The Joe Rogan Experience - #1453 - Eric Weinstein

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

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

What's up, brother? How are you? Joe, how are you? You hanging in there? I have not been off of my property more or less in two weeks, so it's crazy to see another human being. Yeah, I don't think this is healthy for us. I know.

This lockdown shit. Everybody's so weirded out. You want to run into people walking dogs, like they don't want the dogs to get close to each other. Like, hi. Everyone's across the street. Hi. And I'm a hugger, right?

Me too. And we're in California, so I'm a hugger in California, and all of my instincts are wrong. Everything's all messed up. Everyone's across the street. Hi. And I'm a hugger, right? Me too. And we're in California. So I'm a hugger in California and all of my instincts are wrong. Everything's all messed up. Everyone's confused. Here's the big question. How long does it take before we normalize and go back? Like, let's say the end of July. Everyone announces, we got this thing locked down.

We have a viable treatment. It's no different than the flu. It gets you this chloroquine with the Z-Pak or whatever the current treatment is. When do people start hugging again? What do you mean? It's going to be crazy. I mean, I think that the idea is we're all so starved for touch that we're going to have a jubilee like you've never seen. People are going to greet each other with tongues who are almost like just acquaintances. I don't think that's a good idea. There's still colds and cooties and all that other shit.

I know, but I think everybody's losing their shit. They definitely are. I've been talking to a lot of friends that are on the extremely cautious side, let's say that, and they're not going anywhere, and they're wearing gloves and masks when they step outside their house to go do something in the backyard. And they put the glove and mask down and they spray it with Lysol when they come inside. It's not healthy and it is also healthy. I mean the idea that we have not been tested in so long. It's good to remember also that this stuff is live and real and it has always been live and real. And, you know,

if it was possible to live without this stuff, that would be one thing. But the 75 year nap that we've been in since 1945 is itself the greatest threat to all of us. And our preparedness is just a wonderful indicator where you actually get to see this is the quality of your experts. This is the quality of your leadership. This is the quality of your leadership. This is what they look like when put under stress. That's true, right? That is a good thing. And I'm impressed with the medical community.

I'm impressed with the people that are recognizing that this is a huge problem. Not so impressed with the administration of a lot of these hospitals that haven't prepared in terms of like masks and ventilators and a lot of these other things. Not so impressed with politicians, but also it just seems like everyone, like you said, was in this nap state and hadn't really been tested. And really, globally, no one had been tested since the pandemic of 1918 like this. Right. no one had been tested since the pandemic of 1918 like this, right? 68, which I had, I had the Hong Kong flu,

and 57 were sort of the best parallels to this. You got the Hong Kong flu in 68? I had the Hong Kong flu and was sick as a dog in San Francisco. I was like three, two, I mean, three, four. I think it went from 68 to 70. Do you remember it? Oh, yeah. I think it went from 68 to 70. Do you remember it? Oh, yeah. I was in San Francisco. My grandma had to come up from L.A. to care for me.

It was bad. It was like one of my earliest memories, yeah. And so 68 and 57, I think, are the best comparables to this before we go back to 1918. And almost nobody remembers these things. Like it's very weird. Many people had never heard of the Hong Kong flu when I started talking about the fact that I had. Yeah, I vaguely remembered it until you just said it. I'm slightly older than you, right? Yeah, I'm 52.

I'm 54. Yeah. I don't remember the Hong Kong flu, but I do. You know what I mean? Like I don't remember the Hong Kong flu, but I do. You know what I mean? Like, I don't remember it personally. No. But you as a health geek are up on these sorts of things. And so you understand the ways in which, you know, for example, you can have a flu where the, I guess the cytokine storm, you know, is the threat from your immunity. Your immune system is like bigger than the virus itself. There are all of these various weird things that happen. But I think that let's call it the big nap. The big nap is itself the greatest threat to us.

And this is bad, but it is also a shot across our bow. And this is what was happening in my mind when I was on here talking about the twin nuclei problem of cell and atom. We didn't stop history. It's not like we're past atomic war. We figured that out. We just hit the pause button for a little while. We didn't stop history. It's not like we're past atomic war, like we figured that out. We just hit the pause button for a little while and we hit snooze. Yeah. And the fear is also that nefarious players will take this opportunity to erode civil rights, to erode civil liberties, and then China to gain power in the US.S. market to gobble up a lot of stocks while everything is down and try to increase their stake in our economy and try to push.

China's got its hands lovingly around our throat because our elite have been moving into greater and greater states of China dependence. And so I think that's what the BDSM community refers to as breath play, and I don't like it. Breath play is like you kind of like half choke somebody? Yeah. How do you know that? What? I don't like the fact that you know that.

I went to MIT, and MIT is wildly into BDSM. Are they really? Why are geeks and Aspies into BDSM? Somebody said lots of rules. What's an Aspie? Asperger's people, right. Lots of rules. They like that?

They love rules. Because to do all this stuff safely, you would have to have a huge hierarchy of rules. And my claim is that China is – they supply so much of our stuff. We've moved all of our manufacturing base into these crazy supply chains. And we are completely dependent on a strategic rival. And China is very careful. If you remember when they hosted the Olympics to have these amazingly impressive displays that are always friendly. But what they're really saying is we have our shit together

and you don't. And our system was hackable. It was open. For example, if you have a company that has a duty to its shareholders, the directors of the company must do whatever is in the best interest of the shareholders and everything else doesn't matter, then you can have a situation where a director has to move things to China because that is in the best interest of the shareholders, even if it's absolutely not in the best interest of the United States. This is what Ralph Gomery, who used to head the Sloan Foundation, once said in an address I was at at the National Academy of Sciences. He just said, as a director, I am incentivized to do exactly the wrong thing for the United States of America.

So I'm going to put one hat on and tell you, as an American, we must not move all of this over to China. And then I'm going to put my director's hat on and I'm going to vote to move everything over to China because I have no choice. And so, you know, in essence, the smart, good people, all 11 of them, were always fighting this thing about you cannot become China dependent. And during the big nap, there was no way to make this argument convincing. You couldn't say, look, we have a serious strategic problem by your continuing moves to bring China in as the solution to every equation we can't balance. And that is really the problem, is that there wasn't any ability to say, we are way too dependent on a strategic rival. You saw this at the beginning of the pandemic. Everyone was afraid of what? I don't want to appear xenophobic. I don't want to appear like

Chicken Little. And so all of our friends, the nutcases, the marginal weirdos, the supposed grifters and gadflies are the people who most got this one right and early. And all the respectable people like Nancy Pelosi telling people, please go to Chinatown to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Bill de Blasio of New York saying despite coronavirus, get out there. You know, lead your lives. Don't let this thing hold you back. These people need to resign. Nancy Pelosi should resign. It's one thing to say we don't have enough information about this. It's another thing to say, take the information that's coming in, disregard it, and get back in there and keep fueling the economy. This is exactly our leadership class, their problem. They think about this in short-term economics.

The long-term implications of us all sheltering in place, nobody can compute the consequences of this. Not one person in the world knows what happens when you run this experiment. Yeah, it's a new thing, right? The made in America argument was always like sort of frivolous, almost xenophobic. Like, so much of all the stuff that you need to kind of keep things exactly the way they are. It's cheaper to make it over there because they will, like what we saw with Foxconn, where they put nets around the building to keep people from jumping off. And the weirdest thing was people trying to argue that the suicide rate at Foxconn was essentially the same as the suicide rate in the general population. Well. Have you ever heard that argument?

Yeah. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? That's where they work. There's nets around where they work because so many people where they work jump off the building to end their life because their life sucks that bad. That they kill themselves at work do you know how rare it is to kill yourself at work probably pretty fucking rare you know how common it is where you have to put nets around the building you're like look we're getting really tired of people going to the roof and jumping off because it's the easiest way to kill yourself

they're going to get more creative yeah the problem is we are all hooked up to this need for cheap products yeah profits when we can't figure out how to innovate enough to actually create the juice in our own system. And therefore, we have to rationally. You were going to say? No, I was just going to say. I mean, also, we've gotten into this idea of every year we have to have a newer, better piece of electronics. Like, if you had to go the rest of your life with an iPhone 11, how much would you suffer? Not that much.

Although I would say that many of us are not that excited about the next phone. That itself is an antiquated thing. Right. But what I'm saying is like, why can't they make it so that you can just fix this? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like who the fuck fixes their phone? You don't fix your phone.

You bring it in. Oh, you're going back to like depression era thinking. Well, not depression era thinking. It's like why can't things be sustainable? No, no. The plans obsolescence and the need to constantly update so that you never – it's a tricky problem. If you need growth to power your system, then in a weird way, it makes sense not to build the optimal phone. Right.

Because if you were to build the optimal phone and then people stopped renewing everything. Your system's fucked. Then your system weirdly breaks down. So it makes sense at the level of the phone that you wouldn't start innovating, if you can't figure out how to restart innovation in a big way, now you're stuck with either having to learn to live in steady state, which none of us – Americans have no program for living in steady state. We need growth. That was the whole point of the embedded growth obligation idea, that it's suffused throughout every institution. Every pension plan assumes growth, right? All right.

So now we have this problem where we don't have the growth and we need the growth. And then in a weird way, the planned obsolescence is like fake growth. It means that we're going to rebuy our phones as if they were now highly innovative. So there's like a weird way in which we become dependent on nonsense. Yeah. Dependent on nonsense is a great way to put it. This is really highlighting that for a lot of people. When people are home and they're with their families and they're not traveling, especially people like me and my peers, like a lot of my comedian friends who travel constantly, we're like, it's kind of nice to be home.

Everyone's sort of re-looking at this like, is this life that we've sort of accepted as this is the way things are, is this really the way things should be? Or is this just we just got caught in a pattern and we're operating on momentum? If our comedian force becomes non-dysfunctional, we are screwed. Well, that's not gonna happen.

That would require so many there's almost no group that is as far away from normal as comedian i know that's why i get along with them so well it's so hard for me to hang out with regular folk you know that's that would be rough like if i had to live in a community of regular people that just work every day what if you had like a community of only comedians? What would that look like? Oh, that'd be fun. Really?

Yeah, yeah, we'd be fine. We have that. That's the comedy store. The comedy store. Yeah. If the comedy store was just locked down on like a 500 acre piece of property and there's a bunch of houses on there. We could only do jokes for each other.

We would just entertain each other. Well, half the fun of comedians is just us hanging out. We would just get together and laugh. Well, by the way, I should just say one of the great things about moving back to L.A. has been your invitations to come hang with the comedians at the store. What a great scene. I mean, you made this point to me about a renaissance. And then I think I sent you David Byrne's book about music, the chapter on CBGB.

And it's almost an exact map of what CBGB did as the Harvard of punk to the comedy stores, Oxford of comedy. Yeah. Yeah. You, you, you've been to the back bar. That's the best. That's the spot. You got me hammered two times ago. And I was just, I stumbled out of that thinking that was the best time and I couldn't remember anything. Well, you know what's great, too? Even when non-comedians like yourself and, you know, Melissa and Matt and, you know, some of their friends and all these other people come there and they're around these people, they act freer. They're laughing louder. They're making more off-color jokes and everyone's just laughing, having fun.

Melissa's the worst. You have to be very careful. Oh, she's hilarious. She's very funny. Yeah. Melissa Chen, by the way. Shout out. Shout out to Melissa.

By the way, what great stuff she's doing on masks. Yeah. Explain that. By the way, what great stuff she's doing on masks. Yeah. Explain that. Well, she just takes it on herself to ask the question, why don't our doctors and nurses have masks? And so she's running around trying to figure out how to connect donors, flights, product. Whatever she's doing, she's heroically taking a ton of this on her shoulders and not – I'm hesitating because I don't even know what I'm allowed to say.

Right. Yeah, we don't have to talk any further. You should. She's a very interesting person. I'm really glad you introduced me to her. She's fascinating. This is a great time to see what people are actually made out of. Who's heroic?

The heroic impulse. Sure. And who can keep their shit together when things go sideways, when things get Western, as it were? Well, let me ask you a question. Of all of the presidential candidates that were in the race, like everybody who's dropped out as well, which of them would you want in a COVID situation? Tulsi. Tulsi.

By the way, that was my answer as well. I didn't want her foreign policy. That's one of the reasons I wasn't like gung-ho on Tulsi. I didn't like some of the stuff about, in India, there's some issues about Modi, and I don't want to get into that. In India, there's some issues about Modi and I don't want to get into that. But if you ask like who would you want to – like who has that kind of lockdown military? We have to make sense.

The bullshit needs to leave the room. The odd thing is it's a millennial female of color that I would immediately want to subordinate to. Well, she's – Because she would also be no bullshit. She had the strength to call out all of the nonsense. I'm positive. She would just say, this is unacceptable. What are we doing? This is emergency time.

We have to suspend these issues. We have to get these things to our doctors, nurses, emergency technicians. I mean, look, I should say that I'm trying to be like smiling and positive, but I am just burning with rage. I cannot believe – That things weren't set up correctly? The scale of the screw up and trying to even understand a government that I cannot trust as far as I can throw it. To feel contempt for the Surgeon General of the United States. To say that the World Health Organization

is a danger to world health, to say that the CDC is lying. I hate being in a position where I believe these things. Yeah. What about Tulsi? She's a person of real character. You know, I don't see her like I see a lot of these people

that are running for president i see them wearing masks you know i mean i don't even need to name names but they they're they're doing their best impression of a politician like a shitty comedian will do their best impression of david tell you know that's the best example that someone gave me of uh like the the comparison there's there's There's a style of communicating that a lot of them have adopted to try to appear. And you can tell that they're coached. They're trying to appear presidential. She's just, that's who she is, man.

I've hung out with her off camera, on camera. I've seen her, just the way she communicates with people. I don't know her down to the bone, but what I see, I'm very impressed with. And she's developed her character over two tours of duty overseas. Again, who volunteers? Who takes this stuff on? This is the furball that I can shove down the throat of the DNC to make the party fall apart under that Hillary Clinton overhang? The weird thing is in an actual pandemic, I am almost positive that she has the stuff.

Yeah. It may not be her year. Right. She's only 38. She's only 38. I am almost positive that she has the stuff. It may not be her year. Right. She's only 38. She's only 38. It might not be her year, but she'll get there. But how interesting that, like, when the shit hits the fan, the person with the highest number of intersectional points, maybe, is actually the person that you want to lead on merit. Right.

But they don't want her, which is even more hilarious. They don't want her because she can't be bought and sold. Well, that's, it's really simple. I think that, you know, we need to revisit some stuff, which all of this anger and ferocity that we were using to stand up to social engineering invading the mainstream conversation. I believe that COVID proves that it is deadly. That if your top concern is not appearing xenophobic, people will die because you are functionally incompetent. You've just lost 40 IQ points for nothing. Well, that was the initial response to Trump's idea of shutting down flights from China. People were furious and they were calling it

racist. Well, the idea that you can put a negative sign in front of Donald Trump and form an opinion that if he's stupid, then whatever the reverse of what he does is smart, right? Is itself moronic. It's dangerous. It's completely irresponsible. And here's the weird thing. And I said this to you on the phone the other day when we were talking. The weird thing, Joe, is that we are the actual adults in the room. Tulsi, you, me. I don't know.

That's a huge problem if you're lumping me in with. Well, that's what I'm trying to say. But this is the problem, which I think I get this actually better than you, which is you have a beautiful life and you recognize that part of it comes with humility of not thinking too much of yourself, being self-deprecating, all these things. I think that those are all to your credit. It is also time to lead. And if you believe that you having to break out of whatever mindset you're in could be the difference between saving physicians' lives and nurses' lives, you'd do it. You would do it.

For sure. For sure. OK. Well, this thing is the flagship of pirate radio. I mean this is Samizdat for the world. And the concept of samizdat, that you would have truth that would circulate underground in the Soviet Union that would not be – like you are seldom rebroadcast inside of like MSNBC or CNN except when they're like going after you. Well, what's weird is Fox News is the flagship inside the right of center gated institutional narrative. And then you have all the other organs like MSNBC, CNN, NPR, BuzzFeed, whatever these things are in the left of center gated institutional narrative.

Very often Fox will pick up on things that we do if they stick it in the eye of the left. Yeah, that's exactly. And so the point is, is that they selectively amplify us. And that process of selective amplification is itself dangerous. Like I get invited more frequently by Fox and people and I turn them down because the narrative inside of like the New York Times is, well, he's part of that right wing thing. Frequent Fox News contributor, Eric Weinstein. Oh, that's the adjective occupation name. Yes.

