Will continue to see Harvard as this shining um city on a hill uh and that’s you know that’s somebody who’s there now um I I think it’s a disgrace and we can’t talk about it which is the fascinating part that we are effectively losing our society because we’re afraid to say certain
Things because we’re being made afraid to say certain things what do you mean well okay so it as a Harvard Alum you get the Harvard magazine and this this thing is incredible because it’s just always uh Harvard people promoting other Harvard people in the sort of PR um the
Nepotism magazine yeah H PR Fest and I think I remember that the article introducing Claudine gay was entitled a Scholar’s scholar and I knew from the get-go that this was not going to go well because you know I don’t think people understand what Harvard is and how it functions and why it’s
Different um Harvard is really the fusion of two separate institutions um one is about Brilliance and one is about power and so you can think about this as the sharpest minds and the sharpest elbows and the sharp mind crowd gets uh tons of resources because the sharp
Elbow crowd makes sure that power is used to perpetuate Harvard’s place of privilege and the sharp mind crowd contributes um Prestige to the sharp elbow crowd and so by virtue of the fact that you can’t Decon flate the sharp minds and the sharp elbows Harvard continues to have this very special
Place now what is this special place why isn’t it just a un like any other um I think sort of two or three principal reasons one of which is that uh Harvard is sort of an extension of the US government the government Department which is sort of Harvard’s version of
Polyi is kind of an extension of the state department at times the economics Department uh ends up setting economic policy in many ways for the United States and above all there is this concept that in every field there’s usually one institution that sets The Narrative so for example in journalism
The New York Times is different than all other newspapers and news organs because of its focus on what we sometimes hear of as narrative driven journalism now people now talk a lot more about narrative but 15 years ago I don’t think this was common knowledge that the
Editorial room at the New York Times was a place where people thought about what the long arcs of stories were and you figured out what the Arc of the story was before the facts came in so for example Hillary is inevitable uh was a long Arc in narrative-driven journalism it wasn’t
True but all the information that came in when Hillary was running against Donald Trump um was fed through this prism of the inevitability of Hillary Clinton in the same way Harvard practices narrative-driven academics it tells you what is happening what the grand arcs are and those just like the 2016
Election are very often untrue and so that’s a way in which Harvard serves power it it uh it brings people in who are brilliant and then it takes the ones of those who are willing to play ball with the engines of power and it uh it enters into the
Storytelling mode in which Harvard sets the tone for everyone um so when you lose Harvard it’s very important and very different but the last thing that I would say that really distinguishes Harvard is that Harvard um there’s the open part of Harvard the classrooms and there’s the closed part
Of Harvard that you can’t see at all and it’s sort of a system of star Chambers um and I don’t think people who have not Tangled with Harvard would would comprehend how much of what Harvard gets done it gets done behind closed doors because it can’t be done in
The open but like what do you mean I’ll give you a a crazy example uh I was not allowed to attend my own the defense now you’re not an academic by training if you tell that to an academic they don’t even understand what you’re saying they think that you’re making a
Joke or you must not have understood something or maybe you were sick that day and you had to zoom in or who knows what but I don’t mean that at all I mean when I tried to get my PhD the Harvard math department instit instituted a rule that said you could
Not attend your own thesis defense you could not determine who would uh present your thesis your dissertation so basically what happened is um if you had an advisor which almost everyone did your advisor presented your thesis behind closed doors nobody’s ever heard of this in the history of
Academics is this how Cline gay got away with it no I don’t know Claudine gay was taken down for two different reasons um one reason she was taken down was for not having crisper statements about the uniformity of application of rules of codes of contact when it came to uh Jewish
Students um so it’s one thing whether you have a free speech policy or maybe you have a um code of conduct where you say we can’t tolerate certain kinds of speech whatever that is there’s certainly a question about the differential application of that on behalf of different groups so that was
One of the ways that she got into trouble the other way she got into trouble was the vulnerability of plagiarism in a weak academic record and you know let me just say this early and you’ll come everyone will come to it late plagiarism is the tip of the iceberg of uh attribution
Bullying where effectively you have these people who determine who did what in the narrative driven storytelling that is academic and what what papers get cited which papers don’t what discoveries are named for certain people is determined largely by a tiny number of Institutions Harvard preeminent among them and so
Harvard just plays games morning noon and night night with writing stories that put Harvard at the center and particular individuals um at the top whether or not those individuals have earned it or not and what’s hard for me is most people are now thinking okay Harvard is just
Full of it but it it isn’t it’s half full of it and half the best place on Earth to do anything important and th that tension is not is what’s not recognized now power has to take a backseat to academics and to Discovery and to Brilliance if this game is to be
Maintained you can’t constantly just exercise power and tell stories so in in my history with this University I’ve tried to figure out why does it behave so differently than every other institution of of research is Dei the boogeyman that everyone is worried about you know
I’m this is so hard to to even get into it our universities won World War II uh in large measure I mean when if you need codes broken if you need new weapons developed you’re supposed to have SEAL Team Six of the human mind that you can call on and that’s supposed
To be MIT Caltech Princeton Harvard it’s a very small number of Super prestigious universities um part of the problem is if you think about I don’t even know how to say this exactly if you think about a university as akin to a an exotic car a
Lot of people buy a McLaren or a Lamborghini or Ferrari because they like the styling status but the sole of all of those cars is racing right and and the people who buy the cars for the racing sometimes are really annoyed by the fact that the cars
Are status symbols and that’s what a research University is to me I’m interested in the racing and other people are interested because it it sort of uh what you do to show that you got a $2 million bonus uh from your investment banking job uh if you don’t race it I
Don’t know what you’re doing there and I’d prefer that you’d leave um the purpose of a university is not teaching purpose of a great University is training and research and we can’t afford to lose that I I don’t think people have any idea how important it is to be able to
Call on your own nation’s top academics when you need the truth you need something done you need help and so whatever it is that is denaturing our universities that’s turning this into a nightclub where you the whole trick is to get past the bouncer for the cool kids
Uh has to be stopped but what does it say that the ex-president of Harvard is someone whose academic bonafides were found out to be plagiarized largely I’m trying to say the balance between the sharp elbows and the sharp Minds is wildly off and and why is
It no nobody wants to say what everybody is thinking which is this person is not fit to be the president of Harvard University and why is that because they’re going to get called a name this was made all about race oh what you can’t tolerate scholarship of this quality from a black
Female it’s like you’re starting I wasn’t even questioning this before but now you’re saying a Scholar’s scholar me thinks that does protest too much we’ll get back to talking to Eric in one minute but first I need to tell you about element stop having coffee first thing in the morning your adenosine
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Description below or heading to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom that’s drink LM nt.com slod wisdom there was a quote from Howard Jacobson that said I hope Claudine gay marks the start of people who know nothing losing their jobs look we need to bring back exclusion we’re talking way too much
About inclusion inclusion and exclusion are two halves of a normal process Claud and gay needed to be excluded from that office not included now if you told me that cond Lisa Rice was the president of Harvard she’s black she’s female and I don’t agree with her politically but I don’t think many
People would have a qualification issue with cond Lisa rice or let’s say James Gates is a black man distinguished physicist this has to do with people coming from weaker subjects particularly activist subjects subjects that didn’t exist before the late 60s early 7s when all of these things were created you
Know to an extent when you had I don’t know if you recall the the pictures of what is it Willard straight Hall at Cornell with the black students emerging with weapons um you know there was a revolutionary feror at the end of the 60s early 70s and you have people
Creating like women’s studies uh you know black studies African-American studies and these these departments were basically born of activism more than scholarship I’m not saying no scholarship gets done there but scholarship and activism are essentially fused and many of us think activism is great just don’t do it next to our
Physics and math and computer science and music departments you know if what you’re really there to do is to ignore certain things and accentuate others and not search for the truth um that’s not an ignoble Pursuit it’s just that’s not what scholarship is scholarship is about understanding
Things and getting them right and we we’ve gone down a terrible turn but you know just consider I think your listeners uh might enjoy Googling the string um cook cook something up to ease him out that was a phrase that was used uh internally in documents within Harvard when um a
Kenyon was ejected from the Harvard economics Department um back in the 60s and what had really happened is that this guy had had passed all of his exams he was fully qualified was working on his dissertation to become a Harvard PhD in econom omics and the university I
Think decided that it didn’t like an African man sleeping with white women in in America and it got rid of him even though he was in good standing that the only reason we know about that is that turned out to be Barack Obama senior so Harvard conspired 100% with the state department
To destroy the career of Barack Obama senior and that’s how Harvard worked in the star Chambers it cooks and what does it do it Cooks things up it Cooks up stories it Cooks up um attribution it gives people credit for things that they didn’t do first it takes credit away
From other people um I was there in the mid90s when it destroyed my wife’s career um through something a Star Chamber called the Harvard jobs uh Market meeting and all the economists go into a closed room they lock the door and they say who’s got a good student
And my wife was the student of a Nobel uh Award winner in economics and she had um done something which was to bring an entirely new kind of mathematics into economic theory to replace something called the marginal Revolution a new form of differential calculus called gauge Theory and a guy named Dale
Jorgenson who recently died said nope so even though a Nobel level Economist was promoting her and saying this is great stuff she should go anywhere in the country a woman of color from the developing World um an old white guy just said no and you know in a second uh she her
Position in the world is reordered in the pile and why were they doing this because they wanted to fix the CPI uh and I don’t mean fix as incur it I mean fixes in fixing a baseball game um because the CPI is used to transfer wealth what’s CPI the Consumer Price
Index and the reason it’s important is that mostly what the government does after its military is uh entitlements Social Security payments Medicare payments and those are indexed to inflation and the way in which it takes in money is through taxes and those tax brackets are indexed to inflation so
It’s very funny everybody focuses on Central Banking in the FED but the Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains a statistic that transfers billions and billions of dollars and if the CPI is overstated uh it pays out a lot of money and takes in very little money and if
It’s if you can get it to be understated uh then you get to take in much more money you don’t have to pay old and sick people and that’s what the Harvard Department was doing there’s a single figure that mediates everything that gets squeezed through how funny and
And so what we we were doing as a collaboration was showing the right mathematical framework to calculate the CPI but that would have allowed less [ __ ] it would have allowed less yeah to use the technical term sir so uh but but the point being that the Harvard jobs Market meeting inside of the
Harvard economics department is a Star Chamber the way the uh immigration um status of Obama’s father was a Star Chamber as was the way in which my PhD was over and over again Harvard closes its doors and it makes stuff up this sounds unsalvageable as somebody I don’t
Know it sounds it sounds like we’ve got the people leading it have gotten in through some combination of diversity Equity inclusion nepotism gameplaying harsh elbows seems like the people they just hired a guy named Daniel S Fred who’s one of the greatest mathematicians alive in my
Area um Dan and I might disagree about String Theory we can have scholarly disagreements just had lunch with him in Austin Texas um that guy’s a scholar through and through I can disagree with him I can fight with him uh I can I can have my differences I would support him 100% as
A scholar to take over uh you know as a as a Provost or Dean if they were interested there’s no shortage of absolutely fantastic people at Harvard but if they’re unable or unwilling to play the political games in order that are required unless they’re prepared to
File their elbows down to a sharp Point well this is what Bill Amman is doing so confusing I just I have the feeling I don’t know this guy at all don’t have positive negative I thought you would have cross paths with him at some point you would think there are various people
Who I don’t cross paths with for whatever reason um I don’t even think we follow each other or maybe I follow him but I don’t think he follows me um I think that the problem is is that a lot of these people don’t know how the research Game Works they think about
This in terms of the Harvard Business School the law school the undergraduate Alumni network they don’t see the part of Harvard that actually produces the Mystique you know the analog of the racing for the exotic car and I I worry that the right thing to do right now is to appoint uh
Kinly research oriented person in a super rigorous field it doesn’t even have to be stem like music is an incredibly rigorous fi but what we need right now is rigor we don’t need another person from uh the social sciences at this moment we need somebody to reestablish that Harvard is an
Intolerant place that it has the highest possible standards it’s unabashedly elitist it’s unabashedly American and it cannot live with Dei Dei is a parasitization of our best hopes and dreams and we have to recognize that Dei has to be destroyed so that goals like diversity and getting the right people into the
Room are not sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity and lack of Ethics it’s interesting that at places like Yale they had made some changes to the ways that grades and diversity account for admissions but they didn’t get rid of legacy admissions which kind of tells you everything that
You need to know about what’s being protected no I don’t think it does is this not another way to ensure that the people just to ensure that power is is held in the people who already have it but very soon this thing isn’t going to be worth very much I don’t think that
People care I think this is the same as looking at why Marvel are going downhill yeah say more there are a lot of movies coming out at the moment I think the most recent Star Wars director openly said I enjoy making movies that make men feel uncomfortable to John Stewart Star Wars
Yeah maybe one of the most male dominated audience movies that I can think of yes it’s self-destructed so what I’m trying to say is is that you can you can say oh we’re going to keep things open for legacy admissions right but very soon you’re not going to want to be
