys. If that group is meant to be, then they don't trip over each other's solos and they're trying to come up with something. But even with three great friends, I have this issue. I mean, it's just – I've seen great stuff with multiple people on your show. And I've seen stuff that doesn't work. And you know, the other night we had, Brian Callen is fast becoming

one of my favorite people in the world. And he had us over. And it was really fascinating. It was all guys who could rip your head off, not your head off, they could certainly rip my head off. And very thoughtful ones at that. There were people from all different ethnicities. My wife was the only female. And one of the things

I found astounding was that everybody was taking the piss out of each other. And it was the most intimate, positive, loving kind of an environment you could imagine, where people are joking about each other's ethnicity their religion and i had to remind myself about how men actually manage intimacy and closeness and it's not the way women do it and we shit on each other we shit on each other and it's friggin important to how we do business and increasingly i have this idea that I need that in my life. Well, we have to check each other to see if each other is taking each other seriously. You have to make sure you're not taking yourself too seriously. This is the thing. I didn't feel like lots of jokes were made at my expense.

I was probably the only guy there who wasn't some form of a combat sport veteran. And there were a couple of jokes at my expense on that. There were a couple of Jewish jokes. I felt terrific leaving that place. There was no part of me that felt like, wow, I really got hazed, but I hope I got through it. I mean, these guys were just so positive and generous of spirit. Well, Brian is one of the best at that.

He's so silly. Like most of his podcasts that he does, other than with me and him have pretty cool podcasts we've known each other forever we've been best friends since 1994 is that right yeah i mean guys that guy's smart i love him so much that i broke up with this girl and uh brian um she was she was calling me because she was horny and i was like look i have a new girlfriend but i have a friend who'll fuck you and he's just like me and so this i i sicked brian on my ex-girlfriend and he fucked her one of the funniest conversations i ever had with an

ex-girlfriend she calls me up she goes your friend came inside me and i went what she goes yeah your fucking friend came inside me and i was like well did you tell him that you were on the pill she goes no no i'm not on the pill and i was like well i don't know what to tell you you know that's brian you guys should work that out my damn ex-girlfriend call you up mad because your friend ejaculated inside of her. It was one of the most, I hung up the phone. I literally fell to the ground laughing. I was lying on my back on the floor of my house going, ah! Like, it's just so ridiculous.

That's Brian Callen. Brian Callen everywhere. So I called him up and I said, what happened? And he's like, whoops. It was just such a ridiculous conversation. But I've been friends with that guy forever. So all of our conversations are like that. I see.

All of our conversations are like jokes and hazing and shitting on each other. But it's all hugs and love. I mean, I love that guy to death. He's so positive and generous. And one funny thing thing i was looking at his instagram and he's seated next to i don't know i can't remember was it cheetah oh yeah a wild cheetah in africa yeah and he's talking about how he hunts with it i like to get up in the morning perhaps Perhaps we will hunt together. I smell antelope nearby.

Just like he's clowning. There's an actual. A real cheetah. Yeah. But cheetahs are interesting, man. You can actually pet them. It's weird. I didn't know that.

It was a game reserve. I see. Like one of those safari reserves. Don't ruin the image. No, no, no. I mean, a lot of that is in Africa. Not in terms of like they're not pets. Yeah. But they're so used to people because people are always going on safari there and apparently you can

get real close to them in some environments but cheetahs uh in particular a lot of people keep them as pets like you see like a lot of sheiks and like rich guys in the middle east they'll be driving around in their fucking amg wagons with a cheetah next to them a cheetah on a leash and the cheetah's just cool with it see nobody nobody nobody does that with hippos i think if you want to go next level yeah that wouldn't work out hippos just decide to fuck you up yeah what is with us in the hippos hippos are like they're a cousin to pigs and they're right yeah they're a ruthless fucking animal oh now i see it They don't play any games.

Yeah. And for vegetarians, it's not even like they're their food. They are vegetarians, but they do eat meat. I know. Well, so do deer. Deer and cows, they'll eat birds. Okay, we're not going back into that vampire deer thing. That freaked me out last time.

But deer oftentimes eat birds. They eat ground nesting birds. There's a lot of video of it. People don't want to believe it. They think that they just eat grass. Most of the time they do, but they will eat a bird if they get a chance. They know it's food. Yeah.

It's weird. And they have an herbivore's digestive tract, but they'll still eat a bird. There's a lot of videos of deer and birds. I guess I've been really fascinated by the number of Species in which some human Like totally deadly species Where some human has decided I'm going to dedicate my life to hanging out And not getting eaten

Hyenas There's some asshole that is He's hanging out with hyenas on the internet And petting them They seem really playful and friendly Real sweet It's real weird This guy's like nuzzling these hyenas

imagine choosing the hyena that's your system that is that is an animal that bites so fucking hard they have they have like one of the strongest bites ever measured because their their whole thing is just smashing bones and trying to get out the nutrition that the lions leave behind so they're all just about crushing bones. So their whole face is designed to smash bones. Yeah. And, you know, they're fucking rude. See, here's the guy.

He's hanging out with these hyenas. He plays with them. Look at this asshole. But they're playing with them. They seem to think he's like their buddy. Look, they're biting him, but they're gentle. I mean, they could rip his arm clean off, but they're they seem to think he's like their their buddy look they're all they're biting him but they're gentle i mean they could rip his arm clean off but they're biting his leg and you know he's nuzzling with them he's letting him bite his face i do not know i do not know

because i think a lot of these have to do with imprinting oh yeah for sure yeah well that was the thing with my friend phil demers who worked at marine land one of the reasons why he's so furious at them is because he's got a walrus named smooshy and the walrus imprinted with him when it was really young right the walrus thinks that's his mom okay that he's rather the walrus's mom you know so he's just on this fucking furious quest to get this walrus released and to shut down this shithole known as marine land yeah he's been sued forever he's been involved in lawsuits as long as i've known him and he's been coming on this podcast for years for years we've been you know trying to boost his signal and trying to get the word out and then when blackfish came out that sort of really turned

the tide right where people got a chance to see what orca captivity is really like. And they were like, holy shit, this is horrific. It is absolutely barbaric. But anyway, this walrus come from him. He gave me that. That is cool. Yeah. That sits there for Phil.

That sits on the desk for Phil. Who is the Hall of Fame here on the desk? Is there a camera over there? Oh, this is, these are all little statuettes from a company called Plasticelle. And Plasticelle is, how do you say Fong's name? Fong Tran? He's an amazing artist who's created all of these little figurines. This is Rory McDonald, who's an elite UFC fighter.

Bruce Lee. Notorious B.I.G. That's my dog, Marshall. Marshall has one. That's me. Tupac. Conor McGregor. Kanye.

And then that is a different one. The bobblehead one,'s rich rebuilds he's got this really dope um uh really dope website uh or youtube channel where he he's the only guy that I know of that's ever rebuilt a Tesla he bought a wrecked Tesla and then bought another one and put the parts together and figured out how to make it work and the Tesla people do not like him they don't like that he's doing that. Now he's made a place called the Electrified Garage in Massachusetts where he is working on Teslas and electric vehicles

outside of their ecosystem. So he's doing it on his own, like an independent Tesla. Massachusetts. You think he's going to hybridize with Boston Dynamics? No, he's an independent guy. That would be cool. He's not how do you say his last name benoit right it's benoit it looks like benoit but it's benoit

very cool guy he was on the podcast recently hey what happened uh what do we know about the kanye situation where he was gonna talk about mental health i was kind of excited about that i you know if he wants to he can do it i'm not yeah he's he's uh he's his own thing he is a brilliant artist but oftentimes a brilliant artist it's not this is not the best format for them to just talk like sometimes it's better for them to express themselves through their work maybe although i found you know i spent two days with him, and I found that when he's in a relaxed frame, his flow state is just, it's beautiful. Well, I enjoyed talking to him. I talked to him on the phone.

I really enjoyed our conversation. We had a nice conversation. I think he's a very good dude. Very sensitive human being. Yeah, very cool guy. But this is not a relaxed environment. You know, this right here, everybody this is not a relaxed environment. You know, this right here, everybody knows how many people are listening.

It's just, it fucks people's head up. Really? Because the illusion that I have is just you and me talking. And then I come out of here and people are like, what did you say? Well, you and I are friends. So that illusion is more maintained. When you don't know me and you come in. I mean, I would have to be friends with him.

That's one of the things he wanted me to come to his church. He's running a cult, essentially. Everybody's wearing white. They're all dancing, doing religious stuff. I'd do that. Yeah. I'm busy, man. You're busy.

Sunday's your family time. Sunday's your family time. Well. I'm not into it. I get it. I think it's beautiful, but I'm not. He and I were walking down the road and, you know, there was this Crip alert. Crips? Yeah, the Crips from Long Beach said, you know, Kanye, you better stay in Calabasas.

It was like a little bit of a tense situation. So we're walking along the road and, like, people were hanging out of the windows of their car. You're like, Kanye! And I think it was just like positive, you know, like like wanting to make contact but it was very disconcerting and this guy was preternaturally calm you know he was just like i was nervous how long ago is this this was you remember when he went on tmz well we're talking a year or less yeah i think it was probably a year ago it's probably medicated not anymore oh is that right yeah yeah he talked openly about the fact that last six months or so he's been off of his medication and uh he whatever they had him on was fucking with

him creatively well you do you remember um oliveracks had this chapter in The Man Who Stuck His Wife for a Hat about a drummer with Tourette's Syndrome? No. And then he took a drug to control the Tourette's Syndrome, and the guy's drumming became kind of monotonous, very regular, but not creative. Yeah. Look, what that guy's got inside of him, he's so prolific. I mean, you listen to his music. It's so interesting and eclectic and prolific. And he's just constantly churning out more great shit. He doesn't have any flops.

I mean, his music is pretty fucking amazing. And he's just, that's his shit, man. He knows how to just get in there and create. And he's got this whirlwind going on in his mind. He's fearless. Yeah. He is exploring. I don't want to get into the details,

but one of the things that really impressed me was he would go to places that I'm too scared to go to in my own mind. And just, well, just, you know, thinking about your inadequacies and externalizing them and your vulnerabilities and knowing, you know, what is going to emasculate you. And his point is like, I'm so comfortable with myself that I'm going to mine that as a source of art because I bet it's in everyone.

And, you know, by exploring these contradictions and these false fronts and, you know, he's got a level of internal access. You know, he's got a level of internal access. I'm actually quite interested in the mental health aspect of this, which is there's so much mental unhealth as we term it that I don't think it's all mental unhealth. I do think that there's something about the artistic process that seems to be very informed by states that we call unhealth. Yeah. Well, we require people to stay inside these rigid boundaries. And these rigid boundaries, they're great if you want to show up at a job and work nine to five and don't use certain noises with your mouth because it makes people upset. But that's not for the creative process. If you

look at true outliers. If you want to discuss true outliers, like people that are really capable of producing extraordinary art or architecture or works, different interesting things that are part of the creative process. Those people are all unwell, every single one of them. I mean, in terms of like if you made them do what a normal person has to do every day i think normal life is unwell in terms of this this requirement of showing up five minutes early working all day long getting off maybe bringing some of your work home getting some sleep getting up in the morning and doing it all over again all while raising a family and trying to enjoy your time your limited finite time on this planet well this is why i said i've left

i'll say you left is that it's not healthy here so where are you well um maybe maybe this is a good segue i hadn't thought about this way but um so can we use this format to, uh, announce that I am in fact starting the podcast. I've recorded a couple episodes already, uh, that are in the can and it is, it is called the portal, the portal. Yeah.

So the portal is, um, refers to this, this very interesting, uh interesting thing that I thought everyone was aware of, but very often people wouldn't react to it. When I was a kid, I read all of these stories that I thought were known to be the same story, but different versions of it.

And I called it the portal story. And it was always the same. Somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence in an ordinary world until some sort of magical portal accidentally or on purpose enters their life. And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, a looking glass, platform nine and three quarters. go through a rabbit hole, looking glass, platform nine and three quarters. Or, you know, Dorothy famously was used to introduce Technicolor, where she, the first part of the film, she's in Kansas and it's in sort of grayscale black and white.

Oh, that's right. And then she lands in Oz and they open the door and it's Technicolor. And there's this transitional scene where you see Technicolor for the first time was that the first time ever in a movie i believe so and so and so the question is um where's the portal like why do we tell the same story over and over and over again with different protagonists but it's always the same formula it's somebody is trapped in an ordinary world. They're sort of, they're around normies. They find the portal and the portal becomes the call to adventure and they spend time in the alternate universe. And then somehow they're able to live. Very often they return. If you remember the Phantom Tollbooth, Milo gets this

present of a car in a tollbooth and he goes through the tollbooth. What is that from? Norton Jester was the author, and Jules Feiffer did the illustrations. It was just this brilliant book where there's like the land of letters and the land of numbers, so it's arts and sciences. arts and sciences and you know like there's a there's a person who starts from his head and grows down until his feet reach the ground and there's a numbers mine and he has to rescue the princesses of rhyme and reason in order to restore order between the two kingdoms of you know like left and right hemisphere it's some incredibly uh exciting story and the idea is that after he goes and does all of these like there's an island called conclusions and when you make an assumption

you leap to conclusion so you suddenly jump i mean it's all very clever wordplay and stuff at the end of the adventure the toll booth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it you know and so my question was always why why on earth would we tell the same story over and over and over and over and over again it has the same format and it's always a different context and i came to believe that this story is actually this unkept promise for most people that in their adult lives, they don't find these portals. So for example, have you ever been to Barcelona, Spain? No. There is a church in Barcelona, Spain,

which is plenty impressive from the outside. When you go inside, I've been looking at pictures of it my entire life called La Sagrada Familia. It is a psychedelic drug trip and a half like you've never seen. It is the most bizarre interior space I've ever seen in my life. Can you bring up the interior of this thing? And on the one hand, it induces like a hallucinogenic state. On the other hand, it's an idea of what this architect Gaudi, now Gaudi is very famous.