Frequent adjective, Fox News contributor, my occupation and then my name. occupation and then my name. That game, like if NPR would call and put me on, I would go on Fox. But their very clever game is to make it sound like, oh, well, you're choosing to go. No, you guys are choosing to ignore a lot of what's changing the culture. And therefore, the only people who are willing to ask us on and rebroadcast us are the people who are angry at the NPR, CNN, MSNBCs. Well, I think they realize the limitations of their medium. I really do. I think that CNBC and MSNBC and CBS and NBC and ABC, they all realize that they're in this really weird situation where they have to

do these seven minute segments interrupted by commercials. They have a restriction. They can only air at whatever time of night the show is supposed to be scheduled. And they rely on these internet clips to sort of carry the show. I mean, the YouTube clips are probably far more popular than anything they ever released that's on the air. I mean, their distribution thing is fucked it's very it's very bizarre and it was very interesting watching bill maher uh sit down here he's like i guess this is it the man cave

you're like yeah good to see you bill he's like i'm here to grovel and ask whether you'll come on my show no he was trying to force me on his show. I know. There's very little groveling. He's not a groveler. No, but he's a – He's a strong armor. Well, what he is is he's caught between two tectonic plates. He is the closest thing we have inside of the beast in some sense to what we're doing maybe. Yeah.

He's a comic. He is a comic, but he's also – you know, he's a guy with real courage. Yes. And he's in a very tough, I think he's in weirdly the toughest spot of us all. Well, he's a guy who's on the left also, who thinks that a lot of the stuff, as I do and as you do as well, a lot of the stuff that's perpetrated by the people on the left is not just dangerous, but it empowers the right. It empowers Trump supporters. It gets people on the fence to give up and jump right and get welcomed.

Yeah, I've stopped being nice to these people. You can't be. No, it's just... It's too much buffoonery. And it's psychotically dangerous to watch people continue the buffoonery in life and death situations. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree.

And Bill's there on the right side. Are you going to do a show? Have you done a show? I'll do it eventually, I'm sure. Yeah. The only options that he gave me, I already had gigs booked. I see. I think that it's really important to use – I mean I don't know them at all.

But to the extent that that was a beachhead to connect these two universes, my model of this is that we've got this traditional legacy world and we've got this sort of internet world that hovers above it. And in general, the insulating layer between them is astounding at this late date. layer between them is astounding at this late date. The number of things that happen on the internet that don't really have any echo inside of the mainstream is astounding in 2020. And then you get these arcs that happen between the two. So, for example, the famous Sam Harris interaction with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher's show was an arcing between these two universes. Well, it was also a guy on steroids that was roid raging at a guy who actually knows what

he's talking about. That's what was going on. I mean, he was preparing a guy on steroids that was roid raging at a guy who actually knows what he's talking about. That's what was going on. I mean, he was preparing for Batman. He did the math on that. That's why he was so angry. But then Kathy Newman and Jordan Peterson was another arcing where Kathy was playing the role of Ben Affleck. Jordan Peterson.

Not really. No. What she was doing, she was trying to get away with this same strategy that she has lazily employed before, this sort of general boxing and categorizing of someone's opinions that don't really represent their actual opinions. So what you're trying to say— So what you're saying to me, Joe, is that I have absolutely no point and I'm a worthless human being who should never visit your show. Is that what you're saying, Joe? What you're trying to say. So what I am trying to say is that in a generalized sense, she was just doing that same old, same old thing with a person who is not participating.

I sort of liken it. Go ahead. It's also that these people that they would victimize by putting them into these narratives, right? And they're accustomed to using these patterns. These people traditionally did not have any other way to respond. There was no internet clips that were released. You could write a letter to the editor. Well, yeah, right. Or page 27. Yeah. And maybe they would print a retraction, you know, and no one would pay attention to it. I mean, this is standard behavior for some newspapers and some journalists, right?

The unscrupulous ones unfortunately but this this model doesn't work anymore because anyone can go on youtube and instantly say my time on the kathy newman show this is what went wrong this is why she did this and this is what they told me in the green room and this is what and then you lay it out sort of sort of no here's i mean let's play with me. Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. I don't know. My take on it is that the great thing about, we have an ability to do almost anything we want on YouTube so long as we don't get shut down. Let's say that. However, you also have this concern that as long as this world remains gated, if, for example, you have a closed world of people who are pretending to have conversations amongst themselves discussing the issues and then you have the institutions say we're only going to deal with the authoritative sources.

Then the problem is, is that if you have a state of pretend, you know, LARPing or kayfabe, whatever you want to call it, that's taking place inside the gated institutional narrative, the institutions are going to predicate their actions on the official nonsense. And whatever we do on YouTube, as long as there is an insulating layer, unless we can actually lob something into the wall, you know, over the walls of the Citadel, they will continue to actually act as if we'd never said anything, we never pointed it out. It's like you're at this kid's magic show, which the magician is completely incompetent and the lights are on, and you can see all the wires and trap doors. And the magic show continues to go on. And so you may make the point, well, everybody can see that it's bullshit.

But as long as the institutions agree to pretend that they believe the bullshit, we have a real problem. And the internet didn't solve that. The internet might not have solved it. Sorry to interrupt you. I think what it has done is severely erode the foundation of it to the point where the trust in it is just – there's no real mainstream anymore. Like this idea that the mainstream news is the mainstream. Well, how is that real if YouTube videos get more views? Like if you make a YouTube video and it gets 5 million views, but then something goes on MSNBC and it gets 500,000 views.

What's mainstream? What is mainstream now? We're talking about, instead of mainstream media, I think the term traditional media is the best way. The same way the term... I like legacy, but keep going. Legacy's good. Well, look, for the longest time, people had to use Morse code.

Then they figured out phones and those Morse code guys were fucked. What did you do? And then phones were attached to cords. Yeah, but I'm saying that there's still a function. No, there is. There's still a phone. No, but there's still a function, unfortunately, to the...

So I love the point that you're making. I'm just trying to figure out how to play with it. Let's assume that there is no mainstream left. What we're really talking about is legacy institutional media. And the great danger is that assume that the mainstream completely exits the building and it's only 10,000 people trading bullshit amongst themselves, but they also control all the institutions. So like you, the world gets to keep reality and we, the institutions agree to traffic and bullshit. You can make lots of jokes at our expense, but we're also going to be figuring out whether we're going to stock masks

or what our farming policy is or how the US military should be deployed and where we should send troops to protect oil fields and all these kinds of things. And that's what's concerning me is that a lot of us are settling for being right and having them look like idiots. And their point is, OK, fine, we'll continue on. We'll look like idiots. But we also still control the levers. So with legacy media, your assertion is that legacy media has a much more impactful presence in terms of foreign policy, in terms of dealing with the pandemic, the response, things along those lines?

Let's play with it and see where it goes. Okay. If you think about Wikipedia, Wikipedia might have a rule that says, we don't do original research, so please link to authoritative sources. And you say, okay, great. What are authoritative sources? So now the authoritative source is the CDC or the WHO or the Surgeon General or the New York Times or CNN or MSNBC. Like if you have this –

But is MSNBC – like if someone just goes on the air and talks about something, is that an authoritative source? Wouldn't it be like an expert in health, like someone who's gone over peer-reviewed studies, someone who is well-educated? Who's the surgeon general right now? I don't know. Or CDC? Is that Redfield? I don't know. I'm sure he's a competent physician. I also think that there's a whole thing about pretending that masks don't work. Masks don't work in the general population. Please don't buy them our health care people need them is that what they're saying well that's what they've been saying right and so the issue is that you have some piece of nonsense so that is a piece of nonsense because california is now

changing their recommendation saying if you're going out in public it's not just nonsense it's deadly nonsense it's deadly physician killing nonsense i I mean, I'm trying. Smiles, everyone. Yeah. I mean, what we have is a situation in which we knew that the mask and personal protective equipment supplies are wildly off to say nothing of ventilators and ICU beds. And now what do we do about it? And now what do we do about it? So we have rules like please don't bring masks to work because it scares the patients or please don't wear homemade masks because they might actually be more germ filled or virus filled.

So you're back propagating what you wish to be true to get the action that you're looking for. What we have is a prisoner's dilemma where if everybody runs and buys up masks who – like the people we need to be protected most are the heroes who are actually dealing with multiple COVID patients and taking huge amounts of viral load. So there's no question in my mind that those are the people that as a society, if you would level with us, like there is a speech to give, which would go like this. My fellow Americans, as readiness are, I am forced to tender my resignation effective of Friday this week. I have failed to heed many of the warnings in our academic literature. I have failed to heed many of the warnings in our academic literature. Because our reserves are severely depleted, it is imperative that we not suffer further loss of life. And therefore, I am forced to make an unusual request. Having failed you, I'm asking everyone who stockpiled masks for personal use to think about doing something sacrificial for the good of us all.

Our heroes are currently exposed to the coronavirus and taking huge amounts of viral load. And I'm asking you to donate any unused masks that you have to this population as we are desperately trying to replenish our stocks. Please continue to shelter in place and recognize that the benefit to you is minor and the benefit to us all is major. And this will be following your heroic impulse to bring us back together as a nation. First of all, is there a readiness czar? No.

Okay. Second of all, no one's going to say that. They're never going to admit. They're going to say we are adjusting our recommendations based on the new. No, Joe, I'm going to be completely unreasonable. I know I have this mode where I just – I become completely unreasonable. Go ahead. This is – if that's where we are, then it's time to revolt.

Revolt how? I don't know. Well, we need people that – Civil disobedience. Like to put our healthcare people – I mean I have not been off my property for weeks. I have not been off my property for weeks. The reason I'm here in part is to do what little I can and it's very little to support the people who are our literal heroes, our life and death, putting themselves in harm's way. The idea of hospital administrators abusing our physicians and nurses makes me apoplectic with rage. The fact that these people are told that they can't talk to the press and they write to me and their family and their

children write to me. My mother was asked to do this. My uncle works in a prison. He's not allowed to wear a mask. He's not allowed to bring a mask. I send a mask, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, there's a lot of those stories. Okay. What the hell is wrong? It is time for these people to resign and it is time for us to remember that we have the ability to turn over our own government. This is – we are so unprepared as a nation. And we have been sold out for so long by our self-appointed leadership class who nobody wants. That we either remember who we are and how this game is played. I mean, this is like, this is a pre-war footing.

And this can easily lead to war. The transmission mechanism is you have everybody stay indoors because you're worried about deaths of accountability, which is, you know, I don't think they're worried about the number of deaths. I think they're worried about deaths that result from triage and that would result in career-ending action. Yeah, this is what you were saying on the phone. You think that's really what's bothering them. Yes.

But if we all have to stay home while they replenish our supplies, then the economy goes into recession. Recession can become depression. Depressions lead to armed conflict and armed conflict leads to war. That would be a transmission mechanism from these stupid masks to something that nobody can handle. And here's the thing. We are coming up on Passover. And we Jews have a tradition that I wish everybody had, which is that we read one stupid story

every goddamn year just to drill it into your head to make sure it's always fresh. And this is when it's time to leave, when it's time to change, don't wait for the bread to rise. This is what I say to every Jewish person. You're sitting around waiting for the bread to rise because they all know the story, which is you eat the goddamn matzah because the people who waited for the bread to rise are no longer with us. Their descendants are no longer with us. And it is time to revolt. This leadership class is unworkable. The reason that you and I both came to the word Tulsi instantly, I don't think you took

much deliberation, is because Tulsi would know what to do. Well, she's also the least encumbered. Yeah. She's the least burdened by the ties to the system. Everybody in the system hates her. Yeah. You know, and the whole point is she would put heads on pikes. Yeah.

This is the moment for heads on pikes. And it's important. It's not a vengeance thing. The importance is what is the cost to you killing people by failing to heed the academic literature if a supply was depleted and you didn't replenish it? What is the cost to you? Well, there's lessons in how other countries have viewed this and how they chose to act, particularly South Korea. South Korea acted quicker. Smaller population than us, but a much smaller impact of the virus.

They shut things down very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Singapore. I don't know how Singapore. Very, very aggressive. I think that they, you know, they use surveillance and tracking and, you know, making sure that they visited anybody who was known. I mean, they had a different system. And as people like you and me who love our civil liberties, I believe that in part Singapore's draconian society lives off of things that only we can do due to our freedom. So you have to realize that freedom is itself an export. And one of the great dangers is that China has been exporting the benefits of freedom from the United States into an authoritarian system so that they get the benefits of both worlds. They get the benefits of our middle finger, which I think is the secret of American innovation. And they get the benefits of authoritarianism where they can do things that we can't because they can order people to do the unconscionable. So my feeling is I'm on Team

Civil Liberties and Team Civil Liberties has to be somewhat nationalistic, more militaristic, more command and control. Who would you take orders from? So in a lot of fields, I'd take orders from you. You're the big dog in this space. And to the extent that you wanted to coordinate something, I would use my channel. I would subordinate to you and I would want sometimes people to subordinate to me if I was taking a lead on something important. When we have this fear of leadership, because we're all so individualistic that we never want to take an order.

Like whenever I'm training a new assistant or something, one of my always best practices is, can I get you coffee? It's very important to show that the ability to ask to serve somebody else and the ability to lead are tied. You have to be a follower to be a leader and a leader to be a follower. You shouldn't be one or the other. We need right now a more war, we need more of a war footing. We need a war president. We need war senators. We need people of this mentality because the nap is coming to an end. And I do think Nancy Pelosi needs to resign and Bill de Blasio needs to resign. I think that this administration made some good moves and fumbled the ball.

And I believe that past administrations made some good moves and fumbled the ball. And I believe that past administrations made some good moves and fumbled the ball. And the imperative is to stop back propagating what you want us to do, like defeat a prisoner's dilemma, and come up with a lie that would cause us to act selfishly, rationally. Like if you tell me that a mask is actually more dangerous in my hands because it becomes germ-filled, then the idea is like, oh, OK, so I guess I won't use the mask. Well, yeah, because you lied to me. And the idea is that that's what you're trying to do.

You're trying to say what would need to be true to get you to do what I want. I don't understand what you're saying about these masks. What are you saying? So if I say, for example, let's imagine that I don't want to put seatbelts in cars. OK. And I say, you know, Joe, a seatbelt could trap you. Should your car go into the water off of a bridge, you could in fact die from the seatbelt because you'd become entangled and would not be able to save yourself. Right. But the problem with that analogy is seatbelts actually do save lives. On balance.

But is it possible that they're just acting poorly with this mask thing, but that masks actually can contain a lot of viruses and they can hold on to viruses? Seatbelts can kill you, but do you believe – that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to say it as a related rate problem. Let's talk about everybody who gets sick and dies from contaminated masks, everybody who gets sick and dies from a false feeling of safety. Let's just go through a huge list of every bad thing. I see the analogy. And now the idea is think about all the lives saved because of masks, both in terms of transmission, which I don't cough on you. I cough into the mask or in terms of, I don't breathe in either

aerosolized or droplets, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And now the two are real, but you're focusing on like the seatbelt deaths of entanglement because you actually have a covert agenda. And like – What do you think their covert agenda is? Oh, I don't know exactly. But if I had to speculate, I'd go like this. One, we're terrified of triage deaths, deaths that occurred simply because we didn't have enough resources that were mandated to be stockpiled or talked about in the literature. That's one thing. Because there's liability. Then there's liability, which is, oh, we were following the Surgeon General's recommendation at the time.

Now, if somebody suddenly found, you know, like all the masks in the world, I think that the Surgeon General would suddenly say the science has become conclusive. Because there would no longer be a worry about liability. You would just get those masks to the people. You'd get the masks to the people who need them, and then you'd slow transmissions by- Don't you think there's also a lot of just figuring it out as they go along? No.

You don't think that's a lot of what's going on with that? No? There is figuring this out as it goes along. As regards to masks, I believe that everybody knows that masks save lives on balance. They know that the people who need the most have very weird rules. There's this whole thing about the states versus the federal government. There's this issue about price gouging and price mechanisms. There are all sorts of things stopping the mask problem from being sorted out, one of which is the number of masks that are produced in China and the fact that we may have sent masks and personal protective equipment to China.

And that we're back propagating our response. How much are we quarantined and how much are we locked And so partially what we're doing is a parallel sense-making operation to the standard media, which is Twitter said we will now be removing tweets if you contradict official authoritative health sources. So that's just what I did. Surgeon General's lying. CDC's lying. WHO is lying. Come at me. Do you think they're lying? Yes. Why do you think they're lying? Give me a specific example of why you feel like they're lying. Well, for example, you saw this interaction with the, was, Hong Kong TV asking about the WHO about Taiwan? Yeah, that was insane.

Well, explain that because it's fucking insane. It was insane to watch. First of all, he pretended, the head of the WHO pretended he didn't hear them. And then he had them say it again. First of all, he moves like, you can see his hand go to cut off the connection. He hung up. He said, I couldn't hear. She said, OK, I'll repeat the question.

He's like, no, let's go on to the next one. Well, why would he want to go to the next one if he didn't hear it? Come on. Yeah. I don't even have. Here's the point. We are so afraid. Explain what he did to people that don't know, because people are listening here and they're a little confused.