Associated with I mean already Yale has mismanaged its research University for years it made a very bad decision not to go hard on on sciences and stem uh and focused in my opinion too much on on softer Fields um you know so what happens when Harvard is no longer that
Prestigious if people start laughing at Harvard uh what good is it going to be that you can get your kid in I don’t disagree but I think people are so out of touch the people who are in power are unable or unwilling to see just how just how quickly the stock price is
Plummeting I don’t think that they’re able to see this thinking about it especially using the the Marvel example again or some of the things that are coming out of Disney you have a quantifiable figure what was the opening weekend into the box office you know exactly where this
Is there are fewer places to hide when it comes to that here’s the number what did it cost what did you make opening weekend right and you have projections and you have targets presumably that you want to hit if that number doesn’t cause people to think maybe we don’t need
Another narrative about an all female cast that is better than the men without overcoming any CH you’re not looking at is um you know if you look at Mike Hopkins work on the con karian variant in the mathematics Department that’s like opening opening weekend statistics man great stuff happens at
Harvard make no mistake about Harvard is an amazing and horrible place and we’re going to all now focus on how dumb it is and how horrible it is and like then you’re not seeing the tragedy you’re not seeing look I didn’t have an adviser I one of
The only people you’ll ever meet with a PhD that had no advisor um but the guy who saved me was named R bot and rul Bot discovered something that’s so important called bot periodicity that if I could convey it to you your mind would be uh you you’d think DMT was for
Children uh has to do with the fact that there are only four systems of numbers that have particular property and one of those sets of numbers spins a Margo around with the other three with an eight-fold sort of symmetry who knew that this thing was even possible it’s
Just it’s an incredible fact about the world um I associate him with Harvard that’s unud there’s no there’s no one of the world who can tell me that bot periodicity wasn’t one of the most important things that happened in the 20th century and to have a person like that you know
Just feet from John Tate uh I could go on and on about all the real things that happened in Harvard what we need right now look I would love to run for president of Harvard if Claud and gay can be president of Harvard so can I and
What we need is somebody who’s been wronged by Harvard you need somebody who has not been on this kind of escalator to power who’s constantly shown Love by the the system there are all sorts of people that represent what I call Black Sheep Harvard you’ve got white sheep
Harvard and black sheep Harvard and black sheep harv is no less important but it’s the people who are not loved by the system who don’t know when to shut up the people who will take a stand and who will zig when everyone else zags why would that be
Useful because we’ve got to purge the University of the things that don’t work and it’s going to be ugly it’s going to be unpleasant it’s going to be a civil war on The Faculty I was learning about an idea the abalene Paradox one of my one one of my
Favorite ideas from last year the abene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group’s members because each member assumes the others approve of it it explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots
When they get together kind of like the emperor’s new cloudes an acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want want to attend you attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you that at a business meeting someone suggests an idea that he thinks
The others will like recruiting a trans influencer is the face of the brand each member has misgivings about this but assumes the others will consider them transphobic if they speak out so everyone app approves of the idea despite no one liking it abene Paradox
Yeah um I like it uh it has a lot to do with Timor quran’s theory of preference falsification I think that that’s not exactly how it happens Ela most of the way these things work is that you’re afraid to speak like Le let’s predict what’s going to be said when this debuts sour
Grapes uh grifter charlatan uh Eric doesn’t like women Eric doesn’t like black people oh uh such snobbery what has he ever done you know we know what every action brings about in terms of its response and that’s kind of why we don’t speak up it’s just not worth it there
These horrible people that follow you around looking for you to say anything like I don’t know I don’t I don’t know if she’s qualified it’s like did he say it can we get our knives out that thing has to be driven out of the University we can’t
Have these people it’s not just in the University though right no no but I’m saying the universities are special because the if everyone is going to take power later passes through them you can’t afford to lose them you can’t afford to lose your news media you can’t afford to
Lose your universities you can’t afford to lose your political parties three for three at the moment that’s right yeah but look it’s worth fighting for so you know they’ll call me a bunch of names they’ll try to deface my Wikipedia entry that’s what they’ll do
What do you make of the most release of Epstein documents you tell me oh man I mean surprising to see step Hawking on there in some ways but why I wouldn’t know what Jeffrey Epstein would want with Steven Hawking what are you assuming is so terrible about step
Hawking being in these documents I didn’t say that it was terrible okay like that answer that’s interesting I’m surprised that Jeffrey Epstein would have an interest in stevenh Hawking Beyond him being somebody that is well-known influential powerful and potentially leverageable which is that makes me think what he took an interest
In physics and I don’t know why and you do at least you have an idea about why he took an interest in physics Jeffrey but I don’t know why I don’t know why Jeffrey Epstein was interested in physics well what would you guess there’s some special mathematics there that allows him
To or the people that he is associated with to better be able to predict things to be able to use it in some sort of a way around financial markets around new technology that’s emerging to just be able to see the direction that the future of technology is moving in perhaps
Hm you know more about this than me come on well I look I I’d go back to this conference that he held I think it’s 2006 or 2004 called confronting gravity so he holds a conference I don’t think he holds it on this island on his
Island I think he holds it on uh St Thomas maybe um and this this is entirely consonant with an earlier meeting that he had with me where he wanted to know about what I was doing with mathematical physics and I have to say look why gravity gravity is in some
Sense about the fabric of SpaceTime and if there are things about the fabric of SpaceTime that you can unlock that are not contained in general relativity nor in the standard model how much power do you think is in that you saw what the neutron did to unlock the strong
Force um you can take out a city with a little bit of physics I’m going to turn this around Chris because we had a great Dynamic the last time and I I want to see you play with ideas too um tell me what you imagine might be the
Power beyond the standard model in general relativity if we can already destroy all of humanity uh albeit with some com complications you have to engineer a bomb what do you think might be on the other side of the next great discoveries well I mean this gets into sci-fi and
And speculation around that probably fits the next Marvel series they should use this as the as the tagline I would guess things to do with being able to move across space okay wormholes time if there are other higher Dimensions if that allows you to access if the Multiverse
Theory holds uh if that allows you to access different universes and to move between them it might be Limitless power it could be Limitless power in the form of energy could be Limitless power in the form of tra travel um what if what if it allows you
To control neutrinos in a new way I mean like people don’t think about neutrinos it’s very hard to send a particle through planet Earth unscathed but neutrinos do it right so in some sense if you were a a Sovereign Nation wouldn’t you be focused on physics I mean here’s the thing that I
Just don’t understand I’ll be totally honest about it who isn’t interested in this stuff you have to be crazy to do what we’re doing with physics we’re running physics into the ground physics is you’ll go to a Marvel movie about some guy trying to collect Rings or stones to
Get infinite power over the universe that’s physics that’s not Stones when you see somebody talking about Limitless power think physics don’t think money think physics physics is the source force of infinite power and is Jeffrey Epstein sufficiently versed in physics to know that he needs to be at the Forefront of this
No but this is what we dealt with last time so kids if you haven’t seen last time’s episode I don’t think it was Jeffrey epy I don’t understand why we’re so focused on this man why aren’t we focused on on whatever created him like this is really weird we can’t think
Take half of all the time you spend thinking about Jeffrey Epstein talking about Jeffrey Epstein everybody talking about and spend half of that time saying what do we what do we think about whoever was behind Jeffrey Epstein whatever was behind Jeffrey Epstein is what I think cared about
Gravity cared about space time cared about physics and you get to use this supposed financia as a wedge to be able to start to break this open well this is the thing if I’m looking you know there there’s a picture of Lisa Randall at this conference nobody’s worried about the sexual
Depravity of Lisa Randall this is stupid Lisa Randall is an amazing physicist he was interested in physics Jeffrey Epstein whatever he represented cared about physics does that make you more or less nervous well you have to appreciate I have no idea why my country the United States of America doesn’t care about physics
Anymore it canceled the SSC in 1993 superc conducting super collider it’s bet the farm on string theory which has completely not worked out we’re now this is the 40 so we’re now in 2024 this is the 40th year anniversary of the green Schwarz anomaly cancellation which basic basically
Handed the keys uh to The Liquor Cabinet of physics over to the string theorists and they’ve been uh drunk on these stories about the first Super string Revolution the second Super string Revolution um all these things that they’re going to do the theory of everything and they just had a uh panel
Discussion at the world Science Festival with Brian Green moderating between David Gross Edward Whitten and Andy Stringer and this thing is delusional why I don’t know I mean physicists I know are calling me up and saying you’re right Eric I can’t believe how crazy this is because they’re
Pretending that they didn’t flush 40 years down the tubes um driving physics into a ditch in other news this episode is brought to you by Shopify the reason that you started a business is not to learn how to build a website or to code or to do inventory management it’s to sell the
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What stage you’re in can you explain in an accessible way what the problem is with string theory sure it doesn’t work we can go a tiny bit more that level of advancement a little bit further explain it to me as if I’m two yeah yeah or a high IQ golden retriever
Um the problem with string theory is its sociology not its equations the sociology of a string theorist um do you mind if I play you a recording absolutely yeah yeah yeah the following uh clip is from uh a podcast which probably has the highest IQ guests of
Any podcast on planet Earth called the universe speaks in numbers nobody listens to this podcast but this uh this is Edward Whitten um and he is uh talking about um is being asked about String Theory by Graham farelo back to string theor do you see that as one among several candidates or
The preent candidate or what I mean what do you see the status of that framework in the landscape of mathematical physics I’d say that string slm theory is the only really interesting direction we have for going beyond the established framework of physics by which I mean Quantum field Theory at the quantum
Level MH and classical general relativity at the microscopic scale mhm so where we’ve made progress It’s been in the string slm3 framework where a lot of interesting things have been discovered I say that there’s lot of interesting things we don’t understand at all M but you’ve never been tempted
Down the other roots of other options for I’m not even sure what you would mean by other Roots uh loop quantum gravity or those are just words there aren’t any other Roots there words there are no other Roots there are just words that is the world’s leading theoretical physicist
Opining about strength can you imagine anything less scientific coming out of the mouth of Edward Whitten and and by the way this is the world’s scariest individual to go up against and I’ve had it I’ve just absolutely had it can you imagine being a scientist and
Saying there are no other Roots When ask are you ever tempted by other Roots they’re only they’re only words no other roots I I don’t even know how to respond to that what’s the difference between uh dogmatism and conviction you tell me a fifth of Jack Daniel ah the guy sounds like he’s
Convinced why you so sure that he shouldn’t be I’m convinced the geometric Unity is correct and I am open to being wrong I am open to ethical colleagues talking to me about their misgivings this is an unethical position to hold what’s wrong with string theory I’m going to say the same thing
Again first of all if you if you ask me technically what’s wrong with it I would say to you that uh let’s say the explanation for three generations of matter uh based on an IND of six on a cabia manifold at every point in space and time is not the right explanation
You’re not going to be able to handle that I understand that so we can’t have that conversation um the problem is you have a group of people who don’t feel that they have to listen to anything else and if anything else happens then they say well we’ll just call that string theory
And you’re thinking so heads you win and tales I lose and and that’s science the these people need remedial ethical training training in science I’m convinced of my own theories I have to be open-minded that I’m wrong their theories have had all of the money all of the minds all of the years
The conferences everything the praise the pr articles you name it for 40 years straight and it’s done what it’s destroyed physically you can’t have this ethos look there’s no one more accomplished in Quantum field Theory than Edward Whitten he doesn’t belong at the lead in the lead position in a science he’s
Doing math fine but you can’t you can’t be a leading physicist and say there are no other Roots there are no your dog doesn’t hunt we’re not allowed to see other dogs I I don’t understand your dog’s been dead in the backyard for years and you’re still talking about how
You know you’re going to go take it hiking so this being in 40 years basically no progress in string theory no meaningful no useful internal to string theory but functionally outside of that yeah I mean in that’s 40 Years of strength theory in 50 years the standard model of particle theory hasn’t
Moved there are no young people who have ever walked on the moon and there are no young theoretical physicists who have contributed to our picture um of the universe in a way that’s been confirmed if it’s the case that the underpinnings of string theory aren’t accurate if it’s also the case that for
Such a long time there hasn’t been any progress that’s been made why are so many people continuing to to cling they’re afraid of that man that one guy oh yeah he’s the Tyrant that’s pulling the strings behind string he’s the string theist no no no no everybody who’s gone up against this
Guy in essence has lost he’s terrifying when you mean when you say go up against what do you mean you’ll bring up a point um well you might have an argument with him and he’ll solve the problem you’ve been working on for two years in an hour if it takes him that long
Uh you have to understand how vertical human achievement can be and this guy is at the very top of the human mind I mean he’s he’s just he’s utterly amaz amazing and he’s completely scientifically uh outside of his ethical boundaries with statements like this you you can’t do that to science even Edward
Whitten is not so great of a mathematician that he’s allowed to take out theoretical physics and you know if you ask me like about my own Theory um in in terms of like what has happened to me talk trying to talk about it for 40 years more or less the field says
Well what does Ed think what does Ed say what was Ed’s feedback because everyone was afraid of him you have to understand how dominant a single individual can be in order to understand this effect there was a great string theorist named Joe Pinsky and Joe once said to me Eric you