He did a lot of buildings around Barcelona. There is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet. And, um, whoa, fuck, that's beautiful. And if you look up at the roof, wow. And like, you know, most things you're sort of prepared for them your whole life. And then you see it and you think,

eh, I guess, I guess that's cool. I've been seeing this thing my whole life and I had no, no concept of what a genius this human being was because nothing he did. look at the outside of it, the outside of it the outside of it i mean look this guy is if he never did the inside of this church he would be a very famous

and idiosyncratic architect wow but are they doing work on it there they haven't finished it and in fact he's such a he's such a genius that they can't finish it in the style that he started it because nobody knows it's like an unfinished symphony what would you do nobody's smart enough to finish the this church wow look at the roof on that okay now that is a portal that is a portal right and when we when i was on this program before you know i thought long and hard what is it that i could push out to the planet to let people know how wonderful and beautiful the world that we live in is? And we pushed out the hop vibration. And suddenly, if you recall, I said to people, this is the most important object in the universe, not the hop vibration in particular, but the class called the principle bundle,

which people have no idea it's out there. And it is the basis of the construct in which we live. So how is it that a normal human being can make contact with real physics, with real beauty of biology, or just understanding order, symmetry, all of these things that are beyond normal experience. And what I hope to do with the podcast is to have amazing guests and interesting conversations, but to, Oh, thank you for that. That guy was on drugs.

That guy was, he was drugs. Well, that's, you know, remember that's what Dolly said. Somebody said, Dolly,

do you take drugs? He said, I am drunk, right? Another Spaniard. Spaniards are really something. But that is very similar to psychedelic states. Well, maybe some people have access to them all the time, right?

In part. Well, there's actually an illustration that sits above our sink out there from a guy who has a tumor in his pituitary or his, uh, not his pituitary gland, his, um, uh, what is the one that the one that they think produces DMT? What the fuck is it called? Not the pituitary gland. No.

Pineal. Pineal. Thank you. He has a tumor in his, thank you. Tumor in his pineal gland. And so he, he accesses these states all the time.

So this guy has, it's 100% DMT-inspired artwork. I mean, if you look at it, it's like what you see when you do DMT trips. It's a version in his style of art, but you can see the signature of DMT. There it is. There's his artwork. What is his name? Sean Thornton. Sean Thornton. Thank you, Sean. Thanks for the artwork. It's fucking awesome. There it is. There's his artwork. What is his name? Sean Thornton. Sean Thornton.

Thank you, Sean. Thanks for the artwork. It's fucking awesome. And it sits in our kitchen. I'll take a picture of it later and put it online. But that's his stuff. That's super DMT-like. Oh, that's amazing.

I mean, that's a tryptamine-type experience. You could say Alex Gray is probably the most representative. I would say he's the most representative in terms of artists in the DMT space, in terms of like tryptamines and psilocybin and things along those lines. And so if you think about psychoactive chemicals, some of them are stupefying, but some of them are portals. And this concept of, if you look at a wall, how do you know that the wall doesn't have a door? How do you know that there isn't a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the

right book? We learn to stop looking for the portal. i think what i what i do differently than other people is that i became obsessed with exits that there are other worlds and they're real that this this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole and the matrix is metaphor for very real things and that we just we live our lives in the most ordinary mesoscale phenomena where you know we don't see um we don't see the quantum because we're not you know playing with polarized lenses in ways that show us what light actually is um you know we're not playing with superfluid helium we're not uh not understanding just how bizarre olfaction is or whether there's some sort of quantum aspect of biology.

And what you see people doing is that they start grasping for everything. I'm not saying that there's nothing to ancient aliens or UFOs or whatever, but a lot of that is just people want something richer and more amazing for their lives. And I'm not going to pass too much judgment on that, but I am going to say if we just restricted the rest of our days to the provable stuff that we know is out there, it could be amazing. People need more meaning.

With all of the rationality, with all of the mystery we've taken out of the world, it's time to put a ton of it back in. When you say put a ton of it back in, how are you going to put it back in? Well, if I were to start talking about the Octonians, an eight-dimensional number system that no one understands, I can do that totally rigorously. I can show you all sorts of bizarre stuff involving the Octonians. What is the Octonians? Well, that's my point. You don't even know that there are four types of numbers whose dance, it's called the real numbers that we know, complex numbers that you were tortured once with in high school.

Maybe during some kind of a trip, a friend of you mentioned the quaternions to you. And then there's this one system of numbers, which is like the crazy relative nobody discusses, and that's called the octonians. And the octonians are so weird that mathematicians don't even really understand why they're there. That's an octonian, that thing?

Well, my guess is that that's probably back to the root lattice of E8, which we discussed last time, which has this kind of Mandela pattern to it. But I could show you their multiplication table. I could describe their symmetries. There's a symmetry group called G2, which involves these strange numbers. But it's a mystery. I probably know more about the Actonians than most mathematicians. If I got to the end of all of my knowledge of the Actonians, I still wouldn't know what to tell you about why they're there and what they mean. Nobody knows. I promise you that. That's a real mystery. Now we could talk about, like, you know, my friend said that that event that happened in Siberia in the early, you know,

20th century was actually an alien visitation. Well, maybe yes, maybe no, I don't know anything about it. If I just focused us on like what we know is out there that we don't grasp, which is 100% rock solid, it provides so much mystery and meaning and invitation to adventure. Like if you're looking for a hero's journey, I'll show you a ton of these things. And it's empowering. It's just incredibly empowering to know

that you're a hair's breadth away from superpowers. So I want to help people explore that. So what is that? Like when you're explaining this, when you're saying this is bizarre series of numbers, what is it doing? Like what, how do we interface with it? Well, um, so for example, let's, let's take an easier system that we feel a little bit more confident with. There's this thing called the quaternions, which are based on the number one, the complex number i, if you remember that from some distant math class.

And then there's something called j and k. So i times j equals k, j times k equals i. and K. So I times J equals K, J times K equals I. J times I is equal to the negative of I times J, so negative K. There's a multiplication table for these objects. And these objects help with computer vision, computer simulation, 3D projections. They're used all the time in probably video games. They may come up in nature. I mean, we know that nature uses complex numbers, and most people never found out why they were being told about complex numbers or imaginary numbers, because they never got to the point where you're actually looking at wave functions that describe photons and electrons and all of that good stuff that you read about in physics.

So in essence, the octonians are a system where I, J, K keeps going effectively through elemental PQR, you know, until you've got eight different objects. And they're not even associative, which is one of these rules that you learn about, you know, multiplication is associative. And you think, well, what isn't associative? Right? So if you talk about commutativity, for example, I can't tell whether you put on your shirt first or your shoes first because it's commutative

as to which order you did it. But if you put on your underwear in a different order than you put on your pants, it'll become immediately obvious which order you did it in. Right? Okay, well, there's another thing called associativity, and it's almost everything that we deal with in elementary mathematics is associatives. You're like, why do I learn about associativity? I've never met anything that isn't associative. Well,

the Octonian, they ain't associative. They're a number system that is responsible for most of the platypi of mathematics, if you will, things that just occur anomalously. So that's an example of an invitation out of this planet. If you start to think about the Octonians and care about them and say, are they a message? Do they have meaning? We can prove that they're there. I can construct them for you. But they generate so much bizarreness in some sort of abstract space.

How are they recognized? Like how was it, how did it come to be that this was a point of discussion? Well, there's a process. In fact, there are two processes where you can build these number systems up from each other. So you build the complex from the real, you build the quaternions from the complex, you build the octonions from the quaternions, and then you can't build anything beyond that because each time you're giving up a magical power to get to the next stage. And by the time you get to the Octonians, you're exhausted. When you say giving up a magical power?

Well, like, for example, it's very hard to think about the square root of negative one. So, like, what does it mean for something squared to be negative one? Right. So that's like the complex numbers gave up that kind of sensibility. And then the complex numbers are at least commutative, A times B equals B times A, but the quaternions don't have that property. So then you have a further property called associativity.

So you're sort of, to build the next system, you're giving up properties that sort of make sense to us. And by the time you've gotten to the octonians, you've given everything away. There's no way you're gotten to the Actonians, you've given everything away. There's no way you're going to build the next system. But yet it's real. Yes, yet it's real in a very real mathematical sense. So does it just highlight our lack of understanding?

Yeah, and it is a call to adventure. It's like a message from something that isn't human. I'm not going to say that it's God. I'm not going to say that it's logic or design. But it's a more complex System of the universe That's right and you have to uncover that these things Are there or for example

You know C. elegans I don't know if you've like played with Do you know about C. elegans? No C. elegans C. the letter Elegans So it's,

okay. So it's this worm that was chosen by this guy, Sidney Brenner, who just died. And it's a shame because he would have been a great podcast guest, just like one of the most brilliant biologists that we didn't focus on. And he said, you know what?

We're missing a species that we can completely describe soup to nuts. Here's the one that's about the simplest thing with the brain. It's only got a thousand cells and 300 of those cells make up a very primitive neural system. And we're going to track where every goddamn cell, like bring up Jamie, if I could ask you to bring up the cell lineage diagram for c elegans so this will be the first of two images well that is a complete map of how one fertilized egg

becomes a tiny microscopic worm for every possible division. What in the fuck am I looking at? I love when you say that. That is so wild. Yeah. Right? Now, here's the thing. Everyone in biology knows how cool this thing is. And very few people, not enough people outside of biology,

know that we have completely mapped how one cell, like if you're 30 trillion cells around, it's too big to write a diagram. It's only possible because there are only a thousand cells and this thing has locomotion, it has sexual reproduction, you know, it eats. So you're looking at the architectural plans for an actual organism. And Jamie, when we're done with that, if I could trouble you for the... For the folks that are just following, I'm going to pause for a moment. For the folks that are following at home listening, just listening, not watching, what we're looking at, Jamie, explain how someone can see this image if they want to Google it themselves.

The letter C. It's not the not c like the ocean c elegance and then the cell lineage it looks like a really long basketball bracket yes pushed out forever that's a good way to describe it yeah so it's fucking wild yeah talk about march madness yeah april madness june man yeah it just doesn't stop if we could bring up the um wiring diagram or adjacency matrix yeah the c elegans wiring all right yeah perfect that is a complete map of the 300 neurons in the c elegans worm how they are wired to each other like that is a map of the 300 neurons in the C. elegans worm how they are wired to each other like that is a map of the mind of the worm wow okay so that's the portal that's another portal here's an organism which is completely mapped and has complex behaviors. It has, I think, about half the number of adult

cell types that you and I have. So maybe we have like 250, like only 250 different kinds of adult cells, more or less. I don't want to get too precise about that. And yet we are like 10 trillion or 30 trillion copies of those tiny number of different types of cells. Well, I think the C. elegans has about 125 or something like that, different cell types. And it only has a thousand cells and it's able to do most of what we're able to do. We move around, we eat, we have sex.

Pretty simple life. Do you think it's ever possible? Well, I'm sure it's probably possible, but do you think in our lifetime we'll ever see a map like that of a human organism i don't think so but the cool thing is we have this map and we still don't understand it like we've got this thing dead to rights we've got it boxed in it can't we know every single cell what it does we have all the wirings between the neurons and we still don't get it right right so Right? So, like, imagine that you're eight years.

What the hell is that? Well, what a genius this guy Sidney Brenner was for choosing this organism. Mm. Right? Because this organism is the simplest place to look at complex life. Mm. This image of the reconstructed biological neural network, it's like, what?

Like you're looking at... Okay. Now, we could have a discussion about some weird Peruvian structure and whether we've been visited. And I'd be up for that. I'm not going to pretend that I'm too good for it. But I know that this is real. Right. I don't up for that. I'm not going to pretend that I'm too good for it. But I know that this is real.

I don't have any doubt. I'm not going to sit around asking, well, do you believe that aliens talked to this federal government in the 40s? Right. That might as well be an alien. Yeah. And it's an invitation to adventure. Yeah. And we are destroying, I mean, just getting back to it, the reason that I'm fighting through culture war issues, which are not very interesting to me, is that we are destroying the thing that has the ability to make sense of the world.