He was asked about the Taiwanese response to the COVID epidemic. And he didn't want to say Taiwan because China claims that Taiwan is part of China. And because China exercises so much influence over the WHO, he wanted to say some very general thing, which is like, I think all provinces of China have been doing an excellent job, meaning a different country, Taiwan, because there's a dispute. So what do you think China's most interested in? The People's Republic of China, the communist China, communist Chinese want no recognition of their existing something called Taiwan.

And why does the World Health Organization give into that? Well, how do different nations get control of things? We have influence at the UN and we've caused the UN to do things that are America-centric. Other countries have influence and you do this by being on particular committees, rotating directorships, who pays the cost. I don't know how the WHO seems to be so enmeshed with China. And I don't want to opine about these things because I want to keep my voice. Right.

But it spoke volumes to watch that guy do that and do that little dance, try to avoid saying Taiwan. My entire life looks like that interview. I hate to say it this way, but my relationship with authority and my big critique is that this is the generic expectation across almost all institutions now. They are all serving bizarre goals because growth is what gave us our independence. And when we became less innovative and we – or the innovation dried up and we couldn't grow our way into new things. The number of people who could use their middle finger effectively and say, I'm steering this organization to do the right thing and this is my bet and we're going to go forward. Those people as a class were removed.

If you think about like what do you do with Churchill when there isn't a World War II to win? It's very uncomfortable. Like, would he open a dry cleaner? We don't know. You have special people who really only shine when there's an emergency. There's a guy named Jaipurkash Narayan in India who's very important. And he was one of the sort of founding fathers of modern India. And after Indian independence was achieved, lots of the people who had been founding fathers went to the next phase where they became like, they enriched themselves, they did standard political things to gain power in the system.

He was the one guy who sort of stayed true to the revolutionary spirit. And bizarrely, when Indira Gandhi created a state of emergency, which was a disaster in India, the people said, well, who can we turn to in a dark time? And oddly, I guess Prakash means light. So there was this phrase like in the darkness, there is one light, Jai Prakash, Jai Prakash, Jai Prakash. They turned to the one guy who'd become the patron saint of lost causes because he never broke faith with the revolutionary spirit. And he gets called up once but he's incredibly important because everybody knows in a dark time who they can trust. Right?

That's a very important parallel to where we are now. Who are the break glass in case of emergency people? Yeah. When you, when you watch the people that are talking in these presidential addresses, there's none of those. I don't see any break glass. I mean, this Fauci guy is obviously an expert in diseases and he's a doctor and he's trying to do his best to lay out the ground rules of what we need to do and what this looks like over the next couple of months. But it's like Jocko Willink, you know, like Jocko is not telling you, don't worry, you don't have to change your routine. You can get up at 930. Just do a little bit, just a little bit. He's like, discipline equals freedom. I'm up at 930. Just do a little bit. Just a little bit.

Discipline equals freedom. I'm up at 430. What are you doing in bed? It's time for discipline. Well, because he's a military guy and military people don't have any room for bullshit. They don't have any room for fluff. Right. But people like SEALs, they don't have any room for fluff because you have to be able to perform.

Well, okay. So then in that situation. So fuck your feelings. Get up at 430. That's how they feel. That's what I'm trying to say. But those, you can just do a little bit. And that's great.

That's great. You guys are enforcing mediocrity. Congratulations. And that's what I'm trying to get at, which is we have a situation where we know. If you have two trainers and one of them is doing the don't worry. And the other one is like, I'm not going to lie to you. You're going to be sore. You're going to be miserable.

This isn't going to be fun. Which do you choose? Some people will go with the former. Yeah. They like to stay fat. There's a lot of that out there. Okay. Mediocrity is a very comforting thing.

I hear you. Yeah. It's fucking, look, it's hard look it's hard it's hard to be that 4 30 in the morning guy well some days that alarm goes off he's got to be like fuck this man well you know that jocko doesn't live that 24 7 yes he does no he may live it he may live at uh 18 6 nobody goes to sleep you remember that thing he did about the cake i was at a birthday party there was a delicious piece of cake in front of me. I struggled. Eventually, I succumbed to temptation.

Yeah, but I'm telling you, man, that doesn't even mean anything. That goes through that fucking blast furnace of a body he has. But I'm saying. Nobody's 24-7 on this stuff, Joe. But that is a fake weakness. Yeah. He'll give in to appear. He's a performative weakness.

Yes. He just wants to appear immortal like the rest of them. He's appearing to make you sort of commiserate with him he's appearing that oh I have some failings too I ate cake yeah what he doesn't tell you is he probably went down to his fucking dungeon basement after he ate cake

and did squats for an hour I believe that there's people that are really that guy and he's one of those people he's really that guy I spend a lot of time with J people that are really that guy. Yeah. And he's one of those people. He's really that guy. He's that guy all the time. I've spent a lot of time with Jocko. Okay.

He's that guy. But that's because he's a Navy SEAL commander. I want one of those people right now. Those guys are important. Right now. Yeah. Those guys are important. And we have to clean out this class of people that put up with each other.

It's like the reason they put up with each other and they don't like indict each other or sue each other or report each other is that they're all the same. And that was the key skill for between 35 and 50 years, which is knowing what not to say to upset the institutional apple cart. Well, that is politics. And that's one of the things that disgusts people about it.

And that's one of the things that, one of the reasons why Donald Trump actually got into office is because people looked at him as an antidote. I mean, that's the whole clean up the swamp, drain the swamp. That's him. That's what they thought. They thought this was a solution. He might bring in his own swamp, but he was against their swamp. Exactly. Exactly. And then Bernie Sanders has his own kind of swamp. He's got a different kind of swamp. You know, everyone's got their own swamp. It's like, what is your particular pattern that you would like to push? You know, what has got you to the dance?

You know? Sorry, I'm laughing. But Barry Weiss was sitting here and she's just like, so Joe, who do you think you'll vote for? And then he's like, Bernie Sanders. And then you called me up. You're like, Eric, what did I just do? I said, Joe, I think you might have just swung the election. Well, the wrong way or the right way.

The whole thing, look, Joe Biden being the main guy is the only reason why they went after Bernie Sanders and went after me. I mean, the whole idea was just to reinforce the idea that Bernie Sanders is making poor choices by connecting him to someone who says fucked up things when he's trying to be funny. Yeah. And you put it in print with some quotations behind it. I'm like, wow, this guy's awful. Everything out of context is awful. And what they're trying to do, without a doubt, is the same thing we're talking about. The guy who's willing to dance with them, which is Joe Biden.

The guy who's the professional politician. They don which is Joe Biden, the guy who's the professional politician, which they don't give a fuck if he can barely talk. They don't give a fuck if he forgets what he's saying halfway into conversations. But this is the whole thing about the gated institutional narrative. The key issue, and I learned this when I used to do immigration stuff in Washington during the 90s, I learned this concept of steady hands. This is like one of the most terrifying phrases ever. So I told you, I think this concept of steady hands. This is like one of the most terrifying phrases ever. So I told you, I think at some point that in New York, whenever people are deciding to do a bad thing to screw people over, they always use the phrase, it's a beautiful thing, meaning

that you can extract money from people who have no say in the matter. In Washington- This is financial circles you're talking about? Yeah, New York finance. So whenever you hear the phrase, it's a beautiful thing. It means somebody is being raped financially. In Washington, the phrase that I learned to fear is steady hands. He's a pair of steady hands. That means you can count on him to do the wrong thing in an emergency to keep everybody on the inside okay. And there's like a separate system for promoting the people who do the wrong thing and making sure because everybody inside is super dependent on somebody burning all of their credibility in public. Steady hands. Yeah, I mean, that's the main hope of this free information society, that all of these disgusting practices, these legacy practices get

exposed. Well, here's the weird thing. When Amy Klobuchar dropped out, it was like a baby boomer born in the, I'm going to say 61, something like that. Everyone remaining was born in the 1940s. Elizabeth Warren was the youngest. Then you had like Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. So everyone was like born between 41 and 49. Now, all of those people would be the oldest president, all of them, the oldest president at inauguration. Like we've lost our mind. This is normal to us. This isn't really commented upon that you would have five for five septuagenarians vying for the presidency of the United States. It's pretty crazy. The evidence is the clearest with Joe Biden, right? Because he's showing actual real deterioration.

But we've seen deterioration from Trump, particularly earlier in the first year or two of his term. There's some spectacular videos of him falling apart where he couldn't enunciate words. He couldn't say words correctly while he's speaking to the country. His tongue was like swollen in his throat. It was very strange. Right. But people think of that as maybe a substance issue. Like he goes up and he goes down and sometimes he catches it on the wrong part of the wave.

And that's when he's in front of the camera and he struggles through it. But he literally can't pronounce words. But then he'll bounce back and he'll be fine. Joe Biden's not bouncing back. You know, whether he has an aversion to the same sort of supplements that Donald's using, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Yes. He has these episodes. He's inconsistent. Sometimes he seems fine. And then sometimes he seems like he's completely lost. And, you know, I learned about this. It was very uncomfortable for me. I was watching Stefan Molyneux and Mike Cernovich going on and on about Hillary's health. And I was just thinking, these guys are actually weirdly making sense on this topic. And I've never really interacted with Stefan Molyneux at all. And it sort of scares me. I don't really want him in my life. of Stefan Molyneux at all.

And it sort of scares me. I don't really want him in my life. But it didn't mean that he wasn't right. And he wasn't being courageous in saying it. And then when Donna Brazile, I think, came out later and said, yeah, there were real concerns about Hillary's health all along. Well, she was fainting.

Yes. Whenever you lose consciousness, that's a bad sign. We don't know what it was that she was doing. But what I'm trying to get at would be that we are dependent on these people that we are told are trolls as the free people. And I remember Orwell talking about the proletariat, where the proletariat was weirdly free and the central people were the ones

who had no freedom. And I saw this also in the fall of the Soviet Union. I had a family in Moscow and Kiev and in Chernov Sea that we discovered right at the end of the Soviet Union. I had a family in Moscow and Kiev and in Chernov Sea that we discovered right at the end of the Soviet Union. And I went over to visit. And I remember preparing for that visit. I called up these people in Chernov Sea right near Moldova in the extreme west of the Ukraine. And I said, you know, like, hello. And I hear the voice on the other end of the phone. It was like the time when long distance phone calls were still romantic.

And I hear,. And I'm realizing that these are young people who are still speaking Yiddish. They don't give a shit about anything because they're not important. They're not in Moscow. They're not in St. Petersburg. They're on the periphery.

And there's a measure of freedom that comes from just not being central. Right're on the periphery. And there's a measure of freedom that comes from just not being central. Right. You can communicate freely. And you can think freely. Is anyone in legacy media talking openly on any of these shows about Biden's deterioration? I don't know. Tucker Carlson is another person to watch who is freer. He's free of Fox. He's able to go against Fox. I'm looking at Greg Gutfeld. I don't know what Greg has been saying, but there are a small number of interesting people who are still housed inside of the belly of the beast. And I don't know if you heard my theory

about the rebel end of corporate and the corporate end of rebel. No. So you and I, I think, would be sort of – well, at least I'm wearing a jacket. I would be the corporate end of rebel. OK. What am I? You might be the rebel end of rebel. I don't know. You're faking being the rebel end. You're pretty – yeah.

What am I faking? What? I'm faking being the rebel end of rebel? Those tattoos obviously wash after you just apply them every day. But the rebel end of corporate would be like Barry Weiss. Okay. Right? So she's in the belly of the beast, but she's pushing the edge.

Bill Maher would straddle corporate end of rebel, rebel end of corporate. Unclear. Right? And so there is an important partnership across this. If you think about, you remember the film Inglourious Bastards. Did you like that one? Sure. Loved it. OK. Lieutenant Aldo Ray is this interface between regular army and the psychotic Jews who will kill Nazis given any opportunity. And you need people who interface between like the bad boys and the regular units.

like the bad boys and the regular units. And these are incredibly important. What is the plural of nexus? Nexi? I don't know. We got into trouble the first time with octopus. Octopi. No, it's actually- It's not octopuses?

The recommended one is octopodes spelled octopodes. Yeah. Whoa. But I've seen octopodes. Really? Yeah. Whoa, but I've seen octopi. Yeah. Well, people use octopuses, octopi. There it is. Plural form of nexus is nexusis or nexus.

Okay. Oh, boy. Jamie with the win. Thank you. How weird that it's either or, that it could just be nexus, the plural form of nexus. Well, that makes sense, I guess. So these nexus. Yes.

Sounds good. I'll get used to it. Are incredibly important and we have to keep them up. The rebel end of corporate because these corporations are starting to realize that their need for kayfabe is just far exceeding. Kayfabe? Kayfabe. Kayfabe is carnival speak for the word fake. And when catch wrestling devolved into professional wrestling. You know about all that?

That's very interesting. Yeah. That's a weird one. That's very interesting. Yeah. That's a weird one. That's obscure. The catch wrestling, carnival wrestling. Actually, Jamie, could you bring up the word kayfabe and Weinstein? Can you name any people that were involved in catch wrestling, the real catch wrestling? How far do you go with this?

You know what Farmer Burns was? Farmer Burns? Farmer Burns. No. Famous catch wrestling guy. Used to do a hangman's drop. His neck was so strong, he could tie a noose around it and drop six feet and hang there. So when – by the way, if you want to read a great book on professional wrestling, I would highly recommend the book Ringside, which talks about the evolution. So what I call K-fabrication is the transition of something

that usually has twin attributes, is very dangerous and very boring. So old-style wrestling was incredibly dangerous and people would be crippled from about. So as a result, they would often just circle each other and not really engage. And war is like this. Mostly war is extremely boring and then obviously can be quite deadly. So in order to routinize these things, we create kayfabe, which is the system of stratified lies that professional wrestling is undergirded by. So do you know what a worked shoot is?

Yes. Okay. What's a worked shoot? Well, a shoot is an actual fight. And a worked shoot, like a work is a fake fight. Right. So like if two guys were pretending to fight, and there was actually, there was an issue.

So just to lay this all out, in Japan, there's an extreme admiration for professional wrestling and professional wrestlers would get into mixed martial arts and they would get into mixed martial arts with varying levels of actual commitment so some of them would get into mixed martial arts and have fake fights is this like pride yes? Yes, exactly Pride. And Pride actually was founded by Hickson Gracie, who was as legit as a man has ever lived, and Takada, who was a famous professional wrestler. And Hickson fucked up Takada in a real fight.

He only would have real fights. Who was the Gracie killer who came out of Japan? That's Sakuraba. Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, Sakuraba, he, well, he's a phenomenal catch wrestler, by the way. I don't want to blow you off course. He came from, I believe, Carl Gotch and Billy Costello, and I think that's the name of the gentleman.

There was a bunch of people who taught him catch wrestling. So his style was submission- catch wrestling he had he had like both like he you know he was involved in professional wrestling as well but he was a legit fighter anyway the point was there was a weird blurring of the lines and there were some fights like mark coleman had a fight with takata where it was really clear that mark coleman got paid to take a dive because mark Coleman should have smashed that dude. And he gets caught in his heel hook and he doesn't tap. He's going to tap.

Then he winds up tapping. Everybody's like, whoa. But everyone watching that knows fighting was like, get the fuck out of here. What is happening here? Oh, my God. It's a fake fight. It could have been a contender. So there was fake fights mixed in with real fight, right?

It was pretty common pretty common in pride and this is what happened in the transition in the early 20th century between catch wrestling and professional wrestling is that you You start doping reality with fakeness and the thing I was asking about at the work shoot. It has to do with the layering of Nonsense and reality. So the idea is that you have something which is ostensibly fake. Then you have a breaking of kayfabe ostensibly, which is the shoot on top of the expected work. But a worked shoot is tertiary in that the shoot is in itself fake. And so a worked shoot is a tertiary deception. It's a fake fight that appears real.

It's a fake real fight that appears to break out of a fake thing that is pretending to. Maybe it's quaternary. The brain can't go much beyond four levels of lies. Right. And so you had a famous storyline. I can't remember who it was, where a wrestler was apparently supposedly having an affair with another wrestler's wife and that was the storyline um so the people who write the these things are called bookers so the bookers had come up with this storyline and then the affair became real because the brain

couldn't sort of manage all of the deception. So the two people actually got together. Because they were supposed to hang out and pretend. Right. And they're like, let's just do this shit. Right. And so, you know, oddly, I was fascinated by the moment where Vince McMahon declared, I think, to the New Jersey Sporting Commission. He made this unbelievable, it was like one of the great moments in the 20th century, I think.

He realized that he was going to be taxed into oblivion. And so he had a choice. Should he pay this tax or do something really bold? And he went in front of them and he said, you realize that everything we do is fake. Now that could have completely toppled the wrestling world. The admission that there was no reality to this was a potential death blow. So he said this is all staged. All the fights, the winners are known in advance.

