Eric Weinstein Demands UFO Secrets From Pentagon Scientist

24:22I never heard that before. So that never came up in our classified and unclassified conversations. I'm not aware that Dick Cheney had any role. To speak to this three-letter, the head you cited, a three-letter, in our discussion at Seoul in San Francisco, you directly said CIA, DS, and T. At one time, Glenn Gaffney, etc. So, was the UFO program portfolio owner. So to Dr. Weinstein's question about technical rigor, physicists, did you ever have the opportunity to ask anybody near the head of this apparatus why there wasn't a stronger motivation to have physicists on staff? I mean, from an early era, why was there not that prioritization?

25:04Well, I would love to talk to the head of the crash retrieval program during that era, but he refused to talk to us. And that was Glenn Gaffney? Yeah. Glenn Gaffney. And who is Jim Ryder?

25:38He's this Lockheed Martin Space Systems guy. He was the senior vice president of the Lockheed Martin Space and Missiles Company, which is also the space systems company. And his dual hat job was director of the company's Advanced Technology Center. Did he also work on UFO crash retrieval initiatives? Well, I don't want to say that or confirm or deny that because of the consequence to his family. One of his daughters works there. Okay, got it. It could cause her issues. So, okay. So I can't get into that particular detail. Okay. Yeah. No, no problem. I'm so sorry. No, go for your investigations.

26:20Like, did you ever encounter technical intelligence that you considered high credibility that seemed like it would have had to have come from direct communication with NHI or did it all seem like it could have been through passive investigation? I couldn't get to that. There's two things I couldn't get into because I didn't have access. I didn't have the right clearances. And I wasn't allowed to, let's put it this way. There are people I was working with who knew who to contact, but they wouldn't give me the contact because they were not allowed to give out the name and organizational office or program that the individual worked at.

26:58And so they were not allowed to share that with me. So I couldn't get into the NHI issue. I couldn't get into the alien or NHI contact issue. The fact that Ryder essentially said, we have no idea how this works. Does that imply to you they never had direct, they never had the ability to ask questions of someone with full knowledge of the technology? Did you ever make that connection? No, I think Dave Groesch was able to make that connection. I couldn't. When you're on Age of Disclosure and you are saying sort of confidently that Roswell had, you know, a certain number of beings, one of the beings probably survived, is...

27:36That I don't know. You know, that's a point of information I have never gotten in any of my official government interviews or even unofficial off-the-record interviews is that any of these aliens ever lived. This is coming from a different avenue, and I don't recall Dave Brush telling me that that was the case. But I won't dismiss it offhand. It's just that it's not a piece of data that ever came my way after 30 years. As part of your official investigations in OSAP, you were making sure that your sources were completely uncorrelated, right? They weren't speaking to each other. Oh, yeah. Well, they wouldn't be able to because they were in compartmentalized programs.

28:19And we had compartmentalized clearances ourselves, so we could only talk to them at a certain level. And even we could not get special access program clearanced because the VP of Lockheed Martin, there was a VP of TRW before it got bought out by Northrop Grumman. Um, these guys, uh, they may know about each other, but they're not read in on each other's programs because that's what compartmentalization meant. It meant that, uh, they may know about each other through the, through the portfolio owner, but they're not allowed to communicate because of that compartmentalization. And, um, uh, so where was I going?

29:00I think I lost my train of thought. I'm sorry. Well, tell me about George H.W. Bush, Bush 41. Well, that's separate. That's separate. Yeah, totally separate. But yeah, just wanted to ask you about your interactions with him because it seemed like from your accounting, he wasn't fully aware of the UFO crash retrieval program, but he became aware of it through some interesting gains. Well, he became Gerald Ford's CIA director. So Gerald Ford became president. He nominated Bush and Bush got confirmed and he became the CIA director. So he goes into this for his first briefing as director of the CIA.

29:34The first thing that came out of this briefer's mouth was the Holloman landing in April 1964 at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. So he started briefing Bush on that. And Bush said, what are you talking about? I've never heard of this before. Describe what this is for the audience. So to make a long story short, three craft, UAP craft, UFO craft came in. One of them landed not on the runway, but on the tarmac close to a hangar. The other two took off. And a gangway comes down, extended down, and down comes a humanoid-looking, very tall NHI being. He looked of Northern European descent. So he goes and meets with them, and they go into that hangar.

30:19And that hangar turns out to be the equivalent back in those days of a special access program hangar. It's all secured. They've got guards around it. That's the end of the story. so this film was made of it and this story has circulated at various times uh uh the defense audiovisual agency under the command of two uh retired generals uh i think jerry miller was the name of one of them i don't remember the name of the other jacques valie talks about them in his book revelations i think it is and uh he and alan hynek were invited to go to the da va and see that film, get access to the film and see it.

30:57So they got there, and apparently they were not allowed to see that video because one of those two generals said that they got intercepted or somebody got in the middle of that and convinced them not to allow Belay and Hynek to see that film. You do have this fact pattern over decades of, you know, this sort of luring in of various, you know, UFO researchers and presentation of passage material, which is, you know, material that might have some truth in it, but it's also sprinkled with falsities so that, you know, the researchers can be discredited. So why now is there this line in the sand where we should trust that there is this real UFO legacy crash retrieval program going on?

31:45You know, I'm kind of thinking maybe it all began with Keller, Herknapp, and Lekatsky's first book, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. I think that started it off. And then Lekatsky did his first book and then second book last year, and I think he's got a third one coming out. And then Lou Elizondo's book came out. And so I think this is a crescendo of things that have come together in the right time, the right place, the right people, and that's why this is happening. And if you're Stratton, and you're hosting because he was the guy who ran the UAPTF, the UAP task force. That's right. But he also was working with Jim Lekatsky on the OSAP.

32:25He was at DIA at the time. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't know that. He and Lekatsky are the ones that built the OSAP program together. So it wasn't just Jim Lekatsky alone. It was Jim and Jay and their support staff. There's the DIA and contractor staff that supported them. So Jay was involved with the OSAP from the very beginning. And then we talk about OSAP, ATIP, these sorts of programs that are, you know, very small dollar amounts, you know, vis-a-vis. $22 million. The inflation adjusted Manhattan Project. Yeah, Harry Reid had an intention on turning it into a Manhattan Project. He was intent, this was like just to get it started.

33:07And then the subsequent fiscal years that would follow, he was intending this to go like maybe a decade with worth a billion dollars, maybe two billion dollars worth of programmatics. But you were simultaneously saying there is an underlying program that is a legacy reverse engineering program. Yeah, this came after the fact. We were trying to get into the crash retrieval program. Our goal was to get after it and co-opt it into the OSAP so we could do what the goals of the OSAP wanted us to do. And I don't think that was necessarily to bring it out in the public domain. That was to keep it classified anyway.

33:48But our job was to get access to it because we were not convinced that there was any progress made. And as a matter of fact, the senior VP at one of the aerospace corporations who I had years worth of interviews with before and after he retired confirmed that there was no success in the reverse engineering program after eight decades. and it just didn't go anywhere. They had modest success. They understood the materials that craft were made from. They figured out how they were constructed, but we couldn't reproduce any of it. We had no fabrication or manufacturing technology at the time of the crash retrieval programs when they were fully funded and fully operating to figure that out.

34:31We could just use our SEM and transmission SEM microscopes other advanced condensed matter state diagnostic tools and evaluate it, look at it, look at it down into the almost nanoscale. And we could see how the materials were assembled, but we could not figure out how to reproduce that process. If we have made no progress, why aren't we more open with the scientific community? That's the security aspect of it. I'm not involved with that policy aspect. I don't have contact with the people that make the policy on that. So I can't answer that. But you are not that I don't want to. I just don't. No, no, no.

35:11I get it. And you're saying confidently that there are billion dollar budgets involved in the actual core UFO. I don't know. I don't know that it's that much. It was on that order from my interviews with TRW and Lockheed Martin people that that was the order of magnitude of the budget expenditures. that were given not on an annual basis, but it was more like maybe over a five to 10 year period. But then the budget would go up and down, just like NASA's budget would go up and down. So the budgets would go up and they'd be flush with money, get a few more people in, get some better equipment in the lab.

35:52And then the budget gets cut and they got to go to bare minimum operation. People get laid off and whatever. I wanted to ask you, you know, there's this sort of not even lore. There is a document called the Wilson Davis memo. You get asked about it all the time. It's kind of apocryphal meeting that occurred between you and Admiral Thomas Wilson. UFOs or something. That's right. The last gospel of the Bible. You are famous for your meticulous note taking. And apparently this meeting took place in the EG &G parking lot. And it is this, you know, Admiral who is head of J2 Joint Chiefs. He was retired at the time.

36:30He was retired at time. He was. He got called back into active duty for a short period of time because he had to close out a project at Area 51 that he was responsible for under his office at the DIA that he initiated. And it was a complicated project. He couldn't tell me because I didn't have that kind of level of access or anything like that. So all I know is he said, I'm back because I've got to go back up into that. He wouldn't say Area 51. I knew what he was talking about. He was saying he used the word back in those days, the undeclared or unacknowledged facility near the Nevada test site.

37:05And you have to go back there because they need to close out a major project he initiated when he was active duty DIA director. And so he was willing to meet with me at the behest of two guys at the National Nuclear Security Agency that I personally knew. John Alexander and I knew them. We were all members of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. We were forming a Las Vegas chapter in 2002. So these guys were in Las Vegas because one of them is the director of intelligence at the NNSA site in Nevada, and the other one was the director of counterintelligence at the NNSA site as well.

37:41And so at least formerly, Wilson was supposed to have all military tech under his purview, under his scope. And he's expressing a lot of frustration to you, right, that he's just met with this private corporation. This is back in 97. This is in 97. The summer of 97. And he's saying he's saying these there's this team of people in the hundreds of people and they have this tech, this material that doesn't seem to be of human origin and progress is sort of slow and cumbersome. But that he, for whatever reason, wasn't supervising or overseeing it, even though he should have been. It's that they claim he didn't have need to know, and that's possible.