Talk a lot about String Theory but I’m not sure it exists sometimes I think we’re just running sub routines for Ed that’s how dominant this person was is that even one of the top figures in the string theory movement uh guy who basically introduced brain Theory uh above
Strings um his point was we don’t even quite know what we’re doing Ed just tells us to do things and it’s it’s time for Ed Wht to actually face the other theories that are out there and stop jawing off about how it’s only just words outside it’s it’s
It’s it’s almost hysterically funny but that ever happened do you think that Ed where does he hey Ed if you’re out there you want to have a chat love to won’t happen why because it’s a spell because he’s casting a spell because if he actually had to face a
Real critic somebody who has some knowledge of what the history of string theory was he would have to take into account all sorts of things he doesn’t have to take into account when he appears on a stage of colleague look he has a right not to
Face unethical people he has a right not to face people who are badly informed or not trained in the subject that’s fine but I don’t see these people having gone up against their technical critics you know feeman was a huge critic of String Theory Sheldon glasha who won a
Nobel Prize for symmetry breaking was a Critic of string theory there are string theorists who have defected like Dan freedan there’s no shortage of very competent people who have said what the hell is going on why are we doing this this is madness I’ve never heard Ed Whitten face one of these
People when I think about somebody like Brian Green sure he doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy that needs to bow at the feet of this person Brian Green’s got a successful career he’s books he hosting these events so on and so forth is everybody dancing to the tune of
Some super smart tyrannical string theorist leader it’s not tyrannical look I I don’t know how to say this right because I’m obviously a Critic I I Revere this person this is very very painful for me to say you know if if you ask me of all the people’s minds on planet Earth that
I I Revere the wonder that is Ed wht’s brain is beyond almost anything I can communicate at least when you have a Beethoven or or or a I don’t know an artart Tatum or a Picasso or modigliana you can see what it is that they’re
Doing this guy has done so much for us and he’s done so much to take science out of physics and it’s it’s almost impossible to talk about the the the profound nature of his contribution and the enormity of the destruction he’s caused it’s you know it’s like he gave
Us everything he took away everything because you see Quantum field Theory under Ed Whitten with help from particularly Michael AA and Graham seagull was revealed to be just math we thought Quantum field theory was about the physical universe but it’s much more General than that and Ed Whitten is
Largely responsible for showing us what Quantum field Theory really is but in so doing he also divorced it from mathematics and so what Ed Wht did is he effectively showed us that what we thought was the physical Universe was just like calculus just a framework but you
Know keep in mind that my view of it is if if the universe is traversible the only way to get there is through the study of physics gtin and uh these guys are guarding the exit to me a previous generation threw a lit match into a room filled with
Kerosene and this is the generation that’s blocking the exit so you know teller and ulam uh gave us the hydrogen bomb it’s a geometer and a particle theorist and I would expect that Ed Wht was taking responsibility for trying to figure out whether the cosmos are traversible and whether we can leave
Earth is there any way we can get access to more energy is there any way that we can reveal SpaceTime to not be fundamental so that we maybe we can do something that would be confused with going faster than light maybe we can reach the Stars through methods that we
Can’t understand using what we have why is Ed Whitten guarding the exit Ed there are other theories there have been theories for 40 years I met you in your office in 1984 85 in Princeton on a snowy day and you threw me out of your office for what reason
Because I started talking to you about the fact that I didn’t think you were right about three generations for for particle theory and you claimed that um kusac Klein Theory couldn’t work uh because of chirality considerations you were wrong you have one claim as to why they are three generations I have
Another do you want to meet let’s talk nothing will happen they they don’t show up how long can the world of physics be captured by an idea that no meaningful progress is made inside of before more people say it’s time to look at something else um that’s an interesting question the problem
Is that um there isn’t going to be much of physics left when this group dies it just retired I believe from The Institute for advanced study because it has a capped age of 70 and he was born in 1951 um no I there isn’t much physics left people have forgotten what the original
Problems are he swapped out one set of problems that we all agreed on why is nature Left Right asymmetric why are there three copies of matter rather than only one why the particular set of symmetries that uh generate the strong weak and electromagnetic forces uh all of these problems that are
All about the physical world in which we live and he swapped them out for different problems like how do we quantize gravity as if that’s definitely what we have to do those were sort of mathem itical analytic problems rather than physical problems and so as a result two generations of physicists
Have been brainwashed into not caring about the physical world and being they’re totally devoted to various abstract areas of mathematics how long can the legacy of that continue for well how do you rebuild theoretical physics when almost nobody’s doing theoretical physics and I don’t mean look there’s some technical wiggle
Words that if I don’t say them um my colleagues will go crazy but in the field of fundamental physics Beyond general relativity and the standard model there isn’t much of a field left you go on a random day to the archive where people post papers and the papers
Aren’t really about Charmed quirks or muons or realistic models of the universe they’re about weird esoteric topics and Mathematics and that has everything to do with uh a transition between 198 actually 83 through 86 87 where the field lost its mind rediscovering the problems of physics can’t be as hard as discovering
The problems of physics if you’re not paid to work on physics the way they’ve got us is by their they’ve got their hands wrapped around our our wallets we can’t afford to do physics it’s it’s as if there’s a force that says if you want to work on the world’s most important
Problem we’re going to make you poor we’re going to discredit you it’s almost like there’s a force field trying to get us not to unlock this power and I’ve been very curious about why that is and nobody like with all the rich people in the world nobody’s funding the
Stuff at the level that it needs to be funded this is the most important funding priority on planet Earth because otherwise you’re all sharing one atmosphere with a bunch of idiots and really powerful toys it’s unless we can somehow channel the technology of interdimensional space beings please never say those words hey
Look the interdimensional space interdimensional space beings David GES didn’t say extraterrestrial he said interdimensional Yes But Eric Eric and David talk and this is not fair to David grush David grush knows that he’s a physics ba he knows he’s not a PhD he’s repeating things that have been said to
Him he had the presence of mind to try to give an example of what interdimensional might mean and he used holography and so as a result everyone’s making oh David G says holographic interdimensional beings this is absurd and it’s not fair to David grush I’m telling you I mean we can call
David up right now and I promise you he’s not going to back this madness and stupidity so what’s going on with this most recent update about aliens which one well I saw this frustration that lawmakers had because they were getting compartmentalized if you don’t ask precisely the right person precisely the
Right question and precisely the right right way you’re not allowed to get an answer you don’t get an answer but you couldn’t even look if you don’t know what a Romanian manifold is if you don’t know what a determinant line bundle is there’s no way you can ask intelligent questions about alien
Visitation how did they get here there are no scientists there are no relevant scientists in the story that does anybody find that at all odd even this the situation with David grush is fantastic um he goes into a a hearing he says a bunch of completely batshit crazy
Stuff right can we agree on that all right all right and then weeks later some Representatives go into a skiff and they say Well it certainly uh seems like it confirms some of what grush has been telling us and you’re thinking okay so you you separated the confirmation which you did abstractly
Because it was inside of a skiff but you you can only talk to people who’ve emerged from the ski who were willing to say vague things and the crazy claims now what is this really about we nobody knows now what I’ve been saying for about four years is there’s way more to
This story than I had understood I thought UFOs were total nonsense I thought this was a waste of time and I was wrong I was just wrong why what do you mean and what ways were you wrong why are you now convinced in a way that you weren’t previously well I didn’t
Know yeah I’m not convinced that UFO like shiny metal craft are real at all what I didn’t know is that there almost certainly are large programs inside the federal government that are denied that are labeled UFO sh don’t tell anyone now whether those programs contain anything about non-human
Intelligence or aliens or spacecraft or anything like that is anyone’s guess because I haven’t seen anything however the programs almost certainly exist what gives you that impression talking to 4 million people who tell stunningly similar stories in other words there is a weirdness and the weirdness is tremendous circumstantial evidence that
These programs exist have existed for a long time and have involved extraordinary uh in particular physicists way back in the day and on the other hand that there is no credible proof that there are craft or aliens or anything like like that how do you square that Circle how would you I
Can’t look the coordination problem of all of these people is immense there’s that but Secrets have been kept more much more effectively Than People imagine say more I don’t want to no but I mean that there are organizations that you cannot Google there are organizations that have clubhouses and members that you cannot
Google um so I know that secrets are durable uh what we don’t know is what these secrets are about see let’s create a decision tree which is there are little green men shiny spacecrafts and all this kind of cool stuff and there aren’t okay if there aren’t what’s the best explanation for
Why there’s so much energy and activity and so many claims around this and I would guess and again this is a this is a guess and not a particularly good one that there was a Clearing House program for everything under the sun if we needed to retrieve somebody else’s plane Behind Enemy
Lines we had a UFO cover story if we were trying out new Aerospace equipment we had a UFO cover story uh if we were trying to get our Rivals to misspend their uh precious treasure on weaponry and strategic counter measures we had a UFO cover
Story um if we were up to no good we had a UF cover story whatever all these things are imagine there was a kitchen sync approach and that’s what UFOs are all about it’s about a black sap special Access program as waved and bigoted as it could possibly be that
Um basically was a one-size fits all uh story for all sort it’s an in extraterrestrial scapegoat yeah an extraterrestrial scapegoat program okay now whatever that is if you imagine that that leg of the decision tree is real it’s it’s all very funny because now you’re like all these people have taken it seriously
But it was the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians who were supposed to take it serious like I on the UFO F you know it’s like people are going to blow this beautiful cover story that we’ve created for everything that’s one possibility another possibility is that
We’re on the other leg of the decision tree and that we have no programming for it and so everything about it seems impossible what’s what you said about physics physics is science fiction the physics that you just learned is almost always about science fiction what if you have um multiple
Time dimensions and people can circle around in time and if you find out about them they can Circle back to the point where you didn’t know you have a neuralizer built into the success or to SpaceTime Is that real I don’t know all I know is that physics will always blow
Your mind it will always do something seems impossible and that’s one that’s why it’s the coolest subject around now I don’t know what’s going on but I can tell you that the circumstantial evidence that there’s been a program that has been um long running and involve very high level
People it’s almost impossible to imagine that this is fake there’s a 1971 Australian document from the uh Australian intelligence service that has been Declassified made public which clears up all sorts of uh mysteries about what was going on with physics in the 1950s and 60s and it names names it
Says that Freeman Dyson John archbald Wheeler Pascal Jordan the Nazi um all of these people were working on anti-gravity and the only reason to be working on anti-gravity was is that there was reason to think that something had gone beyond uh einsteinian relativity in other words mostly we we
Learn about physics from colliding you know it’s like breaking rocks together you’re going to smash two rocks and then maybe you’ll see a little spark and you’ll study that except we do it with protons this would be like some different thing where there was a more advanced species and you’re looking at
Its Machinery to try to figure out well what science does it know that you don’t how much truth do you think is in that I’ve seen rumors on the internet of leaps forward in technology throughout the mid 1900s that people suggested was due to reverse engineering of something that
Had been discovered do you think that the technology movements that we made through the 1900s were self-created I’m not clever enough to solve the UFO puzzle there’s almost no topic where I can’t generate multiple explanations this is the only topic I’ve ever met where I can’t generate a single
Explanation for what the hell’s going on nothing I can think of makes sense look I’m very focused on this because if if there are aliens here I I might be the only guy who knows how they’re here how so I don’t think it’s practical to Traverse the cosmos using general relativity in
The standard mod you can use time dilation you can hope for wormholes you can imagine generation ships there’s a whole bunch of stupid stuff that people talk about when they talk about interdimensional interdimensional travel and all this kind of nonsense why because they can see the night sky and they can’t get
There so you think okay in terms of the science that I’ve seen Carl say discussing or on Cosmos with Neil degrass Tyson how would I get to a distant planet using the science I know and then you have to sort of do it with masking tape and you know chicken wire whatever uh
Whatever that is um doesn’t really appeal to me they’re not here if they’re here using standard physics now I’ve tried to make a list of everyone on Earth who has a distinct Theory of physics right so you have you know um Julian Barbour has a theory or Steven
Wolfram has a theory or Peter white has a theory so I go through all of these other theories and to the best of my knowledge nobody else does that like we’ve stopped talking to each other we stop thinking about this so in the world of theories about how
Something might be here there are very few theories of the universe and why is that it’s because the constraints are so profound there’s no room to move to imagine to let you know human creativity take over we’re in a straight jacket that is so tight nobody can think and we’re there
Because our theories are so good the standard model and general relativity are astounding theories but they’re also a straight jacket so I’m very interested interested in you know if you’re Obama you just Reach Out grab it and kill it yeah exactly um yeah I’m very interested in this topic specifically because the universe
Is either traversable or it isn’t and if it is it’s not surprising that anyone’s here and if it isn’t we die here in short order so it’s a hugely consequential question um but there are almost no no theories I can’t imagine like look Chris in part I I’m almost reluctant to do
Podcasts anymore because I don’t understand why we’re behaving the way we’re behaving what you mean when you say we no one on planet Earth is behaving rationally with respect to physics and UFOs you have a claim that is being heard at the High highest levels in Congress that we’ve lost control of our