It's really the design. Reason and logic? Yeah. I mean, the ability to say no. You come with an experiment that failed, and you say, I mean, like, the ability to say no, you know, you come with an experiment that failed, you know, and you say, I think it succeeded. I say, no, it didn't, it failed. And you say, well, I actually am Cambodian, and I think you're discriminating against me, because I'm Cambodian. Like, look, your experiment failed. It has nothing to do with you being Cambodian. I see what you're saying. And you keep that stuff out of my lab. Culture war stuff. Yeah.

Really what I'm animated by is get your fucking social engineering out of my laboratory. You've got 10 minutes and I'm calling security. That's my issue. It's not telling people how to behave or that I have all the answers or that we need to be objective in our lives and that we just want to have sensible discussions. You're coming after core reality and our ability to make sense of the world. And so I'm happy to entertain all sorts of things. You take one foot, step one foot in my lab and I'm calling security. And if I can't do that, if I can't maintain a scientific journal or a university in which the bullshit departments do not invade the departments that are actually doing the super important work, we're lost.

And there is a distinction. I mean – This distinction needs to be made. There is a distinction between hard science and gender studies. to be made there there is a distinction between hard science and gender studies if you could pull pull up jamie um let's do the uh anomalous magnetic moment of the electron oh you can do that yeah you went all sean connery on me raise the eyebrow yeah one eyebrow isn't that like a genetic thing like Like you can curl your tongue. Like,

yeah, I could do that. Some people can't do that. Apparently you turn it over. Mm hmm. What do you mean? Turn upside down. Oh no, I can't do that.

All right. You got one thing. I got another. Okay. This is very mature job. Yeah. Um, but what is going on here? Um, put a sign where i'm looking for a number

with like 10 or 11 significant digits um we are able to do calculations in quantum electrodynamics let's say a quantum field theory in which we can figure out the precision of something, we can predict it to like 10 or 11 decimal places of accuracy. And when I look at the achievement that was necessary to have theory agree with experiment to that level, and then I listen to some of the discussions about, well, just take these hoaxes about, you know, somebody who submitted parts of Mein Kampf to, you know, with Jews rewritten as men.

Peter Boghossian. Right. Those two subjects are taking place in the same institution. One is incredibly rigorous and demanding and completely unforgiving. And the other thing is just like… Frivolous and nonsensical. Well, maybe there's a core of it that makes sense, but it's not going to get anywhere close to the achievements of the hard sciences. But the core of it, whether or not it makes sense, the real problem is the motivation for doing it in the first place. Well, the real motivation may be activism,

but activism and scholarship aren't, I mean, there's so many things that I want to be true that just aren't. I want beautiful, I mean, like, you know, nature, you spend time in nature. You want to think, you know, like nature's a community and the forest is a bunch of different organisms all working together. No, it's red of tooth and claw everything that you think about the universe

that is purely beautiful and aspirational is contradicted by some system in nature and that's why evolutionary theory was the first thing on the chopping block it's just like well this contradicts everything we want to claim about organism well tough luck i feel like there's a way to define this clearly that makes people understand it better okay and i don't i don't know if i'm the guy to do it but i feel like someone there's a this is an incredibly complex issue right where you're dealing with emotions and feelings and people who feel like there's injustice in the world and inequality and they focus on those things to the point where they're almost participating in social engineering by ignoring reality and focusing on what they want

to be true in sort of this way of reimagining the world and they're also demanding compliance this is a big part of this whole thing that's going on here then on the other hand you've got this stuff you've got these hard sciences that demand just rigorous rigorous intellectual debate they demand careful study of the facts they demand a deep understanding of complex mathematics in order to achieve these results and to be able to verify them. And they're unforgiving. Unforgiving. Yeah. They're two totally different things.

And what you're saying is when one of them, that is this sort of frivolous, airy, kind of utopian version of what they like the future to be and that interferes right where they want a certain amount of diverse people on the staff and i am not even saying that it's frivolous i'm not even saying it's not scholarship i'm saying that whatever it is i don't care. Maybe it's some beautiful social thing. But then they'll hit you with, you don't care because you're a white male and you have white male privilege. And what I realize is that as important as inclusion is, exclusion is equally important. And the instant you say that, I don't owe you the time of day.

What does that mean by exclusion is equally important? Well, we keep talking about diversity and inclusion, diversity, inclusion, diversity, inclusion. And there's an implicit threat in that, which is what makes it really juicy and interesting, which is like, well, let's look at us. We've got three white guys in here. There's Jamie, you, and me. Speak to yourself. I'm 1.6% Africanrica i'd like you to recognize that i knew he was i knew he was going to play that card but you sir can pass as white right

yes okay now in order to have the objection like there's some little bit of guilt which is like well why aren't there any people from cambodia in here Is it that we're really anti-Cambodian? If you carry that guilt, you're always worried that you have to be able to prove that you're inclusive. It doesn't matter. Right. Right. Okay. It is also important to exclude certain voices from the conversation.

So the voice that plays the card, which says, well, you're only saying that because X. I don't have to listen to that voice. And I think this is really important. That is not a voice that needs to be answered. It's not a voice that needs to be taken seriously or paid attention to unless there's some serious allegation that there has been some kind of discrimination or inclusion. The burden of proof is on you for saying why that's interesting in a particular conversation. The burden is on you to explain why that's interesting. Right.

Well, for them, they're trying to engineer a more fair and balanced society. If I was going to take their perspective, they would say that the reason why there aren't more women in science or trans people in science or, you know, feeling like… But I'm also trying to engineer a world where there are more women in science. How are you doing that? By trying to figure out what is it that's selecting against women. selecting against women. For example, that we need to get women more money, as I said on this program, earlier in their lives so they can hire help to help raise their children so they can spend more time on their careers and balance. Yeah, but a lot of women don't find that attractive. They don't want to do that. Maybe, but I'm trying to think, but my point is, is that there are lots of reasons that men and women are different, right?

Yeah. So, for example, I saw a beautiful video of a guy who jumps down an enormous flight of stairs on a skateboard and he just nails the landing and it's just a thing of art. And then it shows you 150 attempts where this guy just abused his body and failed and failed, maybe broke a tooth, blood everywhere. And you're thinking, oh, you showed me the success and you didn't show me that this guy was willing to put his brain, his life on the line in order to nail that trick. And he's actually one of the world's falling champions, right? Okay. Well, when you start saying, well, why are you putting this video of this person who's doing this thing on the internet because that person belongs to a privileged class? I'm

saying, well, I don't know, that guy abused himself and put himself at risk and devoted his life in a singular way that no sensible – I mean, I would be appalled if my son did that. I'd be furious with him. There are things that are happening that result in imbalances that aren't about some kind of unfairness. And I think it's very important to say that unfairness is real and structural problems are real and non-structural problems and things that really aren't unfair are also real. I think we both agree that it's important for people to have the opportunity to pursue what they enjoy pursuing. I think there's also an issue where we want people to be more represented.

more represented we want more of that that kind of person that's interested in something when they might not necessarily naturally gravitate towards it and it might not be that there's some impediments and that there's some boundaries and some some sort of uh boys club that keeps them out and it might be more that they're just not that interested in that well that there are all sorts of biologically been that's been proven in studies. But I'm trying to make a different point, right? Okay. To me, what I'm trying to say is, I made a mistake years ago, I think,

of engaging and answering this point, which is, you know, let's take piano competitions. Why are piano competitions historically disproportionately, you know, let's say entered in one by Russians or chess or who knows what? Well, Russians are beasts in the way that they destroy children on their way to the concert stage. They will do things that most American families will not do to produce a concert pianist. Okay. That's not an unfairness for the rest of us. I mean, I play the piano. I can't get on stage with these guys because they're just amazing.

It's not an unfairness that I'm not represented on that stage. You know, if I told you that my intention is to become the world's greatest jujitsu expert at age 53, being overweight and not having any history in combat sports, you know and I know that it's not going to happen. With the right amount of drugs. Come on, Joe. And engineering, we can do miraculous things. That's true.

We can make him better than he was. Yeah, we need daily stem cells. We're going to have to do some real we're gonna take a chance on cancer and all sorts of other diseases right we can we can achieve some things okay but the previous conversation that we're you're trying no you need to develop you need to develop it needs to be a part of your well here's the thing that i always say about uh striking sports right striking sports are probably one of the more interesting ones in that when you start out at an early age, your body develops learning how to strike. And it's a gigantic advantage over someone who learns once they're past puberty.

When you get someone who's learning how to strike and they're in their 20s, it takes a real outlier to become super successful it's very very rare but i remember being in a fist fight and throwing a punch and not connecting and hurting my arm yeah it happens all the time oh i didn't understand if you it's not free you know it's like a very it's a very now all you've got is your left arm and you've got a really pissed off person across from you. What I was getting back to is I wanted to talk about, in part, the portal and how it relates to the whole sort of weird social justice thing. The key point is I'm not that interested in the culture wars. I'm interested in the pipeline of amazing stuff that is unforgiving right but don't you think that along the way you have to kind of address that the culture wars are a thing

try to figure out why they're a thing trying to figure out what what are the main points and main factors that are responsible for it being a thing right and is there a way to mitigate its impact on progress well this is i'm concerned that the culture wars are going to keep girls black people whoever short people i don't know what out of the things that they want to do why because we're not being honest about what it actually what is involved in selecting against people so So you brought up the issue of interests. So like the Google memo, the James Damore issue. Right. Which is a great example publicly.

Okay, but my wife went on Dave Rubin's show. Look, this is a woman who brought techniques of gauge field theory into economics. So she's no slouch when it comes to analytic thinking. Is gauge field theory similar to gauge symmetry? Yeah, gauge theory. Okay, same thing. Just call it gauge theory. She wasn't doing quantum theory, but she was taking – her thesis brought techniques of bundle theory, like the hop vibration that we had,

and showed that economics, without any alteration, was a mature geometric system in a gauge theoretic idiom. So we collaborated on showing that you can't accommodate changing preferences in economics without gauge theory. So that was kind of pretty amazing. It was really great fun. didn't enjoy the unpleasantness of focusing on these things because they were so abstract. And so I wanted, you know, I was interested in people. I was interested in making sure that our models could capture human dynamics better. And, you know, I was just really excited by the collaboration we were doing, which was, you know, she and I came from two different worlds and we found this bridge between them.

So she went on Dave Rubin and said, look, it's not about abilities. Women are as smart as men. It's interests. We're not interested in the same things necessarily. And that should be okay. But when she said it on Dave Rubin's show, it didn't register anywhere. Then James Damore said it. And like the world freaks out. How dare you?

But that's also because he said it within the environment of Google. He just wasn't on a podcast. But if he had said that same exact thing and he was an employee of Google and he was on a podcast, even if it was a popular podcast, I don't think it would have created nearly as much of an issue. Well, he was also somewhat spectrum-y, and it was the fact that it's Google and the fact that you can get paid for these weird sort of spectrum-y skills, which, you know, guilty. That's what I care about. I really enjoy doing isolated things in the absence of other people

that have a very technical nature to them. that have a very technical nature to them. And my experience in general is that I've had female collaborators in very technical subjects. Fewer women are interested in things that involve isolation and technical things removed from human interaction. And so that statement will undoubtedly cause a flurry of activity. And if a person says it who's not suspected of trying to keep women out of something, my point is I want a much more equal world, but i have a very different diagnosis as to why the world is as unequal as it is and your diagnosis is that it's unequal because people have varied interests and that but also like something as dumb as kin work we can work women take care of sick relatives children and the elderly at a level that most men can't be bothered with you know it's just like yeah i don't care so you know you've got all of these guys hyper focused on their career who are doing the equivalent of jumping down a flight of stairs on a skateboard you know maybe it's not healthy

and then you've got another group of people who are like saying you know i want to have children i want to stay home with the kids for a couple of years because it's really important in terms of their development and bonding and all these things. And I say, absolutely. How do we create a financial product that gets you money early in your life when you need it? And then maybe you pay something out. It's just a different diagnosis as to what the problem is. It's not all oppression. Part of it is resources and financial products. Part of it is interests. Part of it is the fields being set up in a way that is biased.

I do believe in structural oppression. I just don't believe in the level of structural oppression or the remedies for structural oppression. Like if we don't, we are losing many of the best minds that are on female shoulders. We just are. There's no question about it in my mind.

And rather than saying. What do you mean by we're losing them? Well, they exit the system. They get through the, like, let's say, BAs and STEM subjects. A lot of them enter PhD programs. Like let me give a very simple example from the Harvard Math Department from years ago. I think Harvard had this weird thing where it would very often allow one woman in a year to the PhD program in mathematics.