38:21Their budget came from his. In other words, their funding, I'm sorry, their funding came from his director's budget, the budget he gets as a director. This was DIA money that he wasn't aware of. He wasn't aware because this is a Woos app. He hadn't been read in on it. And so when you deal with budget line items for these things, they're just innocuous budget codes that a comptroller general of the Defense Department or the military services or the U.S. government understands how to read a budget code. And then a standard plain English description is deliberately meant to be vague, so you can't identify it.

39:01That way, if the budget document gets captured by espionage assets from foreign nations, foreign adversaries, they won't understand what the hell it is. So are they going to see is something they may or may not even know how to interpret and some innocuous words. And this could be as innocuous as aerospace technology review or, well, let's look at the OSAP, Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program. It could be something similar to that or of that nature. You'll see something of that nature. It doesn't say UFO, alien, off-world. It doesn't give you any clearer indication as to what it is.

39:39It's meant for that reason, is to keep our enemies off the track to be able to figure out what we're spending our money on and where. Wilson didn't know that because he didn't have any need to know. Just like a president in the United States really doesn't have any need to know about the crash retrieval program because mostly they have to know to ask about it. And when they ask, that's an order from him that somebody lower down needs to give him a briefing. But if he already doesn't know, he doesn't know to ask. What happened when Jimmy Carter got briefed? uh i don't know what the aftermath is but i know that alonzo mcdonald confirmed to several of us that um in our group during that era the osap era that uh he talked to the staff that attended that briefing he talked to carter and it happened he even sent us the june i don't remember the date in june but i've got the document but it's june 1990s 1977 uh it was an economic meeting in the National Security Council meeting room.

40:38But then when it came time for this classified UAP or UFO program briefing, they moved it to the Oval Office. Do you know what the nature of the meeting was? Well, what we popularly known as Project Aquarius. And so I know that Alonzo did not dispute that that was the code name. It might not have been, but it might have been. But he said, This was it. This is the real deal. This really happened. And by the way, I got from the Carter Library the attendee list for that date. And it shows the name of the regular meeting for the Economic Something Council because that's what Alonzo McDonald's job is at the White House.

41:17So is that public information? The names of the people that attended were there. The only thing is two names and organizations were redacted out of all the lists on two pages. Only two got redacted. Can you send me that? Say again? Can you send me that with the redactions, obviously? Oh, I can send that. That would be amazing. So basically, Alonzo confirmed that it happened. He was then the principal staff director of the White House staff. I think that was the title back then. Before that, he was Jimmy Carter's special representative for trade, I think, to the United Nations. So he had something like an ambassador level title.

41:56Do you know anything that transpired in the meeting itself as far as? Well, he talked to Carter and the guys that are named on that list. And he asked him what transpired. Carter told him and the guys who attended told him. And they said, we learned that the United States government has been in contact with aliens, UFO beings. Danny Sheehan says Carter's head was. Well, what he does is when he's in a moment of stress or something that's really critical. So Alonzo told us that Jimmy, or President Carter, has a habit of putting his head down on his table like this and praying. This is how he prays, on his desk or at a table, at a briefing table.

42:39So that's what he was doing. He was just praying. And he was praying about the consequence of this information that he just now learned, what its consequence to American society is, and maybe to the United States government. and our defense of our country against an unknown potential hostile, we don't know, force that we don't have a technology to overwhelm. Did he learn about, have we had treaties or agreements with any of these beings? That I never heard about. No, that never came up. Okay. I don't recall. I've seen the Aquarius document. Alonzo said it was real. People have been saying for years that that was fabricated by Bill Moore and Rick Doty.

43:18And it turns out, no, Alonzo said those guys had nothing to do with anything. That document, uh, and by the way, I don't think you can find that document on the internet unless you use the Wayback Machine all now, nowadays. It used to be available, uh, as late as 2010 or 11, and then it's just gone. So, um, Alonzo read every word of the Aquarius briefing and he said, oh yeah, that's what these guys told me that they did. But the guys in the briefing got together afterwards, went to a motel, and they basically wrote down from memory what they recalled about the briefing because they each got briefing documents.

43:58When the briefing is orally given, they're reading through it. Then when the briefing's over, they got to give the document back to the CIA guy at the door that came to the documents because they're going to be destroyed. Where's what they wrote down from memory? Where are those documents? Well, that's the thing. Those are gone. Okay. I'll get to that. So the White House gets a copy, a permanent copy for their records. So that's in a really heavily classified part of the Carter Library, I believe, maybe. And then the CIA keeps a copy because that's their program. Okay. So these guys had 8 by 14 inch legal pads.

44:32And they all meet up in a hotel. And they all start downpouring from memory what they think, what they recall of the briefing document. so they they did round robin so everybody passes their document to the next guy so forth and so on all the way around and so they're going to cross check what they remember against the other guy's notes and they're going to keep doing this until they find you know they're going to disagree on what was said on this little point of this language and this terminology and whatnot they're going to keep doing that until they finally converge on a document that that strongly resembles the briefing document that they all read.

45:12And they all agree on it. And they said, yeah, this is more close to what we read. And we collectively, you know, came to this convergent final version. So somebody typed that up on an old-fashioned electrothermal printer. And that's what you see in the photographs that Bill Moore took of that document. And it was said that the senior falcon senior falcon was somebody else i know his name i just can't think of it but it's in one of my uh one of my investigation why do all these guys have bird names i don't know that's just the choice of an admiral at the dia okay nothing to do with the aviary aviary is more in the 1990s conspiracy era or maybe the late 80s even okay is that you know this is senior falcon was a DIA officer who was sent to communicate with Jamie Shandara and Bill Moore.

46:10He was the one that passed undeveloped 35mm film of the so-called MJ-12 documents. These are the first generation documents that were created by James Jesus Angleton's Chop Shop, his mole hunting document production factory. So that's the connection there, is that these documents came from the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was the Directorate of Human Intelligence Collection. And Admiral E.A. Burkholder, Edward Burkholder, was the director. And Air Force Colonel Roy Jonkers was his chief of staff. So, those documents came out of there. Well, this whole thing about the films, the undeveloped roles of 35mm film that would go to Bill Moore and Jamie Shandir, that was what that was about.

47:01Rick Doty was considered to be the junior Falcon, but he was not a legitimate mediator of information from the DIA to Bill Moore. He was more coming out of AFOC as a counterintelligence agent trying to throw him off the track. Let's just keep it high level, I guess. So you have Roswell in 47. You have Magenta before that in Italy. But then this craft crashes there and that gets transferred to U.S. possession. And then how many other crashes between the 30s and today? I can't give you the official number because I know that number on a classified basis. I could say it's less than 40. Okay, less than 40.

47:44I think Hal Puthoff said on the Joe Rogan experience, somewhere like we have between 10 and 15 crafts in our possession. He said 15. I think he said more than 10, but that's still... More than 10. Okay, got it. He said more than 10. I'll just say less than 40. Would you describe the majority as wreckage or intact? A mix. An even mix. Okay. Okay. And not all of them involve recovery of NHI bodies. Dr. Davis, what gives you confidence that we haven't made progress with any of this material? I can't speak of my confidence level after my senior VP source died. Because before then, I'm highly confident because he was still connected in.

48:36He was still on active duty work up until he got retired in the early 2010s. Then he's retired after that, so he's sharing with me the information that he had all the way up until he retired. And so I'm highly confident on her percent level that what she told me is right. And as a matter of fact, he arranged for me to meet one of his co-workers on the crash retrieval program back in the 70s and 80s. Did you meet them? Oh, yeah, it was a woman. I met her. He, my source, his wife, took me to her home, picked her up. We went into San Jose to have dinner at a German restaurant. How many of those people, crash retrieval program people, have you met total?

49:15Two. Okay, so I think it's five total. Okay. Five total at that one, at that particular company. How many have you met total in your life? It was just those two from that company and one from TRW. Okay, wow. Did you meet many of the 40 of Dave Grush's firsthand witnesses? Say again? Did you meet many of the 40 of Dave Grush's? I didn't even know who they are, really. He never shared that with me. I see. I have a rough guess, but believe me, don't confuse that 40. Yeah. With the 40 core people on the task force, on UAP task force. They're not. Totally different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're totally different.

49:51There's no overlap. No, that makes, I would hope that there's no overlap. Yeah, I don't think Dave was allowed to tell me the names of those people or their organizations and where they're located because that was WUSAP level. Yeah, final question before I want to get into the second section of this discussion where I want you to drive mostly. But how did Admiral Thomas Wilson react when you when you met him in 1997? And why, I guess, why did people direct him to you? And then what transpired in the meeting? Well, I can't get into that. I can't confirm or deny that we met for the security reasons.

50:26okay there are legal issues still involved that are active so um uh because i can't reveal that in public that wasn't meant for public uh consumption and that was released from mitchell's estate and um that was supposed to be destroyed one year after mitchell got a copy of it as a courtesy from from who generated it and uh unfortunate that his kids were sloppy and um And I guess Ed was sloppy in that he didn't give any instructions on what to do with that document, if he should die, but he was supposed to destroy that, as far as I understand. I would be remiss if I didn't. This can be cut if it's not okay to air, but during our discussion in San Francisco, you did confirm that you wrote the Wilson Davis notes by way of a conversation about seeking legal counsel.

51:16Yeah, they're real, they're legit, they're 100 % accurate. Okay, thank you. But that's the typewritten version. And there's a handwritten version, but that's all I can say about it. Have you ever seen a UFO? Oh, yeah. My wife and I did in Tucson, Arizona. Broad daylight, a boomerang-shaped craft, below traffic pattern altitude. Looked kind of like halfway boomerang, halfway boot heel type shape, but it was close. Have you ever seen a craft in a hangar? No. I wish. I wanted to. Have you ever seen any one-of-one material? So idiosyncratic, never seen before material? No. Okay. Yeah, and the arts parts don't qualify.

51:58Okay. We don't know what the providence of that is. And Hal and I were involved in the TTS meeting at the Pentagon Conference Room in August of 2024, where we read the full 90-page ORNL. That's the Office of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Their 90-page materials analysis report on the arts parts. And there was nothing there. There was no there. There's a little bit of ambiguity because here's the ambiguity. The way that material was assembled is not consistent with what we were doing in the 1940s era when magnesium became a major alloy of interest for the aerospace community. And so that's the ambiguity.