Airspace you either clear this thing up in an afternoon or you call in Seal Team Six yeah that’s a really good point how is it that we’ve got such an outlandish claim which is being accepted uh not necessarily accepted which is being received with without the Justified Fanfare it’s like either this
Is completely crazy and needs to be thrown out or this is absolutely wild and we need to do something about it why is it why is it the case that’s a really great Point that’s a really great Point why is it the case that that this has made
Either it hasn’t made more Fanfare in terms of people mobilizing government and such or hasn’t made way more criticism in terms of it being thrown out I don’t know why does the diffuse proposal from the Eco Health Alliance not get properly adjudicated scientifically I don’t know what that is
Um the Eco Health Alliance is this group run by a zoologist Who got $50 million from the defense department to help a lab in China work on Corona virus and making them more humanized I mean like we should be able to adjudicate did we start Co but we
Can’t all of these very simple things we don’t adjudicate look Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that the Consumer Price Index is based on a cost of living measure I claim that’s not true in order for that to be true you have to take in consumer preference data and you claim
That you don’t work with consumer preference data I’m either right or I’m wrong it’s usually consequential in terms of billions I claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is completely lying that it’s working on a cost of living framework and that the academic responsible for it a guy named Irwin
Dart uh his theory of superlative index numbers is hogwash doesn’t work it’s based on homothetic preferences that takes an afternoon to adjudicate I claim that there is no labor shortage of scientists and Engineers despite claims that it’s been going on since the 50s because large market economies don’t have Labor
Shortages that’s a feature of centrally planned economies there is no possible way that’s that’s a 4minute discussion we are just lying lying lying lying is the substrate of our society we’re lying about physics we’re lying about economics we’re lying about Finance we’re lying about Corona virus and biological research we’re
Lying about uh monetary Aggregates how many different Hills are you waging a war on there’s only one it’s called managed reality this is all managed reality what’s up you know I have I have this image of a of a tanker that is flipping over on a freeway and there’s a bodies scattered
And people are bleeding and the tanker’s on fire and there’s a cop maybe a special forces guy with an automatic weapon says nothing to see here folks Move Along you’re like nothing to see there’s like a severed hand on the pavement and you’ve got a tanker and it says you know
Danger flammable Hazard and it’s is it about to blow and tell tell me what’s going on like nothing to see here folks well the nothing to see here folks is managed reality we all know what that is policeman is actually saying act as if there is nothing to see here and move
Along it’s an instruction to pretend so we are being given instructions right now to pretend on everything pretend that you don’t understand the CPI Eric oh okay pretend that you don’t understand immigration and labor markets Eric okay pre pretend that you don’t understand physics pretend that you don’t understand
Plagiarism pretend that you don’t understand um biology and gender well you it’s one Hill it’sfor it’s enforced pretending by a class of people that thinks that it is in a position to tell us all how to think at this level now I don’t disagree that that police policeman has a right to say
Move along folks nothing to see there’s a very clear reason why that person is saying that but when you start to say that to your experts to the HazMat team who’s telling you you know don’t don’t put out an electrical fire with water when you are telling nothing to
See to the mother who sees her child on the pavement when you when you’re constantly telling everybody who has a stake in something and particularly everybody who has expertise in something you’re a Charlotte and you’re a grifter you’re a fake you’re a fraud you’re it’s like
Shut up just shut up there’s one Hill are you the only person on that Hill though because as you’ve said here there’s a bunch of different the CPI stuff to do with physics the stuff to do with the space I appreciate what you’re saying funneling on
You there are lots of people on the hill the problem is that you have to visit all of these fields to know it’s in that field too you know I was complaining about narrative-driven journalism before people were talking about narrative at the same level that if you if you go
Back to my written output or speaking output you’ll find that in 2011 I was talking about professional wrestling and kayab as the model for underlying reality that this is what’s going on in our society it’s because I visited all these different fields I’ve been an immigration expert who spent in the
Middle of the 1990s in Washington trying to understand why we passed the Immigration Act of 1990 I’ve been a finance guy have the first paper that I know of on morgage back Securities and the danger they posed To The World Financial system from 2001-2002 Rose I uh rang the alarm on
The Chinese using uh our universities as a Espionage program uh I said that Hillary was not inevitable and that Trump was in much better position to win because of Tim or quran’s theory of preference falsification I said this thing about physics you’re all out of your mind I
Switched my field from physics to mathematics because I could see what was going to happen I think that what you’re trying to ask me is are you the only person who’s visited all of these fields to see the pattern and why are you at the center of all of these stories well
Narcissism no um this is the personal an uncomfortable part I think I didn’t understand that my principal means of trying to figure out where I’m supposed to allocate my efforts is wrong I just detect that something doesn’t make any sense like very you know autism is not
Necessarily a bad thing I think it’s a competitive advantage in the right in the right dose there’s a sweet spot there’s a sweet spot of autism um I think I’m Beyond The Sweet Spot I think that what happens is is that I become convinced that somebody is wrong
And I start trying to tell them about the fact that they’re wrong and you know as the joke goes I thought I would be greeted as liberators um but in fact you’re actually causing a huge problem so you know the Bureau of Labor Statistics they’re sitting duck obviously what they’re doing is completely
Ridiculous but if I say that and everybody’s agreed to keep their mouth shut about it it’s not like they don’t know what I’m saying it’s not like they don’t know that I’m right it’s that we’ve all agreed to act as if I’m insane what I keep doing is I
Keep using the same stupid algorithm saying hey that thing about UFOs doesn’t make sense or we could clear this up in an afternoon or hey guys what if we roll up our sleeves and just fix the problem many problems are owned a problem that’s owned you know
Does the person who rebuilds homes want fewer homes to burn down no their business is Building Homes after they’ burned down does an does an arms maker want a more peaceful world does a health care System want nutrition to decrease the number of patients who walk through their doors
All of these are owned problems and my problem is I keep trying to solve somebody’s own own problem that’s why I keep ending up in all these places can I teach you about mgrm questions tell me about Milgram question this is Stanley Milgram an idea from Jay selac so what makes a woman
Attractive is a mgrm question in other words the social penalty for an unflattering answer is much higher than the reward for telling the truth because of this we simply can’t trust the answers we receive even if they’re coming from Friends the best known trick question is when did you
Stop beating your wife any conventional answer to the question confirms its assumption to escape the Trap you need to call out the question this type of question isn’t that common in practice it’s really just a rhetorical gimmick the most important and most common type of trick question sounds more like do
You love big brother it’s a question where an unacceptable re answer regardless of whether it’s true or false will be punished and the punishment is greater than the reward for the true answer I’m going to recall these mgrm questions after the famous psychology experiment where electric shocks were administered
For wrong answers and there’s a Associated idea called the chilling effect when punishment for what people say becomes widespread people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive that’s closer to the ash experiment thus limits on speech become limits on sincerity it’s an interesting problem
Um tell me about why you brought it up and what do you find interesting about it it is one way that explains how a group of people from the outside can look coordinated but it’s actually a common a common Trend a common motivation working below the surface
That motivates them all to behave in a way that appears coordinated from the outside from the the inside it just looks like perhaps cowardice perhaps compliance so yeah I’ve been very interested in these sorts of issues um I try to tell people why the truth can’t work and people are always
Confused by this they say okay tell me I have mildly bad breath and some people will say you have mildly bad breath and I say well you just told told me that my breath is so horrendous that you were willing to cross a social Chasm that essentially no one ever
Crosses to tell me that I have mildly bad breath so obviously my breath must be as bad as a sewer um then they say would you like a stick of gum and I say sure and I’d show no cognition that you’ve actually told me about you know you can’t transmit
That piece of information easily it’s very akin to this um yes now our society hinges on these things on the other hand there are ways of getting at these uh questions through language so for example you’re not allowed to say that you like cleavage but you are
Allowed to say that was an incredibly dramatic neckline right and so why is it that one phrase is penalized it’s because there’s a Russell conjugation that works in a Russell conjugation that does it he sweats she perspires they glow right and so in such circumstances the key
Question um is how you are allowed to discuss the truth as well as whether you are allowed to discuss the truth many times there’s a penalty for not being skilled the skilled person is allowed to say something deftly the appropriate Nuance with appropriate social graces yeah but and then the question becomes
Why can’t you say certain things and you know this is in part I believe in these social norms but I believe that it is necessary to create spaces in which you can actually talk about the truth and increasingly what we’re doing this is why inclusion is one of the
Dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard in my life um is you put somebody to create a low trust environment in every High trust environments uh Discussion Group so diversity is good so far as it goes inclusion is good so far as it goes Equity is a disaster we can’t even disc
Discuss it but the reason that inclusion is a has become terrible is that we are trying to create a low trust environment in all previous High trust environments and that thing means that we can’t actually have any serious discussions like if you have uh knowledge about why a venial disease is spreading
Um it may require that people tell you that they’re having sex with animals uh that’s a you can’t have somebody who’s going to giggle you can’t have somebody who’s going to shame you have to have a completely dri dust conversation about how venial diseases can leap from non-humans to humans
And we need experts and we need closed doors not to become star Chambers you mentioned before about being able to have an insight into what was happening in 2016 yeah what you think happens in 2024 I don’t know I don’t know you know I I
Um I met with Robert Kennedy Jr not too long ago and he was nice enough to have uh my wife and I to his house it was very clear that he’s trying to hearken back to a previous remembered America through his family and he’s willing to
Die for it there’s no question that he’s willing to die to seek the presidency I think that Americans are going to have to come to grips with the fact that um our two political parties either one of them could win if they wanted but the problem is is that they
Want to win as a trough so in other words imagine that what America wants is no more troughs you don’t want to win playing to that aspect of America if it means getting rid of the trough because the trough was your entire reason for running a political party what you mean when you
Say trough assume that your party gets into power now you get to hire all of your friends into government positions then they get revolving door contracts with whoever they were regulating or dealing with so effectively everybody’s going to pig out and help themselves okay we got Democrats into Congress now they can
Trade their personal accounts pass legislation and do far better than the market you know whatever it is imagine what Americans want is like hey stop the corruption I don’t trust why we’re in Ukraine the way we’re in Ukraine because I don’t trust why Hunter Biden is being
Given a cushy salary from a a Ukrainian company well what you’re telling what the what the population is telling the two political parties is and the troughs and the political parties are saying okay what else do you want we can’t can’t give you that because that’s
The whole point of why we do what we do we’re not public spirited we’re not thinking about America we’re not thinking about the future we’re not thinking about the good of the world or the environment or any of the stupid stuff that we are forced to talk about
Every four years we’re talking about swimming pools we’re talking about um third wives fourth homes you know you’re getting in the way of that so tell us what else you want that doesn’t interfere with the trough and Americans are pretty clear it’s like get rid of the get rid of the goddamn
Troughs you’re you know you’re slopping each other you’re you’re pigs at a trough and and now the idea is that since you’re not doing anything I want my ethnic group to be at the trough too it’s like this has nothing to do with anything we have to clear these people
Out they’re just bad people well way too close to the 2024 election for anybody to be cleared out now really I mean what’s going to happen between now and November I don’t know I mean how old is Joe Biden I don’t know okay what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating
Event between now and November including death so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that so I I don’t think you know whether he’s even going to make it to November 81 yeah you have no idea what it’s it’s a million years between now and
November I don’t know whether Donald jump Donald Trump is going to be you know facing jail time I don’t know whether there’s going to be an Insurrection by magga people that who feel that the Department of Justice is going after a candidate for political reasons I don’t know if
People are going to look at kamla Harris as a you know the likely commanderin-chief why are you laughing come kamla Harris is like she’s become a meme of a meme of a meme so so absent from public life as far as I can see that it’s it’s hilarious you don’t think
It’s hilarious oh it’s hysterically funny you’re talking about KLA Harris being in charge of the world’s greatest nuclear superpower it’s it’s a scream you talking about Joe Biden being in charge of or Donald Trump well Trump will be older than Biden on this next reelection than Biden was when he first entered
Office well yeah Biden began at 29 in the senate in 72 look this whole thing is Chris let me let me just be more forthcoming people want want to know why I’ve somewhat retreated from public life I have no clue how to talk about this stuff this whole thing is so incredibly
Stupid nobody has ever done this in the United States we had a election 1980 because Ronald Reagan was 69 years old age was Central we’ve never been in this territory before does that not mean that you should spend more time trying to Grapple with ideas if you’re not sure
About them what does that mean that if your concern is you mentioned people have asked why You’ stepped back from having more public conversations one of the reasons is that a lot of the topics that you try to Grapple with don’t seem to make sense that much anymore is that
Not the time when you’re supposed to Grapple harder with them if somebody says to you uh Eric uh you know the previous election uh are you supportive of the Hillside Strangler or uh Ted Bundy go M well I don’t know if Charles Manson might run
As a as a third party candidate so it’s too early to say this is all so pathetically crazily stupid what am I supposed to do just say get off my lawn every four seconds I I I don’t know how to react anymore there’s no part of this world at