And that person usually felt isolated and would often kind of leave the program. And then one year, a female who was admitted deferred. So that meant that there were two women starting the next year. And they formed a support network and they both got through and then other women came in after them. So it's like, oh, that's interesting. We just learned something, right? If you let women in in pairs, maybe they're going to do better and then maybe three will do better or four will do better. Okay. I'm totally up for that kind of a remediation up until we can build up enough female experience so that women have role models. It's really helpful to be able to look at a senior female researcher and go to her and say, how did you do it? You got married, you had kids,

you had a very successful career. How did you come back? You know, one of the things I found, I used to be interested in this problem and I found that a lot of the women in the 1950s were very successful in STEM subjects, had a lot of money or their husbands had stable jobs that allowed them to use nannies and housekeeping in order to free themselves from drudgery. Well, that was an unadvertised feature of the system because that's not available to everyone. It's a feature where financial privilege actually enabled somebody to stay in science. So, you know, the issue isn't a question of inclusion or exclusion of groups. It's a question of how are you so sure that

everything is structural oppression? That's a really weird thing. And if you can launch that objection cheaply, if you can just say, I can take any group and say, why does this group have no one in a wheelchair? Now I've got to spend 30 minutes explaining that? I don't want to do it. It's not a good enough objection. Like if we're going to make progress, let's actually make progress that matters rather than making ourselves feel good. Why do you think that this social justice movement has reached such hysterical levels over the last decade? Well, a couple of things. certain positions became like the failing business of traditional media meant that you couldn't actually employ people

at the same level that you could employ them before. So a lot of people who didn't have huge opportunity costs entered journalism. What does that mean by huge opportunity costs? Let's imagine, for example, that you're very ideological, and somebody offers you a $50,000 a year job, which allows you to be ideological, or you could take a $150,000 a year job,

and ideology isn't a large part of the offer. Only the ideological people are going to give up $100,000 a year for the privilege of activism. So in part, when you have a failing business model, you start select, as a system of selective pressures, it's going to start selecting for very different people. So that's one of the things that's going on, is that you have very economically frustrated people because the silent generation started a problem.

The baby boomers amplified the hell out of it. Gen X is still waiting to take its place in society. And the millennials just don't even see a path through standard careers. Nobody's putting a glass of scotch in their hand and a cigar in their mouth and saying come with me kid let me show you how it's done well isn't it also partly because the discussion is out there and the discussion is a very attractive one the discussion of one of the reasons why you haven't gotten by in this world is because of inequality and because of some sort of systemic racism or systemic sexism or systemic homophobia or transphobia and it becomes

when you give people an option to find an excuse yeah they gravitate towards that when you create safe spaces right and you coddle yeah and you make you mean all these pieces are in place there's many many moving parts right and i think all these little pieces are in place where we're we also have these massive echo chambers because of social media. We have these people that, you know, they find ideologically similar human beings and they bounce off of each other. But these are all real problems. Like, I have an intersex friend who I haven't seen. What does that mean?

Somebody who's indeterminate between male and female physiologically. So, okay. Let's imagine that they have some karyotype XY profile and that the developmental process did not produce unambiguous genitalia. Okay. Okay. Is that a hermaphrodite?

I don't want to... Okay. Just intersex. Okay. This is a person I think is pretty terrific. And I look at all the forms that say male, female, and I just, you know, my heart sinks. Like we're not even in trans here. We're talking about somebody whose biological card that they were dealt.

Could have been you, could have been me. Right. And through no choices at all, this person is being shoehorned into a paradigm which puts them in an increased risk of suicide and it breaks my heart and we should change it we should break the male-female dichotomy absolutely now i have a different feeling about trans but if we solve the issue of intersex which is not pressuring just accepting that some tiny percentage of the population which is not vanishingly small it's just not large is neither unambiguously male and female in terms of genotype, phenotype concordance. We will do most of the work necessary to take care of our trans folks who are suffering

too, right? Now, trans is a much more rich world because there are a million different issues taking place in trans. And they're all conflated. Part of it because of developmental biology, part of it because gender really in some sense is socially constructed in a way that like when people say mathematics is socially constructed, I have to reject it. And I give this example of like kilts and lungis from Scotland and India, are skirts, but they're not female in those places. So you have to learn about male and female relative to the codification in your society. And the issues of what are our obligations to recognize, hey, this is really a female mind and a male body versus this is a regular mind and a regular body,

but needs instruction. All of these things are conflated. And I was really hoping that if we, if we used intersex as the test case to break the binary, because the binary is an oppression. There's no question in my mind about it. Well, how is it an oppression? Because let's imagine that I, let's say I have persistent malaria induct syndrome. So I'm phenotypically on the outside male and I go to my doctor and he says, hey, you've got a uterus. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have a uterus. Okay. That's an exotic situation. Maybe I want to identify male, you know, because the outside equipment looks male. It's a weird situation maybe the idea is that we're talking about extremely rare circumstances so does that really define it as being oppressive like what like what is for for a friend of mine who is in neither situation yeah it's oppressive but i mean is it a press like some people are born paralyzed

right some people are born with like serious neurological diseases that don't allow them to be motile. That's right. Is it oppressive if people are just recognized, like most people, recognized as being able to walk and move around? What if there was no category called disabled, right? Okay. Or in a wheelchair. Okay, no category. All right? Okay. Or in a wheelchair. Okay. No category.

All right. Yeah. So you've got somebody who's got a spinal cord injury and you have people saying, all right, everybody walk this way. What do you mean you can't walk? Get up. Why are you lazy? That's what it sounds like to me.

Like it's one thing to recognize that not everybody is in the standard category, but it's another thing to hard code. Hard code where? Are you talking about job applications? Forms. Okay. The federal government gives me a form. There's a binary.

It says male or female. Right. Let's imagine it doesn't say other or prefer not to say. Okay. So we're just talking about filling out forms, which is how often does that take place in your life? Often enough that it represents oppression? Where you have to be defined as male or female? Emotionally?

Emotionally. I think this is oppression. Oppression. Yeah. I mean, look, I... But it's really, isn't it done under the interests of defining people simply? Because for the most part, you're dealing with males and females. And for the most part, they're just trying to figure out what's what for their statistics yeah but you know again this is

this is fun i'm glad you're asking me these questions because usually i have to be on the other side of this issue and this is really where my heart is which is i care about these people and i know that in every single conservative society in the world, there are accommodations made for the failure of simple binaries to accommodate the population. There's no society that's so conservative that they've sorted the world into male and female. You know, the famous example in Iran of the Ayatollah making a fatwa that said it's fine to have gender reassignment.

We have to recognize that every single population produces gender sexual ambiguity. of homosexuality being a grievous crime because like i believe in iran it's illegal to have homosexual activity but you can have gender reassignment so if you're a gay man you can choose to become a female that's true but there's also a thriving gay scene in tehran you know do they have to recognize this and they're all sorts of prosecution you know that there was a situation in india where i you know, I have more experience where you would say, oh, those two people are confirmed bachelors. You know, that they're so dedicated to their professions that there's no room for family and they live together. Right? So, like, traditional societies have, everybody accommodates homosexuality and failures of simple gender binaries

and you know i always bring up the example of turkish where turkish doesn't hard code the third person singular pronoun as male or female it just has one pronoun for both so thank you for giving me the opportunity to show where my heart actually has been this entire time, which is I believe this is oppressive. And I don't think that it oppresses that many people. But I believe that it's an important oppression that we have to realize that we hard-coded. And that's what generated a lot of the feelings. Before we get to trans, you can simply say from the position of intersex that the world is a richer place than male and female. And people say, oh, it's XX versus XY.

It's like, no, it isn't. It just isn't. It, for the most part, is. For the most part, it is. So in terms of, it has been an edge case to deal with. But that edge case is important to me. Right. Because the edge case are, they are human beings that are.

Not only that. Right. Because the edge case are, they are human beings that are. Do you want to chase a couple of edge cases? Everybody with a really different experience is more important to me than everyone with a standard experience. I think we have to take care of the standard case, but I'm absolutely interested in outliers and edge cases. So to get back to the line of thought. Well, that's an important distinction. And what you're saying is very important because you are, in one way, someone could pigeonhole you from your earlier statement that you're not interested in a lot of these different studies, grievance studies, a lot of these gender studies. Because they're sending it. If they interfere with hard science, which you are getting, particularly with evolutionary biology, you're getting a lot of interference you gotta right and you're not interested in that but that does not mean that you're an insensitive person that's uninterested in human beings you're just not interested in the disruption of the the the acquiring of data and the analysis of said data. I don't think that activism makes for good advancement.

Well, I think there's also a problem with who's the activist and what age you're talking about and how idealistic these people are and going back to biology, where's their mind at? How formed is their mind? How narrow is their view of what the world is or should be and their impact you know what what what's what's significant about their impact my disagreement let's give you an idea of where my energy comes from let's imagine that you actually believe that males and females are equally intelligent

okay just a fisherian equivalence. Can I say LOL? Then what would you be? You'd be fascinated as to why you don't have males and females in an intellectually – in equal numbers in a demanding occupation. So you'd start saying, huh, if I already assume that males and females are equally intelligent, I care about different categories. How much of this is about fertility? How much of this is about kin work? How much of this is about structural oppression?

How much of this is about path dependence? You do some very careful thing in order to understand your problem. And only when you'd finally understood your problem would you say, okay, now I have an idea of how to remediate it. We need a financial product that transfers money from late life to early life because the huge burden that knocks women out of the STEM pipeline might be

that they have to take care of elderly parents or young kids. Bingo. Now you're working in a totally different idiom because you've actually come up with a different idea. Or for example, if you hard code, like Sean Carroll, I think just had a podcast in which he said something to the effect of, well, the IDW is kind of too interested in race and IQ. I have never been interested in race and IQ. The only time I became interested in race and IQ was when I started hearing

there is absolutely no variation between groups in any kind of cognitive endowment. Well, certainly there is in terms of height, the ability to radiate heat, melanin content of the skin, the ability to absorb sunlight. It doesn't pass the smell test that you could be able to say that a priori. It's not a scientific type statement.

It's something you'd have to investigate. So in that situation, am I interested in some finding that says that one group is smarter and other groups are not as smart? Do I believe that IQ equals smartness? No, I don't believe IQ equals smartness. Do I believe that there's no cultural bias? I think there is cultural bias. I'm definitely on record of saying there are ways in which groups that are said to fare less well in terms of IQ demonstrate actual intellectual dominance. This is some rich, weird area I've never cared about

before. And the only reason that it becomes interesting to me is that suddenly we're making these incredible proclamations with certainty, like, you know, you can't say this word or this is absolutely true. And like, life doesn't work like that there's no word in the english language george carlin made this point all the time there are no bad words there's bad intent yes they're bad people well isn't it also the issue being a part of a group say more i the idw is too interested in race and iq i'm not i'm not who is i mean i'm really not i don't discuss that at all i understand but who who is interested sam harris has discussed it before but he discussed it with someone who was studying i don't think sam cared i think that sam felt that he had sam

felt that charles murray had been railroaded by him by he sam harris and then as sam came to understand what it is like to have a mob turn on you, Sam said, maybe I'm wrong about Charles Murray. And then Ezra Klein made this really interesting point in a really unfair way against Sam, which was basically like, hey, you don't know what Charles Murray is. He's a hybrid. He's not just a social scientist. He's also got an agenda. Right. Is that accurate?

I think so. I've never read Murray's's work but i don't know enough to say either but deeply polarizing i think bell curve the whole idea about being able to recognize the differences in in race and iq it's like it's a very contentious subject both analyzed first of all i mean look i have to admit that I don't score that well on certain tests. So I have a built-in total skepticism of IQ tests, SAT tests, ACT tests, any kind of test. Because it's an unnatural examination. It's not intelligence.

It just isn't. What is it? It's a proxy. Like there are people who think, oh, it's a unnatural examination it's not intelligence it just isn't what is it it's a proxy like there are people who think oh it's a really good proxy i've never met someone who has a really high iq though that i i deem to be intellectually inferior yeah but i've met people who don't have very high iqs who just blow me away yes right well there's absolutely there's a type of intelligence that certain people possess particularly creative intelligence yeah there's a creative intel like there's certain people that might not score well on sat tests but they're capable of producing amazing stuff whether it's

literature comedy whatever whatever it is movies they can make things they can do things they have a genius in in their ability and that requires some intelligence it requires some immeasurable there's something that you can't put on a scale well this is what you know i said to jordan i said jordan peterson i said i don't think i have an iq because the conceit we have to remember that a priori we would always have guessed that intelligence was many different things. It was a composite of like lots of different types of intelligence. The conceit around IQ is you'd think that was true, but guess again. There's essentially one kind of intelligence.

There's one scale. It's a surprise. Oh, that's really surprising. Tell me something. Of the various forms of intelligence, is one of the things that you call intelligence processing? Yes. Yes, processing is very important. Okay.

I don't score well on processing. In fact, I don't think anyone in my family has ever scored well on processing. What do you mean by processing? I don't know. Some kind of mechanical process of how quickly and flawlessly you can encode information, play with it, and get it out. If you're a dyslexic, let's take spelling. Lots of people on Twitter say, ha-ha, you misspelled here. In fact, it's H-E-A-R in the case that you meant. It really just shows me something about your intelligence that you can't keep track of spelling. Okay, That's your level of thought. Do you know how many brilliant people can't spell, can't write?

Well, also, you're not even thinking. You're just trying to get the word out, and you misstep. Yeah, but like my mind, you know, at some point I got sent home, I think, because I was asked to draw a chicken in school, and I put two wings and four feet on it. I'm so non-observant. My handwriting, my- You got sent home?