You can't tax us because we aren't actually a sport and you don't have any jurisdiction over us. And then it turned out nobody cared. Right. And so the interesting thing is that they used to have this concept of a SMARC. A MARC is somebody who doesn't know they're being conned. A SMARTMARC or SMARC is somebody who knows that they're being conned and still continues to play. So in some sense, it was the bet that you could take all the marks and turn them into SMARCs and the business empire would continue and you wouldn't have to pay the tax. marks and turn them into smarks and the business empire would continue and you wouldn't have to pay the tax. So I was hanging out as what does with Hulk Hogan. And I was trying to check whether

or not this was true. And he said to me, Eric, you realize who came up with that strategy? Me. So I was like, what? So he said, yeah, I was the one who said that we should. Do you believe him? I don't know. It's hard to tell. Well, that's the whole point about kayfabe. Yeah, that's where it gets weird. Did you ever see the interview where John Stossel

is accusing a professional wrestler of it being fake, so he decides to smack him in the head and ask him if that was fake? It's really horrific, because he dropped, he ruptured his eardrum. I mean, this is an enormous man. I forget the guy. It ruined the guy's career, the guy who was the wrestler.

But he hits him with an open hand. I mean the guy's career the guy who was the wrestler but he he hits him with an open hand i mean it's an enormous guy full blast hits him on the head with this this open hand and drops him he goes was that fake was that fake get up pussy and he goes that fake and he hits him again and drops him again was that fake well okay let's talk about this i don't think professional wrestling is fake what the fuck are you saying? Well. I know what you're saying. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there it is. This is the guy. We'll play it so we can hear what he's saying. Okay, we'll get into trouble here with YouTube. But he hits him in the side of the head, and then he hits him again. It's Dr. D, I think, Dr. Death or something. That fucked him up right

is that him right there is that the guy now Jesus Christ time is a cruel bitch is that the same guy is that him Jesus Christ yeah

legendary wrestler bounty hunter and author of don't call me fake Dr. David Schultz goes into detail about his infamous 2020 incident where he slapped John Stossel. Look, he's got a T-shirt on it about it and everything. Jesus Christ, it's his whole life now.

Yeah, well, that's his moment. Wow. It's not fake. No, it's orchestrated. The results are known in advance. The death rate of those guys is like nothing else. You'd have to look to like wingsuit flyers to see people who die at the level that professional wrestlers do. The punishment that they take and weirdly the skill level.

Hulk Hogan put me in a headlock. Why did you let him do that? Did you ever see what he did to Richard Belzer? I'm sorry. I know that he's said and done bad things, but there is so much love that comes pouring out of Hulk Hogan. I agree, brother. Anyway. He's a great guy, but he put Belzer to sleep on his television show and Belzer fell and bounced his head off the ground.

Hulk had me in a headlock. Why did you allow that? I know that if that guy had so much as sneezed, my head would have just popped off of my trunk. Right. I mean, that guy's a beast. He's a huge man. He's a huge man. You know, he's lost like four inches of height because of all his back surgeries.

Yeah. Is that true? Yeah. I first met him like way, way, way back in the day. I ran into him. I didn't meet him, meet him. I just ran into him on the street in Beverly Hills. I was like

holy fuck and then I interviewed him for Spike TV back in the day when Spike TV was they were doing professional wrestling

on Spike TV and they wanted to me to interview him while I was doing the UFC so I interviewed him we had a fun time together but he was considerably smaller

it was really interesting it's like that was just oh there's Belzer so he put Belzer in what we would call like a power guillotine and look belzer's out cold right here watch the left arm there it is out cold so watch he just drops him that could have killed him that part right there where he falls and he bangs his head off the ground like he just dropped him like he was on a padded mat or something like that. You really should never do that to someone.

But they don't worry about their self because they put themselves into so much danger. This is the thing. Yeah. I mean, these guys are the punishment kings of the world. Yeah. And they're extremophiles in that sense. Now, what my belief is, is that we are, it's real in the sense that the injuries, the death rate, the skill levels and most of those guys could really fight. They may not be UFC level fighters but a lot of them come out of wrestling backgrounds.

Yes. Like legitimate. A lot of them are very, very tough guys. I think, what was it, in 2013 or 11, John Brockman asked the question, what's the scientific theory that nobody knows that would make the biggest impact in people's cognitive toolkit? And I'd just been allowed to answer this question along with like actual legitimate people. And so I was kind of like being very protective. And my wife said, you know, you could give a lot of answers to that question, but that's not the one you want to give. Do kayfabe. I got this theory that kayfabe was the most important psychological theory that nobody really appreciated, that in some sense, professional

wrestling is light years ahead and understanding how the human mind actually works because of the issues of that deception. And so I wrote up kayfabe, which is going to determine wars and presidential elections. And then sure enough, Donald Trump comes directly out of WWE. Like he really understands if you look at that fight with Vince McMahon. Yeah. Donald Trump intuits professional wrestling and it is a superpower. Jamie, can I ask you to bring up Weinstein and kayfabe and see if – 2011, what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Eric Weinstein. So I thought it was going to be thrown out. And in fact, that turned out to be a very prophetic essay.

Well, for sure, once Trump got into office. prophetic essay. Well, for sure. Once Trump got into office, I mean, that is an excellent point of what he does is that there's a part of his appeal is that he's speaking in, uh, he's, he's like, he's hitting a certain frequency that provides comfort and it narrows the boundaries of what's possible and puts things into some very digestible form that morons love. You know what I'm talking about? I'm not saying that all people that are Trump supporters are morons. There's people that support him economically, but there's a lot of people that are morons that like him because he's talking in this frequency. There's a narrow band. He's not going to say anything crazy that's self-deprecating or introspective

or he's not going to prepare you for the great beyond or include you in his concerns for the demise of civilization and Western values. That's not in him. He's got a bandwidth. He's got a very narrow band. And inside that band, he's the king. Ratings are tremendous, tremendous.

Everyone's doing a great job. We're doing a great job. He says these things that they reinforce this sort of pro wrestling sort of vibration. Somewhat. I have to admit that I don't meet many morons at all. Did you come to Comedy Store more often? When it's back up. I'll bring you around some morons.

No. Sure. Joe, you don't even believe that. I think that in general, people, when they are given no choice at all, express themselves moronically. When they're given no choice at all. Yeah. I want a choice of an actual president that's viable. I don't have one.

So then you're going to ask me, well, which of the non-viable people do you like best? Well, this is the real issue with the Democratic Party. They've essentially made us all morons. Yeah. With this Joe Biden thing. They really have. They made us all morons.

Who do we need? I mean... I can't vote for that guy. I can't? I mean. I can't vote for that guy. I can't vote for him. I can't vote for him. I can't vote for Trump. I'd rather vote for Trump than him. I don't think he could handle anything.

I mean, you're relying entirely on his cabinet. Like, if you want to talk about an individual leader that can communicate, he can't do that. And we don't even know what the fuck he's going to be like after a year in office. can't do that. And we don't even know what the fuck he's going to be like after a year in office. The pressure of being the president of the United States is something that no one has ever prepared for. The only one who seems to be fine with it is Trump, oddly enough. I mean, he doesn't seem to be aging at all or in any sort of decline. Obama almost immediately started looking older. George W. almost immediately started looking older. Yeah. George W. almost immediately started looking older. Well, I think that this is not a change in Trump.

Trump, in a weird way, has just always been this performative, like a fake alpha. Right. And he still plays golf all the time. He hasn't switched up mustard. I mean, I'm sure he switched it up a little bit because of the pandemic, because he's apparently a germaphobe, which is hilarious that this could be his demise. You know? I mean, isn't that kind of hilarious?

Yeah. That might be what does him in. The guy's always been worried about germs apparently. How does that work with his active extracurricular life? I don't know. I guess he wears condoms. I wouldn't have imagined Stormy Daniels would be the person that he would have chosen first then. It's very strange.

She was a hot lady back in the day. Well, it's not a question of that. It's just that she was also an active one. Yeah, that's true. If your key issue is transmission. I mean, I'm not judging anybody. I'm just saying as a vector of communication. Yeah, that's true.

That's a good question. And, of course, the porn industry weirdly has very high health standards at one level because it would have to right maybe that's his rationale that they're tested yeah it's interesting um so i had ashley matthews on my program and i and she was you know talking to me about who's that who's actually the woman behind riley reed oh okay and how hilarious is? It's like that's her pro wrestling name. Yeah. Well, and I don't know that she'd used her name fully until we were talking. And I said that I really didn't want to interview Riley Reid. I wanted to interview Ashley Matthews.

Whoa. How'd that go? She was good. I mean, it was a bit of a mismatch, but she is polite and sweet to a fault. She's trying to be thoughtful. I really admire her courage. She doesn't want body augmentation, so she's got a non-classical porn body. a non-classical porn body. She chose to do a trans scene because it was erotically interesting to her,

even though she was told that it would kill her brand. She doesn't necessarily, sometimes she shaves her body hair, sometimes she doesn't. So there's a lot of what she does that I think is incredibly admirable. And I got to know of her of what she does that I think is incredibly admirable. And I got to know of her because she came to a show that I did with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris in San Francisco.

And she was tweeting out that she was a huge Sam Harris fan. And then I saw something she did where she was talking about it was impossible for her to get banking and regular services as a pornographic actress. Banking? Yeah. Remember Operation Chokepoint? No. Operation Chokepoint was, I think, an Obama-era Department of Justice initiative to try to make it very difficult to engage in legal occupations like payday lending and things or porn. Porn? Yeah. So I think they used the FDIC to harass credit card companies and banks into not making it

easy for these people to gain access to ordinary services. So I've been very concerned about the ways in which the authoritarians attempt to regulate who can do what, who can say what, say what, where, get banking, you know. So that's still going on to this day? Yeah, to an extent. She has a difficulty getting banking? Like she can't get – I think MailChimp won't work with her because she's a pornographic actress. Oh, in terms of mailing lists. Because she's a pornographic actress.

Oh, in terms of mailing lists. And then there's like chargeback issues where marginal businesses, you know, people will cancel their credit cards. But in fact, if you're doing a business where very few people are canceling the credit cards, they'll still claim that they won't work with you because of the risk of cancellation. So there's this whole thing where we harass and tax. PayPal payouts no longer supported. What is this, Jamie? What's this whole thing where we harass and tax. PayPal payouts no longer supported. What is this, Jamie? What's this from? This is from Pornhub's blog, yeah. We're all devastated by PayPal's decision to stop payouts to over 100,000 performers who rely on them for their livelihoods.

If you have PayPal as your payout option, please select a new method and update your information in your model settings tab if you have a pending payment for October blah blah blah blah so this is because of porn Canadian my okay so this but hold on a second is this prostitution is that why this payout thing I believe that once upon a time Sam the San Fernando Valley was the head of prostitution its head of pornographic acting and movie production because it couldn't be charged as prosecution. Now, as prostitution. Yeah. Now, Ashley makes the point that she is comfortable being called a commercial sex worker.

So in some sense, prostitution adjacent, but not prostitution. And to your question about how did that go? I was quite nervous about having a pornographic actress as a guest. I did it, in fact, right after Sir Roger Penrose. So it was one of the better transitions. I like it. Thank you for my next trick. I think it's important that we talk about porn.

I think it's important that we talk about porn. And I think it's important that if this is going to have a huge effect like dark matter, you know, you feel its gravitational effect, but nobody can actually see it because you can't talk about what's going on, what does it say about us, and the ways in which, you know, they've got great data. The way OkCupid has great data on what's going on in the world of courtship, porn has great data on what's going on in the world of kink and eroticism. And, you know, for example, she pointed out that incest porn surges around the holidays when people are spending time with their families

what wow and incest porn is a cancer that i don't think we're even talking about that's gotten really really pronounced yeah well all taboo porns stepmom porn you know that kind of stuff stepsister yeah there's there's something about, I hear, but there's something about those things that for people, it's like, there's so much porn that this is the last taboo. The last taboo is your, your dad marries this hot lady and then your, your dad's like, son, I want you to have a good time with your mom. I'm going to go off golfing and dad leaves and stuff. Yeah. I'm gonna go off golfing and dad leaves and stuff. Yeah. You know, I think it was your line.

You could do one eye rail, right? You just did two at me. What's that? The Sean Connery one eye rail lift. Yeah, I can do one eye rail. Yeah, yeah. Where was I? Focus.

Something about a line? Porn. Crossing of lines. Don't remember. Damn. It's in the top. It's that neuron. You don't even smoke pot.

What? I said you don't even smoke pot, Harley. I wanted to talk to you about one of your podcasts I listened to recently. You listen to a podcast? Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that. Controversial. The O'Keefe Podcast.

Okay. The Project Veritas guy. Yeah. That's an interesting one because you had a really good point in that people, when they hear that this is a Project Veritas thing and for people who don't know who he is, James O'Keefe from Project Veritas, they've done a lot of work exposing some biases that are held by some of the people that work in these social media groups, social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook and things like that. But the way they've done it is all through hidden camera type stuff. And there's a narrative that people love to use where they go, oh, that guy, he uses selective editing or that guy. You can't believe anything they say. Everything he says is wrong.

But that is impossible. Everything he says is wrong. But that is impossible. Because you're listening to these people talking, and they're talking about how they marginalize right-wing viewpoints. They look for people who have, like, manga in their headline, and they put them in certain categories where it makes it very difficult for people to get their stuff. The algorithm supports that they know how to marginalize these perspectives and these points of view. it on video you hear people say things that should be outrageous to anyone who believes in objective reality and yet people love to say that's just a project veritas thing that guy's full of shit and they go oh he's full of shit good and then they they cast it aside well i thank you for bringing that up.

Look, I want to take risk. And that was a huge risk. Yeah, it's a risky one. Because part of the thing is that if you touch these worlds. By the way, can I try one of these CBD things? Yeah. Well, they're not in the fridge. This is the last one. Can you get one?

Tell Jeff to get some of the CBD Kill Cliffs. They're very addictive. I'm going to warn you right now. All right. 25 milligrams of CBD. Okay. I have a friend who cannot come to the United States ever because he attempted to come in with some CBD, which is not psychoactive. Shut the fuck up.

From the UK. Come on. He can't come in the US ever? I believe. They can't appeal that? Now that CBD is legal here? Well, his mom is Amanda Fielding. Do you know who Amanda Fielding is? Yes. Do you love Amanda Fielding? No.

Explain who Amanda Fielding is. Amanda Fielding, Countess Amanda Fielding is the head of the Beckley Foundation for the scientific study of psychedelic and related substances in the UK, who I think works with Imperial College. She's an older lady, right? Oh, yeah. And she's self-tropanned. Right. That's right.

You told me about this. She's put two holes in her skull, and her husband, Lord Jamie, or is he Earl Jamie? Maybe he's Earl Jamie. I'm sorry, I don't know these things. He's trepanned as well. Oh, great. And they are two of the most lovely, learned, wonderful people in the world.

What's the benefit of self-trepanation or trepanation in general? Oh, Jesus Christ, there's a video of her doing it? Yeah, I think it's called something like a hole in my head. What is that? It looks like she did it with a stick. Yeah, or something. She did it herself. She had her own tools.

Why did she do that? First of all, when you are British aristocracy, this is what you do. No, you don't. Yes, you do. Sometimes you go on vacation. No, no, no, no. This lady's crazy.

Jesus Christ, look at that fucking hole she put in her head. So she drilled right through her skull. Yeah. All right. Now, the reason she did it, and I think it's an interesting one. Please. Joe, come on. Don't be judgmental.

The belief that she had was that your brain, your brain expands to fill your brain case and that when it runs into a hard stop, that the blood circulation has changed and that when the blood circulation changes, you lose that sparkling clarity that comes from your sort of childhood. And so if you remember how clear the world was when you were a kid, her belief was by relieving the pressure from the brain case that you actually get a kind of permanent upgrade in your cognition and the level at which you're experiencing all of reality. Is that true?

I don't know. I'm not self-depressed. I have not drilled a hole in my head. Did she say that this was like an effective method? I think both she and Jamie say that it's been very positive. Get the fuck out of here with that. Wow. This is a different flavor.

We've got a great flavor here. 25 milligrams of CBD. That's crazy, though. So this guy is permanently barred. Cheers, sir, without having anything in there. Permanently barred from the United States because of that? From CBD. Non-psychoactive. Right. Maybe they just knew his mom was a nut job that drills holes in there. Yeah. Permanently barred from the United States because of that? From CBD. Yeah.

Non-psychoactive. Right. Maybe they just knew his mom was a nut job that drills holes in her head. She's not a nut job. Well, that's debatable.

She was in fact the one who changed my mind about psychedelics. She changed them? Yeah. I was totally opposed to them. Wish I was there to show you

it could be done without having a hole in your head. I said, Amandaanda you've been taking lsd regularly oh yes since the since the late 60s i said well how is it that you seem to be completely all there she said oh it really doesn't have any negative effects and well i'm trying to race through the story rather than being perfectly accurate. I said, then what did we get wrong in the 60s?