52:47But the isotope ratios of the materials it contains are Earth. They're manufactured. Part of what I love about you is you are a walking compendium of all these exotic, you know, experiments, physics experiments. And whenever, you know, anybody gets some sort of anomalous result, you are a great evaluator of that. And you've written a book that I will plug here called Frontiers of Propulsion Science, where you've comprehensively reviewed a lot of these sort of more exotic, you know, propellantless propulsion sort of, you know, modalities. Have you ever seen an exotic experimental result or an experimental result that's anomalous, rather, that you believe is real and replicable and not?

53:32No, I wish I did. I haven't. Nothing that's ever, you know, breaks the sort of standard model or, you know, anything? No, certainly not. Okay. I just think that the standard model has done an outstanding job through the avenue of condensed matter theory to come up with some pretty exotic condensed matter states, which have been, you know, theoretical curiosities decades ago. And now we've advanced our laboratory technology and condensed matter physics so well that they're discovered. They're being discovered right now. So they're really wonderful, wonderful exotic states. insulator topological insulators metamaterials uh all kinds of other stuff like majorana particles that are supposed to be uh i think they're massless aren't they eric but if you

54:15Eric Weinstein:have a the majorana particles if you have a majorana mass mechanism different from a dirac mass mechanism that's only possible if a particle is its own anti-particle yeah that's right correct That's right. But these are not free particles. These are quasi-particles because they're quasi-particles because they're created by the collective action of the electrons in the semiconductor or condensed matter system. I want to cede the floor to my former colleague, Eric Weinstein. I appreciate you indulging all my crazy UFO questions. Just wanted to kind of establish a ground truth around Eric Davis's past experience.

54:57One of my favorite comments on our last discussion with Hal Puthoff was, now I know what a dog feels like when it watches TV. And so if, you know, this is not for the faint of mind, just so you're aware from, you know, for the audience, this will be a really fun discussion. But, you know, I want to get into what we touched on, which is why are there no theoretical physicists on the program? And what do you think is going on? How do you think maybe what we've talked about with the observables of UFOs might dovetail with some of your theories.

55:31Eric Weinstein:Okay, well, I don't even know how to begin this. I mean, look, the first thing is that in general, I can produce too many explanations through a creative, sometimes undisciplined mind for a certain set of facts. And this is one of the only times and perhaps the only time I've ever seen a situation where I cannot come up with a single theory of what's going on that explains all of the bizarre behavior in UFO, UAP land. Too many people who seem relatively reasonable with nearly eidetic memories talking about particular names, dates. It is impossible to me that we have a theater company that has figured out how to create this space opera.

56:15Eric Weinstein:And on the other hand, the lack of anything tangible that I don't believe in something this old, this long, this many events, that we have absolutely nothing to go on. So let me just say from the beginning that this is the odd situation. One of the reasons nobody from my world wants to get involved with it is that it just makes you look foolish from the point of view of a scientist. Well, they can't get involved unless they're working on a contract. contract well the sky is a big place and i disagree you said that you've one of the top government scientists i can't think of his name you would know who it is uh gosh he was a physicist and i just helped put off knew him and um he had all he had a lot of clearances into the manhattan project the post-manhattan project uh a lot of other high technology projects throughout areas of the DOD.

57:19And so he was an academician, and he had clearances. A colleague of mine up at Baylor also has DOD classifications, and he's working on classified stuff that you're not familiar with, you've never heard of, you won't get access to it. If you have a contract that requires a clearance, you will get access to something you don't know about in the public domain.

57:41Eric Weinstein:Okay. I understand that there's a lot of stuff that's classified. We have an entire system of national labs. There's no question about it. I'm talking about, like, at the level of ground truth, right? Our two primary theories are the standard model and general relativity. Both of them are relevant here as limitations on what we can understand of the world we see. And if somebody has access to theories beyond those two, and they predicate manufacturing on it, and then we get the gifts of that manufacturing, just assuming that that story is correct. We should be seeing some very weird stuff that is not explicable as if Newton was looking at Lorenz contraction.

58:27Eric Weinstein:He would say, what the heck is that?

58:32Eric Weinstein:And so I'm just going to begin with things that make me hugely uncomfortable. And again, it's not as a digger. It's like, I just can't figure this out. So we toss off these humanoid aliens, like aliens that are tetrapods, literally tetrapod body plans. We have arachnids, we have insects, we have cephalopods. We have all sorts of intelligent life that doesn't follow a tetrapod body plan. The odd of a humanoid evolving through convergent evolution somewhere else of a humanoid is vanishingly small. But it's not surreal. Yeah, but it's preposterous. But Occam's razor wouldn't be that these beings would be from elsewhere.

59:21They would be that they'd be derivative of humans.

59:24Eric Weinstein:Or look, you can tell me some other story, like these things aren't even really the beings that the real beings have constructed these things to interact with us, not to not to make us uncomfortable. OK, I understand. Do you believe that? That's possible. OK. All right. But any biologist hearing this story is just going to have the same reaction. You're like, tetrapods? This sounds like it came out of a Buck Rogers thing where it was too hard to hire an actor to behave as if they had a completely different body plan. So all aliens from the golden age of cinema or silent movies, whatever, were going to be tetrapods if they were playing an alien.

1:00:07Eric Weinstein:So that, first of all, really bugs me, is that I don't want to hear about that with no mention of, it is stunning that there are two eyes, a mouth, a head, and it walks the same way we do. I mean, even if you look at like a, I don't know, a camel's legs, you know, where we have a knee, it has an ankle or, you know, something like that. So that's the first part, and that's just the biological. The next part is, I was very interested looking through some of your physics papers. You seem to live in a world that I really honestly didn't know existed, so I learned something from that. It's sort of like national security physics.

1:00:58National security physics?

1:00:59Eric Weinstein:Yeah, that's not like a real thing, but if I look at a lot of your papers, they're focused on... that. This is a bizarre, how would I put it, bizarre physics that accepts the standard model in general relativity as ground truth, predicated on some sort of engineering desire. Now, I'm just looking at, per my book, I was looking at the physics of what's possible with anti-gravity, gravitational wave propulsion, or rockets. Within what? Within what framework? Say again? Within GR. GR. So GR with or without positivity constraints? Or how are you...

1:01:41Eric Weinstein:Let's slow it down. First of all, I don't understand. If these things are here from out of town, if they're not co-resident with us here on Earth, they're not here using the standard model in general relativity, I don't think. I mean, it's not impossible. But I'm not doing UFO physics. I'm doing propulsion physics for interstellar flight this i'm not looking at this from a ufo perspective i'm doing this as part of so maybe you can make this so you're dry wormholes things like that okay yeah i'm not doing this because of ufos i'm just saying hey if this is valid to any degree and we could expect maybe or pray maybe that in the future we can engineer these things this could be how ufos move because we're trying to develop this physics for exploitation as a technology for future interstellar and interstellar missions.

1:02:37Eric Weinstein:So this is hugely important for me just to understand the context. If I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I don't want to push anything that isn't true. I think what you're saying is assume a proof of concept that something can voyage at an interstellar level with intention. Assuming that one piece of information, attempt to figure out how that could be done as best you can with the tools we have yes okay so then you and i completely polarize i think and again that could be wrong on one one issue i would not be wasting my time again that's judgmental i would feel that i was wasting my time if I was trying to do this with GR, with general relativity.

1:03:26Eric Weinstein:I might have an Alcubierre warp drive, but I'd think, how much energy do I need to warp space in this particular way? Or, well, I could fall into a spinning black hole, and maybe I could try to figure out how this would be traversable and non-catastrophic. And I could imagine using all of the exotica of GR, well, I'll bet everything on time dilation, and it'll be really expensive to go there and home, but I can still get there using Lorentz conversion factors. None of that has any appeal to me. Clearly, it's had a great appeal to you, which is fine. We can polarize that. Surely, you don't think...

1:04:15Eric Weinstein:Isn't it much more plausible that if Kraft were true, and we accept that as our premise, that it's basically proof that GR isn't the last world, that general relativity is a constricting framework, and that there's something beyond it that has general relativity as an effective theory. I agree with that. And they're using that. I agree with that. Okay. So that makes this mysterious, which is why are you using GR? Because that's the only tool I have that I know of from my graduate education and my research interest. And so I don't have the liberty to—I'm not a pure theoretical physicist. I'm more of like one-foot theory, one-foot applied.

1:04:56Eric Weinstein:Okay, so let's take that. If I had access to anything that seemingly was breaking GR, general relativity, I'd be dreaming about things related to general relativity, because we know that we don't like general relativity at a deep level. It's got a terrible variable in it, which is called the metric, where it's easy to fall into things that are not metrics from the space of metrics. It just doesn't behave well in terms of quantization. We know that we have got these two kinks in space-time called the initial singularity, which we associate with the Big Bang, and the Schwarzschilder black hole singularity that we associate with collapsed stars.

1:05:44And I don't like GR.

1:05:46Eric Weinstein:I mean, I love it from the point of view of Einstein having pulled it off, but it's 110 years past its sell-by date. And why are you not tweaking it? I don't have intuition on how I could tweak it. And I would rather somebody smarter than me do that. I would like to have somebody who tweaks it and I could look at it and say, hey, it either does or does not predict a potential propulsion mode that could get us to where we want to go across interstellar distances without the consequence of G over C to the fourth. So.

1:06:34How do I interpret.

1:06:40Eric Weinstein:there are a lot of people who are interested in gravity. Yeah. And there are none of them on this program? Say that again. Other people are interested in gravity. Let me start from a different place. There is this 1971 Australian document that I became aware of where the Australian intelligence officer, Harry, do you remember his last name? Harry Turner, who was head of their nuclear division. Starts writing down, here's what we surmise about our friends the Yanks. and their efforts in this area. Okay. And he names, I don't know, six universities and the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT, Purdue, Indiana.