Yeah, something like this. They sent you home? I was like aberrant or I was making fun of the teacher. Because it was four-legged chicken? Well, famously, Mrs. Bacchiero in first grade sent me out of the class because I said that a spider wasn't an insect because it had eight legs. She sent you out of the class? Yeah, because I was-

Well, you're correct. In that case, I was. In the case of a chicken, I wasn't. Well, maybe you saw some weird fucking Chernobyl chicken somewhere. Yeah, man. Chernobyl chicken Kiev. That's good. That's comedy gold.

My point being that if you don't have a high confidence in normal metrics, the race and IQ discussion doesn't land like so to get back to charles murray yeah so charles murray it is it's hard to say he wrote the bell curve right was either dismissed as being racist or applauded by people who you would call white nationalists who trot out his ideas as proof right as measurable proof that certain races are superior and you know we could discuss the so he was many online people who trot those out all the time and they use it to form these weird groups of people that love to hear that. And that smacks of racism.

Well, this is the issue, which is you have a situation in which he appeared to have a political orientation, which is that he didn't want money spent in certain ways and he wanted it spent in others. There was a political interpretation of why he wanted that which was maybe he's a closet racist then there was facts that will tend to empower people who are actually racist all right but let me pause you there sure but then there's the actual data right now in examining the actual data if you just look at the actual data is is it racist to look at the the real numbers like if you say nigerians in particular who are incredibly industrious and some of the more um successful

immigrant groups that come over to america also to be black. If you wanted to look at Nigerians in terms of like, if you wanted to, if you, if you, if all, if you, if you wanted to look at them particularly as a group, it'd be very difficult to be racist. You'd have to say, well, these are superior. A lot of superior intellects come from Nigeria. They also trot out the Asian one, right? That a, like this, one of the weird things that people like to show that they're not racist right like look it shows asians are of a superior iq i i i puzzle on that one that one's puzzling say more because i think with certain people with certain males let Right. Let's just go with males. They look at African Americans and they see superiority in certain ways.

They see superiority athletically, artistically, musically. You look at the contributions of African Americans culturally across the board in terms of like the real, the Jimi Hendrix, the Miles Davis. Speed of thought and creativity. Like but not just that also athletically like the the fucking outliers are just so many there's so many michael jordan's mike tyson's sugar ray leonards there's so many african-american outliers who are just extraordinary in terms of their their accomplishments right but not that many asian americans in that regard so it's almost like they'll concede like they're not doing the things that make me jealous do you see what i'm saying okay they're not they're not creating this insane music although there are a few right but overall they're not creating these insane

athletic accomplishments that these white amer Americans can't keep up with. So we'll say, but look, they're superior intellectually, so I can't be racist. I'm pointing out that these Asians who I'm not jealous of because they don't do the things that I wish that I could do. But then when it comes to the African Americans, they're pointing out all the things that the African Americans can do that they can that they can't do but they're saying oh but they're intellectually inferior well this is proven i'm not racist i don't want this to be true but it seems to be true i see you see what i'm saying it's like a way of it's a way of suppressing accomplishment right while like almost mitigating the impact of the the jealousy that they feel. So if you think about, for example, first of all- Does that make sense?

I think so. First of all, I just, I hate this topic. Yeah, me too. It's a weird topic. It's a weird topic. It feels greasy, even touching it. Well, but now we have to, right? I feel like my wrong view of it is if you'd never brought this thing up,

we would never have had to deal with it. And I no longer believe that's true because we have so much inadvertent data. I don't want the data on chess. We have an idea of how many grandmasters there are and which groups, like male, female, Asian, black, various portions of Europe, I don't know what that data means. But I can't stop the data because it's going to be generated even if nobody comes up with a standardized test because it's a game and it's scored and it has something to do with intellectual abilities. On the other hand,

I mean, I'm a competitive guy and you do comedy, I do some amount of music. I can guarantee you that both of us have had our ass kicked at some point by African-Americans who excel in both of these areas. And I don't mean all God's children got rhythm. I mean getting out thunk in a competitive situation. funk in a competitive situation, looking over somebody's shoulder on the keyboard and they're thinking so quickly in so many dimensions, I can't even imagine what the hell is going on. So therefore, I never had a lot of fear about it because I'm in close proximity with somebody who's just kicking my ass. And therefore, I thought i could leave these topics alone i would never have to deal with it the way in which that they come up you know in a way that is really unpleasant

is this new thing which is that all imbalances are all structural oppression right and which doesn't allow for trade-offs between groups like fins fins are good at some things they're not good at others nobody believes in like anti-finish prejudice so we don't think about it right it's just not a it's not a big issue for us you know finnish humor how many finnish comedians are there i have no idea right well how many do you run into at the comedy store that's a bad it's a bad example because you're dealing with America, America and American comedy, and you're also dealing with the highest level of the game.

It's like the comedy store is essentially like the Harvard Research Labs of stand-up comedy. Yeah, but nobody's worried about anti-Finnish behavior. We're worried that we're prejudiced against certain groups. We're worried that we're prejudiced against Jews. We're worried that we're prejudiced against Mexicans, against blacks. We have a pretty clean idea of what bigotry we really still need to worry about. Right. And we feel guilty about it.

And that's why you say it has this kind of lubricious quality. What are you really up to over there? Why are you looking at that data set? And what my comment is, is I don't know how to stop this thing. I'm not excited about it. I'm not interested in it. I definitely think that we have to actually think about the social implications of all these things. But if your idea is that we're going to stop this at the level of data and analysis, I can't afford that. I just can't afford that. We need to have somebody who's able, like,

for example, microcephaly. You've got people with smaller heads than the rest of us, maybe because of the Zika virus. Well, is it unethical to study what the cognitive impairment due to microcephaly is? I don't know i don't know what to do but i know that i want to have a very thoughtful conversation well how can it be how can it be unethical to study the cognitive impairment of someone who's affected by a disease and that could possibly help fund research help fund preventative measures what if there's a correlation with with smaller heads and cognitive impairment? Let's take mosaic down syndrome.

Mosaic down syndrome doesn't have the same profile as regular down syndrome. You get much higher functioning people. Ultimately, we're all souls and we have to figure out dignity and we have to figure out some system by which we can live with this increased level of knowledge but does examining impairment right does that really mean that it's a prejudice like what about an examining impairment from people who've been injured should we avoid doing that because we don't want to be ableist um do you see what i'm saying not quite because we're talking about reality right we're talking about issues if you're if you're examining someone who contracted the zika virus and it led to them developing a smaller head which is one of the horrible side effects of that right is examining

that in some way some sort of prejudice should we avoid examining their cognitive if we avoid examining it we might do some damage. If we examine it and publish the findings, we might do damage. So you're saying you might do damage to the people that are infected or afflicted? If we don't begin with an idea that ultimately the issue is compassion for ourselves and others

and that a lot of our genetics and our history predisposes us to bad behavior now that we're living with each other like we have to start i mean as hippy dippy as this sounds we have to start from a place of love and decency i care i certainly agree but i don't think that we should avoid reality well that's this is the thing right yeah so now i have this other thing which is reality is compassionate in and of itself. Remember when HIV was an equal opportunity disease and it just started in the gay community and it's going to jump the fire road and it's going to be as much a heterosexual problem as it was a homosexual problem? That turned out not to be true. It was an ideological

statement that didn't look at the differences between different kinds of epithelium and different sexual practices between gays and straights. It was an activist position that started to compete with a epidemiological position or a biological position. And so historically, what we did is we had private expert communication. And it's not always clear that you can trust your experts. It's not always clear that you should start with the data. What if the data says terrible things? Like maybe the data on people with microcephaly says something and you have got a person who's going to be judged by the size of their head,

which is visibly off from the rest of their body. We haven't taken up the challenge of our time, which is, okay, we've got a lot more information than we wanted, and we have a lot more ability to analyze it, and we know something about ourselves. We know that we have got bigotry as part of our makeup. And we know that we're not really good at certain ways of integrating information and not becoming triumphalist and jerkish about it and taking victory lapses if it's a competition. Like, my group's better than your group. So that's where we're stuck.

Now, I want to be struggling with other people who are saying, look, I don't know what the answers are. I don't think, as I brought up before, I don't think East Africans are cheating on the Boston Marathon because they've come to dominate it. Just because suddenly you had a diverse group of people replaced by a they have been bigoted and structurally oppressive encounter data that they can't handle, which the science is giving us more data than we ever wanted on these things. And we're not answering the challenge of our time. And that's what my issue with social justice is. It's not about I don't want a better planet or a more inclusive planet. I don't want a better planet or a more inclusive planet. It's like, stop crowding out the really difficult, interesting, open-hearted, and hard-headed conversation with this dime-store nonsense about simple answers and simple truths. Because those aren't true.

And it's not going to work in the long term. And it's not going to work in the long term. I mean, I guess that's maybe the idea is we're competing with social justice for the rights to try to come up with a better, more equitable future. And the complaint about it isn't you guys are trying to come up with a better, more equitable future. It's what if you're going to make the same mistake when we said, well, the heterosexuals are as much at risk as the homosexual. Well, that wasn't true. We needed to devote resources to our homosexual community. And we did need to get the heterosexual community interested. And we had a problem. And we needed to think about, you know, very thoughtfully, we've got an epidemic that's killing people. I think when we're talking about this, I think everything you're saying resonates and everything you're saying makes sense. And I think when we're talking about this, I think everything you're saying resonates and everything you're saying makes sense.

And I think when we're talking about compassionate human beings looking out for each other and that this should be something that we all – this is like one of our primary concerns whenever we address any issue. Right. One of our primary concerns whenever we address any issue. I think our problem in this country, there's many problems, but one of our problems is the loudest voices on the fringes. And this is one of the things that I want to discuss with you is what's going on in Portland. Yeah. voices on the fringes that the people on the right and on the far right and whether or recognizes recognizing as emblematic of the left they think it defines the left and i don't think it does and i i think it is it's a symptom of it's it's a symptom of first of all terrible government of of of someone who's allowing this to flourish inside the mayor of Portland who seems to be supporting this in some sort of a weird way.

Weird way. And ideologically believes that Antifa, just because of a name, stands for anti-fascist. If you had no name, what you would have is a bunch of hood-wearing, mask-wearing, violent thugs who are beating people who disagree with them and because that's what we saw with that andy how do you say his name go is it i think it's andy no no and it's ngo right i treat the g is silent until somebody corrects i think you're right um what you saw from that video yeah that anyone could support that of with a person who's just talking they i mean he if what i've seen of him yeah what they've tried to describe that he supports neo-nazis that he supports the proud boy i've seen none of this i've seen no evidence of this but i've seen the

narrative trotted out over and over again as a justification for violence against him when the left supports bullying in the the worst possible, ganging up on someone, punching them, hitting them with sticks, crowbars, all this crazy shit, thinking that it's okay to throw milkshakes at people, thinking that this is fine, this is nothing. I think this is a horrible precedent to set, and it's a terrible it's it's a terrible move if you're playing a game it's a terrible first move because things only escalate they don't de-escalate no one says wow you beat the shit out of andy no this is a mystery right like what the hell is going on well the hell's you're allowing people to wear masks and carry backpacks with weapons and there's a natural human inclination when someone gets hit to jump in and hit them too so you see it all the time watch world star go to worldstarhiphop.com and watch

someone gets hit a bunch of people just jump in and hit them it happens at truck stops and fucking high schools it happens people get brain damage people die each other all the time people permanent injury when you're seeing in portland there was one of them where an old guy got hit in the head with a fucking crowbar by some masked kid because the old guy apparently disagreed or they all disagree on things i don't someone's decided my guess is that the old guy is not exactly as portrayed i believe that the old guy may have been there with a telescoping baton oh so he was hitting people let's take this i think this is so worthwhile but like let's do it right okay because i think this is so mysterious what

the hell are people doing supporting right andy no being beaten up on video so let's stay stay with him because that's the the best clearest example of someone who's a tiny little gay man he's tiny. I mean, he represents so many different maligned populations, right? He's pretty intersectional. Yes. He's Asian. He's an immigrant. He's an immigrant.

He's gay. Is he a Republican? I thought he was left of center, but I was told that he was a conservative journalist. Well, I've been told I'm a fucking alt-right guy. Yeah, exactly. It's very confusing. All right. He's also diminutive in physical form he's not dead he's not threatening physically right and uh they've chosen this guy as an example and one of the more disturbing things

were how many people saw the video and were justifying it saying things like get another hobby these and are the anti fascists will not stand for you know your your your bigotry and your hate like what are you talking okay you think it's okay to punch this guy like the the fact that you guys all piled on and punched him and this is so subtle i've been thinking a lot about it i have a model i'm i'm happy to hear yours because there is a mystery can we both agree to be at the beginning that you would imagine that that video would have shocked people and to find so many people sort of excusing it is really shocking? And given that he's also clearly intersectional, you wouldn't predict this from first principles.

Right. No, you wouldn't. If you looked at it on paper, you definitely wouldn't, especially if you allowed him to self-identify as leftist center. Okay. So here's how I think the model goes. Okay. Unless you want to give yours first. No, go ahead.