And she said, oh, dosages. I said, what do you mean? Those dosages were moronic. And so people were just putting huge amounts of LSD in things and having terrible experiences. And I thought, well, OK, this is completely – she's crazy because I know it's acid. And so I just had this image that you pour acid on a brain and it turns it into emmental or cheese with lots of the holes. And sure enough, like we don't even know what the lethal dosage of LSD is. At a physiological rather than at a software level, it seems to be incredibly well-tolerated because it's the only thing that has this effect in such tiny trace amounts. Yeah. It's the same as psilocybin, the LD50s,

outrageous. You'd have to eat pounds of it. And so she changed my mind where I realized that I'd been thoroughly propagandized and that I had never examined my beliefs around these chemicals. And that in fact, many of the most powerful appear to be very well tolerated. Yes. Yeah. The most powerful ones, in fact. But they're also the ones that most closely resemble

human neurochemistry. Which is weird too. So I think that... Look, I'm a fan of eccentrics. As are you. Yeah, for sure. And I don't think Amanda's crazy. Oh, she's definitely crazy.

She drilled holes in her head. Oh, it gets weirder than that. What else? She had a pet bird called Birdie. earth outcropping that in order to reach it, I think you have to walk over Doric columns that cross them, like, you know, these old columns from Greek temples. Oh, okay. And so the tops of them form steps across a moat and it's guarded by attack

swans. It's like you can take nothing at all psychoactive, and then you're visiting this woman, visiting her bird's mausoleum, being attacked by swans, walking over Greek columns to cross a moat. Yeah, but that's just fun. Drilling holes in your head is really where I draw the line.

Cheers to that. That just seems... I mean, I don't think there's any real science to relieving pressure by drilling a fucking hole in your head. I think you're just relieved by the fact that you've taken this really radical step outside the norm and decided you're going to be the person who drills a fucking hole in your head. I'm sorry. I'm team Amanda Fielding. She may have made a crazy decision in her life.

Does she keep doing it every now and then? No. Drill a new hole? Well, you know, it's like plastic surgery. You get addicted to it. Pretty soon there's nothing but the dirt. Just holes. Yeah.

Swiss cheese head. No. These are two of the most lovely and cerebral people around. Was she on acid when she drilled the hole? I doubt it. I mean, I don't think she's – sorry. I just – I think she's as eccentric as the day is long. But I'm such an admirer of people who are willing to try to cross the adaptive valley and do it and fund their own expedition.

Yeah. Right? So this is like a giant risk. It's just crazy that – so it was her son that was barred from coming into this country? The filmmaker. Just imagine if you had a can of this 25 milligram CBD Kill Cliff and then like, you fucking criminal. Get out of our country forever. But we're using these things as excuses.

Yeah. Like I desperately need to have Douglas Murray come to the U.S. But people don't like Douglas because of some of his opinions. But he's been here. I don't think he can come now. What? I don't know. There's some issue.

Was this recent? He was on the podcast. When was he last year? When was Douglas Murray here? A few years ago, I bet. Two, maybe two years ago. Was he here in the old spot or the new spot? I feel like it was the new spot.

It was here. Yeah. So it's within two years? He can't come to the new spot? I feel like it was the new spot. It was here. Yeah. So it's within two years? He can't come to the United States? I think he can't come to the United States, and I'm very angry about that. And I'll tell you another one that I'm really angry about is Alex Green, the CEO of Symmetry Labs. Do you want to bring up the tree of Tenerere, T-E-N-E-R-E, from Burning Man? Oh, boy.

You said Burning Man. What's wrong with Burning Man? Have you been? No. Too many feet. Too many what? Too many feet. Too many dirty people.

Okay. If you can find a video of this thing. There's where all the masks are. They're fucking hoarding them for Burning Man. So, like maybe the third one, 2017. Okay. Okay. So the guy.

Oh, that's beautiful. So this is a tree in Burning Man. They've got all these LED lights. The guy who came up with this is rotting right now in federal prison. The guy who came up with this tree? Yeah. For what? He's a physicist, musician, a very good friend of mine, somebody I leave my children with.

Great family friend, wonderful Passover and Shabbat dinner guest, and currently in jail for weed. What? Weed? Yeah, but I want you to think about, and there are much better videos than this where these giant waves and things go through. The people who are bringing transcendence and grace and beauty to our lives when they're hounded because of like what language they've used, things that like self-experimentation, advocacy for psychedelics. advocacy for psychedelics. I'm very, it's very important that we have rule breakers, mavericks, people that you might call crazier lunatics,

and that we be very gentle and celebratory. What is this gentleman's name again? Alex Green. Alex Green. And Alex Green, was he arrested for distribution? Yep, I think so. How much did he have? Don't know.

Where was he arrested? I think it was New York. New York is still illegal, as weird as that seems. It may well be, but my point is, I want Alex- So he's in federal prison?

Yeah, he's in federal prison. How long? I don't know. A couple, few years, I don't know, with parole, he's in a treatment facility, but I get a call

from the person I leave my children with when I go out of town sitting in federal prison. It's like, this call originates from the U.S. Correctional – Jesus Christ. And this guy is – he's a genius CEO of a beautiful mathematical art company. And I just feel so powerless to figure out how to move people along. Was he targeted or did he just fuck up and try to buy a large number of it,

a large quantity of it so that he didn't have to go out and get it? I imagine that he was involved in some, I don't know the specifics of his plea and I don't want to say anything that could screw him up. But I imagine that the issue was something to do with a large cannabis business. Okay. So he had some sort of distribution business in New York State. I'm not opining that he didn't break the law. But I also think at some level when you go back – I mean when you know, when you see cannabis being advertised everywhere and you grew up in a world in which like only bad people did that. Yeah. Um, it's pretty infuriating.

Yeah, it is. You know, and I, at some point I was so angry about Alex that I started talking about coffee and, uh, wine as drugs. Would you like red drugs or white drugs today? Yeah. Hey, should we go get some drugs down at Starbucks? And people would be very weirded out. But tell me those things aren't drugs. They're drugs. They're drugs.

They're drugs. Always have been. I only smoked cigarettes for one weekend in Turkey years ago. Man, did I not know. Cigarettes are a drug i was flying dude i um don't smoke but i have smoked before shows okay with chappelle uh he's giving me cigarettes and uh tony hinchcliffe he's giving me cigarettes before shows and i've smoked a cigarette and then we got on stage and it's like you're you're on a drug it's a cognitive enhancing drug, by the way. It fires your brain up.

Up to a point. And then I'm so jittery. Yes. I can't even be. Definitely can do that. I can't even think. Yeah, if you do a bunch of them. Society has accepted a bunch of drugs and a lot of them that'll fucking kill you.

And then they've made some drugs that are some of the most powerful drugs in terms of their force on creativity. Cannabis is one of the most amazing drugs ever in terms of creativity. Do you believe that's as true of indica as it is of sativa? Yeah. Indica definitely gives you some pretty wild thoughts. It perturbs normal consciousness, right? In that perturbation, if that's a word, is that a word?

That's a word, right? In that adjusting of your normal perceptions, that's where these new ideas come in. That's where these new, it's almost like you get a little chance to pop your head off the top of the clouds and look around and go, oh, this is not what I think it is. This is some weird thing. head off the top of the clouds and look around and go, oh, this is not what I think it is. This is some weird thing.

You know, and I got really high the other day and I made a post on Instagram about Joe Exotic and Donald Trump and then this thing. And I was, like, saying, like, here's what's weird. Like, the thing that keeps coming to me when I get high is not – it's that – the idea that one day things are going to get back to normal. And the idea is that there never really was a normal, that it was just an attractive illusion. And then it's a comforting and attractive illusion. And I used a photo of Joe Exotic in one of Donald Trump's most ridiculous tweets where he was talking about the coronavirus and how he's a huge hit and how –

What is Joe Exotic? where he was talking about the coronavirus and how he's a huge hit and how Donald Trump's raging. Joe Exotic from the new Netflix documentary series called Tiger King, which must be a part of your life. Get on board right away. I don't know anything about it. And then the other one is, look at this. That's Joe Exotic. It's amazing.

He's a guy who smokes meth. He's married to two different guys at the same time. They all live together. It's great. I don't want to tell you anymore. Spoiler alert. But, Jamie, go to my Instagram so you can see the Trump tweet that I also included in this post with this image of Joe Exotic. Because these two things together was just like I was stunned.

And Tim Dillon actually had sent me this tweet by Trump. And it's the second image of the Joe Exotic. It's like a double post. So if you click on the image, like look at that. President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefings, Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news. What am I even reading?

Roughly the viewership of the season finale of The Bachelor. Numbers continue to rise, he writes. Numbers continue to rise. What am I reading, Joe? This is Donald Trump, the president of the United States, makes a self-congratulatory tweet that his talking about a pandemic virus that could potentially kill as many as 200,000 Americans. Revolution. Just guilt.

Revolution, Joe. Look at this. I want to revolt. I can't. I can't. I get you're wanting to revolt. I get that. I get you're wanting to revolt.

I get that. But me, as a high person in the valley, sitting on my back porch while my kids are asleep, looking at this tweet, I'm like, well, I don't even think there is a normal. I don't think normal's real. I don't think normal's real. I think we've been hoodwinked. Normal's not real. I don't think it is.

I don't think it's real. That's one of the things that I love about nature. You know, we were watching a video yesterday of an owl eating the head off of a hawk because I was explaining there was sort of a hawk war that went on in my backyard. At one point in time, these owls killed these hawks, and I would find these headless hawks. Like, owls are mean motherfuckers, man. Oh, man. They're so mean. They look wise and kind, but they are badass. They're so mean.

I know. But they eat the hawks' heads. That's like the way they do it. And I found this out by Googling, who the fuck eats hawks' heads? I would find these hawks in the middle of my yard with no fucking head. I'm like, what is this? It's great. It's owls, man.

They were these badass owls that would fuck up these hawks. By the way, great recommendation from you. What? Bunny UFC. Bunny UFC? I had never seen rabbits fighting. Oh, yeah. They're so mean.

Oh, my god. They're so mean. I tried to figure out which are the animals that I want to see fight the most. Yeah. So giraffes are way the hell up there. Oh, yeah. They fight wild. Giraffe see fight the most. So giraffes are way the hell up there. Oh yeah, they fight wild. Giraffe battles are the best.

Bunny UFC is so funny. It's funnier. It's like kangaroo fighting for sure. Well, we didn't know how mean they were to each other until my daughters got two male bunnies and we left them in a coop together. And we're like, oh, well, this is not good. And they grew up together.

I mean, these weren't like bunnies that didn't know each other, but they would fight to the death and they would like oh well this is not good and they grew up together i mean these weren't like bunnies that didn't know each other but they would fight to the death and they would fight all the time their ears were all torn apart we had to separate them yeah so this is this they fight all the time they're they're rodents man have you seen penis fencing in flatworms no no i have not penis focusencing. And flatworms. Okay. Jamie? I learned so much from you about bizarre animal sexual behavior all the way back to the cuttlefish that pretend to be women.

Yeah. That was a good one. That's a really good one. Okay. Because there's a lot of men out there like that in society. So this is penis fencing with flatworms. Penis fencing with flatworms. So this is like in terms of why do people who like social engineering not like biology?

Flatworms have two different life cycles, a male and a female life cycle. And they don't know when they encounter each other in romance calls whether or not they will be male or female. And it's decided by a violent contest. So they've got, I believe, two plural of penis. P and I? Let's go with P and I. I only want to see one at any given moment. They have two penises and they attempt to stab each other.

And whoever penetrates the other succeeds in what might be termed traumatic insemination. And the loser is assigned the feminine gender, right? So the idea is that it's more costly to bear the young than it is to pierce the opponent. So female is given to the loser. Whoa. So they just do battle until someone fucks the other one and that person becomes a chick. Or that thing. There's a worse species. What?

Bed bugs. Bed bugs have no vaginal opening. You got to make one? The only way that a female can bear young is if a male attacks her thorax and breaks it open in an act which is definitely called traumatic insemination. So, you know, you have a situation in which violent rape is the only method by which females can leave young so what they do to you when you stay in a hotel is just child's play compared to what they do to each other my point is if you want to talk about eradicating bedbugs with ddt i'm all for it they are the the feminists' worst nightmare species. And, you know, you and I talk about the natural world.

Is that what they look like? Well, they blow up like balloons, I think. So if you see one that's flat, it hasn't really gorged. So they're like ticks? Ish. Ugh. Anyway, we had them under control, believe due to ddt and but on my list of 10 nightmare species bed bugs and flatworms for the twin traumatic inseminations uh would be way up at the top

so it's like a needle so they they literally puncture through the thorax with a needle. Oh, there we go. Oh, Christ. Yeah. Now these are, if there is a good Lord, boy, does he or she have a lot to answer for? Yeah. What did you do, you fuck? Why did you make bedbugs? And why'd you make it like that? Imagine what kind of natural selection takes place where the only way that you can reproduce is through violent rape. Well, it's interesting. There's a different system, which I think is fascinating, which is there's a conserved quantity in dung beetles where they have weaponry on their heads in the form of antlers for fighting the males. And it turns out that there's an inverse relationship.

So there's some resource that's allocated between the copulatory equipment and the weaponry that the dung beetle has. If they have a lot of weaponry – oh, there goes the Sean Connery. That's good. The eyebrow thing? Yeah, I love it. I've tried it for years and I can't do it. You can't do it? Is that a genetic thing, right?

I don't know if it's genetic. I'm just a failure. Okay. The larger the weaponry, the smaller the copulatory apparatus. Oh, so it's like a monster truck thing. Yeah. If you don't have it going on,

you got to go get yourself a monster truck thing. Yeah. If you don't have it going on, you got to go get yourself a monster truck. It was like that tiny little gun in Men in Black. Remember that? Anyway. So what happens is, is that the size of the copulatory apparatus may be the engine of speciation. That when a male's equipment no longer fits the female, that may be the cue that some dung beetles will speciate because they can't reproduce effectively. And we don't know why the conserved quantity would be spread between fighting equipment, which is used only to displace rivals, and the size of the package.

When I went on a tour of the Vatican, I had a really great guide. It was really cool. He took my family through this thing and he was a professor and he was really happy that I was so curious about things. And I was on an edible. Don't tell my family. And so we were wandering around billions of dollars of stolen art. And one of the things I kept saying, I go, why are their penises so small?

Like, what's going on with that? And he was like, that's a really important question. And he's like, back then, the thought was that bigger penises were brutish and that they were, that these, you know, you got to realize these are people that were fending off barbarians. And the idea was that their gods would be beautifully proportioned, but they would have these small sort of less dangerous penises. It's very interesting. Or peni. Yeah. Yeah.

And that they would make them like that on purpose. They were all, they all had little dicks, all of them. And I'm like, these guys, like, if you looked at these guys, like, just the way they're built, the reality is most of them would have hogs, right? These are heavily muscled, thick men with a lot of testosterone. They would have big dicks, most likely. Thick men with a lot of testosterone, they would have big dicks most likely. Right. That's the reason why women find that build attractive probably other than the fact that it's going to be the person who would be more successful at protecting you from said barbarians. Well, I think – isn't it true that the castrati of Italy were sought after as lovers? They could still perform.

Really? Yeah, but then you didn't need to worry about pregnancy. How could they? They could get erect when they were castrated? That doesn't make any sense. Is that wrong? Yeah, I don't think that's correct. I think they're eunuchs.

I think that's why they would do that to men. I mean, men who would work in castles. They would have eunuchs that would work with the queens because they couldn't perform. I believe, well, I don't know what operation was performed on the castrati they would lose all the testosterone okay but i believe that there was a way in which they were sought after as lovers maybe they just ate a lot of pussy maybe that's probably what it is what just cunnilingus yeah i actually think that they were able to set i'm not sure what operation was done but i believe that they were able to, I'm not sure what operation was done, but I believe that they were able to sexually perform in a conventional way. Jamie, and if you could find the plural for penis, that would be great.

It's got a peni. Yeah? Yeah. Penises just sound so fucking crude. You said dicks. Dicks is normal. At least there I know. Well, dicks is real.

That's the right way to say it. Cocks. A lot of cocks. Yeah. You don't say cockeye I Might start um, do you know the the Michael Jackson story? I know some man this is one of the Michael Jackson stories that I was promoting before it actually was Confirmed by his doctor the doctor that wind up killing him and went to jail. I

Was like the way that guy sings because I was aware of castrati's I'm like he sounds like one of them. Yeah, he sounds like he has this permanent female voice Well the doctor that went to jail for sedating him and when he wound up dying, dr. Jackson, right? Right, whatever the guy's name was That guy confirmed that Michael Jackson was chemically castrated by his father to preserve his voice. And they did it to him at a young age. Wow.