The moment that looks sane to me and and you know I’ve done the requisite work which is if that’s the way it feels to you then you should look at your own sanity okay let’s let’s entertain the idea that I’ve lost my mind it’s like no no this is all completely
One problem of managed reality one of the things I am concerned about toward the back end of this year is whether or not whoever wins is going to be accepted in even remotely a peaceful way it doesn’t mean the same thing as it used to look there’s some mystique and some Majesty
Necessary to make these things work you have to believe that the Supreme Court is a bunch of incredibly smart legal mind you have to believe that the president of the United States is a an exalted being who has power to make decisions on the behalf of the country you can’t afford Nancy Pelosi’s
Husband trading up a storm like this everything’s become Instagram stories behind the scenes of the Kardashians nobody trusts experts exist when your kid needs a life-saving surgery you’re going to find out that all you’re drawing off on Twitter about screw the experts doesn’t mean anything to you you’re like save my
Child we need experts we need institutions we need Lies We need fictions we need stories we need adult level public spirited fictionalization of the truth I’m not claiming we don’t but now you’ve got this different class of people who says okay you don’t want the truth we
Need to have stories let’s just make up stuff and put stuff in our pockets how much of it is coordination how much of it cowardice well I would rephrase that a little differently maybe I would say uh nobody smart has gotten anything to work like this in a long
Time the reason we have Donald Trump versus Joe Biden is that everybody failed I failed I’ve been podcasting reaching Millions I’ve been teaching people about all sorts of things one of the things things I find very funny is that there’s a if you look at um the negativity that follows you
Around there are these very conserved things that one of them is Eric goes on forever and says nothing if you look at the sheer density of information I’ve dropped on podcast I’ll put that up against anybody you know but it’s like we want Eric to disappear we want Eric
Not to say things who do you think is behind that don’t know because you stopped your podcast yeah I was a fan of that podcast that first episode that you did with Peter I thought was was fantastic I can’t tell you how many people every day where’s
The portal bring the portal back what does it take to bring the portal back he tempted MC Jagger said something about Brian Jones that has just haunted me and he said Fame doesn’t sit comfortably on anyone’s shoulders but there are shoulders upon which it appears not to sit at
All and I thought okay if there’s one guy who’s good at being famous it must be mcj and for him to say it doesn’t sit comfortably on any shoulders if you just parse it you think oh he’s telling us something it looks like I’m good at
Being famous but it’s not easy and it’s not something that’s comfortable and then he makes the second point about Brian Jones and he says there appear to be shoulders upon which it does not sit at all and I think I don’t like the fact that you can’t turn it
Off it’s a oneway street for a very long time that’s right and you know there’s a point where you’re wandering through Istanbul and somebody yells out Eric Weinstein and you’re like there’s no way to get away from this and you didn’t like that wonderful guy um most everybody I meet is
Fantastic I like lots of of lots of being well known but the toothpaste hasn’t I I’ve hoped that the toothpaste would sort of go back in the tube I could do a little bit of podcasting here and there and it just doesn’t work so you don’t want to are you at the moment
Are not prepared to bring the portal back no I’m thinking about it I’m thinking about it because I can’t get back to look I have fantasies about not being well know and I don’t and I think it’s too late deeper into the breach look but also nobody wants to listen to this you
Know remember what you were saying before mgrm questions h i wa let’s play with it because I think it’s a fun it’s a fun idea you ever heard somebody say something oh the paparazzi like yeah but actually I believe it I wouldn’t want to live with Paparazzi the problem is is that
Nobody’s going to hear it for what it is if I really dislike somebody I want them to become famous see how they do I came up with this idea I put it in my newsletter last week uh a Titanic problem you could also call it a champagne problem okay Titanic problem
Is an issue that everyone says you’re in such a privileged position to deal with this is an extra special type of tragedy a tragedy that unfolds while everyone cheers like being on the Titanic after the iceberg water up to your chin with everyone telling you you’re so lucky to be on the greatest
Steamship of all time and the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can’t help but agree but also you’re feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment and you’re not sure why it’s from Adam masani I uh I didn’t know you had that up your sleep that’s really good yeah
Yeah I I think look I like my ideas is being wellknown there’s tons of of being well known that’s fun but in the aggregate it’s like somebody tells you you can have you can have an orgasm every 3 minutes but you can’t turn it off ever some there’s some people who
Have that is I know it’s a neurological disorder and except it’s 30 seconds right and you can quickly see that you wouldn’t sign up for that right and so Fame is like that is that do you really want to never know who sees you when you go out in
Public I’ve been fascinated by the price that people pay to be someone that most of the world admires and Elon was recently on Lex’s show and he said my mind is a storm I don’t think most people would want to be me they may think they would want to be me but they
Don’t they don’t know they don’t understand I love that I love that friend of mine said to me um very dear friend said I’m ER Eric I’m always jealous of where you end up but then I think about it and I’m re I realize I’m never jealous of how you get there
Right like at some level the easiest thing is somebody who’s ripped wow that must be awesome well did you just F figure in how much work that took um you know I have this guy that I I think the world of um Ryan Williams who
Was a scooter kid who then did BMX and does these crazy tricks 3 seconds in air what he can do is amazing and I worry about him uh he’s C me tickets to Nitro Circus which I very much enjoy I don’t see anybody I know there because it’s a
Different slice of the world but I think it I don’t understand why we all don’t go to Nitro Circus every we my monster truck I’m I’m all in um but I look at how many times he fell doing this trick where he got the bike to rotate in an opposite direction
And he and the bike like did opposite circles before they came back together and I said that’s your Mona Lisa and they started putting out a reel of like how many times he didn’t succeed at that trick hundreds of bailouts yeah there’s no way in the world you
Could get me to do that I I I I want to do the trick I want to know what it feels like but he’s one of the world champion fallers right and so in large measure um I’m divided I like having my ideas well known 95 98% of the audience figures out
How to be respectful and reasonable and there’s just this hardcore 2% there’s a article by Tim Ferris called 13 reasons not to get famous is that right one of my favorite articles it’s over 10 years old so Tim Ferris if you think about his trajectory it’s really interesting
He sort of gets thrust into Fame with the 4-Hour Work week and has this sort of very unique angle on life where he’s so intensely curious about the the way that you do something so you would mention that you have a gratitude practice and you wouldn’t just say oh what time do
You do it on the morning it would be what pen do you use what notepad do you use which prompt do you use do you have a timer are you doing this in the sunlight are you doing this indoors Outdoors what sort of a seat is it all
Of these right he’s very very interested in the particulars right um then he gets this TV show and he’s part of this TV show where he tries to sort of hack his way very quickly through lots of different things do you know that he managed to make himself into a tie
Boxing champion no so Tim read the rule book of a particular subset of K1 tie boxing kickboxing something like that and he found out that if your opponent goes out of the ring three times in any bout you win by default so he just just sprinted across the ring grabbed his
Opponent threw him out of the ring three times and became a Champion by doing that consistently they then carved that back out of the rules and got rid of it but he just had this this hacker mentality yes yeah hacker mentality he was life hacking and then he talks about what actually
Happens when you reach the size of audience that most people aspire to have and that there are strange externalities there was a guy that camped outside of his house managed to work out where his house was maybe from metad dator in photos of some kind right uh and had
Camped outside of his house for a while adamant that Tim was sending him secret messages in his podcast saying that he wanted to be with him exactly he had to start checking into hotels under pseudonyms he no longer posted photos of where he was going when he was going on
Trips because people were reverse engineering it he uses this example that million to one odds happen eight times a day in New York City because if you have any sufficiently large data set the law of large numbers suggest that within the catchment area of 100 how many people
Does how many people does Rogan uh reach per you know individuals a billion individual people maybe but he’s surrounded by security of course so you know in part one of the things that I’m trying to think about is you have to become rich enough to make
Use of the tools and then you have to decide okay I’m going to go behind walls and that’s not what I ever wanted I wanted to be able to go to Starbucks not tell anyone work on stuff that I care about and you know there was something about being contacted by
Killers uh it was a Colorado killer I think who killed five people in tattoo parlors who was trying to get in touch with me why don’t know because I’m a lightning rod for crazy people what do you think it is is it something to do with the ideas of of well let’s see
Almost everything is fake uh we have to get off of this planet um the alien story has much more to it than you could imagine take Jeffrey Epstein is a construct of somebody take you know we’re going to go through all of these the world is an incredibly interesting place and we’re pretending
That it’s incredibly boring and I’m I have the stupidity to say hey can we go back to reality and and and claiming that we should go back to reality in a world which is suffused with uh delusion means that I think we also don’t understand how many people are Driven Crazy by
Small amounts of sanity you know if you imagine that Robert dairo character and Taxi Driver you imagine David burn of Talking Heads doing Psycho Killer right um it’s somebody who’s seeing through the world and they’re creating their own Illusions but they’re they’re not aware that they’re creating their own
Illusions they just see that the world is fake and you know filled with sludge and sewage and you don’t want to meet the taxi driver character yeah this idea the the champagne problem or the Titanic problem of almost everybody has less wealth and less Fame than they want which means
That anybody who complains about the externalities that come with wealth or fame the total addressable market for sympathy is basically zero the total addressable market for Envy is very high who is going to say when lots of people aren’t as well known or aren’t as wealthy or are suffering in one way or
Another that you seem to have somehow figured out it’s very difficult to garness empathy for seemingly crying from your gilded C again it’s not about it’s not about Fame think about it in terms of privacy and insulation everybody wants privacy when they want privacy right if we had a toilet here
And said feel free to use it nobody’s using it but there was no walls you would not think that that was being offered to you uh seriously um that’s that’s the way that you explain what this is It’s a complete absence of privacy the something similar but it’s about
Music so you might be interested uh I must have brought this up 10 times it’s so fascinating Lis Capaldi the Scottish singer did a documentary uh for Netflix that uh he does this first album he’s singing songs that he made when he was a teenager the same songs get recorded and
Released and he has just the most phenomenal success billions of streams worldwide tour he then has to write a second album Co happens yeah and he starts to develop a Tourette’s twitch like this because of the pressure that he feels some of it very rightly coming
From the world but some of it being internally generated as well yeah you know he he can move at his own pace and there’s this it’s interesting watching him go through it because you think yes there is all of this pressure and and the world is expecting so much
Of you and you didn’t ask for this you just wanted to sing the songs that you sang and so on and so forth but also there’s not the same type of pressure that you’re putting you’re em bibing this and then starting to spin it up yourself as well and he is the perfect
Example of somebody I think who has the ability to become world class but doesn’t have the ability to be world famous yeah and I think that those are two different skill sets the ability to be worldclass and the ability to be world famous yeah
Um I know I also I think I I like I like people too much I really enjoy just being able to be a normal human being in the world and move around and try out ideas and you know I pseudonym nice pseudonymous substack account okay so
Like for Christmas do you know who T Wilkenfeld is she was the bass player with Jeff Beck she’s an amazing talent friend of mine came over for Christmas two Jews we start hanging out she wants to sing the song the gospel song the last month of the year she’s just come
Off tour with the the Almond Brothers Band so there I am trying to follow her some song I’ve never heard I can’t sing and playing guitar and we’re just Clowning Around and somebody’s taking video of it and she’s like oh we got to release this I’m just thinking if you release
This I’m gonna have to listen to how everybody Eric thinks he’s the world’s greatest guitarist and that it’s embarrassing because she plays with Jeff Beck and now Eric is making an ass out of himself so I didn’t release it I mean it was joyous it was fun it was silly
And it’s just like the the constant stream of moronic abuse I don’t even know how much of it is from humans I think a lot of it’s from Bots I think Elon is very misguided he has this idea of like anybody who shrinks from criticism or uh you know jokes uh it’s
Too thin skinn it’s like you have no idea what your product is your product allows stalking you don’t know how this isn’t about people yelling you suck this is about people combing your all your public records saying oh well if you didn’t if you didn’t want us to
Know where you live you wouldn’t have thrown that check into the trash or so I was going to bring this up before we before we started it’s it’s such a shame that we can’t play music on YouTube without getting copyright struck it’s so annoying because I’d love to get you to
React well I’ll do it once we finish yeah I want to get you to react to my favorite band of 2023 all five of my songs from my Spotify wrapped were from the same artist okay there’s a band called Sleep token don’t know it okay so
They I don’t even know how to begin to describe what this particular genre is okay they’re listed under metal technically but they have elements of rap they have elements of hip-hop they have elements of jazz a lot of elements that are off key that are all sorts of stuff brilliant completely Anonymous every
Single member of the band completely Anonymous oh I love that they have law around the band they um use what look a little bit like Nordic runes on the album artwork and if you track all of the different runes and then reverse engineer what they are sometimes in the
Corner of tiny little pieces of album artwork there’s there’s notes and things that the first song they they made made their songs or they made their albums in eras and this one was this last one was a Trilogy the first song of the first album of this particular Trilogy which
Was released in 2018 there was different members in the band on the back side right has the exact same melodic progression and Sample as the last song of the last album wow these guys are just another level an absolute other level last week uh they’re not named either there’s
Vessel that’s one then there’s two three and four and then there’s backing singers and they’re referred to as like I I II and IV love it three’s birth certificate was discovered and released on the internet yeah through a telegram chat yeah they’d reverse engineered based on some they looked at this particular
Uh American recording copyright association website where you have to legally list some of the names of the people and you can reverse engineer who that is and oh that person used to be in this band and that s that his voice sounds like that person and