All right. The first thing that we have to understand is that there's a division. I want to lay this out super carefully. is between what you're calling the loudest voices, and I'm going to call the most courageous, well, I don't want to call it courageous, the most willing to accept loss. The voice is most willing to accept loss. Most of the left does not want to be dragged to the extreme left.

And so you hear this thing about, why are you focusing on a fringe? And the answer is because the fringe is running the show, in my opinion. What do you mean by willing to accept loss? If you go into an Antifa versus Proud Boys melee, you're willing, you accept that you may get clocked with a bike lock.

I don't think that's correct. Or a bike lock. I don't think that's correct. Or a baton. I don't think that's correct. I think you're dealing with people that have no concept of real violence, no experience of real violence. They're LARPing. Have you seen, yes. It's fucking cosplay. It's cosplay LARPing.

Have you seen the image of the guy who's a suspect? Looks like he's never worked out a day in his fucking life. Looks like he's never been outside. And I think these people are playing a fucking game. We've agreed on this. Yes. Okay. But you are willing.

So you think you're going to get into a Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner kind of a thing where both of them always survive to the next cartoon? They have no idea what they're doing. Have you ever seen a fight between people that have no idea how to fight? Yes. Yeah. Okay. I've been one of those. Okay.

That stuns me. As a martial arts expert, it stuns me that people are willing to participate in that. It's like me not knowing how to get in a motorcycle and getting in a race. Right. I don't know how anyone's willing to do that, but they're willing to do that. And they're willing to do that because they're delusional. They're delusional. And they're supported in their delusional perspective by the giant numbers of them.

They all get together. And then they wear masks, which further emphasizes this illusion that they're a part of the game. But Joe, look, assume that you are not even in a physical situation. You're willing to be very loud on social media about very simplistic perspectives. Yes. And you're willing to become a pariah at some level because are you though i think mostly you're supported there's far more support i'm not necessarily you are going to trigger so many times on this explanation that i probably just need a little place in the

table to start building this up and then you can tear it the hell okay okay the first belief is that the belief that i have is that the fringes are much more running the show than the people who claim that this is a small number of people believe that the fringes are scary fringes are willing to go places the rest of us aren't i agree with you on both sides left and right left and right so i spend a lot of time focused on the fringes because the fringes have become terrifying and the middle has become cowardly and the whole principle about the whole idw thing was about creating a non-cowardly core that could actually potentially hold the center

because people are actually fairly courageous like Like you would have to say, my brother is fairly courageous. Ben Shapiro, Andy Ngo, Sam Harris, these are people who've stood up to death threats. You know, I have a guy who's threatening me every day of my life, you know, coming through the internet and my family. You have to have some courage in order to be part of this thing. And that's part of my irritation when people come after it. So there is a cowardly center and a very terrifying fringe, and the fringe is going around the whole thing, right, left and right. The next thing is that people are secretly weirdly sympathetic

with the violent fringe to their extreme, rather than making common cause across the center. So, for example, you imagine that you run a laundromat, and you're being visited by a member of organized crime every week. And he comes into your laundromat, and he kind of plays with your stuff, and he says, oh, it'd be a shame if anything happened to your business. And he shakes you down. Starts saying, oh, you know, I noticed that you have a daughter.

I would love to date her. Perhaps we'll go out sometime. You hate this guy. Then some sort of violent vigilante element that's operating extrajudicially after you've gone to the police over and over again, breaks this guy's kneecaps. You're weirdly sympathetic with the vigilante because you're being terrified by a group that is not being taken care of. I think that this is in part why some elements of the left that should be more responsible, that have institutional positions,

that have platforms that they institutional positions, that have platforms that they can broadcast, are weirdly sympathetic to Antifa. And why country club Republicans are weirdly sympathetic to some of these far-right groups is that they view them as this is the dangerous group that's kind of taking care of the problem that I can't stand up to. dangerous group that's kind of taking care of the problem that I can't stand up to. So you've got this bizarre, cowardly sympathy from the center who won't actually stand up and say, I have more in common with a country club Republican. Like in my case, I view myself as a progressive or at least a liberal. I have more in common with a country club Republican

than somebody who's got a bike lock, who's looking for trouble in a street demonstration trying to smash up a Starbucks, right? I don't want the help from my left. Now, the group that wants to play this out using these sort of proxy groups to handle the problems is saying, look, we're going to sound an air horn before one of these things so that all reasonable people can get the hell out of the way. And if you don't respond, then you're collateral damage and that's on you. That's how they see this.

I think that's very accurate. So in other words, I think Andy Ngo is the guy who doesn't listen to the air horn. Brett Weinstein doesn't listen to the air horn. Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris don't listen to the air horn brett weinstein doesn't listen to the air horn jordan peterson sam harris don't listen to the air horn i think that's very accurate in your description of these fringe people doing the work of the people that are more reasonable but are happy to have these bad people do do their work to fight this battle for them because they think that ultimately it's for good. Yeah, I need my organized crime group to get rid of your organized crime group.

Right? And so the idea is that the law and order people are like, I really don't want anybody's organized crime group. And I'm going to actually stand up to the mob. And I'm actually not going to pay you your goddamn protection money because I'm going to own a laundromat and this is the United States of America and fuck off. That's the view that I represent. I don't want i don't thank you antifa i don't need your help yeah you know what i actually am much more afraid of the far right and the reason i concentrate my negative energy on the far left is what are you trying to do you're trying to get the genie out of the bottle on the far right that is is the danger. Yeah. You want to see more tiki torches? It's not tiki torches that you need to worry about.

It's armed people who come and they're not bringing bike locks. Well, we're pushing ordinary human beings to the extremes. Yeah. Right? And the thing that I get is that I believe that the Republican Party, I never get a chance to say this stuff. I have never gotten along with the Republican Party, you know, I just, I never get a chance to say this stuff. I have never gotten along with the Republican Party. I just don't like it. I view it as the thing that wants to exclude me from their country clubs. I have an older model. They're the group that wanted to put in condo developments in Yosemite Valley because they couldn't figure out why we would want to preserve the national parks. They were the ones that laughed about

clubbing the baby seals. Ha, ha, ha. I just always had this attitude, fuck these people. This is my emotional cadence. And we always had this thing where the Democrats were the – we had most of the smart people. And so in a tiny fraction of time, we have seen this giant evaporation of intelligence, if not actually through a lack of courage.

The people who represent responsible left-wing thinking, who believe in structural oppression but don't believe in the extent claimed, you know, who want to keep making progress, who want to make sure that traditionally marginalized groups are taken care of, that we take our responsibilities but not our guilt as the reason for trying to make a better world. I'm not paying reparations for slavery. I mean, my family came over here in like, what, the 19-teens or 20s? You know, we came from pogroms. Is anybody going to be paying Jews for from pogroms is anybody going to be paying jews for the pogroms that you know am i going to be getting ukrainian reparations let's

not be ridiculous what do we want civil war do we just want to open up tear off every band-aid for the purpose of uh you know trying to make everybody um as uncomfortable in their skin as possible. What we have is a situation in which we don't have courageous people willing to fight for what works. We have a tiny number of people who are animated by this. The reason I'm animated by this is that I'm trying to keep the pipeline open for science. It's really what happened to my brother before it ever happened to him. My brother and I were in this discussion about what are we going to do

to make sure that there's always a place to do biology, to do mathematics, to be able to weigh competing claims. And when you start politicizing everything and you choose activism over thought and reason and civility and comity, you consign yourself to becoming a less great nation and you're no longer able to lead. You can't build a world on angry activism that's trying to go back to a lily white nation that will never happen. And you can't enforce like equality of outcome we don't even want that people who work their ass off deserve some of the pleasures of working your ass off and i don't always want to work my ass off and i you know jackie chan is the one i always look at that blooper reel at the end of every jackie chan

film tells me he deserves his money. I'm never going to do that to my body, ever. I don't want an equality of outcome with Jackie Chan if I make some little film and this guy risks his life for every scene. It's insane. We need to create a world in which people are excited and animated about keeping the pipeline of decent thought, compassionate thought, open-hearted thought, and rigorous and unforgiving thought both on the table at all times and not adulterating one to serve the other. I don't want to see science abused to oppress anybody. And I don't want to see somebody's dime-storn concept of utopia infecting our ability to make sense of the world. Those are twin directives.

And this is what I'm excited about. We need to get the world excited about curing disease. We need to get the world excited about cross-pollinations of ideas between different groups. We need to get the world excited about every group that is sort of marginalized contains neurons that we are not accessing, right? And so, for example, Asian females make up about a quarter of the world's population and very few of the world's Nobel Prizes. We should be getting greedy about how do we get those Asian female brains into our STEM labs so that we can have the fruits of their discoveries. People can't hear this because they've settled on very cheap versions of progress.

It's time to get back to real very cheap versions of progress. It's time to get back to real progress, not fake progress. How do we do that? I agree with everything you just said, but how do we do that? Honestly, this is my third time on perhaps the biggest podcast in the world. I don't know. Maybe that's giving you a little bit too much credit. It's not very far off.

We're doing that. We're trying to stand up. And if people respond, and you've given me courage to start a podcast. I got to tell you, I did not want to do this. I brought my producer, Jesse Michaels, here. I was a pain in the ass to this guy. I did not return his phone calls. He tried to get me to sign contracts.

I wouldn't look at them. I've started with this turnkey podcast company called cast media they put up with me for like eight or nine months where i dragged my heels uh i don't want to be famous i don't want to be well known too late i know well i'm sort of well known well it's look so this is the crazy thing you want to get really nuts yes it's time to leave time to to leave what? This planet. Oh, boy. Listen, we can leave this planet. I got something right here.

No, no, no. Take you to another planet right now. He's joking, federal agents. Let me give you my argument. Where are we going? Well, we don't know that we can leave this planet. I love this planet. I love this planet. I have a good time here. This is my favorite planet. Mine, we don't know that we can leave this planet. I love this planet. I love this planet.

I have a good time here. It's my favorite planet. Mine too. I know. But here's the real reasoning. We started a clock around 1953, which is when we had the explosion at Bikini, the first hydrogen bomb,

and when we figured out the double helix. And I call this the twin nuclei problem, and it began in 1953. In 1953, we started a clock. It was also the height of the McCarthy era. We do not have the wisdom to be able to fuse nuclei. We don't have the wisdom to be able to investigate the cell. It's too much power. So our wisdom may have increased slightly maybe it didn't i don't know but our power is now godlike so our biological intelligence what our minds are capable of has not it's it's been surpassed by our intellectual achievements in terms of our our technological

innovation these things which while complicated um succumb to our intellects right right like they're much simpler than we ever imagined to be able to create something that normally happens in the sun on an island in the pacific or to be able to rewrite a cell the way craig venter did you know a synthetic biology we are now gods but for the wisdom and that's a great quote we are now gods but for the wisdom. It should be a meme. Picture you. Picture you.

We are now gods but for the wisdom. That's going to be up there. Someone's doing that right now. Darrell Bock I know. Let's not focus. Focus. Okay. So that started this clock.

And the world's most serious human beings should be working on the twin nuclei problem. What do we do with new godlike powers given our history of conflict, our history of envy, our history of madness? Because we succumb regularly. I was born 20 years after the end of World War II and we all know what really happened there. I mean, we're nuts. We're absolutely not capable of this level of responsibility. And so the question that we have is, do we believe that we have a long-term solution in terms of increasing our wisdom? We should definitely try it. Everybody who believes that

should work on that problem. But if we don't think that we have the wisdom to live like this, we don't know how much time we have left, but it's probably not a hundred. I mean, it's probably maybe a few hundred years tops because sooner or later you're going to have Putin-like or Trump-like people. I mean, I'm sorry, I would have a very deep antipathy towards Donald Trump. He's not temperamentally fit to have the secrets of theoretical physics at his fingertips. He just isn't. And it's imperative to me that he not be elected in 2020 and that the Democratic Party wake up and get rid of its crazy fringe so that we can buy some time. And it's nice if Elon thinks we can go to Mars. Maybe that will allow a small number of us to diversify in case we do something really dumb to the planet.

But if human beings are to continue and we are to continue evolving, we need to spread out. And there are three rocks that are inhabitable. There's the earth, there's the moon, and there's Mars. And the moon has nothing there. Mars is pretty uninteresting to be blunt. I know that it's beautiful that we send back these pictures and we've got this one gorgeous planet that we are clearly not smart enough to steward. We're still having idiotic climate change debates. I mean, even if climate science is somewhat junkified, we should still be taking climate super seriously because we don't know what we're doing. It's such a complicated nonlinear system and we're not even capable of focusing. You know, it's like two seconds later, I'll be watching the Kardashians for sure.

So what is the answer? Well, in my opinion, we've got to increase the number of possible places we can go beyond three. To say nothing of space stations because that's not realistic. None of these things make sense. So the first place that you have to get to is we're really deeply screwed and not because of apocalyptic cult-like reasons, just because of science, just because of 1953. So the only opportunity is if we can break the Einsteinian speed limit,

so far as I know. Or we can upload into silicon or we can reboot from tardigrades like none of these answers are good so what i've been toying with since i was 19 was what is the theory beyond einstein and that's the thing that I've been most uncomfortable talking about, although I've been talking about it more. I gave these lectures in 2013, in May of 2013 in Oxford, and I was appalled by the way in which the world's physics community responded. I mean, I was very scared.