1:07:21Eric Weinstein:I forget what the complete list is. And he names like Arnowitz, Desser, Dyson, Oppenheimer. And it sounds like the Manhattan Project for Gravity. Okay. And this is broadly consistent with this story that I've been, I think I first did it on Rogan in episode 1945, which they gave me the Trinity date. I love that. which is that we have this bizarre thing called the golden age of general relativity which makes absolutely no sense and it's a story about two people Agnew Bainson and Roger Babson who appear to be in the language of the intelligence and again I'm not a guy who thinks he's seen a bunch of Jason Bourne movies so he can talk the lingo but they appear to be what I've been told are cutouts and they're both fitted with stories, it seems, about why they need to contribute to antigravity.

1:08:23Eric Weinstein:And they find two physicists to work through, one named Bryce DeWitt. So Agnew Bainson and John Wheeler find Bryce DeWitt and set him up at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill at the Institute of Field Physics. And then the other one, Roger Babson, out of New Boston, New Hampshire, seems to be somehow linked up with a guy named Lewis Witten, who's a gravitational physicist out of Johns Hopkins for his PhD, and found something that sounds like Bell Labs that nobody's ever heard of called the Research Institute of Advanced Study, or RIAS. And it has Sheldon Glashow within it. It has Rudolf Kallmann within it.

1:09:06Eric Weinstein:It has Solomon Lefschutz, the topologist comes out of retirement to work inside of the Martin. And we always talk about Lockheed, but we don't talk about Glenelg Martin that became Martin Marietta that became Lockheed Martin. So it's the Martin that really matters. And you and I talked about that years past. I've read the documents or the websites you've sent to me and I'm already familiar with elements of that. Okay. I've got old newspaper clips. All right, so we've got 18 talent. We've got Sheldon Glashow, Rudolf Kallmann, Solomon Lefschitz, Desser Arnowitz, Dyson. This begins to feel like, you know, the boys are back in town.

1:09:48Yeah, this is physics firepower.

1:09:50Eric Weinstein:Yeah, right. And then the trail just seems to go cold in the beginning of the 1970s. Correct. So... And I could never reconcile that I noticed that back in graduate school during the 80s. And I went to an APS meeting. That's the American Physical Society. So I went to an APS meeting with my dissertation supervisor. And I ran into, they have like a booth for the APS, you know, all the books they sell, the Physics Today magazine. Well, that was published by somebody else actually. But they have all that for members, for membership services and benefits. And so they've got this advertising booth in the commercials exhibit part of the conference.

1:10:39And they had the APS historian. And I brought that up with the historian, like, what, 1984? And Bob Forward was still at the Hughes Research Labs in Malibu. He's the one that motivated me to ask that question. Because he had been looking at anti-gravity. when he was at Hughes. And this is before he got his PhD in general relativity under Joseph Weber at University of Maryland in the late 50s. And the APS historian had no answer for me as to where this disconnect between the, yeah, what happened to anti-gravity research, what happened to this golden age of GR. He said something effective similar to what you said.

1:11:29It disappeared in the 70s, but he never saw what happened. All of a sudden, roughly the early 80s, now we have superstring theory coming up.

1:11:38Eric Weinstein:No, there's an interregnum. So we have this golden age of general relativity. Things culminate in the standard model 73-74 in particle theory. There is a period where there are two great ideas in physics, supersymmetry and grand unification. Right. which dominate during the 70s. Then there's a pre-string-like craze for something called N equals 8 supergravity. And N equals 8 supergravity was the candidate theory. It's too unique to be wrong, theory of everything. And then right up until 1984, where we get the Green Schwartz anomaly cancellation at Ed Witten, Lewis Witten's son, directs the entire field to put its energies on one bet.

1:12:30Eric Weinstein:And this is where the phrase, the only game in town, which are - Yeah, I remember that. Tojit, T-O-G-I-T, the only game in town. And Tojit takes over physics where if you say anything that isn't string during this period right after 1984, it's a bloodbath. And basically, Feynman is upset about it. Glasshow is upset about it. Weinberg basically pleads no contest and says, I'm voting with my feet. I'm going to go do this cosmology in Texas. And years later, we get this very weird meeting about AI, not related to physics, between Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. And they're sat down and told, do not invest in AI startups.

1:13:19Eric Weinstein:AI startups are not going to be allowed to be a thing. We're going to have two or three AI companies and we're going to cocoon them as part of the federal government. And Andreessen and Horvitz are sitting there and Horvitz says, well, I think they say, well, how are you going to restrict this? You can't do it at the technology level because it's just math and you can't classify math. Yeah. So, so Ben basically said, look, it doesn't make sense because to regulate AI at the technology level, you're regulating math. And of course, we're not going to do that. Like that doesn't make any sense. And you'll recall that what they said was, no, actually - We can classify math.

1:13:54We can classify math. And literally, this is verbatim. We classified whole entire areas of physics in the nuclear era and made them state secrets of the theoretical science of physics.

1:14:10Eric Weinstein:Okay. Now, quantum gravity, if you look and you do a Google n-gram search, there is basically no hits on quantum gravity until around 1972. And it comes out of nowhere. And we're backfitted with a story where

1:14:29Eric Weinstein:I can get almost any physicist of today to repeat the phrase that quantum gravity is the holy grail of theoretical physics. It's a fictitious history. I remember that's when Folling, Davies, Ford, and that group, started publishing their papers on semi-classical quantum gravity. Well, but my point is, the physicists do not know their own history, just the way most academicians believe that peer review goes back to the founding of the Royal Society. And it's very clear that it comes from about 1965 to 1975. So what we've done is we've erased institutional memory of the physicist's origin story from the physics community.

1:15:16Eric Weinstein:And this issue of quantum gravity looks like a cock-blocking mechanism, that it basically binds to the receptor of a physicist's mind, and it causes them not to make progress. And so we're 42 years into an unquestionable, it feels like a mass psychosis. Yeah, we've had all these different approaches that never work to quantize gravity. Right. So you have what appears to be a mass delusion. Not that it wouldn't be a good theory. I believe that gravity has to be harmonized with the quantum. I'm not disputing the quantum. Yeah, there's no question. But the idea that Einstein must be beaten, taken to the ground, and forced to submit to the quantum has not been productive.

1:16:01Eric Weinstein:Correct. I agree. Okay. But after 42 years of failure, you would imagine we would hold at least one, two, or ten conferences saying, what do we have wrong? Why are we not trying to make progress? And you don't see that. Well, that's the mirror to your thing that there are no physicists on the program. In other words, this is an effect. that is so dumb, it is so pathologically stupid, so unfathomably wasteful, why would you not question your own lack of progress? In fact, Leonard Susskind, one of the fathers of modern string theory, was on a show of a sister podcast, Kurt Jai Mungle's Theories of Everything, or maybe it was with Lawrence Krasnick, and he says, we have to go back to the beginning.

1:16:50Eric Weinstein:We have to question absolutely, we've got this wrong. If we don't go back to the foundations, I'm just thinking like, finally, it's breaking. He says the foundations, and he says of string theory. I said, oh, string theory has failed. So what we need to do is not question the string assumption, but we have to go back to the foundations of string theory and fix string theory. I mean, it's an infinite sequence. So one of the questions that I have is, Is physics just, are we not getting the obvious? Somebody figured out that physics is just too dangerous to do in a university setting. It seems that way to me.

1:17:31It seems that way to me.

1:17:32Eric Weinstein:Because you see, now we're a joke. That's right. But in 1979, 77, you had these two Streisand effect problems. You had a guy named John Aristotle Phillips, who was a junior at Princeton, who chose Freeman Dyson for his advisor for his junior thesis. And he said, look, I'm the Princeton mascot. I'm not really very good at physics. Can we use the fact that I'm not really good at physics to do something novel? And Dyson said, like what? He said, well, I want to design an atomic weapon, and I want you to tell me whether my design would work using my limited understanding of physics. and Dyson said, as long as I give you no information, I simply tell you whether it would work or not.

1:18:16Eric Weinstein:You do it all 100%, you're on, you're on. So he submitted his junior thesis. Dyson took one look at it and said, yeah, this will work. They removed page 20.

1:18:31Eric Weinstein:And I believe it is not found in the Princeton library with all of the other junior theses. Oh, really? You'd never heard this story? I have not heard that story before. That's news. That's very interesting. Very, very telly. John Aristotle Phillips is the guy who is in the center of that. There's another guy named Howard Moreland who worked for the Progressive magazine. And he had the assignment, see if you can figure out with no knowledge of physics, the Teller-Ulam design for the hydrogen bomb. and he did it and he did it because all of the um information had been sharded and discarded and declassified he basically put the pieces of the broken coffee cup back together by being meticulous so it was a an archaeology and reassembly it was a reverse engineering program from the from the shredder of theoretical physics yeah i agree with that that sounds like it okay well that that violates restricted data, which is this bizarre doctrine that comes from the 54 and 46 Atomic Energy Acts.

1:19:45And the government wanted to use prior injunction against him because he had no

1:19:51Eric Weinstein:right to free speech in this area. And I think what they found was we can't stop him because we declassified all the information he used. So that gave the government a huge problem, which is that it was creating a Streisand effect and calling attention to the fact that there are no nuclear secrets. I mean, there are probably many, but the core ideas are not the gating function. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Shortly after that, we get string theory and we become kind of incapable, right? It's like the glass bead game or something that amuses people at a very high level. Like we're turning the best physicists into chess players because nobody ever blew something up with a rook, right?

1:20:37Eric Weinstein:And I guess my question to you is, are these two sides of the same coin, that we don't make progress beyond the standard model and general relativity, and we don't have any physicists on the UFO-UAP claimed crash retrieval program? I've always thought that the answer is yes to that question. Do you have any interaction with the Jasons? No, never. You know who they are? They change. They're not always the same group. No, I've never met any of them. I know who—at the time I knew who was in the Jasons, I didn't know any of the people on the committee. Do you want to describe what they're supposed to be?

1:21:19They're supposed to solve problems that the DOD gives to them.

1:21:22Eric Weinstein:And it's supposed to be comprised of high-level physicists, mathematicians and the like. Yeah, engineers too, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's specific government problems, problems, yeah, problems they need a solution for, so they give a contract to the Jasons to study a particular thread of problems over summer. These are academicians, so they're off from school for the summer, and they devote their time and energy to solving this problem, produce a report, turn it in, they collect the money, they're done. Okay. One of the things that I think is really interesting is that there are a tiny number of people at a very high level in theoretical, in the foundations of theoretical physics.