Then we go back and see the live recording and from that we can work out where these people live th this is exactly it right and I tell a a joke about this that’s not funny at all um which is uh well if you didn’t want us to
Understand your bracka jeene status you wouldn’t and publish it on the front page of the New York time you wouldn’t be throwing out your dental floss like okay so I get it you went through my garbage you picked out my dental floss you took it to a lab and
You came up with a [ __ ] and ball story that because no no particular Link in this chain may have been technically illegal um everything you do is fine and I I I I also joke about this under the The Heading of perfectly legal if you ask somebody whether something is
Legal and they say it’s perfectly legal you know that you shouldn’t be doing it I’ve never thought of that before but that’s so true an interesting one that I heard recently is any website this is from Kevin Kelly any website that has the word truth in the URL you can
Immediately discount yeah yeah yeah I mean there is this very funny sort of Newton’s law that I also talk about with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris that Ben Shapiro is always talking about the need for reason um in areas which seem normative because he doesn’t want to make an appeal to
Religious Norms so much because he’s known to be an orthodox Jew whereas Sam Harris is always talking about spirituality and morality um because he’s an atheist who is suspected of not having a moral code because he it doesn’t come from a God you’ve got to counter signal you have to
Counter signal and this is one of the reasons for example why people with unusual beliefs often take down other people with unusual beliefs because you’ve already pulled out so many blocks out of the Jenga Tower you can’t afford anymore I was uh reflecting on the odd hor shoe that we’ve seen from people
Like Douglas Murray and Sam Harris who were very critical of religion still are in a large degree but especially you know 20 years ago kind of breaking down a lot of these walls being involved in in being skeptical about the role of it and yet then there’s now almost a return to True
Nostalgia for a grand narrative that unifies everybody there’s a con concern about what has comeing in its place is it wokeism is it is it trumpism is it how do you see that it’s too trite to say baby and bathwater it’s easier to say we don’t know the second order effects of the
Things that we do uh perfect example of this is after the introduction of the contraceptive pill abortions went up and single motherhood went up that’s like a third or fourth order effect that nobody could have predicted I don’t think nobody it would have taken an unbelievably sharp mind to have gone okay so
If before contraceptive birth control is available reliably for the woman to use an accidental pregnancy is seen as the man’s obligation as opposed to the woman’s choice but after that it’s reversed which means that the shotgun wedding goes out of the window because the owners can always be put on the
Woman all right that’s interesting I just think that sometimes you don’t know the like better the devil you know in some ways I have a different take on it but um that’s interesting give me a take oh well okay so one of my riffs is that if you
Look at the Declaration of Independence um the language says we hold these truths to be self-evident you have to say because you have to say we are not going into an infinite sequence of wise statements and by saying we hold these truths to be self-evident you’re saying you may not
Hold them to be self-evident buger off we hold these truths to be selfe if you can’t hold these truths to be self-evident it’s exclusionary in some way absolutely and so very often when you imagine that you’re going to put everything on reason anybody who’s had an intelligent child Knows Why
Daddy why is that well why is that and eventually infinite regret well I joke with my son and I say uh either the parent eventually says because or you end up as a theoretical physicist because that’s what that’s exterminate um you have to have an organizing principle that scales and you know Sam’s
Mistake um is not understanding that even if Sam Harris can be a moral and ethical somewhat rational human being at times on his best day take Sam Harris as a reasonable rational memoral human being you can’t scale that it doesn’t scale that’s a big difference between saying it’s impossible for an individual
And saying it’s impossible for a society um the next part of that part of the document is uh that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator you have to make a reference to ground assumption where you are not going to go below and if you don’t do
That you end up in infinite regress that’s what it cause yeah if I ask you as a computer divide one by three to infinite Precision give me the answer it’ll say 3 3 3 and it’ll blow up it’s called a resource leak you can’t allow these infinite
Recursions seeking truth and as a result of that we didn’t understand the the loadbearing nature of of religion in the atheist movement now I say we that was never my problem I’m an atheist who prays as I’ve said and people are very confused well who do you pray to and what do you
Mean your brain knows how to pray your knows your brain knows how to believe in a God whether there is a God or there is no God well how important is belief I don’t know but I’ve never met an atheist who never believes and I’ve never met a religious person who always
Believes humans flit in and out of belief and non-belief it is the nature of our of our beast and as a result of that you know I feel like uh we’re just not honest if if if you claim as an atheist that you never entertain the idea of An Almighty
And a Creator I don’t believe you and if you’re a religious person who says like my my belief in my Lord is 100% I was like nope there’s a line from George jenko where he says every man knows God when he’s at his lowest place okay the Foxhole yeah yeah it’s very
Interesting very interesting to think about what’s going to come next as a whether it does descend into this sort of post for the next one that you want to do the post-apocalyptic blown out windows spring mattress in the back corner world where nothing is unifying given that
What we spoke about for the you know first 90 minutes is the world is confusing it’s hard to make sense we don’t know what’s real we don’t know what isn’t we don’t know if we can trust the information that we’re getting that’s in front of our eyes we don’t
Know if we can trust the people that are around us do they have our best interests at heart how do we make sense of the world religion provided a pretty good tool for that and I I I I’m not sure whether it’s possible to be a cultural
Christian or a cultural Muslim or a cultural Jew I I wonder how important the belief bit is to the religion bit do you do you pray I meditate which is as close as you’re going to get what do you mean you want to try prayer sure well I mean what what
Prayers move you I don’t know enough I mean I took my mom to ripping Cathedral on Christmas Eve and we went through a full service of 90 minutes with 13 14 15 hymns and a bunch of prayers in between lot of Christmas trees and decoration and stuff but I think that
Would have been the first time that I would have heard something like that since Primary School since I was 11 or 10 yeah is there religious music that moves you see you have the major scale as the centerpiece of western music do you need a guitar we’re
Okay um wait do you have a guitar we have a guitar can we get the guitar come on we need a we need to be able to hear this principal reason for bringing out a guitar would be to stop me from singing which I think is an excellent idea okay
Well hey no but look I can’t sing and I can’t play the guitar I enjoy doing it so the the internet can there you go well look this is a fullsize one last time we gave you one that made you look like you were a
Giant okay so if you just take the the the major scale Right that’s not really music but try just the descending major scale what is that to you it sounds like Mary had a little lamb or something similar now what is it where do I know that tune from what is that Joy to the World the Lord has come right now if you
Take a different scale right um and you go uh the blues scale Right it’s a little bit meanor so you can ask the same question if I do the descending scale you know what is that like the intro from messing with the Kid or it’s close to Sunshine of Your Love right so is a descending scale music not much but when it’s made music by pausing or by emphasis one of the great tunes of uh Western Civilization has created Joy to the World you know my my feeling about it is that song should move you and all of these religious songs Um they mean something you know I I I was in a a car train going from Bulgaria to Kiev and there were all of these Siberian miners I brought my harmonica and they were they had a transistor radio and at some point the radio gives out and they want to drink
And dance because this is their holiday and they started getting really Rowdy and I realized I had the ability to make music so I pulled the harmonica out I started playing some blues and everybody’s dancing and having a great time and and they’re like moreaa whatever and I’m paralyzed I don’t have
That much of a repertoire on the harmonica and the one thing I could do was I start um playing Jewish songs and this woman comes up to me and grabs me by my lapel and says you know in Russia where do you know this from where do you like I’m realizing that I’m
In an anti-semitic environment I think and I’ve got a Siberian minor who recognizes that I’m playing Jewish music and I’m terrified I’m paralyzed I don’t say anything I pretend that I can’t understand or in Russian and she reaches into her bosom and she pulls out a giant Star of
David right and like she’s just looking me in the eyes like I know you you know me there’s a way in which religious music is incredibly powerful and prayer is incredibly powerful and I think we’re afraid to pray you know you say this in terms of meditation we’re afraid to submit to
Something bigger than ourselves to use the the programming that we have that um that makes us feel there’s something that feels disingenuous about praying if you don’t believe there’s a line from Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons the movie Tom Hanks is speaking to the calango and he’s trying
To get access to the Vatican archives he wants to get down there to work out some secret that was left that he needs to find out who who’s killing who’s killing everybody Neno asks him played by y McGregor he says do you believe professor and he starts giving
Some politicians answer where he skirts around the question he says I didn’t ask that I asked if you believed he looks him straight in the eyes and he says faith is a gift that I am yet to be given I don’t believe it we all have the gift
Of faith what we don’t have is the ability to sustain it we don’t have the ability to import it into all qu quadrants of our minds look I’m saying that I’m an atheist I don’t I don’t believe in the stories about the deity but that’s not
Constant you flit in and out you know Mike do you believe in Ray Charles I do do you no no I’m sort of joking but if I think about what did I say by Ray Charles why was that song so powerful he’s basically bringing Saturday night and Sunday morning
Together right there’s a there’s a religious sort of gospel Coral aspect to it and he’s got the retes in the background echoing him he goes uh and they go uh he goes oh oh uh uh oh oh that’s that’s pretty that’s satanic grunting going on on Saturday night right and then you’re
Going to show up in church and you’re going to turn it into uh something else Ray Charles was scandalous because he fused the secular and the sacred the profane and the sacred do you believe in the devil one of the you know you know the song Crossroads by Robert Johnson nope
Well I I can’t let’s see if you do right I don’t know that I could do a Robert Johnson for It Be Country blue but like if this were an electric guitar you probably know Um Went down to the crossroads triy to flag myself around went down the crossroads tried to flag myself Around and all good people they just Pass Me By he’s talking about going to the crossroads to bargain for his soul he wants to learn how to play the guitar and that’s powerful because you have this myth you know the devil Goes Down to Georgia
Or you go to the Cross Roads to gain something in a fan bargain um how are you going to believe that with no Lord you’re going to screw yourself out of the ability to listen to Folklore to mythology to Great literature and that that that makes me
Sad you know it’s it’s like are you making a point of saying that you can’t understand the religious person we need churches and and and and uh MERS and and mids and synagogues and we need them to behave non- psychopathically and you can’t hate on the psychopathy
Um and divorce yourself from the power you know the power of the word and of song and of communal prayer and Harmony it’s something it’s something I’m wistful for I wistful for a belief that I never had in a way yeah uh yeah there’s a I think there’s a particular Latin
Church Chase can you grab this uh big gele for me please um one of the quickest growing denominations I think of church attendance in America is this thing that’s all in Latin mhm have you heard about this no I can’t remember what it is and it’s growing massively in the in
A young age demographic under 30 or something the whole thing’s in Latin and can be awesome right well I think I’m wondering Vatican 2 may have been a kind of a big mistake how so because when you’re forced to actually contend with what the words are in a modern
Context they don’t have the power that they sometimes have as a spell well it’s difficult to switch off a very particular type of critical Vigilant analytical mind when what you’re looking to try and do is allow the experience to wash over you so perhaps uh yeah not being unless you’re
Fluent in Latin being able to just enjoy the experience and just be maybe that is most of what you’re trying to maybe that’s most of what religious service was doing maybe it wasn’t really anything to do with the words very often it isn’t I mean it depends you know so we’re
Actually meeting on Shabbat this is the I shouldn’t have traveled here we shouldn’t be using electronic devices but I’m not a practicing Jew at that level but I think about what we say over the wine when we pray you know we have this thing where we begin like this is the
Sound of of Jewish prayer right and then you’re thinking about what it says and it’s very moving to me because what it is is it’s a it’s it’s taken directly out of Genesis and was uh evening and it was morning the sixth day right and Yom is day and shishi is
Six and arav is evening and voker is morning so you know what the words mean and you’re actually recapitulating God’s shifting from work to rest so as you come to understand what the words mean um it it’s not destroyed by knowledge uh you know you know that old song by The Rivers of
Babylon that’s related to the grace that we say after meals um these are references that matter uh and I think people are are shocked um they don’t know how much of their life comes from scripture you know you have a round of firings that a company somebody says I
Can read the writing on the wall well do you know that that’s Daniel 5:25 do you know what the wall says I think many many take you know you’ve been measured and found wanting your lands will be distributed to the Persians or something like that you know these These are incredibly
Powerful references that we live with you know you think about the birds to everything turn turn turn pet Seer s there is a season and a time and purpose under Heaven it’s Ecclesiastes you think about Jimmy Hendricks going off about two Riders were approaching and the wind began to howl it’s
Isaiah where are you where are you with the power of the word are you afraid to welcome it in are you worried that you lose your Atheism what what are those two riters approaching they come with news that’s the fall of Babylon who are The Joker and the thief in that song I believe they’re on either side of Christ being crucified religion is interested in you whether or not you give a
[ __ ] it knows about you and it finds its way into every aspect of your life and if you’re going to be an honest atheist you have to admit that talking about younger people have you seen the data showing the move of teenage boys politically to the rightHave you been looking at this where else are they going to go it’s a good question I mean I I had a teenage boy I still have one but he’s 18 now and I watched them be pushed farther and farther right by their schools you suck all of your instincts are bad these
Girls are amazing look at you you’re pathetic be l less masculine and more attractive you’re just barking at them constantly they’re not moving right they’re moving out of your stupid way you’ve given them what nothing nothing one of my sons friends died recently by his own
Hand and I don’t know what kind of pressures he was put under but I watched those kids go through this pressure cooker created by this crazy parasitized left-wing educational movement get away from our sons get away from our daughters get away from our sons and away from our