I'm not a physicist. I don't claim to be. very scared. I'm not a physicist. I don't claim to be. But I felt like I tried to present what I hoped was a path forward given that the field was completely stalled out. And this

is it. Physics and biology led us into the valley of death. And it's now time to try to get out. Go ahead. No, please. So what is my responsibility in terms of the portal? What I'm going to try to do with this podcast is gain the courage to share whatever ideas I've had about breaking the speed limit in the form of,

I don't think I have the wisdom to figure out what it means, but at least I have a hope of trying to write the fundamental rules to figure out our source code. And that was the plan, which is, what is this place? What is the source code for reality? Now, what was the response from the physicists that you found appalling? Well, there were two articles that appeared in the Guardian newspaper or website that talked breathlessly about what I had done or what I might have done to call attention to the lectures that I was giving. So these were the special Simone lectures by Richard Dawkins' successor, Marcus de Sautoy,

who was a colleague of mine from way back, Marcus de Sotoy, who is a colleague of mine from way back, who found me in New York City, I think in 2011, 2012, or something like that, working on this theory I called geometric unity. And I was very uncomfortable. I hadn't really told anybody that I was working on this theory for all those years because it's a crazy, you know, there's certain stories that you find in theoretical physics, which is kind of the precursor to madness, of Fermat's Last Theorem, I think, was unfixable. So he announced a proof that he had solved this most famous problem in mathematics, and he didn't have a proof. And then bizarrely, he was under such pressure that he found another proof and actually pulled it off. So it's like, hats off to him. It's one of the craziest stories, but he was working in secret for seven years and nobody knew what he was doing. So sometimes these stories work out, but he was a professor at Princeton

and very highly regarded. And he'd sort of husbanded seven years worth of work to pretend that he was releasing papers when he was actually secretly doing this thing that would have made him a madman in some sense. And so this is what I was trying to do is I was not able to work on these issues in the string theory community because the string theory community was possessed of this belief that they had found the answer back in the 80s. In 1984, they had what they thought was a revolution. And the math community doesn't think in these terms. Like both of these are very conservative communities historically, and very focused on following the leadership of the top

people, unless there's a revolution. And so I started working on a different idea to unify the two branches of physics that appear to be incompatible, that was different than the string theory idea and different than the loop quantum gravity idea or any of the other. And your main motivation was to do this, to try to figure out a more advanced version of space travel? Well, it wasn't space travel. It was we need the source code. Like it might be safer to go further. Once you've unlocked nuclear fusion, you're pretty much as screwed as you need to be.

So then the issue is, okay, we know that we're pretty, I'm pretty sure that Einstein's theory is not final. Because you get these singularities, which I don't associate with ultimate equations. which I don't associate with ultimate equations. So the black hole singularity called the Schwarzschild singularity or the initial singularity that we associate with the Big Bang in like the Friedman, Roberts, and Walker space times are signs to me that these equations are incomplete. But the big problem with Einstein is that Einstein's work was so fundamental that it's like you can't get in under the ground floor of Einstein.

You begin a physics seminar and you're already immediately in his world. You say, let X be a space-time manifold. Boom. You're already in relativity. So it's almost impossible to figure out a way to get in at a deeper level of physics than Einstein's theory. And we know that we have to recover Einstein's theory because that's been proven to work in all sorts of situations. And the same thing with quantum field theory,

which is why I talked about the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. So my idea was that only since the 1970s have we known that particle theory was based on geometry. We knew that Einstein's theory, Einstein used geometry to develop his theory. It was the language of relativity called Riemannian geometry. But many years later, we found out that Bohr's sort of quantum and Planck's quantum and Einstein's quantum as well was based on a different geometry of this guy, Charles Erismont, who was an Alsatian geometer who had worked with Cartan.

And that geometry was figured out at Stony Brook in New York by Jim Simons, who became the world's greatest hedge fund manager, and C.N. Yang, who was arguably number one or number two greatest living theoretical physicist. He's now in his 90s. And they figured out that the secret language of particle theory was also geometry, but a different geometry. And so geometric unity is simply the idea that it's not a fight between Einstein and Bohr. that it's not a fight between Einstein and Bohr. It's the two parents,

Riemann, on whose work Einstein-based relativity, and Charles Erisman with this gauge theoretic stuff that we did in the time before this, which in fact empowers particle theory. And so when do those two geometries unify? It's two different geometric theories. And I've found that in general, they don't unify in a way that you want. You don't have the ability to do Einsteinian tensor analysis

where you compress something called the Riemann curvature tensor and the gauge stuff where you do this gauge symmetry that we were talking about. because gauge symmetry ruins the ability to compress the Einstein tensor. Nevermind what that means. But in one or two rare circumstances, you can actually combine the two geometries. And that's where I think we are. And so partially what the purpose of the portal podcast is, is to use, you know,

I'll just sort of tear the mask off a little bit. We've been talking about lots of interesting things about social justice, about mathematics, about wonder, about psychedelics, and trying to be decent human beings to each other and to set an example. And I think it's been partially a success and partially a failure. But what I'm trying to do is to gain the courage to talk about what these ideas are. And the worst comes to worst. Is that I wasted a lot of my life on a crazy theory that turned out not to be true. What was the response, though? Like, how did the physicist react?

And what was disappointing about it? So the articles engendered an immune reaction. Immune? Yeah, it's an immune response. Okay. Okay, so somebody's giving a lecture, and now how many times have we heard before the next Einstein, yada, yada, yada, yada.

And I totally understand this. It's a reasonable reaction. Like Sean Carroll had this reaction. He referred to me as a backyard Einstein. And his wife. I referenced him twice today. Yeah, he's on my mind. And his wife wrote this amazing article in Scientific American called Dear Guardian, You've Been Played.

Now, she's not a physicist, but she has access to Sean's brain and she writes on physics. And then there was this whole thing where the new scientist said, okay, this guy claimed to give this lecture in the physics department, but he hasn't written a paper and he didn't tell the physicists. It was a sneak attack. Well, of course, that wasn't true. There was announcement of the talk. I stayed in England and I gave the talk once more. And then a final time a week later. And by that point, all sorts of people from Cambridge and Oxford came to the talk

because it was a worldwide topic of discussion. What the hell is going on? And I gave a two-hour talk. Consider that nobody, nobody outside of theoretical physics gives talks on physics. It's like North Korea. They don't get many visitors.

To the extent that they get visitors, they do get visitors from mathematics, but in general, mathematicians don't take an interest in the real physical world. And to be blunt about it, I don't think that the string theorists are very focused on the real physical world either. They've been playing with toy models for nearly 40 years. So a lot of it was playing out in the press.

And the new scientists had to retract. They said, no, what we wrote wasn't true. They did publicize the talk. And then there was an article, they sent a reporter to the final talk that I gave, and the reporter did not know any physics. So I spent the morning with this person, teaching him what the Dirac equation was, like a very fundamental thing. A question came up in the talk about, is your model anomaly free? A question came up in the talk about is your model anomaly-free?

And my model has a property called non-chirality. Chirality, which is the difference between left-right asymmetric models, are called chiral, and left-right symmetric models are called non-chiral. So my model is non-chiral, but the chiral nature of the universe is supposed to emerge from it. And I was asked questions that didn't seem to make sense, which is you can't have a chiral anomaly in a non-chiral model. And the person, the reporter picked up on this and didn't really get it. So there was like a flurry of activity with a big WTF. And if you ask me, with a big WTF. And if you ask me,

by the time I gave the second lecture, people weren't laughing. It was a serious lecture. People heard that it was in the, it wasn't like somebody come up with their own language and their own, you know, written in crayon

and some indecipherable thing. It was written in the normal language, but I hadn't written a paper. And papers are very much the stock and trade of that community. So I would say that the community settled on a rubric, which is paper or it didn't happen. In other words, put up or shut up, give us a paper. Now I had written something. But because my trajectory through math and physics was very unusual, I have a very low trust of the academic community. I support them, as you can tell. I'm extolling the virtues of science. But I was subjected to a situation in graduate school where I had –

but I was subjected to a situation in graduate school where I had, I'm probably the only person you've ever met with a PhD who was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense. Why is that? I don't know. What was your thesis? It was on self-dual equations not being as peculiar to dimension four as was claimed. not being as peculiar to dimension four as was claimed. But I had a situation in which the thesis,

when I had entered grad school, was something that you would present to the world. And by the time I was trying to leave, it was a closed-door affair where the department would appoint the person for you, and I was in the unusual position of not having a thesis advisor. So there's some very fraught story. One thing you'll find is that graduate school, for some subclass of people, becomes an extremely fraught experience where the power of a department not to grant you a degree or not to help you get a job or to expel you becomes very contentious, right? And that was the situation. So I got into a very contentious

situation. But there was no explanation of why it was so contentious? We can talk about it on another podcast. But I was in a very low trust situation with Harvard and with the standard community. And so when work that I had done that was rejected for my thesis was discovered by others in 1994 and revolutionized topological gauge theory, topological gauge theory. I became very sort of sullen and angry and withdrawn because my department knew that I had put forward the same equations that became revolutionary in mathematical gauge theory. Did you revisit it with them?

There was a seminar where a guy named David Kajdan, who I very much admire, the person who had been my advisor, I don't want to name names, had given a seminar saying, all of gauge theory has been revolutionized. Old gauge theory is dead. There is a new gauge theory.

And David Kajdan, who I will name, said, I was in the back center row. I think I was picking my nose, actually. And he said, didn't we have a student who told us to look at these equations? And suddenly the whole room turned around and looked at me. I think this is in room 507 of the Harvard Science Center. turned around and looked at me. I think this is in room 507 of the Harvard Science Center. And it's just like, you know,

try to imagine you're an anonymous person in a lecture and suddenly everyone is staring at you and your fingers in your nose. And that was the moment. And I think I mumbled something just to get out of it. But I was angry. I was angry that they'd taken away my agency. I would, you know, better not to give me a PhD. Better just to say, look, we're going to go short you. Screw off. You don't get a PhD. And then if I end up doing something, screw you. You know,

that would have been a better outcome. So instead, I got a PhD through a very tortuous situation, and I came to give up on academics. I don't think that they're a fair system. I don't think that it's open-minded. I don't think that they welcome all sorts of different belief structures, which are capable of producing innovations. So, you know, for my money, I've been very vocal about this. I've written articles on edge.org, and I've said theoretical physics is stalled. And you've been claiming that you're going to ship string theory. And since 1984, well, where is it?

And it's always, you know, N years away. Now, what was the premise of Sean Carroll's wife's article that they got played? Well, Jamie, can you bring it up? I had broken the rules. The rules? Yeah. You're supposed to submit a paper. The paper is supposed to be reviewed.

It's supposed to appear in a journal. You're not supposed to be doing this from mathematics. You don't have training as a physicist this is a hoax but it's not a hoax well i don't know i mean if it is a hoax it's on me clearly not a hoax you're not hoaxing anyone i'm not trying to so i mean look i don't i don't i don't understand the motivation okay imagine that you're the Princeton physics department. You probably have a cork board on the wall called the crank board. And every week somebody writes to you and says, I figured out perpetual motion.

I have a laser transport device. Right. And so everybody is concerned and frightened that their time is going to be wasted by lunatics. Now, I both fit the lunatic profile and don't fit the lunatic profile. On the lunatic side, I'm outside of the system. I haven't kept up. I'm not particularly mathematically minded. I mean, in fact, I'm sort of a B math student from high school. So it's kind of, I'm the only person I know with my profile with a PhD in math. And on the non-lunatic side, I mean, look, you've been listening to my crazy ideas

for a while and they're all over the world. I have lots of heterodox ideas. I don't think that they're taken as being insane. And I don't think this is insane. It's been looked at by enough people to say, until you actually write it down very cleanly and clearly, we can't fully evaluate it. But it's a gamble. And the worst thing that can happen is that I have something that looks like a final theory that turns out not to be. Are you going to write it out? It's already mostly written up.

I'm in a different phase. I felt that I got rolled in an alley. So here's the big reveal. Okay. It's going to be a lot harder to roll me. I can roll myself. I can screw this thing up just fine by myself but the opportunity to take me into a quiet corner and make something disappear or to hand the credit to somebody

else is going to be a lot harder to do it's not going to happen did you find it dear guardian you've been played i love when they use like slang. It's so bitchy. It's so bitchy. It's so bitchy. Are you allowed to say bitchy when it's a girl? What? When a girl writes it? I don't care, I think. I mean, look, it's only like the future of...

A number of people have been privately asking me about the recent Guardian article and accompanying an op-ed by Oxford mathematician Marcos de Sotoy. How do you say marcus de sotoy de sotoy gushing over supposedly revolutionary you knew unified theory of physics by a man who officially left academia 20 years ago or as i've taken to calling it the eric weinstein's amazing new theory that solves everything puzzling conundrum in theoretical physics only he hasn't written an actual all these are capital letters that's why i'm saying it this way capital letters

an actual paper yet so physicists can't check all those hard mathematical details but trust us it's going to be awesome wow that's super bitchy ahem are you allowed to say that yeah i can say i can say whatever the fuck i want ahem with a period first a couple of caveats i've met weinstein he's a nice guy he's wicked smart this is a stupid article because you know better well it's just the way it's written it's just it's uh it's catty yeah it's for clear for clear. Yeah. Clearly. Yeah. Okay. Well, we could go deep into this after we- But she's playing enforcer. Yes. You broke the rules.