1:22:03Eric Weinstein:And I think most people don't understand what some of these people are. If I show you a violinist who's a soloist, there's no possibility you can convince yourself that that guy knows nothing or that anybody could do that. You see something that's so astounding, only a tiny few can do it. I believe that the same thing is true about theoretical physics and pure mathematics, that once you're in the game, you realize what a tiny number of people are at the highest level in this game. And it's just very vertical and there's no mercy. Oh, that's true. I've done that all the way since I was in middle school.

1:22:47I read enough of physics literature when I was a kid, I realized that.

1:22:51Eric Weinstein:So here's my question. If I look at those people, they're so few in number, I could track all of them. And you pretty much know, not exactly, but by their PhD, you have a 75 % chance that you've identified deep talent. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things I've said to Jesse is if you wanted to figure out that the NSA was there while it was still no such agency, you'd look at number theory PhDs and you'd ask what zip codes do number theory PhDs live in when they don't get an academic job that's visible and you find that they're clustered around Fort Meade. Yeah. okay, do the same thing for this.

1:23:34Eric Weinstein:Imagine that what you need is you need general relativity, the differential geometry that goes underneath it. So let's call that Ramanian geometry. The standard model, the differential geometry that goes underneath that, we'll call Erismanian geometry. And what modern geometric field theory, you know, TQFTs, conformal field theories on up. shouldn't we be able to figure out if there is a program that's actually working on this where it's located by virtue of the fact that there's almost nobody in this game and we can track their physical movements in other words we would have figured out that there was an awful lot of physics firepower at a boys school in in new mexico that's very interesting so like a little detective search i mean my point is is that this is the bottleneck and in the current vogue of saying you know the lone genius theory is wrong um then that that wouldn't work but the lone genius theory is clearly right i mean it's just obviously right it's a it's a psyop to say it is so my my claim is I know a great deal of those people like personally.

1:24:47Eric Weinstein:Okay. I see no indication that they know about any such program. And the only exception I can find is that there's one black hole that you go into and you don't come out of called Renaissance Technologies that hires in these exact specialties. It's got a level of profitability that doesn't really make sense based on what I know about markets. And it's got a secure campus. It's right next to Brookhaven National Laboratory. And it has the resources of SUNY Stony Brook. And SUNY Stony Brook has a math and a physics presence that is far above its rating as a State University of New York campus, even as a flagship.

1:25:36I wasn't aware of that. That's in Long Island, correct? Correct. I mean, I think most people didn't realize that Sien Yang was the world's greatest living theoretical physicist until very recently.

1:25:52Eric Weinstein:I mean, he was like 104. But that's where he was. He was at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I didn't know that. Wow. So my question is, can we figure out whether or not there's a grown-up effort? Because I don't think it's really easily possible to reverse engineer these things when your science is lagging. Like, GR is the problem. The standard model is the problem. Oh, I agree with that. Absolutely. And yet your papers— Well, my papers are separate from that. That's the whole point. It has nothing to do with UFOs. It has to do with Mark Wilson's propulsion physics program. I'm just contributing my knowledge.

1:26:33Eric Weinstein:But those designs aren't going to work. Well, I didn't know that then, but I'm at a point where I know that it's difficult. Well, it's going to be beyond difficult to engineer warp drives and wormholes regardless of the configuration. I took one look at this stuff and I just said, why is he wasting his time? You know, it's, it's, it's, it's interest me. It's what I love. And I haven't been able to figure out any way to jump off that track and get on a track to an alternative version that could lead to something as revolutionary as trans medium propulsion that UAP demonstrate. Okay. So at a bare minimum, bare minimum, it, we would say GR and the standard model, but I already know that even at the bare minimum, that's probably not even touching the truth.

1:27:23Right. I think what's happening is, is I think the UAP craft are manipulating the information domain because I think that there's a subquantum domain of information. people talk about shannon i'm talking about fisher information that roy freedon at the university of arizona did a lot of research for 25 years on published two books through cambridge university press on fisher information was able to use that to derive all the major theories and principles of physics including the wheeler dewitt equation from that being observed and the observer So it's all based on the observer, which is quite a quantum statement.

1:28:04So I'd have to dig it up out of my phone to be able to read to you the two key out terms of Fisher information from which physics derives. New Scientist did an article on it, which was just brilliant. It was in the late 60s, but late 90s, sorry.

1:28:23Eric Weinstein:So, look, right now there's a vogue. if physics doesn't work we can talk about quantum information and information theory because computers have money and so it's a way for us to try to get money from people who know computers by making physics like information is the is the basic layer of the world so i've watched that push for a change of variables just like let's make black holes the new harmonic oscillator that the test object that we push everything onto i really don't find that highly compelling like We basically have quarks, leptons, force particles, Higgs. We have this arena called space-time.

1:29:02Eric Weinstein:It's all a model. The model is extremely good, but we don't live there. We don't live in space-time. Phil, I know that. Okay. It's not lines, curves, points, and manifolds. It's a physical space. No, but it may be a manifold. I'm not saying that it isn't. I'm saying that you know because of the defects in these theories. that you're looking at an effective theory and you're trying to figure out what the parent theory is. Do you have any guesses about that? That goes back to some ruminations I've had based on quantum entanglement networks. People in Quantum Magazine had talked about the work they were doing on quantum entanglements and tensor networks where they were able to show in a model how the Big Bang is actually unfolding or an emerging of space-time and elementary particles in the interaction forces from entanglement networks.

1:29:59And I just don't know how far that has gotten as a theoretical development, but I know that the initial stage of work that was done in the mid-2010s was pretty promising. I just haven't found any publications to show or inform me on where they've gotten with it.

1:30:20Eric Weinstein:Let's talk about getting a craft across interstellar distances. You've got some kind of, and I want to be clear that I think propulsion may even be misleading, but there's something like, is there a method of conveyance? Let's call it conveyance. Second of all, there's an energy requirement. Of course. And what I'm looking at, I hate to interrupt you, but what I'm looking at is something that bypasses GR because GR is difficult to use. Well, let's talk about that in one second. Where we can get around that whole energy requirement that shuts down the ability to engineer and build wormholes or warp drives.

1:31:03We've got to come up with something that gets out of that whole GR.

1:31:06Eric Weinstein:You're grooved towards this toolkit that's pushed in front of us, right? Like entanglement is a real thing, but we talk about it, in my opinion, sometimes too much. I think another thing like that is black holes, wormholes. Again, real things, but at some level, we don't know whether the black hole in the sky and the black hole in the model are the same black hole. And all of these things that we can do lead nowhere, right? We've been around the traffic circle a million times, and by the third time you've seen the same 7-Eleven, you're starting to think something's wrong.

1:31:46Eric Weinstein:Let's talk about GR as a problem. So in the standard equation in GR, we've got really three terms. We've got the Einstein curvature term. We've got the dark energy cosmological constant term. Lambda. Lambda G. Well, lambda times the metric G-mute. and this constant times the stress energy tensor for everything else. Right, the coupling constant, yeah. DESE in Arizona has thrown some cold water on the idea that lambda is a good model for dark energy because it appears that it's not constant. I've heard that, yeah. I've seen some news about that coming out. Was it just theoretical or was there hints of it from observations?

1:32:35Eric Weinstein:That's what I'm saying. Dark energy spectroscopic instrument, or DESE, seems to be recording. Right. It's showing that it's more, it's actually not. Variable. Yeah. It's time dependent. So it's dynamical as opposed to static being a constant. Which sounds like a VEV, a vacuum expectation value. So that people always make this mistake. You know, what is the temperature of the room? They say 71 degrees. You say, well, in which corner? And then the person thinks, oh, well, I'm sure it varies between the floor and the ceiling and where you are close to the window. And that idea that a thing is mostly constant, but with fluctuations, is the promotion of a simple number like lambda to field content, something that can vary.

1:33:22Eric Weinstein:Now, there's a thing called Lovelock's theorem. Oh, I'm familiar with that. He was a mathematician at the University of Arizona. Yeah. I went to school until I knew him. So tell me about Lovelock's theorem and variable dark energy. Oh, gosh, I can't even think of Lovelock's theorem, but I know what you're talking about. Why don't you go ahead? Well, so the way I remember it, again, this is, I wasn't preparing to do this, but. Because keep in mind, it's been 40 years since I had tensor calculus using Lovelock's manuscript for his. Would vodka help? Second book. Yeah. Yes. I think what it says is that when it comes to geometry, there are only two tensors you can make that have this property of being divergence-free that are not dependent on anything else.

1:34:17Eric Weinstein:In other words, it's a two-dimensional space. And one of them is the Einstein curvature tensor, which is divergence-free by property of taking an automatic equation that has to be satisfied called the Bianchi Identity and turning it into a different equation that says that the theory is not bothered by how you put coordinates on a system. Correct. That sounds familiar. So that's the idea of the R mu nu minus one-half scalar times g mu nu, the Einstein curvature tensor, is perpendicular to the space of transformations of coordinates. Yeah. It's like, what, the intrinsic curvature? It looks like intrinsic curvature, right?

1:35:01Eric Weinstein:Well, it's the Riemann curvature with the Vial curvature thrown away and a trace reversal of this one piece of the, you've got 10 components of Ricci curvature, and one component can be broken out and had a minus sign put in front of it. That object has an automatic differential equation. The other one that has the same automatic differential equation is lambda times the metric. Because if you try to differentiate the metric, that's always going to be zero by virtue of the fact that the metric is constant in its own Levy-Civita connection. But by the product rule, if you put a lambda in front of it, then the derivative of lambda is zero times the metric plus lambda times the derivative of the metric, which is zero for that same reason.

1:35:50Eric Weinstein:that those are the only two simple tensors that have this property. So if you lose Lovelock's theorem, I'm sorry, if you have Lovelock's theorem and you lose the constancy of dark energy, you're starting to actually put general relativity in some peril. That's very interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Okay. Depends how you conceive of general relativity. But to continue with this,

1:36:18Eric Weinstein:I don't, believe that you can engineer these craft within general relativity or standard model in any way other than formally so the alcubierre warp drive is a formal solution to the problem because it leaves unaddressed how the weakest possible of all forces gravity could be employed at this completely different level to, you know, sandwich FaceTime on top of itself. I don't think the generation ships make any sense. 800 years. Oh, I agree with you. Okay. I don't believe that the time dilation makes any sense. It's too expensive because everybody's dead when you get back. It's the planet of the apes scenario.