Daughters it’s not left or right I don’t have a republican bone in my body get the crazy people who do not understand human development away from our children stop giving our daughters terrible life advice but like um that’s one of these mgrm questions what am I supposed to say
Um let me speak abstractly so we don’t get distracted with stupid stuff gender is about reproduction and it’s paired and there’s nothing you’re going to do that’s as good as the male female pairing that produces families yes there’s a ton of problems with it there’s a ton of problems with traditional femininity
With traditional masculinity I actually believe that toxic masculinity used to mean something before it meant nothing right now we are allowing our children to be parented by people who should be nowhere close to a child because development for humans is different we’re not like Wilder Beasts where you
Come out with programming where you can walk on day one we’re basically not blank slates but self- assembling computers and what you put into a developing mind um you know what normal child trying to figure out gender identity um does not go through a process trying
To figure out oh I like that dress do I want to marry somebody who’s wearing it or do I want to wear it myself that’s a normal process that you go through in development and if a parent hears that they usually you know try to guide natural gender identity now what happens
When an administrator says oh he said he wanted to wear a dress he’s a girl everybody respect his choice you’re thinking wait wait wait what you took a moment that happens in every boy’s life and you turned it into a trans affirmation moment and then you tried to like freeze it in
And let me guess you really just want to protect something which is great some people want to protect trans kids trans kids exist they have life very hard on them okay let’s ask how many trans kids got manufactured by this Dei movie versus how many would occur naturally
And you have type one and type two error you have a trans kid who was always going to be a trans kid that wasn’t properly treated that’s terrible I agree with the Dei people about that you have another collection huge collection of normal kids who are never going to be
Trans and you push them towards this I had J Michael Bailey on the show who his paper on rogd rapid onset gender dysphoria yeah uh was pulled very very rare that this happens uh and I learned during my research for that about the left-handedness argument for both gay and transsexual people so
In the Middle Ages it was seen as being a mark of Witchcraft or being touched by the devil that you were left-handed which meant that people who were hid their left handedness yeah I think about 12% maybe of the population is Left-Handed something like that but during the Middle Ages uh it was
Significantly less the uh ceiling gets released and people are free to be their true left-handed selves and more people become left-handed I I I can now fully manifest that forward and that is an argument that gets put forward a lot for well now that we have released the lid
On the pressure cooker that was tamping down People’s Natural trans or gay proclivities or whatever they’re now free to be themselves but that doesn’t explain why gender dysphoria appears to occur in clumps it’s not evenly distributed across all schools you you linked two things that I
Think have to be unlined we are fighting the last war because we got male homosexuality wrong I’m old enough to remember when it was a lifestyle choice right and I had gay friends in college who it’s not a choice you know it’s like a quiet I didn’t choose this
Um we’re lumping a bunch of stuff together I don’t think male homosexuality has almost anything to do with female homosexuality I think calling them both homosexuality is very confusing there’s something that seems much more obligate about male homosexuality it’s highly conserved I don’t think it’s unnatural I think it’s it’s part of the
Design of humans and we haven’t quite figured out why it’s there I don’t disagree but I think the left-handedness argument makes sense when it comes to homosexuality but not when it comes to the trans issue no it makes sense in both but the size of the effect is the
Problem you’re claiming I have no doubt that there were some people who had transgendered brains who were closeted uh you know transvestites and and they they had a closet somewhere in the basement where they got to be them their true eles no question that that exists the
Issue is that you created an enormous amount of like type two error so you could go after a much smaller amount of type one ER you created all sorts of negative stuff by not balancing type one and type two and that’s unforgivable you’re not actually the defender you think you are
You’re somebody who’s destroying some lives to privilege others and why have you made that decision I completely agreed with you like I I won’t say there are only two genders you know why because it’s not true in humans yeah two genders or two Sexes well first of all the gender and
Sex used to be largely synonymous before we decided that one was in some sense obligate uh biological and the other was software program well that was a lexical game that was believe in the 1950s that was played to try and bate the yeah but you can you
Can make an argument that you need a term I don’t think the gender should be purposed for that but you could make a an argument that just like abstracting male and female into top and bottom had some utility right okay so what do you mean when you talk about that intersex
Is an really important category to me I know people who are interex they’re they’re screwed they were screwed because our society had no way of dealing with them the gender binary is so strong that somebody through zero fault of anybody is born with ambiguity in their genitalia and their chromosome
Something so yes there are two intended Sexes or genders but nature isn’t good enough to hit that Mark all the time and those are those are human beings those are souls and and and the floppy right-wing thing which is to find the shelling point where you just sit
There and you say there are only two Sexes and two genders I understand why you’re doing it you’re trying to stop this crazy conversation that’s taken off so it’s not like I don’t have sympathies with why you’re saying that but when I bring up you know my favorite example is persistent muan duct
Syndrome where somebody goes into their doctor having trouble having a kid and it’s like well you have Twigs and berries but you’ve also got a uterus you’re female on the inside does that person produce both sperm and eggs no right but surely that’s the definition that is the
That is the line in the ground around male and female large gametes yeah but sorry the the gentleman who goes into his doctor and to find out that he’s got a uterus who is he if he wants to be male I understand why he wants to be male if he wants to
Be able to talk about the fact that he got handed some very strange cards by uh by the Creator in her Infinite Wisdom um I want him or her however that person conceives of self to be that’s that’s a soul to me and I don’t like the energy of saying
There are only two Sexes and two genders and that’s it it’s like I get it I understand what you’re trying to do you’re trying to say that there are two intended Sexes and genders it’s reproductive it’s nature I get it it depends on how we’re going to Define sex
Because if it comes down to gamet size that’s that is binary sure okay but what do you do about the edge Cate The Edge case but no one’s producing both so there are none I don’t know that nobody’s producing both maybe that’s a fact you know usually the issue is is
That you have this this list of homologues right so that the clitoris maps to the penile shaft and the labium Majora map to the testicles what you’re doing is you’re taking a common female template I believe and you’re treating it through the sry y Cascade uh differently during development so that
The default is female but you also have this ability uh through this one protein to create a Cascade that creates male out a female okay that doesn’t always work out now you’ve got an ambiguous situation and you’ve got a a a culture that basically can’t think in
Ambiguities that’s where a lot of this frustration with the gender binary comes from is that you you know somebody in this in a category where they’re not really one thing or the other at a hardware level I I believe that beyond that there’s also a software level there are
People with male brains and female bodies and and conversely I don’t understand this stuff but I believe that that’s true if you ever have the opportunity to interview Dedra mclusky who used to be I think Dennis mclusky very famous economist I had the pleasure of speaking with her a while back and
Um you know one of the things that she said was that she wasn’t doing this to be Hotsy totsi she was going to she wanted to die a an old lady not an old man it wasn’t wasn’t a sex thing it was just the fact that she’d been
Uncomfortable in a male body her whole life so I’m using the term her do I have to use the term no no I could use the term him or his but why would you do that don’t don’t you have enough compassion that somebody ruined their their family life and went through hell
And in public because it was so painful to be in the wrong body I get it okay now you have that compassion and how many lives are you going to ruin over that how many lives are you going to ruin pretending that this is an enormous
Cohort so to the extent that I have a slogan and I basically never speak about trans My slogan is make trans accepted and rare make it rare means use the developmental environment in order to give good coaching about male strategies and female strategies for life don’t relitigate the fact that we screwed up
Male homosexuality just take your lumps we screwed it up it’s a part of The Human Condition it’s never going to go away it’s different from female homosexuality almost certainly we don’t exactly know why it’s here we’ve been blessed with Untold riches uh particularly in the mtic realm from male
Homosexuals it is what it is and now we’re going to refight this over trans where no I think you have tremendous opportunities through development to assign behaviors is the skirt a female object no the Lungi in South Asia is a skirt men wear it I have a Lungi it’s like telling a Scottish
Person that he’s a he’s he’s crossdressing what are you an idiot you ever you ever dealt with a Scotsman you do not want to make that mistake they will let you know very quickly who they are um we’re out of our minds we’re out of our minds we’re creating so much misery
For these young men and young girls and and you know it just it makes me upset because we don’t love our children enough we we don’t love our children enough to tell these teachers hands off my kids go work out your weird stuff I get it
That get away from our children I came up with this idea of toxic compassion which was something I was looking to name metastatic maternity yes yes like an edible complex like the need to smother and protect something so badly that you just want to do violence to somebody because you want
To get your rocks off that there is this problem with compassion but if you prioritize short-term emotional Comfort over everything else you end up with some very strange externalities it’s not just that though I mean I wonder if we’re talking about the same thing maybe not let me read your mine toxic compassion
Is the prioritization of short-term emotional Comfort over everything over truth reality actual long-term outcomes flourishing everything it optimizes for looking good rather than doing good this is seen in much a popular culture as the desirable fair and empathetic thing to do and it’s everywhere people would rather claimed that body fat has no
Bearing on health and mortality outcomes to avoid making overweight individuals feel upset even if this causes them to literally die sooner or have a worse quality of life over the long run parents would rather allow children to play computer games or watch screens and access social media every night instead
Of dealing with the discomfort of taking it away from them even if it ruins their brain development social skills and self-esteem people would rather say that children growing up in a single parent household suffer no worse outcomes than those from two parent households even if this misleads parents children and
Teachers about why kids behave the ways they do Elon Musk recently responded to criticism about his political alignment and contribution to climate change he identified how big of a shift Tesla had caused in the electric vehicle market and the downstream impact impact of that on the environment saying that he’s done
More for the climate than any other human in history what I care about is the reality of goodness not the perception of it and what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil telling people what they want to hear giving them immediate gratification and
Avoiding saying anything that could cause distress prioritizes appearing good over actually doing good it’s dangerous I’m with you you are in an area I think a lot about and I don’t want to I don’t want to attack something that you’re saying but I I I I conceive of this differently there’s a point
About s sanctimony and appearing to do good while doing evil that is different from the need to parent and protect part of what’s going on is a redistribution of empathy which is being called an expansion of empathy right so the idea is we are going to be extra specially
Sympathetic with some groups and empathic with their their trauma their pain and we are going to take away compassion from other groups so for example if you look at suicide statistics in the United States uh from all of the rhetoric you would think that young black asian females would be
Um at the top of the suicide statistics but it’s really middle-aged white men who are killing themselves incredible numbers and you bring up the statistic and there’s an exchange rate in terms of human Mis Mis misery that is measured in suicide it’s a pretty UNF fudge thing that when you kill yourself you’re
Probably in an extremely negative state of personal trauma so what does the compassion grp group think about the fact that the group most likely to end their own lives is exactly the group that is faulted uh you know for the patriarchy it’s astounding oh poor little white men in
The midwest who had their privilege Tak what the hell are you talking about you’re talking about people killing themselves you’re talking about fathers and grandfathers dying what we’re talking about is a redistribution of compassion we’re talking about taking compassion away from people of European descent we’re talking about taking compassion
Away from men we’re talking about com taking compassion away from a business person like Steve Jobs who might have pancreatic cancer and be dying from it in his 50s because he had the privilege of building billion dooll companies who the hell are you you what is your
Problem what come out of the shadows and admit to what you want you want a redistribution of compassion and you’re calling this empathy it is anything but empathy empathy would be an expansion of our understanding of each other’s problems and woes this is basically saying that these people are worthy of
Compassion and these people aren’t the child who might have been wronged for not having having a clear gender identity and that would have happened under any error in in any circumstance that’s one life and then you have a bunch of lives over here that are children who are pushed towards sexual reassignment
Surgery and are sexually mutilated for no reason at all because of of Developmental you know reasons that they got bad advice from adults while they were trying to assemble themselves and you’re compassionate about this and you’re not compass passionate about that I don’t want you anywhere near a
School if you’re not willing to deal with type one and type two error you don’t belong around our children if you don’t understand the human development is important and that it is very hard to improve on the gender binary that is even if there are edge
Cases the gender binary is there for a reason and you don’t have a clue how complicated the gender binary is you probably haven’t even studied sexuality in different species that assign gender you know flatworms assign it based on a contest the winner is male and the loser
Is female you don’t like that tough luck you know bed bugs only practice traumatic insemination you don’t like that I’m sorry how are you going to engineer the entire world around your crazy theories of gender and sexuality we we need these people away from children they’re working out their own
Stuff we need to recognize that homosexuality particularly among men in an obligate fashion is a normal conserved part of the human experience that basically there is a gender binary that there is a small number of edge cases at a hardware level there is a small number of cases meant at a software
Level we have to be compassionate about all that but we can’t take compassion away from everyone else that’s a message to both the left and the right stop saying they’re only two Sexes it’s offensive and and stop forcing people to say something so simplistic because you’re threatening their