It makes sense. Well, in retrospect, it's like the end of the usual suspects. It 100% makes sense. If you look at the rest of his family, look at Tito or Jermaine, they look like men, right? They're these thick men,

like a normal man. Yeah. And then you look at him, he's incredibly slender like he has no muscle at all and He moves like he's got this, you know, there's this dance style that is like quasi feminine almost right it's like he's

singing like a woman like it's like Tell him that it's human nature? Like, what is that? That's not a male voice, right? And hits incredible notes. Well, the idea was that his father wanted to preserve what got them to the dance. I mean, this is a performing, entertaining family. And he was the number one guy. He was the genius of that family.

Yeah. Well, you know what else do you know that okay here's a weird one the rivalry between the nicholas brothers and i think the barry brothers do you have you ever heard this story who's the barry brothers um they were two dancing groups and the the Nicholas Brothers were, just in terms of riffing off this, Michael Jackson brought back the Nicholas Brothers. The Nicholas Brothers, if you can find this, were maybe two of the greatest dancers ever. What year was this? They came out of probably like the 1930s and 40s. And like Fred Astaire and Nureyev and all these people just thought um these are the guys oh yeah oh I am so these I think that may be Cab Calloway even

yeah I believe that is and just in terms of like the femininity, the elegant nature of these guys and both of them geniuses and they could do anything. Yeah, they're incredible. Look how great they dance. My God. Look at, oh my God, the way he's moving his hips back and forth and his legs go sideways. Like what incredible control. Let's just say how much I love being an American. I love all the stuff that comes out of this country,

and we need to get back to being ourselves. What are you talking about? We're being ourselves right now. No, we're not. We're not? No. What are we doing? Well, right now, we're looking at...

Now, if you check out... Look at this. Castrati were also supposed to be great lovers. They could last long, says Tomasini, to, say that name, Montesquie? How do you say that? To Montesquie? They would have inspired a taste for Gomorrah in people whose taste is the least depraved.

What? And when Casanova fell in love with a castrato who conveniently turned out to be a woman in drag, he asked her to dress as a castrato in bed. Okay, I'm done. Check, please. For those women who choose, as Dryden put it, to, in quotes, in soft eunuchs place their bliss and shun the scrubbing of a bearded kiss. Yeah, they wanted someone who eats a lot of pussy. Affairs were idolized and safe, but bed hopping could be risky for the castrati. One was assassinated by his lover's furious family and another who wrote to the Pope requesting permission to marry on the basis of that his castration had been ineffective.

permission to marry on the basis of that his castration had been ineffective. Received the reply, let him be castrated better. The Pope said, no, you can't get married. We're going to cut your nuts off. Better. We're going to do a better job. All mouth and no trousers, Castrati had more fun than you could think. Hello, Guardian.

That's a great fucking. Samantha Ellis meets a singer who wishes he'd had the chop. Oh, great. There's... See, this might just be a story. You know what I mean? The guy says, I regret not having been castrated. Then go get castrated. But that's one of those things where that's just...

That might be a story. Like a good way to write something. Maybe. You know, and clickba, and it's intriguing. It's a story that's been around for a long time. Here's something you may not know. The last Castrato was recorded. See, there's actually a recording.

Oh, we played it on this podcast about a dozen times. Oh, yeah? Yeah, it's pretty gross. He wasn't a talented one. Well, that's not what's gross. What's gross is the thought that this was a child that was taken and castrated and then forced to live this life. Look, it's absolutely ridiculous. But getting back to Michael Jackson, I think that—

There he is. Is that right? Yeah. Alessandro Moraceci. Moraceci? Moresci? Moresci. Alessandro Morestchi.

The last castrato. Christ. The complete Vatican recordings. What did they do to that man's mouth while they had him there? So what I was going to say about the Berry Brothers is the Berry Brothers were a rival team to the Nicholas Brothers. Okay. Did we see – were those guys the Berry Brothers? Those were the Nicholas Brothers.

Nobody remembers the Berry Brothers. If anybody remembers anything, they remember the Nicholas Brothers. But the issue was that the Berry Brothers were... There's the Berry Brothers? Oh, this is... Okay, here's the Berry Brothers. You'll see that they're much more athletic in a certain sense and much less refined. So doing a lot of cane twirling?

Yeah, but if you go to the end of this one, I believe. It's pretty awesome. Look, I mean there's a scene where they you see those stairs? They're about to do something. Jesus Christ, look at that. Spinning and then drop it into the splits. Alright, well keep on this.

So they're running up the stairs and then, oh my god! Oh my god! All right, well, keep on this just for one second. So they're running up the stairs. And then, oh, my God. Oh, my God. They jumped off the top of the stairs, which we're talking about a good solid 10 feet, and they landed into a split. All right, now that. That's a nut smasher. Okay.

These guys. Look at that. Look at that. Bam. That is insane that they can do that. Three of them. And then they did backflips. Right.

Three of them. My God. That's a very impressive feat. That's like parkour. And you never heard of these guys. With a ball slam. No, but I mean, it's like the 1920s, right? Well, this is going to be later than the 20s.

Was it? Yeah. God damn. 30s, 40s? Amazing. The way they jumped off the top and landed like that. Have you ever seen the Hellzaboppin sequence? No.

What's that? Put in Hellzaboppin. This is just unbelievable. Hellzaboppin. Hellzaboppin and then dance. Hellzaboppin dance. Hellzaboppin. Yeah.

Okay, now go into the middle of it because there's a bunch of setup here. No, farther. Okay. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. So this is a guy and a girl, and so he throws her over his back. Oh, my God. I mean, these people can do anything.

Woo! But the amount of practice and how you would practice something like this, the real thing that would be insane to practice is that jump off the top into the split. Well, it's... Man. It's athleticism, artistry, timing. And dance. And, you know, this is also...

Wow. It's incredible. Oh, my God. It's pro wrestling. My God. I mean – What is the – well, I wish we could listen to the music, but we'd get – No, no.

Don't do that. But it just – I want people to be aware of the level of artistry and skill that came out of places like Harlem. It's just – all of this is pure American ingenuity. And this is 41. And, you know, these are hard shoes with, like, slippery soles. Oh, my God. What's amazing is that these guys can get any traction to do anything. And the girl just did that to him.

Holy shit. This is the best of the best. This is like Lindy. Oh, my God. Right? Jesus. Oh, my God. Right? Jesus. Oh, my God. Amazing.

You know what I love about this program, Joe, is I get to take stuff like this and blow it out to people at like millions at a time. Oh, well, that's what I love about having you on. I would love to learn something about this. This is amazing. How the fuck? Oh, my God. Isn't that great?

She kicked him in the balls and sent him flying. Oh, my God. I'm not showing the video for people on YouTube watching. You're going to have to Google it yourself. Oh, okay. But please do. Oh, my God. I'll show you a video for people on YouTube watching. You're going to have to Google it yourself, but please do. Yeah, please do. This is insane. And this is 1941. My God.

Right, and if you want to think about partnerships between men and women and the way in power is passed back and forth between people of equal ability, it's just astounding. Well, yeah, I mean, there's no one person who is the head of this. But like he's throwing her around the room and then she's throwing him around the room. Oh my god, that's amazing. Oh they did it, colorized it.

Wow. Wow, it looks so much better. Oh my god, that's incredible that they can do that. Wow, that's one of the more amazing things about computer technology. Like the footage that they did with World War I, where they took some of that footage and colorized it and smoothed it out and used computers to sort of fill in the choppiness of it.

Have you seen my friend, you should have Alicia Lee on the show. Rosebud AI is going to make models a thing of the past. She can generate like tens of thousands of people who've never existed and you can't tell the difference and like you know how your optometrist says is it better like this or like this right testing yeah she could create for you your absolutely perfect um you know visual mate. And there's no way of having this person or asking them out because they don't exist. And there's no way of telling whether they're real or fake.

So it's increasingly I just can't. What is her name again? Leisha Lee. Leisha Lee. Yeah. She's a PhD in math or statistics from Berkeley. And again, one of these people who can do absolutely anything, art, dance, programming, high-level theory. And so her company is Rosebud AI.

Is this her? No. Okay. She's also an actress. Wonder Woman. Jesus, one of them, huh? Yep. One of them confusing people. One of them confusing people.

One of them confusing people. But it's unclear whether models will still have a job. They won't. Good. Go to work, skinny bitch. Become something more interesting than just a hanger. How about that? So what other what other

what other episodes of my of my podcast because I launched I launched it off of this one yes

I listened to Werner Herzog yeah I thought that was interesting although he's a little bit self congratulatory which is a little shocking but he is the most interesting man in the universe

he's a very interesting guy he's also been in some really terrible movies like he was in that Jack Reacher movie with Tom Cruise the best part about that movie is that he drives a Chevelle 1970 Chevelle don't know about this. You don't know about 70 Chevelle's. Did you listen to that bread up?

Brett episode Brett Weinstein. Oh your brother. No, I did not listen to that one. Okay. I've only listened to five or six If you listen to episode 19, which is the Brett episode, I think that's been the most important one except for the one released today. That sounds like you'd gear me up for the one released today.

Well, I would start with the Brett one. What's so important about the Brett one? The Brett one is a story about his prediction that all the laboratory mice that we use from the major supplier, which is the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, may have been compromised by their breeding protocols, which allowed the telomeres to radically elongate. And that we thought that these mice were representative of all mice and that they had radically elongated telomeres at the end of their chromosomes, which appear to mediate the level of mitosis that can happen during histological repair.

So if you imagine that your cells can divide a certain number of times, if there isn't a counter that stops the number of divisions, everything can become tumorous. And since you have like 30 trillion or 100 trillion cells in your body, it means every cell almost can kill you. So it appears that the reason we may die from senescence that is aging is that that's our anti-cancer mechanism. So if you eliminate like infectious disease, like viruses and insult from being hit by a car,

the two things that you have in the end is either you die from immortality, which is cancer, where cells can divide an infinite number of times, or you die from the recursion limit, which is how many times the cell can divide, called in biology the Hayflick limit. And Brett predicted from first principles that what we thought about mice, which is that they have radically elongated telomeres, was only true for laboratory animals because all the laboratory animals in which we test things like drugs have been broken. They've been broken because of selective breeding?

Yep. have been broken. They've been broken because of selective breeding? Yep, because the breeding rotations privileged much younger mice and removed all sort of threats from the environment. And so because telomeres are not protein coding, they're sequences of nucleotides that repeat as a counter rather than coding for a translation in the ribosome into amino acid sequences. What you have is that the body can mutate, if you will,

to use the Jackson Laboratory's concept of this, very rapidly because it's not building something structural. It's just a question of do we have 17 on the end or 170 on the end? It's just a question of do we have 17 on the end or 170 on the end because it's acting – nucleic acid has multiple ways in which it can participate in regulating the body's responses. So in fact, the breeding protocols constituted a novel system of selective pressures that destroy the efficacy of all of our laboratory animals, potentially. Holy shit.

So he predicted from first principles. He said, I bet if you test wild type mice rather than laboratory mice, you'll find that their telomeres are not long as you believe. And this was actually carried out by Carol Grider, who did not acknowledge the prediction. She didn't acknowledge the prediction. You should listen to the show. Why did she not acknowledge the prediction. You should listen to the show. Why did she not acknowledge the prediction? You should listen to the show.

Okay. Okay. No, because this is serious business. It's complicated. And it's a Nobel laureate on the other side of this. So we're taking some risk over there at the portal. That's really interesting. So the consequences of this could be grave.

It could be that so much of the studies that are predicated on these mice tests are useless. Well, I've called up the Jackson Laboratory and asked them, have you had any changes in your breeding protocol? They said, we don't even count the number of telomeres, the telomere length. And I said, do you have a history of when you've changed the breeding protocols? Are you aware of these articles? And she said, like what? I said, you know, a history of when you've changed the breeding protocols? Are you aware of these articles? And she said, like what? I said, you know, these articles of Carol Grider. And they said, how do you spell glider?

Like the plane? I said, Grider, like the Nobel laureate. And how do you spell that? G-R-E-I-D-E-R. And so and then they said to me, well, we don't remember if we've changed the protocols. I said, you're producing laboratory animals. I would imagine you would have a documented history of every change in the time series of how these animals were prepared. Well, I don't know if there's anyone around from that time.

Are you kidding? Were you absent the day they taught science? Who are you? You know, this is like a single point of failure, if true. I can't even, we've been at, for 20 years, we've been trying to get an answer. 20 years. No one will break the story. I mean this episode, which is almost impossible to listen to because at the beginning of the episode, I'm absolutely insufferable to

Brett because he won't tell the story. He's afraid to tell his own life story. Why won't he tell the story? Because in academics, the idea of some punk kid alleging that they predicted in a telephone call to a Nobel laureate that if they would test wild type mice, the telomeres would be radically along, radically shorter than the elongated telomeres of the laboratory test. And then the person refuses to acknowledge that such a prediction was made, even though we have emails from the lab. So she refuses to acknowledge it or she doesn't acknowledge it? I cannot find a single – I've been over the literature. There is no mention anywhere of – and I live this with Brett in real time.

So I know the events were happening. And I live this with Brett in real time. So I know the events were happening. We have communications with that lab since. I cannot find any acknowledgement from the Johns Hopkins University laboratory that this interaction ever took place. And that because he called and wrote and did not write an email, he did not have a paper trail of that prediction. Now, there's consequential emails that show the interaction between the labs. But how many times have you ever heard anyone predict a molecular result from first principles in evolutionary theory? This is what Brett was supposed to be famous for.

And then, you know, he became like this obscure professor at some ridiculous college. And then this thing happened to him. But that's not his origin story. His origin story is that he is the badass of biology who was able to make this prediction from first principles and may have advanced the theory of why we have to die balanced between deaths from immortality, that is tumors, and deaths from recursion limits, that is telomere-mediated hayflicks, hayflick limits. So what, if anything, has been done since this information has gotten out? The world went crazy for the episode and there was silence everywhere inside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative. Because to acknowledge it, they really have to throw out how much research. We don't know. I don't know. But it puts the question out,

how much research is compromised by the laboratory breeding protocols and breeding rotations from a single point of failure at the Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor, Maine. Wow. Episode 19. Oh, get on it. And you will hear me in a way where you will just say,

Eric is the biggest dick I've ever heard in my life. But it's all to push Brett to actually talk. You should have him back on the show to talk about it. It's killing. I would love to. Yeah. So he just wants to, he kind of wants to soft dance it. Is that what it is? Soft step? He's just wrong. I mean, here's the problem. There's a point after which I'm not Mr. Nice guy and I'm just like adamant. Brett is simply wrong. It's a, it's a result and a story that needs to be told. If there is another side to the story, Mm-hmm. done, which is beyond question some of the most important work that has nothing to do with anything Brett has done. But it does not give that laboratory the scientific right to deny the existence of this interaction, the importance of the interaction. And because there are potential

downstream consequences in pharmaceuticals, we need to have an answer. And every answer is interesting. Like if the laboratory mice having radically elongated telomeres is not a problem in some way, that's fascinating. How could you have an animal that has this huge adaptation to the laboratory not affect things? That would be interesting. If it does affect things, that's fascinating. Well, especially if you're running tests on it that have anything to do with telomere length. Right. Well, no, but if it doesn't have to do, like, for example, let's say you have a really toxic substance, right? And it causes a lot of cell death that requires histological repair. Well, if you have huge, long telomeres, you're going to have an ability to metabolize that toxicity much better.

Right. Right? You'll be able to take the insult that comes from this. And so these mice are probably preternaturally disposed towards radical histological repair. That's why they remain youthful and young. And if you test something that might be, you know, if you're doing toxicology studies, it could be that the telomeres, even though you're not testing the telomeres, what you're actually doing is picking up that these broken mice are like the world champs of repair, but they suck at cancer. They all die of cancer. All of them. Yeah. Almost. If essentially all the mice that with radically elongated telomeres let go long enough, all die of cancer because they're, they're tricked out for one special thing,

which is we are, we are, yeah, we are the best at repair. Oh, wow. Right. So think about it as the theory of death and clear away all of the noise.

There are two ways that, that nature can't figure out an escape from either. You die of immortality, which is that you think all your cells want to live forever, and that's a huge death, a huge danger, or we call it a resource leak in computers, or they die because the only thing nature can figure out to do is to say, you only get a finite number of cell divisions up front. Now, there's some adjustments to the theory, but if you only get it, like if you look at the moles on my face, which people love to comment on in the comment

section, they probably started as a runaway replicative process that arrested at the border of the mole in order to keep it from killing me. So we have cells that go rogue all the time. But then what happens is that there's some means of making sure that the process doesn't take down the entire organism. But think about 30 trillion assassins as the cells in your body, all of which might kill you at any moment. It's like terrifying. And today's podcast?