1:37:11Yeah, I don't.

1:37:13Eric Weinstein:I don't believe in traversable black wormholes and black holes and all this kind of stuff. Well, black holes aren't traversable, but there are wormholes with no singularities and event horizons that are traversable. Okay. In principle. Yes, but I've also heard weirder stuff involving somebody trying to use the black hole information paradox to get— Oh, I think that's just people have stretched an analogy too far, so. My claim is there's a huge suite of not really that inventive ideas. In other words, we're going to accept the science that we have as if we can't do better science. And then we're going to come up with completely implausible ways of using it.

1:37:57Eric Weinstein:And we're going to say those are the leading candidates. Dr. Davis, you should push back if you think traversable wormholes that biological material can go through is a real feasible thing. You mean biological materials going through a wormhole? Yeah. I don't see anything that prevents it. Okay. So you're going to create a wormhole on demand to get where you need to go? You should be able to. That's what my research showed. There's nothing that I would think that could stop you other than that G over C to the fourth power issue. that really gets inverted when you put it over to the curvature side of the equation.

1:38:40All right. Then the properties of the matter, it's going to be C to the fourth over G. So it's going to be a gigantic number multiplying the curvature of space-time that that matter source creates.

1:38:51Eric Weinstein:So walk me through, how do I get to Alpha Centauri by engineering a traversable wormhole? Well, you're going to create the mouth or the throat. Well, that's a good point because even Kip Thorne couldn't describe it. But the best idea is, and this is Thorne's, I did not mine, and I don't endorse it. You create a mouth right at your departure point in space, and you're going to need another spaceship to carry the throat to the destination point. And that's what Kip Thorne came up with. I'm thinking when you're creating the throat, that's where all the physics occurs anyway. It's not at the mouth, the exit, entrance mouth.

1:39:33It's in the throat. So when you're creating that throat, that should automatically do the connection, the hyperspace tunnel connection between two points, two distant points, Earth and Sirius, or our star, Sol, and Sirius, as examples, or Earth and Alpha Centauri, one of the planets over there. But I just know that it does not give you a recipe for navigating, for being able to target your destination. There are no navigational control laws built into general relativity. All you could do is build the wormhole, and you know you could do the studies of a geodesic that goes through it, representing either a photon or a piece of matter, and you can represent that.

1:40:18You know it's going to come out the other side. But how you aim it and navigate to another star using it, that's not in general relativity. You can't pull that out. You can't pull that information out unless there's more work that needs to be done that nobody has thought of doing. So, again. But I think you can make a wormhole on demand if, assuming you have the negative energy density available to shape it.

1:40:46Eric Weinstein:Not one of these proposals excites me. They're boring as sin. I'm sorry to say it. you're talking about people raised on sci-fi who want to be scientific. And by wanting to be scientific, they don't want to go beyond the two frontier theories that we have. And they've also said, I don't want to be uncreative. So the idea is, how do we come up with a wildly implausible story based on stuff that is solid? And at least with some of the other crazy stuff, I have a feeling at least they're trying to do new physics so that the implausibility goes down, but the speculative nature of the physics goes up.

1:41:30Eric Weinstein:I think it would be much better to balance those two. Can we talk about one of these weird things? Have you looked at this extended electrodynamics that no one in my world has ever heard of? I've seen elements of it. I've seen a paper here and there on extended electrodynamics. What do you see that as being? I don't know what they're trying to get out with it. That's my conclusion. I don't know what they're trying to extend where it's going. A little context for the audience. This is a term that gets thrown around constantly in UFO discussions. You have even going back to the 90s, Ben Rich saying there was some math in Maxwell's equations that was a little off.

1:42:10You know, that sort of thing is this recurring sort of theme. And then you have people now saying that it's a more faithful adherence to the, you know, more expanded Maxwell equations versus the heavyside kind of simplification of vector calculus that is extended electrodynamics. Other people say Heaviside is the update that makes the extended electrodynamics. No one seems to come up with some sort of Lagrangian. You've pointed out some real inconsistencies with the gauge invariance. But I believe Hal Puthoff, who you have a long work history with and is a long colleague, he has some interesting work in extended electrodynamics, right?

1:42:50Oh, I never worked on it. Oh, okay. I don't know that Hal has. the only extended electrodynamics i know of is the lagrangian that you're going to have for high energy electromagnetic systems and that would be the born and felled lagrangian i believe it is

1:43:04Eric Weinstein:okay well you're going back to to yang mill's theory in the abelian case it's just the non-linear version of maxwell's equations that you're going to get out of a lagrangian that you can formulate and it will reduce to maxwell's equations in the low energy regime so extended i don't know what they're extending that's the thing i've looked at these and i'm trying to figure out what's the Here's one thing that I've seen. The Faraday tensor made up of the electric and magnetic fields is naturally a degree two object. It's not naturally about vector fields. That only works if you take a particular slice of space in space time where you shouldn't do that because that breaks Lorentz invariance.

1:43:45Eric Weinstein:And then you say, okay, in a three-dimensional world, every two-tensor is dual to a three-minus-two-tensor or a one-tensor or a vector field. And then you plot out these lines in the E and B fields as if they're vector fields. It's naturally a degree two object. So Maxwell's equations reduce to two sets of equations, one of which is just true automatically when it's phrased geometrically. So if you take dA star, some operator, based on A, the gauge potential, the connection, it's really the vector and scalar, the four potential. dA star, that is the adjoint of that derivative, which is itself a derivative, applied to the Faraday tensor, brings it down a degree from two to one.

1:44:35Eric Weinstein:Right. And you say that thing is equal to the current J, which is a degree one object. But D A of F A, which takes a degree two object one degree up to a degree three object, is guaranteed to be zero for the same thing that makes the Einstein tensor divergence free. The Bianchi identity is an abstract guaranteed differential equation that comes out of the geometric construction of curvature. So you throw one of these two equations away because it's guaranteed by geometry. The boundary of the boundary is zero. In essence. So dA of F A equals zero represents two of the four Maxwell equations. And you throw it away.

1:45:27Eric Weinstein:And then you're left with the inhomogeneous ones. And that's just dA star of F A equals J. one of the things I've seen in this world looks to me like dA star equals A. The idea is that the gauge potential is a degree one object. And so you take dA star of a degree two object, and that's set equal to a degree one object A. And that doesn't work to somebody who thinks in physics terms, because on one side of the equation is what we would call a gauge invariant object, something with symmetry. And on the other side, there's an object that picks up an affine shift, meaning it isn't gauge invariant.

1:46:12Eric Weinstein:Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I see what you're talking about. So you can't rotate both sides of the equation in the same way at once. Therefore, it's not a legitimate equation, even though they're both degree one object. So is this what extended electrodynamics is a 10 %? Well, I don't know, because to be entirely honest, the extended, look, I have had to wrap my head around the fact that we have three bizarre groups of people trying to do physics at least. There's a crackpot group, which writes in red crayon, and they just don't, they're nowhere close to the target. there's a professional community which has gone somewhat insane but still remembers how to do physics from first and second year graduate intro classes even if they're researching toy models and they've never seen a quark or a lepton in their research in the last decade and then there's this intermediate group which i just didn't know existed which i will call fringe physics and fringe physics is in general people with sort of like a an electrical engineering background they know calculus they they know integrals they're often technically quite good and they get an idea that you know gravitation looks a lot like a laggermanitism i wonder if i can contribute something but they don't have a sense of like all the things that can go wrong yes I think I know about that.

1:47:39Eric Weinstein:So they tinker, but sometimes a tinkerer can stumble on something. So for example, you could easily imagine somebody stumbling on the Aronoff-Bohm effect, which is one of these hidden features of the world. So our colleague Sabina Hassenfelder has a video not too long ago where she took something that I've only thought about and heard about as physics folklore. So there's only three ways to hide new physics. It's kind of an interesting idea. The first way is that that can be so energetic that you can't afford to see it. So maybe there are particles out there where we can't create enough energy to get one of these particles to pop out of the vacuum.

1:48:20Eric Weinstein:Second thing is that something is so weakly coupled you can barely detect it. So there are lots of neutrinos everywhere. But they're so hard to get to interact with anything that you don't know that they're there. And then the third thing is the really interesting one for UFO land. Sometimes there's a configuration that you would never think to put things in. Like, let's get the current up to this. We'll spin something around. We'll evacuate a tube. We'll put the following rare compounds that have these particular things. And maybe we'll see an effect that is normally hidden, amplified to the point where it becomes absolutely clear.

1:48:57Eric Weinstein:You know, like the Casimir effect, you needed to know that you had to put two plates very close together for something to happen. So that's sort of what we're looking for. We're looking for, is there any new thing that we could do that doesn't require too much energy, that's not so weakly coupled that we can barely detect it, but that can be coaxed to show itself the way the Aronoff-Bohm effect could have been discovered by an experimenter passing a beam of electrons around an insulated solenoid and noticing, oh my God, it seems to be able to detect the current. I believe in a podcast with Anna Brady Estevez, Hal Puthoff openly discussed this idea of extended electrodynamics and him even working with Josephson Junctions and this idea of vector and scalar potential.

1:49:50So this idea of extended electrodynamics is that the, you know, Lorentz gauge is, you know, kind of arbitrarily set to zero and the derivatives of the, you know, vector and scalar potentials, you know, should not, you know, necessarily equal zero. And so theoretically, in terms of implications for the audience, instead of having this transverse Hertzian wave, which is going to, you know, propagate at one over R squared, you're going to get electrons pairing off in all sorts of situations. You're going to get this kind of rapid attenuation of the signal. you might have other sort of more exotic configurations of, you know, parallel, like, you know, wave propagation in a magnetic field or not even the existence of an electric of an, you know, an E field or whatever with a with an electromagnetic wave.