Yes. We know why you broke the rules. There's fame and fortune for you in this. You think that's what it is? Yeah. Well, or you're delusional or- Well, what's her motivation for writing this article though? That's what's weird.

Well, she's a physics- Look, she comes from- I think she's a protege of Casey Cole, the great physics writer from, who's not a physicist. In her defense, do you feel that she felt this honestly and that this was problematic in her eyes, that you were entering into this field that you had not written a paper in, you had left academia 20 years ago, and that she was like, this is all nonsense. Okay, I'm going to put a stop to this nonsense, and I'm going to do it with sort of contemporary language and slang. I don't like the bitchiness,

but I understand the motivation. Look, I think the bitchiness is to make the article more entertaining and more absorbable. it was part of her style as a writer okay now i actually met her as she says and i i had a very high and positive impression of her so why do you think she wrote this without discussing it you know look sean is also one of these people who's trying to enforce the rules he didn't have the easiest time i think he didn't get tenure at Caltech. He's kind of a stickler for reality. He's on the one hand talking total nonsense about Boltzmann

brains and thought experiments, which is what I associate with desperation physics. On the other hand, he's kind of this rigorous rationalist thinker who's a prominent atheist. So he's a complicated guy. He's a great explainer. He's got his own sort of economic incentives that he's one of the very few people who's sort of a voice of physics to the world. And they operate in some sense as a couple. And there's a richness to this. My point isn't to run them down or to boost them up it's just

people are playing out their roles whenever anyone has a sentence that consists of one word and that word is a hem yeah yeah it's i did not enjoy that article but hem well but look yeah but she's trying to throw me a bone he's's wicked smart. He's a nice guy. But he's delusional. He's delusional. And to the extent that I've been delusional before. I'm about the only person in the U.S. who's against high-skilled immigration because people think, why should we keep out the best and the brightest? That's a complicated story. Before the financial crisis, I was saying mortgage-backed securities may blow up the world.

People are like, are you kidding? It's the great moderation. We've banished volatility. People have a chance to know me now. They know that I can get way out there. I said this at the beginning. I get way out there. Okay. I think Elon Musk is totally wrong about going to Mars. Mars is not going to save us. And maybe going to the stars isn't going to save us. Maybe the AI will follow us there, yada, yada, yada. But I'm not going to take this lying down. We're in a desperate situation. And if you're not trying, here's the clear thing. We know what nuclear weapons look like in the fusion era. If we aren't trying to get off this planet before people are unleashing gene drives and weapon you know, weaponized anthrax and who knows what the hell people are going to get up to as the power of biology and the power of physics keeps going, the power of information, at least I'm trying.

I think I'm doing a damn sight better than trying, but assume that I fail completely. I think I'm doing a damn sight better than trying, but assume that I fail completely. How crazy is it that we're not trying to take arms against our new sea of troubles? It's time to rush the cockpit. We've got to get Trump out of office. We've got to restore sanity to our sensemaking. We need newspapers. We need fact checkers.

What is particularly problematic about Trump being in office? That man has nuclear capabilities and I have zero confidence in his decision making. And people imagine that I'm a Trump supporter after I've called him an existential risk. And my boss and good friend Peter Thiel was a supporter of Trump in the last election. I'm taking a huge risk in how much I love this guy Peter Thiel and how much he loves me. Because I'm putting the employer-employee relationship at risk. And people say, okay, you're just a Peter Thiel tool. Well, nobody's going to take that kind of risk unless they have real faith in their friend.

And I work for a friend. I mean a real friend, a person who doesn't cut and run when trouble starts. And I totally disagree with Peter. I have come to understand that Trump, I thought people would understand the Trump danger and that the Democratic Party would reevaluate their situation, but they didn't. They tripled and quadrupled down. And that is alarming. And so that's something I very much got wrong about Trump, is that even Trump wasn't enough of's going to accomplish a lot. One of the things I said before the election is he might be the best and worst of presidents. He might get us a North Korea deal because they're going to look at him and say, this guy is nuts. Who knows what he would do? But we, the technical community, created this problem. And we're abdicating our responsibility by worrying about our egos, by worrying about our reputations, I am abdicating. I should have turned this theory over to the theoretical physics community years ago, even if they screwed me over. And I'm too petty and egotistical to want to give up on it. I watch them take credit for things that weren't, you know,

an assigned credit. I don't like the way they work. The theoretical physics community is our most important community in the world, and it is also a very unpleasant community. And we need to fund them, and we need to let them play. They're dangerous boys for the most part. They're women, but in general, they're very unpleasant men. They have been somewhat cowed. They are not the same cowboys they used to be because they've been failing for 40 years. I should be sharing stuff.

I should be writing things down. I have not had the courage to do it. And if I really have the courage of my convictions, I should share this and see what happens. But one thing is I don't know if it could be weaponized. Assume it's right. You know, I have this decision tree. Assume it's wrong. I've got egg on my face. It's okay. I'll be okay. I worry much more about if it's right. The two things that

can go wrong if it's right is one, that it could be weaponized before it becomes useful. And two, is that there's no solution in it. Maybe we actually are stuck in this place. We never get to go to the stars. We can look at exoplanets and dream but we're stuck here until we change human behavior isn't a trip to the stars just a relocation of our own yeah we're kicking the we're kicking the but we need time man we need time we have not gotten to the point where we don't even feel the danger we're in we are in so much danger and we haven't had almost anything happen since 1945 at the scale of World War II. And so we've got magical thinking between our ears where we think it can't happen here. You know, this is the thing that makes me so fucking furious about screwing around with Europeans and sovereignty. Which is, Europe is a dangerous place. is Europe is a dangerous place.

Europe is historically a dangerous place. It's been a place for years where college students can go and take in the sites, but it's a dangerous ethnic cauldron. And Jews know this better than anyone. And the one thing that the far left and the far right agree on is Jews, and it's not in a good way.

All right? so it is very important we are the canaries in the coal mine we feel this stuff early and things are things are coming apart the the physical world the world of commerce the world of like structural engineering and building permits is still okay so far but the intellectual world that sort of wraps that and keeps it in check is coming unglued. And quite frankly, I don't want to go through that again. We cannot afford another World War II because World War II won't look like World War II. World War III. Yeah.

And I don't know. Maybe it'll look like information warfare. Maybe it won't look like anything like a war that we've seen before. Yeah. Maybe it'll look like information warfare. Maybe it won't look anything like a war that we've seen before. But the problem is, Joe, is that I've got some sort of wildly tattooed martial artist across from me. I'm some sort of guy who dropped out of academics years ago and doesn't have a published paper in this area. And I really literally think maybe it comes down to you and me.

Maybe we use this podcast and some crazy ass differential geometry to at least make a go of it to at least at the minimum excite somebody to think maybe it's possible to make progress well what's interesting about that is what you've said is reaching an astonishing number of ears and eyes. This is why I pushed out. Look, I've been responsible about this up until now. This is my first really irresponsible podcast. Why is it irresponsible? Well, I don't know.

Maybe it's egotistical. Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this. I guarantee you there are going to be a lot of people in physics departments who are going to be pissed off when this hits. Yeah, but it's your thoughts. There's nothing irresponsible about your thoughts. Well, you have to appreciate that when you're working as hard as these guys have, and these guys have been slogging in the salt mines for forever with no progress of the type I mean since the early 70s. It's pretty galling.

somebody talking like this who has the luxury of an invite to this podcast with no vetting with you know nothing behind him other than the hope that maybe he's done something that's interesting and i've never spoken about this you know i have a recording for example of the the lecture that i did at oxford um which i chose not to release you You know, I just, it was so unpleasant. The cattiness, the bitchiness, the nastiness, the undercutting, the idea that this came down to ego or fame. I guarantee you the thing that I really like least about what I'm about to do with this podcast is fame. I think fame is a bad, it's a bad deal.

Like you have to deal with this. You don't want to say what your location is, where you're going to be. You know, people react all day long. People say, can you get me into Joe Rogan? Can you connect me with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan? It's constant. I get two to three requests a week. I don't want it.

I've had a wonderful 53 years without being very well known. And if this doesn't work out, I'll go back to being not very well known. My greater fears is that maybe it will work. And then the thing that I really care about is does it help? Does it buy us time? Can we get off the planet? Is there anything we can do if we actually know the source code? John Brockman runs this thing called edge.org.

And every year he asked a question to like 200 scientists. And finally he got tired of asking the annual question. So he said, okay, 20 years is enough. The last question is what is the final question? And Jamie, could I ask you to bring up edge.org and my name and my answer on, must have been 2018? And it's interesting because, you know, I kept putting stuff out in Edge.

Like, for example, I was very worried about professional wrestling presaging an election. So I did an article on kayfabe, which is the system of lies that undergirds wrestling. And I did one on Bitcoin called Go Virtual, Young Man. So nobody ever paid attention to my series of answers to the Edge question. So this is the edge question. So this is- The last question. The last question. Something unprecedented happened when we finally learned our own source code.

Nobody cared. This is the question that obsesses me. This is when I say I've left this planet. This is what I'm focused on. What happens if we actually figure out where we are, where this place is? What are we doing? Who are we? What built this? And who acts on that information once we do figure it out? What steps are taken? I don't know.

Whether or not the consequences of those steps are ever really fully thought out. I always tried to talk to somebody like government or the intelligence services. I don't know whether I have something. Maybe I do. Maybe I don't. But wouldn't you guys want to know ahead of schedule? And, you know, never was able to get anybody interested. I went through graduate school on the Office of Naval Research's top grant for graduate study.

And I always thought they would check in with me, but they never have. So like the federal government paid for my postdoc and the military paid for my graduate education and Harvard doesn't care and they don't, nobody cares. Nobody believes that anything is possible, which is the really interesting part. What do you mean by that? Nobody believes anything is possible. You mean really astronomical breakthroughs? Yeah. Like we all know, we're waiting to see what Tim Cook is going to do for the next iPhone.

Will Elon get to Mars? Does anyone actually care about Mars? I was there for the moon landings. And let me tell you, we were bored of the moon by the time we left. It's a very weird thing to say, but that's something,

I was born in 1965. We were bored. Well, my perception of the whole Mars thing is that it's the shittiest to say, but that's something I was born in 1965. We were bored. Well, my perception of the whole Mars thing is that it's the shittiest location that we can get to. Yeah. It's a bad neighborhood. It's the best location that we can get to.

That isn't this one. Well, yeah, but it's also like we have spots on earth that suck. Yeah. We don't even go there. We don't even go there. But like at least,

you know, hats off to Elon that he at least inspires people by, he followed up the scent when we gave up on progress. So my point is we're not, nobody thinks this is going to work. I can say it on the show. It can generate a little bit of flurry of activity. It'll die down within a week. We're going to go back to, you who got milkshaked right and we're going to want to know is tulsi is tulsi gaining on andrew you know what about biden can the center hold will the fringe come in

we're just constantly distracted and at least this is going to be entertaining we are at three hours and three and three and a half hours see last time we almost got to four hours i'm happy to end it if people will go to the portal the portal with eric weinstein on on apple apple spotify spotify And popular clients for podcasts. I'm sure they will. This is going to be an interesting one. I'm really curious to see what kind of blowback this one's going to have. Well, two things, Joe. One, you, along with Sam and my brother, really encouraged me to do this so i'm holding you personally responsible for whatever goes wrong um the second thing is i really just i have such a positive feeling about

what you've done uh in terms of empowering people like it really touched me that when my brother was shit out of luck, you did a bunch of shows with him and helped him get to a safe place. And I just want to say that there is like an aspect, we keep talking about, is there any use for men whatsoever? And standing up in a situation in which you can take a fair amount of guff, you can take a lot of heat. You said this thing to me that was really amazing, which is that this is a golden age of comedy. And my interpretation was that there was a period of time where nobody

could figure out how to tell a joke on a college campus. And our best comedians have figured out how to be compassionate enough and kind enough and touch the things that are animating us and making us uncomfortable. And that that's what you're a part of and so i i view you as like a very delicate neurosurgeon i watch the evolution for example of your jokes about professional wrestling being gay right no seriously stay with me joe i watched that it was always funny but it got better and better and better and the idea that that could be told in a way that you'd be totally comfortable with, you know, your gay friend or lover right next to you laughing your ass off,

taught me a lot about the power of just radiating decency that, together with analytic thought. And it's a bit of a template. I don't know that I have the skill to pull this off, but you've been an inspiration. I just want to say thank you for having me back on the program. My pleasure, my friend. It bit of a template. I don't know that I have the skill to pull this off, but you've been an inspiration. I just want to say thank you for having me back on the program. My pleasure, my friend. It's always a pleasure. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Bye everybody. That was fucked up. Thank you.