Today's podcast, so first of all, you can reach it now. I finally got a website, which is ericweinstein.org. And I told you that we have to leave this planet and that...

It's hard not to laugh. Sorry, it's just hard not to laugh. But you're serious. We have to leave this planet. We have to leave this planet. Why? Why do we have to leave this planet? Because we can't all be...

This planet has the best beaches. This planet also has China, Russia, Iran, and the United States under ridiculous leadership. There's lots of reasons why we have to leave this planet. We're not good stewards. We're not wise enough to stay on this planet. We're too powerful. We went through this. And by the way, you pointed out this quote, which is, we are now gods but for the wisdom.

And that became a meme. So that was very interesting. The, I gave these lectures, I think in 2013. It's one of the best quotes ever, isn't it? I don't know. At Oxford. Who originated that quote? I think in 2013 That's one of the best quotes ever isn't it? Don't know Who originated that quote? It was me It was you?

Yeah When did you say it? On your program What day? I don't know Which one? Do you remember which one? You've probably turned into a clip

I'm trying to think about It just came off my tongue and you It's one of those ones where i'll drive down the street and it'll pop in my head like the nicest person no no no it's it's a it's a fantastic quote but it's so right it's like every now and then someone can get the whole thing in a sentence we're now gods but for the wisdom so that's why we have to get off this planet and diversify because too many people have godlike powers. Donald Trump commands a tremendous amount of godlike power thanks to our physics community. Well, his ratings.

See how high they are? It's so hard to stay on focus. Sorry. Okay. Okay. So there's too much godlike power. Sorry. Okay. Okay. So there's too much God-like power. Right. So the best hope that I can come up with, and it's a slim one, is that if we could figure out what goes beyond Einstein's theory, the Einsteinian speed limit might be bendable or breakable because we would be in

a framework that was larger than Einstein's. People often interpret this as what they call FTL or faster than light travel. But that's not what I mean necessarily. What I mean is that the underlying source code gives us opportunities that we don't normally have. So seven years ago, I tried giving these lectures at Oxford, which is probably the university that is spiritually closest to what I care about because they care about geometry and physics and they end a relationship. They've kept the faith with that tradition through people like Roger Penrose and Michael

Atiyah. And I released this theory of geometric unity, or rather I released the video of the lecture that introduces this theory. So this was the first time since 1983, 84, um, that I talked in public when I started this, uh, program, uh, when I was 18, 19, something like that. Um, and I just released the video today on our YouTube channel. And it's the video of you giving this discussion. Yeah. So it's introduced by Professor Marcus de Sautoy, who has Richard Dawkins' old job as the Simone Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

And he met me in a bar and he got me a little drunk and he said, OK, what are you really working on? And I told him. And at first it sounded crazy. And then he started thinking about it. And he asked me more questions and he brought me over to Oxford. He got me an appointment, had me talk to their experts. And then he decided that he wanted me to give these what he called special simony lectures. lectures. And they are an attempt to go beyond Einstein to look for a unified theory of physics between the two major branches that have resisted unification. Now that's usually

in the modern era confused with the idea of quantizing gravity. But the quantum gravity imperative is a, it's a political program that comes out of what would have been the quantum field theory community before it became the string theory community. The idea is we have to take Einstein and make him submit to the will of Bohr. And I don't think it's exactly like that. I think they got it wildly wrong and they synchronized themselves and sort of took the field off the cliff and they weren't able to ship a product they couldn't deliver on any of this promise.

And so when I saw that they were about to go off a cliff, I switched fields as an undergraduate into mathematics and used mathematics as a stalking horse to study the same sort of underlying structures but not to get swept up in the politics of physics. And I had this theory, which I can now talk about for the first time in like 37 years or whatever it is. And like today is the first day that I'm sort of free because I've kept this to myself. So if you want to ask me any question about geometric unity. But why? Why did you keep this to yourself?

Because I don't trust these people. You don't trust these people in the same, like I know there was some people that had written some articles wasn't it Sean Carroll's wife? Whatever, it doesn't matter. It's not them. It's an entire system that believes in peer review it believes in forced citations. You have to be at a university. You have to get an endorsement

to use their preprint server. It's too few resources and too many sharp elbows. Do you think that there's there's a logic to that method no I think to preserve it from charlatans and yeah you have to do that yeah that just want to

publish stories so this way you have to be sponsored makes sense right yes but whatever I'm doing whatever mistakes I'm making assume I'm wrong about it about this theory, which is fine. I'll find out that I'm wrong. Give me the layman's version of the theory.

All right. First time ever. Yeah. Do you know that – let's start off with Escher's drawing hands. So do you – Jamie, do you have a picture for that? The key problem that we have in a fundamental theory that people don't think about is not why is there something rather than nothing? I don't think we can answer that. It's why is there so much that is rich out of almost nothing? And so this issue shows that if you had a piece of paper,

could you will into being the hands holding pens using ink to draw each other, right? That problem is akin to the problem that we face in a fundamental theory. If you had the canvas, how would the canvas bring all of the richness that you see around you into being? And what I did was I said, okay, we have to go below Einstein. So we have four degrees of freedom, but they're not yet space and time. It's proto space time, but before. And then I said, okay, that those four degrees of freedom are like the stands in a stadium. And the stands somehow need to build the pitch. And the pitch is a 14-dimensional space.

So let's imagine that you had – okay, we've got four objects here, right? So the four degrees of freedom correspond to the four objects. Then we need a ruler to measure how much of each of these four objects we have. So that would be four additional variables. And then you have angles, because length and angle is what Einstein gave us in space time. So the angles between any two objects are the same as the reverse of the angle. So then you can count it up, and there's six angles to be had. So there's four degrees of freedom plus four rulers plus six protractors, which is 14. So there's a 14-dimensional auxiliary space. And in my estimation, you and I are in some ways

potentially having this conversation in a 14-dimensional world that we perceive back in the stands rather than on the pitch as a four-dimensional conversation. That is, we are in a three-dimensional room going forward in time. So I've called this the observer's. And the observer's is two spaces rather than Einstein's one space. Can I stop you right there? Sure. Why 14 dimensions?

space. Can I stop you right there? Why 14 dimensions? Because I'm saying that the fields, that is the stuff, is dancing not mostly on the four dimensions that we think we perceive, but it's also dancing on the rulers and the protractors. So in other words, if I have X, Y, and Z, I need rulers in the X direction, the Y direction, and the Z to measure things. And I need a watch, which would be like a ruler in the time direction. So those four rulers are, in fact, in play as well. And the protractors, because space-time is four degrees of freedom plus rulers and protractors, I'm saying work over the space of all rulers and all protractors as part of where these particles and fields can dance. So the rulers and the protractors are part of the system, not just a choice of particular rulers and particular protractors.

So by choosing particular rulers and particular protractors, Einstein is grabbing a tiny filament of the space of all possible rulers and protractors. So in effect, space-time is recovered as the act of the observer's contemplating itself. That's a little bit poetic, but I mean that the choice of a space-time metric inside of the space of all metrics is a section of a 14-dimensional bundle over a four-dimensional space. Now, that's the first sort of mind-bending weird thing is that this is not happening in one place. It's happening in two places, in X and in Y, the stands and the pitch. There are things that are happening in the stands, and there are things that are happening in the pitch. So you know when a guy's trying to make a free throw and everybody's waving their giant noodles trying to get him to miss,

there's an interaction between what's happening in the stands and what's happening on the floor. And the observer's is the bundling of two spaces and saying, hey, you're confused as to what's going on here. Some fields are happening in the stands. Some fields are happening on the floor and everything feels as if it's happening in the stands because that's where you're sitting in some weird way. Then you've got this really crazy stuff, which I think one aspect of it is everybody in theoretical physics is looking to figure out whether there are three or more generations. That is copies of matter. Everything in this room is generation one. It's all made up of up quarks, down quarks,

and electrons. So that up quarks and down quarks give you protons and neutrons and electrons give you the sort of interesting personality of the various chemical elements. They're also neutrinos, but they're streaming through us, so I'm not going to count them. And that's all generation one of matter. So everything in that, think of that as like plastic Lego. Then there's another Lego set made out of wood. And then there's another Lego set made out of like lead, you know? And we don't see those other two Lego sets except if we're doing very energetic experiments. So there were three copies of matter and everybody was trying to figure out three or more. And I thought maybe it's two or fewer.

And so one of the aspects of this theory is that the third generation of matter is an imposter. It looks like this generation of matter in terms of its particle personalities, but if you were actually to heat up the system, it would unify with a bunch of particles nobody's ever seen before. And so there are predictions for what those new particle properties would be. There's also a fourth pseudo generation of what would be called spin three-halves matter, which is not prohibited, but has never been seen as a fundamental. So it makes predictions for the particle properties of new spin half and new spin three-halves particles. It attempts to say that there are sectors of matter that I think decoupled, that the universe is not in fact left-right asymmetric, which would be called chirality. And if you think about the weak force, so if you have a neutron on a table, it'll decay

in I think something like 17 minutes on average, half-life. When it decays, there's an asymmetry in that decay called beta decay. And that was found by a woman, bring up Madam Wu from Columbia and the Cobt-60 decays through beta decay, the electrons come spin out one side and not the other, meaning that the universe is like Marilyn Monroe or Cindy Crawford having a birthmark that lets you tell the left from the right. So this is like the ultimate experimental badass who never got recognized fully. And she did an experiment based on work of Yang and Li

that for the first time showed that the universe had a preference of one of its left over its right, if you will. I don't believe that preference is fundamental. I believe that there's another copy of matter that... So the analogy I give is that if you think, if you look at your three fingers in the center of your hand, your middle finger, which is my favorite, is obviously symmetrical about itself. Your digit ratio two and four is pretty close, but is determined by the amount of testosterone you're exposed to in utero. And then your thumb and your pinky are wildly off, but you could try to make it symmetric and say, well, you know, a pinky is like a lame thumb, which it isn't.

If you're just looking at your hand, you're trying to figure out why is my hand asymmetrical? But you don't realize that you've got another hand and it's thumb to thumb, not thumb to pinky, that is the symmetry. So when you, you know, place your fingertips together, you see that if you didn't know, if you were like Oliver Sacks out and you could only see part of your body, you would think about, oh, the world is asymmetric. Well, my belief is that in weak gravitational situations, this other matter decouples. So you only see one hand or the other and we're all in one handedness. So what I'm starting to do is that I'm terrified of talking about this stuff. I don't have the right credentials, not a physicist. I've been out of this game for forever.

So I often say the wrong things and break rules and who knows what. And I haven't really talked about it. This is like really a very lone. I mean, I've been completely alone on this project all my life. What do you think the end result of this project potentially could be? Because you're saying we could get off this planet. What are you talking about in terms of the actual implementation of this theory of yours? So, Jamie, if you could bring up my answer to the final edge question, which is what is the last question?

John Brockman asked when the final year that he conducted the final edge question, which is what is the last question? John Brockman asked when the final year that he conducted the annual edge question. And that is the annual edge question? Yes. He would ask like 200 people, many of them physicists or biologists or mathematicians. He would ask a question and they'd write an essay. And then every year he'd publish it as a book. And so I did that for 10 years. Finally, he got tired of it. And he said, OK, this is my final year. We've exhausted this. What is the last question? So this is the question that I asked.

Does something unprecedented happen when we finally learn our own source code? Now, nobody picked up on this, but that's what my concern is, which is what happens when the universe finally contemplates itself? When we are the first, like we're always worried about the AI becoming self-aware a la Skynet. Okay. We are the AI. And we're about to become self-aware if we can figure out what our own source code is. So we are Skynet. So you're talking about the source code

of reality itself. Yep. And that our perception, our limited perceptions of reality are giving us a distorted view of what the landscape actually is. I'm trying to make sure. I was somewhat holding this back because I'm afraid of what it unlocks. And now that I know that we're willing to elect Donald Trump, not store masks, play footsie with China, be Putin's bitch, all of this stuff, to hell with this. We're going to mismanage this planet into Armageddon if we don't get some grownups into the room. And so I don't know that I'm a grownup, but I'm willing to vie for leadership by putting something up, having it investigated and seeing where it goes. What is your number one fear about this source code being, for lack of a better term, mastered? Well, the last time we gained some serious insight into the way nuclei worked,

that with a little bit of geometry from Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller, gave us the namesake of the Bikini. That was a terrifying moment. Everything changed in 19, I think that was 54? The namesake of the Bikini? Yeah, Bikini Atoll was an island in the Pacific where we blew up a hydrogen device. Is that those insane images where you could see the water going a mile high into the sky? Gorgeous.

Yeah, is that what that is? Yeah. But they did that a lot, right? Well, they did it for a period of time. And so to your question, what if what – so it's still expensive to create fusion devices. So we don't know of any individuals who own the ability to create fusion devices. If you recall at some point, somebody made a functioning nuclear reactor out of discarded smoke detectors. And got like discarded smoke detectors.

I got like 500 smoke detectors, took out the radioactive element, created a reactor. I think so. Probably a kid, right? Yeah. Probably a kid who couldn't get into Harvard. So we have a situation in which we don't know when ordinary humans will gain limitless destructive power. Try to imagine the Columbine kids weaponizing viruses or something like that. So one of the great dangers is that great power, I can't tell what the power would be if the theory is correct. It might give us the ability to escape.

Trevor Burrus Now when you say escape though, why do we have to escape? This is what I'm always so confused about. Because even when Elon talks about going to Mars, Mars sucks. Mars sucks. Can't you fix here? Wouldn't that be the best approach? Well, you and I agree on that. Yeah.

What we don't agree on, I think, is that I am convinced that we don't have the ability to steward this place. Why? Don't you think we're better at it now than we were a thousand years ago? No, no, no, no. No? So Genghis Khan was doing a better job? Genghis Khan was doing a better job because he didn't have limitless power. Just try to imagine it,

try to imagine a full-on nuclear interchange. And then we're having this conversation afterwards. So you're concerned that nuclear war is not just possible, but inevitable. It's certainly inevitable given a long enough time series because all these weapons simply will become cheaper. There's no countermeasure that we, it's too easy to destroy things relative to building. Right.

Do you think that when we're looking at the failure of leadership on the scale that we're seeing play out because of this pandemic, that this is indicative of how it would go no matter what went wrong? Yes. Yeah. Like if this was an issue of forest fires, if it was an issue of climate destruction, if this was an issue-

Volcanoes, hurricanes, nuclear war, same thing. Same thing. Here's a weird one. Look at the history, Jamie, of Vesuvius eruptions by year since the 1800s. My guess is that Wikipedia would probably have a list. And the last one was in 1944, 45 during World War II, grounded a bunch of planes. And then Vesuvius stops erupting. Like we're wildly overdue for a Vesuvius eruption. wildly overdue for a Vesuvius eruption.

And then when Eikjafjallurkul erupted in Iceland, like we hadn't realized that the era of jet travel in the developed world had happened during an incredibly quiet period of volcanic activity. So did we build any kind of volcanic sensitivity into these planes? No, we just grounded the fleet. Right? And there's a volcano not so far from Aikifelikul called Ketla.

Makes Aikifelikul look like a child's play. So you have to look at the Big Nap as the greatest danger to all of us. And this point about being Jewish is that to be really Jewish, Ben Shapiro makes a point which is not very popular, which is a lot of people call themselves Jews aren't actually Jews. They're really Jews on the way out. People who can't figure out why they're keeping these traditions up, they sort of like to

go three days a year, mumble a few words. can't figure out why they're keeping these traditions up. They sort of like to go three days a year, mumble a few words. There's something intrinsically Jewish about wanting gold bars someplace where you can grab them, you know, knowing where the exits are on a building. Like you have to be prepared because the problem of antisemitism to leave at a moment's notice. And Jews have always lived like this. And many of us have forgotten because we've gotten soft in a world with, you know, knock wood, antisemitism, while prevalent, has been under control in the US for a long time.

And I think we've weirdly become denatured because we haven't been living with open antisemitism. You see it crop up in the comment section of every video, but it's incredibly important to stay in a state of readiness. And I've tried to keep that story about Passover and the exodus into Israel from what Jews call Mitzrayim, which means the narrow places or Egypt. So my contention is the Jews had a great run in Egypt and we are all the Jews and earth is Mitzrayim. And it's time to go. Where are we going?

We don't know that we can go anywhere. This is a recapitulation of our previous conversation. Right. We have to know whether exoplanets are viable, whether we can spread out. And whether or not they're in the middle of a big sleep. Well, they may be. But if we're running a million different experiments, it's different than if we're running one correlated experiment with Donald Trump at the helm of the most dangerous machine ever created in the world. Like that was not my plan.