1:50:35And I believe Hal has openly discussed this with Anna Brady Estevez on this, you know, former National Science Foundation director on her podcast. I didn't see that. OK, OK. OK. I've never I never knew there was a video until I think she mentioned it to me last year or so. So you hear a lot of this stuff in UFO world, like extended electrodynamics and then even possible experimental inroads towards that. And do you know anything about that sort of thing or no? Okay. There are a couple of names that came out of that podcast, Dr. Louis DeSharro and Dr. Larry Forsley that would be of interest to Dr.

1:51:11And I know Larry.

1:51:13Eric Weinstein:Yeah. Yeah. Well, so one of the things that comes out of my work is that we may have the gauge potential that you would put into such an equation wrong. And the thought is the following. Every gauge potential, every connection has a disease when you gauge transform it. And this disease, if the gauge transformation is called G, it would look like G inverse DG, where D attacks G. So you differentiate the transformation and then you use the G inverse to pull it back to the origin of the lead. Okay. That term has no reference to the connection or the gauge potential A. In other words, it's G inverse DG.

1:52:06Yeah. But G inverse AG is perfectly gauge invariant if you put it into a Lagrangian. So in other words, there's a part that works beautifully, and there's the part that spoils the party.

1:52:19Eric Weinstein:But the part that spoils the party has no dependence on A whatsoever. So if you had two separate potentials, A and B, you'd get G inverse AG plus G inverse DG and G inverse BG plus G inverse DG. So the diseases are the same. You take a difference between them and the two diseases kill each other and go away. And you have two terms left over, G inverse AG and G inverse BG added together. So one possibility is that even though this community says a bunch of stuff that makes me very uncomfortable, is that you could have a tinkering community that is actually stumbling to things that everyone else is too sophisticated to look for.

1:53:12Eric Weinstein:just the way when we thought it was the E and the B fields, nobody was looking for the holonomy effect, which is a classical effect that's discovered quantum mechanically. So the embarrassment of finding the Aronoff-Bohm effect in the late 50s when we thought we knew everything there was to know about electromagnetism is the greatest proof we have that a theory that is supposedly completely picked over and totally explored may have basic things that we have wrong about it well into our sophisticated old age. Yeah, basically up until that point, nobody realized or even gave thought that the four-vector potential was a physical field.

1:53:58Eric Weinstein:Well, it isn't in a certain sense. So I give this example that if you know a professional model, they're expected to have a set of things that are called Polaroids. They're just shots of that model in various standard poses so that somebody who wants to hire that model can say, this is what this person looks like without makeup and without fancy clothes, right? Those different Polaroids are what we would call, I don't know, they're sort of avatars of the same underlying human. And so if somebody says, I want to hire that person in three-quarter profile, You say, well, no, you hire the person. That's just the particular shot of the person.

1:54:41Eric Weinstein:The electromagnetic potential is an equivalence class equivalent to give me all of the Polaroids to represent the one model. Okay. So the big problem comes out when you single out one Polaroid, you say, no, no, that's the field. Because what that is, is that's a particular representation of that field, but they're all representations of the same underlying field. Okay. Yep. So that's the problem that needed to get solved. So we don't have anybody in academia that's pursuing extended electrodynamics? I don't know. No, we do. there's a guy named Lee Hively in Colorado Springs. And he has a colleague named Woodside, who I believe is in Australia.

1:55:27And then there's another guy, I think Strobel or Lobel or something. So there are a few of these guys and they've written a paper about extended electrodynamics.

1:55:37Eric Weinstein:So another thing that really confuses me is I saw a bizarre video from 1991, which joe rogan pointed me to with this guy bob lazar seemingly talking nonsense yes do you recall what he says about the fact that you do this engineering with gravity wave a and gravity wave b he no not entirely it's been so long uh he doesn't know what he's talking about because he He was a radiation health monitor for Kimber Meyer Company. And they were a logistic service company servicing Los Alamos National Lab in Area 51. He never had security clearances. He never graduated. He dropped out of his first year of college, et cetera, et cetera.

1:56:28He's not a physicist.

1:56:29Eric Weinstein:Well, I know that. Yeah. I know. So I don't remember, but all I know is he claims element 115 created antimatter, which somehow had something to do with creating gravitational waves in the propulsion system. Did you hear the Jeffrey Epstein tape with Steve Bannon? No. Jeffrey Epstein didn't know what he was talking about either. No, I'm not. But you can tell that Jeffrey Epstein was talking to people who knew what they were talking about. And he's this garbled version of this. Let's assume the same thing for Bob Lazar. Let's assume that he was janitorial staff and that he just happened to be in a sensitive location and that he's saying something because it sounds to me like total garbage.

1:57:11Eric Weinstein:Okay. Okay. He says this thing, which is crazy. He says there's gravity wave A and gravity wave B. And you most likely think of gravity as gravity wave B. That's the long range stuff with stars and planets. He says, but gravity wave A is different. and you associate it with the strong nuclear force. So, of course, I want to throw up in my mouth, right? And he says this thing about QCD, quantum chromodynamics of the strong nuclear force, is what gravity wave A is all about. And so the idea is going to be that somehow, if you could actually understand that what was going on in QCD had to do with gravity, you would understand that that's the source of strength with the ability to actually do something with space and time.

1:57:59Eric Weinstein:So it seems totally stupid, but let me just point out the following thing. There are only two Lagrangians or actions that I know of that give an Euler-Lagrange equation with the curvature appearing without a derivative in front of it. One of them is the Einstein-Hilbert action, which when differentiated gives you the Ricci curvature minus the scalar curvature over two times the metric the other one is a thing called the Chern-Simons function yeah it's been Chern-Simons action yeah the Chern-Simons action comes from something called the transgression of the Pontryagin class in the Chern-Vey representation yeah that is part of QCD in other words the normal Yang Mills Lagrangian, we would represent as F inner product F, norm square of F, where F is the field string.

1:59:04From the topology of, what is geometry and topology for physics, and I can't remember who the author of that book was, but I've seen that.

1:59:12Eric Weinstein:But only in dimension four, you can form a different quantity, where you take F inner product star f where star is the hodge star or complementarity operator and that thing generates the pontriagin class which when transgressed gives you the churn simons which gives you the lagrangian that is closest to general relativity interesting uh i haven't seen that well because nobody's talked about it ever okay that's so this is i think this is the first time i'm i'm ever mentioning it in public. So the thought that I had is assume that Bob Lazar is an unreliable narrator and he was hanging around water coolers and he was hearing crazy stuff and that it's a mix of bullshit and something.

2:00:01Eric Weinstein:Is it possible, Eric, that what he's talking about is that the theta term from QCD is what he's calling stupidly gravity wave A, which no person I've ever heard of has ever used that terminology. I wouldn't think he'd be consciously aware of that. I don't know if it's possible. It's too, I can't rely on anything he says because of his history. Dr. Davis, just to play devil's advocate with Bob Lazar, you were saying there's this longstanding UFO legacy crash retrieval program. You have one guy who's come out publicly and has not changed his story since 89. We didn't really know too much about the existence of Area 51.

2:00:46Definitely not S4. I've never been there. But how would he know about Janet Airlines, a flight there? And he worked at the Unclassified Logistic Support Facility over on Sunset Boulevard next to, not Sunset Boulevard, Sunset Drive next to McCarran Airport. There's a row of light industrial buildings along Sunset Road. And McCarran is right across the street. So Kimber Meyer was there. EG &G Special Projects was like next door. So he didn't go because he didn't have clearances. His job was just a radiation health badge monitor. So people that get on the Janet flight to go to Area 51, he gives them their radiation badges.

2:01:29When they come home from work, they get off that Janet flight. They got to give them back, give those badges back to him. And his job is to check those badges every day to make sure that they're working. Okay, but he's not the radical physicist, but he does have engineering chops. like he runs currently United Nuclear. He literally put a jet engine on the tobacco pond. Yeah, I know. That's just a tinkerer. He's a hobbyist. He's also been twice convicted of felonies, including...

2:01:53Eric Weinstein:This isn't... Guys... He's a nutcase. I have no interest in Bob Lazar the person. The key question is, if he was proximate to information that he garbled, is it possible... Could it be possibly that? ...to take the garbled message and associate QCD with two sectors, is a Yang-Mills sector and a Pontryagin sector, and that the Chernvape representation of the Pontryagin sector inside of QCD associated with the theta term can lead to something which has Einstein-like properties, which is that the differentiate— That would be remarkable, right? That would be absolutely remarkable. The vacuum energy of QCD is impendent.

2:02:29Eric Weinstein:So let's get into vacuum energy and zero-point and what the source of energy is for all of these things. I'm very turned off by certain attempts to mine. Like, if you look at the Heisenberg uncertainty relations, one of the great innovations in our time is that they've been associated to the symplectic form on phase space in ordinarily classical Hamiltonian dynamics. In In other words, you take the space of configurations of a mug on a table, then you add the momenta. So that doubles the space, its size to go from configuration space to phase space, position to position and momentum. On that space, there's a guaranteed object called the symplectic form that comes just out of the math.

2:03:21Eric Weinstein:the big innovation was to say you know that thing is actually the at the base of a different different structure called a line bundle and it's the curvature tensor for this line bundle with a connection whose sections form the hilbert space and quant in quantization effectively yeah in a certain sense and you mean fiber bundle well yeah it's a line bundle exactly that that line bundle it's l2 sections properly taken polarized there's a whole rigmarole right sort of self-quantize the manifold in other words yeah that the the classical mechanics leads naturally to the quantum theory when you realize it's not an isolated degree two object but a degree two object that comes as the curvature of something else that we had not thought to study if you try to if that's the source of the heisenberg uncertainty relations that's a curvature you can't get rid of so if you try to mine it i don't really see how you extract Um, from something that can't be lessened.

2:04:29Eric Weinstein:On the other hand, were you to try to tap into the dark energy, if that is in fact a vev, a vacuum expectation value, rather than a hard constant, could that be used as a on-demand power source? Sure could be. You work on that at all? No, but I looked at people who've sent me their ruminations on that idea. And it looked pretty intelligent, but it wasn't very well developed in my opinion. So I think that would be a great direction to go. And I like where you're going here. I'm just trying to be constructive. Yeah. Let me try another one. I like where you're going. I think you pointed out some stuff I'm not aware of other than the dark energy aspect, which I'm already aware of, which need to be followed up on.