Children there was a story about Winston Churchill’s father that I wanted to tell you about in September 1893 Churchill was admitted on his third attempt to the Sandhurst Military College he wrote to his father I was so glad to be able to send you the good news on Thursday his
Father a former Chancellor of the ex- Checker and leader of the House of Commons wrote back a week later the full text the reply doesn’t seem to be available but we do have glimpses you should be ashamed of your slovenly happy go-lucky Haram scarum style of work
Never have I received a really good report of your conduct from any Headmaster or shooter always behind incessant complaints of a total want of application to your work you have failed to get into the 60th rifles the finest regiment in the Army you have imposed on
Me an extra charge of some 00 a year do not think that I’m going to take the trouble of writing you long letters after every failure you commit and undergo I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the
Idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your school days you will be a mere social wasil one of the hundreds of public school failures and you will degenerate into a Shabby unhappy and futile existence you will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes your mother sent her love Churchill was
19 what do you make of it come on tough to read it makes me think about what drove Churchill to be the person that he became it makes me think about the price again that people pay for the successes that others look at and have Envy of Revere admire
Remember we don’t know what drives people they often don’t know what drives them as well when they look sufficiently deep but that’s rough to read say more about that the guy goes on to be perhaps the greatest leader of the 20th century one of the greatest leaders of all time he
Stops Nazi Germany on just this domino fall as they move through Europe every single country that they come up against and the first one that they hit that they find some proper resistance from is the Battle of Britain up against Britain he is prepared to play a game that nobody else in the
British government is prepared to play there’s a great book called Churchill’s Ministry of ungentlemanly warfare okay and basically the Brit saw as they entered World War II they saw the way that Guerilla Warfare tactics were so uncouth that one of the other military leaders was quoted as saying if that’s
What it takes to win then I am prepared to lose and Churchill took whatever the opposite approach of that was so he begins to find Renegade scientists and inventors uh people that can do Guerilla tactics they can break down Bridges they can so distrust and they they create the
First Limpet mine underwater magnetic mine and these guys are doing it by buying up all of the condoms in villages so that they can water protect an AED balls that they know will reliably dissolve at the particular all of these different things just this crazy Insight that man the slovenly happy
Go-lucky Haram scaran style of work if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless and profitable life you have I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say I don’t know it makes me sad to think that Churchill may have done so much great in
His life and yet never felt enough because of the source code they had programmed into him yeah unwinable unwinable parental love is an incredible engine but I also see love in that letter you see imagine there was no World War II imagine there was no Nazi
Regime what was he supposed to do with his life open a dry cleaner was he supposed to become a vice president for inventory at a large company what what was Winston Churchill supposed to do absent Adolf Hitler I I God this is just so hard to even talk about and think about
Greatness you’re supposed to have great people underglass I call this you know break glass in case of emergency people we don’t have any if you had trouble now who would you go to you know um you’re from the UK I don’t think you’re a biologist but
You know who David atenor is what is the UK’s opinion of David adenor almost universally loved universally loved I don’t know you must know an ex-girlfriend because you said but um yeah he’s a national treasur of the UK we’re supposed to have tons of those people I don’t know of any we’ve beaten
Up everything we have and if if somebody attacks you know I’ve made this point before but everybody focuses on the wrong speeches of Neville Chamberlain you want to get choked up look at his resignation speech that thing is a thing of Wonder his point is this is the move that Hitler doesn’t see
Coming Hitler does not see that I’m going to resign for the good of my country and that Winston Churchill has asked me to stay on so you you guys better know what you’re doing because you’re gonna have to you’re going to have us to deal with the
UK needs to get back in the game let’s just be honest about it I don’t know what the hell’s going on with the UK it makes me very angry and very sick how up I don’t know I was it do you know ditchley some estate that Winston
Churchill was at in the UK not far from Ox it sounds like every other estate that exists yeah yeah I was there for a meeting it was a quiet meeting and there were lots of people in the British Foreign Service there and they’re all impeccably educated and spoke multiple languages and all this
Stuff they were all like moping about you know oh well you know of course with the US there’s nothing really for us to do and this is no longer the UK of the previous blah blah blah blah blah it’s like what the hell is wrong with you people you have this
Incredible role to play yeah there’s definitely a degree of not defeatism but yeah like playing second string uh walk it off dude does your special forces are still the Envy of the planet everybody every body knows how tough the U the UK is when it comes to Special Forces your facility with the
Language is second to none and it’s not just that accent um it’s the fact that you live it culturally there’s so much um quirkiness tolerance for eccentricity for Brilliance not just Excellence that is deep in the English soul and I have no idea what the UK is
Doing yeah you’re smaller you lost your Empire tough luck and walk it off it feels a little bit like uh someone who’s given a ceremonial oh stop it no when you look at uh let’s say there’s a a large debate that’s going on there’s some sort of meeting of of
Countries and the UK is there and it seems like that there is a token gesture to some bygone Dynasty uh we we we must remember to invite the Brits because it’s it’s it’s important that they have a seat at the table I I don’t know I don’t I don’t feel like we’re forging
Forward in the world I don’t I don’t know yeah you aren’t you aren’t you aren’t doing enough you aren’t doing enough but you want to know from your little brother get back in the game walk it off cut it out you’re incredibly important okay so you’re small so you’re relatively small as a
Market and so why did Jim Watson have to come over to the Cavendish Laboratories to do DNA you know think about all the things that came out of the UK I’d kill for the dur equation to have been invented in the US have some pride in yourselves there’s a lot of criticism
At the moment about multiculturalism in the UK what what does that mean that as you enter maybe he thr it maybe Gatwick it maybe one of the tube stations coming out of there uh it’s something like diversity is our strength is one of the taglines and there are a lot of people
That have got okay so let’s fight this out because I I want to do this really do um undoubtedly you know many people of Indian Pakistani origin who speak uh with an Oxbridge accent mhm right and they have prime minister all sorts of mannerisms hadn’t noticed it’s a joke um the
UK is also a software product you can teach people to think as if they’ve always been I mean look let’s be honest your royal family is partially German um think about the UK as a software product imagine that you can load that software into a mind no matter what the skin
Color looks like it’s the software that we’re attached to much more than your Hardware I don’t think we’re getting that level of integration well depends with which groups you have plenty of ashkanazi Jews who are completely English I mean I I just brought up Paul dck darac isn’t a
Uh typically British name it’s French right there all sorts of people who are quintessentially English who aren’t historically now I have a good friend from way back Marcus doto who uh never really thought about the fact that his his last name is totally French you know what is he a fellow of
The Royal Society and OB whatever it is that he is you know it’s just yeah and I I think you guys are much better than you think you are and I don’t know what got into your te but we can’t afford for the UK and the anglophone universe to keep sobbing like
This you know I I I I I I chew out the Australians all the time it’s like my God you have this great country far away from Europe this is your time to lead the US is stumbling what do something with it do something with it new zealanders come on
Guys no look I am incredibly happy to be part of the angone world and not just in terms of the language in terms of cultural norms in terms of all of the things I say we’ve contributed to the world I’m not British I’ve never held a British passport but I very much feel
Like um you know you know the great science that came out of the UK uh is part of my Heritage you know and by the way you know look at a map of the names of surnames in Scotland and Ireland and it’s like a who’s who of everything that
Happened it’s just I’m so proud at some level of this tradition I sometimes tell somebody that you can tell that a man is only partially educated if the word hamiltonian means something thing because which Hamilton the Hamilton of mathematical physics the Hamilton of biology the Hamilton of uh us historical uh
Fame I’m very I’m I’m very bullish on pride in the anglophone universe and we’ve got to stop moping around and the UK is supposed to lead it’s been a while there’s a really awesome Netflix series uh World War II from the front lines I think it’s called so they’ve used a
Combination of AI and archive footage to recolor and put into 4K this entire series and it’s outstanding and there’s one about the Battle of Britain and it’s been a I moved away from the UK and I I had my problems with it and I
Tried for a long time to try and sort of nudge the culture as best I could from within my business or or whatever I was doing and then just thought I can’t I’m trying to shovel sand away from the seashore here and it’s just not working so I’ve come over to America I’ve
Flourished since I’ve been here but that was the first time watching that and looking at that degree of spirit that was the first time in quite a while where I’ve thought to myself [ __ ] yeah like that’s that’s something that I can genuinely be proud of it’s been almost
As long as I can remember since I genuinely thought I’m proud PR of being British come to St helina seriously you got a speck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean below the equator uh I just spent a week there do you know about St Helen no this
The first time I’ve ever heard those two words put together in my life okay they’re the remnants of the British Empire called the British overseas territories right and you have like jalter and Diego Garcia ion Tristan Duna pitare and all these sort of bits and pieces that is’s what’s left it’s an
Island of around 4,000 people where Napoleon died during his second Exile after Elba uh because it was so secure apparently it’s the second most fortified island in the world after Malta uh it’s an unbelievable place um people are incredibly proud of being British and I believe believe that
William is going to visit at the end of this month and there it’s been 20 years since a royal visit of Prince Anne in any event one of the things that I loved about being in Jamestown St Helen um is the pride that people have in being British and being under the British
Order and we just can’t afford for you guys I mean look when I say lead it doesn’t mean the US isn’t going to lead you have a leadership role use it we’re we’re in crisis right now we all remember what it what you know it sounds like to be Winston
Churchill right we we we know what that voice sounds like and it’s very painful for us that actually you know I’m thinking back the problem is which diversity is our strength campaign it’s like some visual diversity if you fly British Airways and you look at that uh safety re real it’s
A joke I mean they’re just trying to find everybody who they could find um you know who displays some kind of visual diversity now the power of it you know the name Michael AA he was the the master of Trinity College Cambridge one of the greatest mathematicians of all time certainly of
The 20th century the name of T is what Lebanese nobody thought about him as Lebanese we thought about him as British I I I think you guys are much better at this stuff than you think and you’ve fallen for the wrong kind of diversity this kind of visual diversity shallow diversity yeah shallow
Diversity don’t be afraid to be British what are you working on next what’s next for you it’s problem I’m supposed to say something like I’ve got a special coming up or um a book I’m thinking about writing a book but look the most important thing that I have is I have a
Possible expansion of our two main theories in physics and nothing else compares to that even if it’s wrong a decent probability which could be you know imagine it were’re one in 100 or one in a thousand which I it’s far north of there in my estimation that it’s wrong or it’s
Right no that it’s it’s that that it’s right I think it’s much greater than those odds and of course you have to believe that or you wouldn’t be working on it but it’s also the case that there aren’t that many people who have even ballpark level skills to say what a theory would
Be um that’s hope for me can you imagine if let’s just imag imagine next week somebody said you know actually this looks right um we could start dreaming about looking up at the night’s sky and seeing it as a bucket list where do you want to go you could ask questions about is
There any way to harvest the Zero Point Energy from all the quantum oscillators you could say is there dark chemistry well you have dark matter we could have dark matter at some level this room is filled with dark matter neutrinos are effectively Dark Matter the only thing that can grab them
Is uh gravity which is way too weak and um and the weak Force which is too weak so in general we’re just being irradiated by neutrinos morning noon and night uh imagine that you had slower moving particles and you could build things with them and they just weren’t
Coupled to the matter that we see here so they passed through ordinary matter if my theories work there’ll be incredible things to play with and one of the things that I find fascinating is that it becomes this issue of psychology like why is he pretending that he has a theory I’m not
Pretending uh why does he think you know who does he think he is and I I just I look at it just think my gosh you guys have all lost the plot the world right now needs hope and it needs a quest it needs something for people to dream about that
Isn’t the same set of questions one of the things that I I don’t love about podcasting is that people tend to ask clustered questions and I’m always looking for that interviewer who’s going to ask me things that are just like people haven’t heard um mostly what we do is we just do
Retreads of the same old questions and it’s not a critique of either one of us as interviewers it’s just we don’t know how to get out of our traffic circle where we go around and around I’m trying to build the most exciting thing in the world which is Hope and a
Future and access to the source code of reality through through differential equations and geometric structures the that sounds crazy to people yeah well look around you how much of this was here in 1700s now go away if if you’re not understanding that we’ve changed we’ve progressed you’ve
Lived through a time of stagnation and I’m sorry about that I can’t help you computers were the only thing that really really took off during this period of time so think about if science progressed the way computers progressed over the last 50 years your world would be completely
Unrecognizable now what do we have we have a wood table mugs exposed brick glass metal there’s nothing here that’s astonishing except the computers that thing that iPad or whatever it is is the only astonishing thing to somebody who’s looking at this from the point of view of
1971 that’s terrible okay so you’ve all lost the plot don’t blame me that I haven’t that’s what I work on I’m going to try to make sure that you have options that your kids don’t have to die on this planet Elon is exactly right about this
Stuff the only thing he has wrong is chemical rockets in Mars I’m sorry he used it as an advertis for SpaceX but he was right about everything else Eric Weinstein ladies and gentlemen Eric I appreciate you I always enjoy coming and sitting down with you uh
These ones fly by I’m looking forward to the next one as well thanks for having me Chris thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Eric you will love my last episode with Eric which was also 3 hours long and you can
Watch right here go on give it a tap