Trump at the helm of the most dangerous machine ever created in the world. That was not my plan. So the formulation of this theory, what you're trying to do is revolutionize space travel? No. What you're trying to do is make it possible for us in a lifetime? We've been stalled out. We've been stalled out for almost 50 years in theoretical physics. Stalled out also. So the simplest way of saying it is no one younger than Frank Wilczek,

who was born in 1951, has gone to Stockholm for a discovery in theoretical fundamental physics made since like 1973. Physics effectively, the prestige part of physics came to an end in the early 70s when everything changed across the board. We had a broad economic change in our world. Jamie, do you want to bring up GDP versus median male income? Something bizarre happened in the early 1970s that we should all be talking about that almost nobody knows about.

And one of the things that happened was is that physics effectively came to an end. A lot of physicists will, all right, you see that graph? So GDP. So explain to people that are just listening. So what it shows is from, what is it, 1947 till about 1973, GDP and median male income are going up in lockstep. They're almost perfectly correlated. And then abruptly, median male income flatlines from about 1973 to 2010 on this graph.

And GDP keeps going up. Now, that is, people always talk about the singularity when we will become one with the robots and AI will take over. This was the actual singularity that happened. And it happened relatively unnoticed. And that's what began to derail. Again, median male income is irrelevant.

It's just one indicator that's particularly clean to show you that that's when the action happened. My belief is that since the early 70s, very little in our society has been progressing. That's not true for computers. That's been like the big bright spot. It's not true for fracking. There's some innovations in imaging. It's not true for fracking. There's some innovations in imaging.

But in general, in an average room, if you subtract off the screens, you can't definitely tell that that room didn't exist in 1973. Because we stopped growing, we got crazy because everything was built on growth. Everything was a scheme that became a Ponzi scheme when growth ran out. So we've sort of been hollowing ourselves out from that time and getting crazier and farther away from reality. And we have to actually figure out where we are. And my belief was that our economy was almost completely created by theoretical physics. Theoretical physics underlies chemistry. So the chemical revolutions like plastics from the graduate. It gave us the semiconductor from which we do our computing. It gave us the World Wide Web, which came out of CERN. It gave us telecommunications, which use the electromagnetic spectrum. It gives us medical

imaging from tomography. We don't really appreciate that theoretical physics has been the great success story of our time. And the theoretical physics community is the intellectual SEAL Team 6 of the world. We underpay them. They're under-resourced. They're now completely unethical because we've underpaid them. Unethical how so? They won't talk about their failures.

They don't talk about who did what. They're not fair and decent because there's not enough resources. And so when resources get scarce, people become psychopathic. And like string theory is just an utter failure that we can't discuss because the baby boomers use that as, well, we're making huge progress while they're actually doing nothing. I mean, I don't say they're doing nothing. They weren't making contact with physics. They became mathematicians like a bunch of soldiers and generals who are playing war games during peacetime. It's related to what they're supposed to be doing but there was nothing for them to do. So they sort of went to the gym and ran on a treadmill rather than actually running marathons. actually running marathons. So we have a terrible situation in that the community that powered our economy and gave us this incredible power in the world through like nuclear weapons and the rad lab

at MIT and whatnot has gone into decline. And it's very dangerous to restart theoretical physics. So it's been safe because there's been nothing new that we can use coming out of it. My belief now is that we have to talk about a thousand year solution to human life with weaponized viruses, with weaponized nuclei. I mean, the amount of damage we can do is astounding. And that's going to restart at some point since the nap is now coming to an end. Like we're living, this is the end of the nap. Three months ago, we were all just leading la la, you know, beautiful lives, doing whatever.

We were struggling, we were, you know, frustrated, but we weren't indoors. What makes you think that this is not something that's gonna, we're gonna overcome and we're going to overcome and we're going to get back to business as usual, December, 2019. Assume that we do. Okay.

Okay. So we come up with a killer treatment. We replenish all the masks. We have vaccines. We all just spent how long watching our leaders tell us to shelter in place. I mean, we all went through this movie. I don't think, I'm watching conversations about open borders change. Hey, should we talk about open borders today?

Let's just keep going about escaping the planet and your theory. Well, okay. Because we've taken many deviations and it's already 4.30. All right. Is it? I don't even know what time it is. Yeah. Okay. So this theory, geometric unity, replaces space-time. So think about a fundamental theory as a newspaper story. It's who, what, sorry, it's where, when, which is space and time. Who, what, who would be fermions, that is matter, electrons, quarks, and what, which would be the force that pushes them around, how and why, how would be the equations, and why would be something called a Lagrangian. And what this does is to say that there used to be two origins for physics. There was space time, which Einstein gave us, and then there's this thing called SU3 cross,

SU2 cross U1, which comes from nowhere that anyone knows. What is that? Well, you and I are seeing each other through photons. Photons are scattering off us and being perceived by our eyes. Photons are associated with electromagnetism. And there is actually a circle at every point in space-time. So here we are in space. My fingers are up here between us. I'm going to snap at a particular instant. At that point of the snap,

there was a circle, as there is a circle at every other point in space and time that we do not perceive, that generates all of electromagnetism. So call this the mysterious U1. We don't know where this U1 comes from. Why is there a hidden circle that generates the electromagnetism that you and I use to make visual contact that we use to send electronic signals like our Wi-Fi? Not only is there a circle, there's also a three-dimensional object called SU2 and an eight-dimensional object called SU3.

And effectively, SU2 generates the weak force. That's not quite right. It's called actually weak isospin. And SU3 generates the strong force, which is sort of on the nose, which is why the protons in your body don't all push apart given that they're positively charged and like charges repel. So why don't you explode? That's the strong force and it comes out of something called SU3.

We have two origin stories. One origin story is the story of space and time. The other origin story is the story of SU3 cross SU2 cross U1. space and time. The other origin story is the story of SU3 cross SU2 cross U1. And what I did was to get rid of the freedom to choose the symmetries that generate the personalities of the particles that make up this place. And then the question is, okay, I called it the magic beans trade. Because if you think about Jack and the beanstalk, Jack gives away the family cow to get beans, which seems like the worst trade of all time. But the beans actually had much more in them than was understood.

And so Jack gets the better of the trade because the beans allow him to do something crazy. So that's what I did. I gave away the freedom to choose the symmetries to generate the particle properties. I tied my hands the way Einstein would tie his hands. generate the particle properties. I tied my hands the way Einstein would tie his hands. And then I tried to show that you could recover these particle properties by trusting that the theory would self-assemble and that's the hands drawing hands. So the idea is that I generated the fermions on top of the space of all rulers and protractors on top of the four dimensions.

And the natural object, which would be called spinners or chimeric spinners, when perceived on the four-dimensional object, that is when you pull back the information from the second world that got created into the first, from the pitch into the stands, the particle properties appear to be more or less the right particle properties of the particles that we see now when I started this in the early 80s we didn't know that neutrinos had mass and so we thought that there might be only 15 particles in a generation and my stuff would only work

if the number of particles in a generation was 2 to the n so the joke when I was in college was I sure hope that 2 to the fourth equals 15. Now, it can't be because two to the fourth is 16. But then, luckily for me, neutrinos were found relativity of Einstein and quantum theory of Bohr and Dirac. In the 70s, we found out that there was a geometry that governed the Bohr-Dirac part of the world called Erismanian geometry from Charles Erisman's analyzation.

And Einstein had used Bernard Riemann, a German mathematician, his geometries. So my gambit and why it's called geometric unity is that the two branches of physics are derived from two geometries. So rather than saying it's about quantizing geometry, which is the quantum field theory imperialist perspective Einstein must submit to Bohr, the real issue is that there's a fight between the saying it's about quantizing geometry, which is the quantum field theory imperialist perspective Einstein must submit to Bohr, the real issue is that there's a fight between the parents, that is, Bernard Riemann and Charles Erisman. Now, we don't know those names nearly as well. And so my goal was to say, is there any world in which these two geometries and the advantages of these two geometries could be made to play together. And in general, there isn't.

But there is one case in which it works, which is this issue of natural spinners. And so the whole gambit was to say, what if the world is not a generic world, but a very natural and peculiar world where certain games work that would not work in a generic situation? where certain games work that would not work in a generic situation. So what I tried to do is to recover Einstein the way Einstein tried to recover Newton from a more fundamental theory. And the incompatibility is that Einstein had to compress something called the full Riemann curvature tensor, which is the sort of measure of how warped something is.

So he broke that beast that tells you the warping of something into pieces. He threw one of them out called the vial curvature and then he adjusted the properties of the other two that were left to create general relativity. So my thing does that but it also has another property called gauge invariance. Gauge invariance is the sort of sine qua non of the particle theory. And this is only possible in very limited circumstances. And the gambit was what if the world is in that tiny class where this game can work. So it's sort of a career suicide theory because if it doesn't work this way, you don't really get anything in the end. So, you know, think about that exhaust vent in the Death Star.

This tiny little vulnerability. And, man, you better hope that thing goes in. What are you trying to do with this? By releasing this with this discussion, this video that you're putting out, are you hoping that more people examine it and try to actually implement it? And then ultimately this would be something that allows people to do what? To revolutionize space travel? I don't know. I didn't know whether I wanted man to have his own source code. So I was divided.

But you were serious about this. I didn't know whether I wanted man to have his own source code. So I was divided. This is you. You're serious about this. This is like very close to. I love you. Came on this program and I said it straight. We have to get off this planet. We made a joke about getting high and all this stuff. But I've always been dead serious about what I'm saying. Now, if you ask me at a personal level, I started this for lots of personal reasons. I always thought that the idea of wanting to go beyond Albert Einstein was something everybody would grow up wanting to do.

It didn't occur to me that there was another thing that you would want to do with your life. That seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I want to understand why we're here. Well, that means you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. Yeah. You found your niche. I found my niche. And then it started this kind of completely bizarre thing because I was not a good math student, but I had to go to the best place.

And so how does a B- math student in high school go to Harvard University with a master's degree at 19? You know, it's like just sheer will, because I was not a good math guy. So I just willed it into being, I got myself there. I taught myself whatever it is that I do. I don't have an advisor, which is very unusual. And I became intertwined with this, this theory. And this theory has been separating me also from people I love in the world that I'm in. I've never known whether I'm crazy or whether or not I have something. Uh, I don't know whether it unleashes power if it works or it only unleashes, um, destructive power. Are you willing to have conversations like debates with detractors or critics of this?

Are you willing to have conversations like debates with detractors or critics of this? I'm willing to have discussions with constructive critics. Constructive critics. And in fact, I've done – well, because – Publicly you have? You said – Privately. Privately. Yeah.

I mean I've talked to people like Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study who I just think is fantastic. There's another guy named Luis Alvarez Galme at the Simons Institute. This is all very hard for the average person to follow, but I think it's incredibly... It's not about the average person. I understand that, but I'm saying, I think it would be incredibly valuable

to just release it for the average, for everybody. I'm starting to. Yeah, but I mean, this conversation, I know you're saying it's not for the average person, but just to have it available to everyone. So if they want to, they could slowly go over it and try to understand it bit by bit and put it together. I should talk about this.

I'm building. I shouldn't even say I'm building it. There is a fanatical community arising around the portal for what we're doing that's different. And there is a 24-7 Discord server where people are talking. Like if you're ever bored or lonely, these people are always on and always talking. I'm never that bored or lonely. It's not for you, baby. that border lonely it's not for you baby but we've been trying to recruit a bunch of artists because i believe that art is part of the secret weaponry of pushing out like i don't think you

know how crazy it was when we did the hop vibration up here it was like close encounters all these artists start creating hop vibrations like i went to temecula and this guy uh nico uh nico myers has a huge hop vibration in his backyard coming off of this program. It's like when people tattoo your face on their arms, right? I'm aware of all this stuff. I just choose to shut the door. Oh, I'm in there with them. Yeah. You can do that.

Good luck. Well, because we're smaller. That's true. It is that, too. But it's also a lot of what I do requires me thinking on my own. I have to be by myself and spend a lot of time staring off into space. artists and computer people are going to help us push out aids to, um, like, can you pull up ericweinstein.org?

Um, there's a visualization that's sketched in the door. There's a portal in the website. there go. Okay. So go down. All right. You see that door? No. Okay. So go down. All right. You see that door?

No. Yeah. Don't know why that's the clip they took. Okay. Beyond that, there should be something. Okay. Right here. This is a picture of a fiber bundle and the path lifting property relative to a connection.

So those floating planes, that was what generates electromagnetism called horizontal subspaces. And you're actually looking at a gauge theory in that picture. And so what you're saying is that what's valuable about the artists getting on board with this is that they can make a visual interpretation of this that can be- Or cartoons. Like there's a guy named, if you had Grant Sanderson- No. cartoons like there's a guy named if you had grant sanderson no he does a show called three blue one brown which is some of the best math videos you've ever seen gorgeous stuff just sucks people in um and you're like you're learning relatively hard math that somebody's made visually beautiful

this guy is a national treasure uh and i'm hoping to get Grant on the program. You know, we've been experimenting when we had Roger Penrose on the program. I said, I'm not going to talk to you about quantum consciousness. I'm going to talk to you about twisters and about your contributions to the field. And what my community did is they built something called like the portal.wiki. So if you bring up the portal.wiki, there's an entire ecosystem that's digesting what happens in our episodes for the lay public. One of the more amazing things about the internet and about something like your podcast is if you build it, they will come. You know, you have a bigger audience. I will say that I think I have the world's best audience.

These guys, like go to, go to, go down to episodes or. How many episodes have you had so far? Is it 28? Yeah. Oh, Eric Lewis, by the way, you should have in. The greatest pianist now playing in my opinion. So if you, if you like, if you go to, or go to the graph wall. I love that you're doing all this and yet you're still interviewing porn stars and James O'Keefe.

Hey, we want everybody. Yes. I love that. To hell with this cancellation shit. Yes. Well, not just that. I just love that you're just a curious person that actually wants to communicate with people on top of being this space man. So, for example, we have this graph wall tome project where we start off with this paragraph from Ed Witten.

If you go down, you'll see that they're figuring out how the paragraph from Ed Witten fails over into this wall that was chiseled in Indiana limestone in Stony Brook, New York, which has all of these below that. Indiana Limestone in Stony Brook, New York, which has all of these below that. So that's the paragraph that tries to sum up the universe as we understood it in the modern era in prose. And I recommend everyone read that. And then if you go down from that, there's this plant, right? Right. Yeah. Go, go. There's a clickable thing underneath that graphic. So, for example, this is the plan for this sculpture that Jim Simons, the world's greatest hedge fund manager, paid for.

And if you click on any one of these things, these ruins, so it's like the uncertainty, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. My people are digesting everything that we say, everything that we point to, and helping each other understand what goes on in my program so that I don't have to spend all the time in the shallow end. Wow. So it's just – This is heavy shit. Oh, my God. Joe. But this is what's interesting.

Joe, I learned this from you, actually. You said – because I didn't think this was a smart idea at all. I got this from you, actually. You said, because I didn't think this was a smart idea at all. And people are so eager to break into what's next. We want to spin our chrysalis and become the butterfly that we were meant for. We're tired of being caterpillars. Yes.

I know you're hearing 5-MeO-DMT, but that wasn't what I was thinking. No. hearing 5-MeO-DMT, but that wasn't what I was thinking. No, I mean, I really think that what you're showing, that is a branch of what humanity is trying to do with creativity, with curiosity, with the thirst for innovation. That's it. Well, it's time to go to the next level. And we are trying, and the funniest part is like, brought to you by Athletic Greens and Theragun. Both good products. This is the funny thing about sponsorship. You see, my grandfather was a salesman. And so in a weird way, I'm living a romantic dream of connecting to my grandfather who sold like used clothing and clothing door to door.

He was a schmata salesman. And I've been astounded at how much I enjoy all of the products that I'm advertising. Like the sleep pad that cools you so you don't wake up in a pool of your own sweat. Unbelievable. It's great. I've lost 17 pounds through Athletic Greens. Well, you've also stopped stuffing your face with stuff you shouldn't eat, right? Only Athletic Greens?

No. You do look skinnier. Your face looks thinner. Yeah, it is. But in part, it's because I figured out how to integrate it into a program where intermittent fasting started paying off. Listen, man, we could talk forever, but I have to wrap this up, unfortunately. But I'm going to watch your video, and then I'm going to watch it high. I'm going to do two, watch it twice and I'm going to try to figure it out. And Joe, at some point, let's just hang out. And I'd love to like, just show you exactly what it

is. Taylor made to whatever questions without any worry about, about, and, um, let's do that. I can't wait. And I just wanted to say thanks again for everything but you do now owe me two appearances on your show i haven't called either of them in and thanks for calling me on your show yeah two on your show yeah my show well sorry on my show on my show yes yes yeah okay you got it all right i owe you two you're the best thank you sir you're the best uh bye everybody wait one thing what uh ericWeinstein.org. Please sign up for our mailing list so we can find you after the fact. Yeah, go get your mind fucked.

Good luck. Good luck, everybody. Thank you, brother. All right, thank you. Bye, everybody. Stay safe.