2:05:13Eric Weinstein:Imagine for the moment that you embed what we currently call space-time in its space of all point-wise Lorentzian metrics. So every way you could possibly have of measuring length and angle through a series of three rulers, one watch, and six protractors. That's a 14-dimensional object that I work with on a daily basis that I call the observers. We don't have to get too far into this. But the point that I want to make is the following. there are ways of traveling through time and space. And I want to say also that time really should always be times because the number of actual temporal dimensions we currently think is one, but it doesn't need to be one.

2:05:56I agree.

2:05:57Eric Weinstein:Okay. We talk a lot about entanglement. We talk a lot about wormholes. We don't talk about pinch to zoom. We don't talk about what? Pinch to zoom. Imagine that you pointed at a star that you wanted to visit. And imagine that you could find some way of traveling in 10 transverse dimensions. Okay. Where what you're doing is growing the ruler in the direction between you and that star. Now, once the ruler says one foot, you need the energy to walk one foot. Right. Not the energy to walk four light years. Right. and then you have to put the ruler back, so you have to shrink the ruler to grow the distance after you've grown the ruler to shrink the distance.

2:06:47Eric Weinstein:So the idea is that this is something like pinch-to-zoom, which doesn't work on an ordinary table, but if this was a smart table, it would be what's called a multi-touch gesture. Have you thought about whether multi-touch gestures like pinch-to-zoom or another one that I call shear-to-tilt might be built into the object that we confuse for space-time? It sounds plausible. I like that. I've seen hints of something like that in some books I've read back in the 90s, very small hints of it. And I thought there was something to it that I just didn't follow up on. Yeah, I would say that makes sense.

2:07:28That makes sense to me. Yeah, that's a very interesting idea.

2:07:36Eric Weinstein:Do you think much about dark chemistry? About which? Dark chemistry. Dark chemistry. Like chemistry with dark matter. No, I don't.

2:07:49I see. I haven't seen anybody use that phrase before. Supposedly dark matter doesn't interact with regular matter, especially at the electromagnetic force level.

2:08:03Eric Weinstein:Well, that's what we mean largely by dark, right? Yeah, because you can't see it. there's no luminosity involved no exchange of photons that we can visibly see and collect a spectrum for well we have we sort of have three long-range carriers we have light we have gravity and we have neutrinos right uh that we know about but let me ask you about a weird phrase that i keep hearing that i don't understand i keep hearing about interdimensional beings which causes me to want to throw up in my mouth people uh i think that's colloquial do you know what Fair dimensional means you're going between dimensions.

2:08:38So I don't understand the word interdimensional beings. I think it's really beings that could transverse other dimensions or traverse other dimension. Does it mean something technical that's being that interdimensional? Again, let's. We move through three spatial dimensions. So that makes us interdimensional already. Okay. And we move through time allegedly in one direction.

2:09:01Eric Weinstein:So David Grush, I believe, used this phrase in a hearing, and they talked about holography. Yeah, Dave's not a physicist. I understand that. So what I'm trying to, look, again, the point isn't to say whether somebody knows what they're talking about, but to say, assume that somebody does, assume that the plumber comes to you and says, wow, I was just at some crazy base, and I don't even know what these words mean, but here's what I heard. right so very often i'm just trying to i'm not i don't care yeah i think he's heard that from his briefings given to from the briefings given to him on the crash retrieval program i just you know he can't tell me that level of information at the classified level because i'm not cleared for it so are you he can verbally on a superficial level discuss it in the open but i don't know what he if he's it sounds like he's garbling stuff at times so and if we had an adversary that was aware of multiple temporal dimensions where we're only aware of one so we have an arrow of time and they would have multiple like a right-hand rule of time it would be it have you thought much about the threat assessment as to what capabilities a nobody does threat assessments like that but i would say that is a something worth worth having a threat assessment done on.

2:10:25Eric Weinstein:And have you, are you aware of reports that we are being, I wouldn't say menaced, but. Monitor. Made to know that we do not control our space. Yes. Do you find that highly credible? Yes. What percentage? Because it was definitive. That was told to me definitively, not speculatively. It was, we know this to be true. So I've been told the same thing by multiple parties who are not related, all of whom seem like credible people. Yet nobody seems to have direct firsthand. Yeah. Even I can't get into that level. I mean, Harry Reid tried to get a special access program and he failed because Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn denied it.

2:11:16And that was because Harry Reid did it the wrong way. He did it the wrong way, and that's why it got denied. If we did it the proper way, which I'm trained on in the security apparatus, we would have been more successful.

2:11:29Eric Weinstein:Do you remember Dick Feynman's book of stories like Shirley, You're Joking, and What Do You Care What Other People Think? Oh, yeah. It's been a long time since I was— I remember a story called Any Questions in which he goes to Buffalo, New York, because as a physics professor at Cornell, he has to teach in an aerospace company? Yeah, vaguely. So he gets beat up or something in a washroom over a girl. I forget what. Do you have a sense what Richard Feynman was doing with all of this? because he also has another weird story where he's got patents for nuclear submarines, nuclear planes, nuclear shopping, I don't know what.

2:12:13Eric Weinstein:Are aerospace companies something that we don't understand where people actually did basic physics research, not material science, not something that's plane or rocket or drone adjacent, but where people were doing actual frontier research in fundamental physics? No, they wouldn't do that. Not in that industry. So they wouldn't use it as a shell? No, they do applied physics research. They're developing technical solutions to the government customer's request to answer the government customer's need for a solution to some problem. So it doesn't go to fundamental physics like, should we worry about these type of quarks versus those type of quarks?

2:13:00No, no, no. They're looking at a physics that could be applied to the engineering of a technological solution for the government customer. That's what the aerospace industry does.

2:13:10Eric Weinstein:Oh, I understand what it's supposed to do. What I'm trying to say is, is it a system of containers? And you can put anything in a container. I mean, in other words, you could imagine that if a container was secure, you could put a drug laundering, you know, money laundering drug operation inside of it. We wouldn't think, oh, that's what you'd expect to find it. That's right, yeah. That it's like something crawled into that shell. My question is, is it possible that theoretical physics was sort of relocated into aerospace companies? I wouldn't say no to that. That's possible. That's possible. When we spoke to Hal Puthoff, he said, definitively, he said, you know, I'm not sure about fundamental physics being tied up in aerospace corporations.

2:13:57But he goes, topological physics, like, probably. And he said, it would seem to me that physics generally is held in these aerospace companies. And, you know, that was very, it made your sort of blood boil. Well, I worked for the Aerospace Corporation for four and a half years. I was one of only a dozen or so physicists with PhDs in the company. I have 4 ,000 employees.

2:14:26Eric Weinstein:Which location? I was at Huntsville, Alabama. Okay. Because I was supporting the NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion Program office. So I was only one of maybe a dozen, maybe two. I don't think it was more than two, but definitely within two dozen PhD physicists in the whole country, in the whole company. And I'll have to tell you that not a single one, few of us were doing any physics. We were doing engineering work. How many of you were trained in frontier theory? Frontier theory? What do you mean? Standard model in GR. Oh. How far back from the front lines were you guys? I knew those guys, and none of them were.

2:15:05Some of them were trained in astrodynamics, so they know general relativity and Newtonian mechanics. I'm the only one I know of who's been trained on the standard model in GR. I didn't know any of those other guys at work. There's one guy at Blue Origin who went to my university, got his PhD in general relativity theory.

2:15:24Eric Weinstein:The University of Arizona Tucson? Ten years after I got my doctorate. Okay. And he's working as an engineer at Blue Origin. Okay. Last question. I can't wrap my head around this. If I was facing an incursion in my airspace claiming craft that defy the laws of physics, and I didn't have a single top physicist on my team, I would expect to be fired instantly. Oh, sure. But that's not how they think. They don't think in terms of that. They're thinking in terms of their bottom line, and their bottom line will not involve a theoretical physicist. They might have— Sorry. What? You have Kraft, the claim.

2:16:07Eric Weinstein:They're engineers. I know. They're engineers. Okay, but if you— They're not thinking in terms of fundamental physics or something beyond the standard model or something beyond generals. They're thinking— How are they doing on this project decades in? The supposed project. How are they doing on it? What's their level of success? All I know is, as of my knowledge— If you're failing at something that requires new physics, you say, defy the laws of physics. We can't make progress and we have no physicists. That's because they don't have - David, this can't add up. It's a two-line proof. It defies the laws of physics.

2:16:42Eric Weinstein:We haven't made progress. We have no physicists. Okay. If something defies the laws of physics, who do you call? I know you ask any of us, any of us, write down 15 names of who you call if you had a craft that defied the laws of physics. Wait a second. 12 of those names, 10 of those names would be the same on everybody's list. The final thing I would say is if Hal Puthoff was telling us that some physics is held, whether it's even if it's just experimental physics, You have a bunch of people over the last 70 years, the foremost in my mind, Townsend Brown and, you know, this Ning Li at University of Alabama Huntsville saying that they're getting little weight reduction effects, gravitational shielding.

2:17:30That's wrong. They didn't. They were they were incompetent. There is no weight reduction. So simultaneously, Howell's thing of there being two chapters in my book on the Townsend Brown effect. But there's the lead electrostatic scientist from NASA, Cape Kennedy, just left to start a private propellantless propulsion company. And he says it's derivative of Townsend Brown's effect. Those older papers and that older subject matter is probably valid for most of the point. It's unfair to say that it's not. However, without a theory back then to describe it, it was hard for them to miniaturize it, to optimize it.

2:18:07All of those things you want to do to make it a useful force. His name's Charles Bueller. Talking junk science. Even though he's the electrostatics guy? And then the physics chair, who is the lead of Ning Li's department, left to join her company, Larry Smalley. Yeah, but she was wrong and so was he. Okay. Okay, and they made off with$400 ,000 in Army Research Lab money and didn't produce a producible for it. They didn't deliver anything for that money. So the topological physics effects— Have you talked to Travis Taylor? He knew all of them. He knew Ning Li. So the topological— rotten, terrible physicist.

2:18:40So the physics that are held in private aerospace, we just have to sort of guess. Like, there's no sense of what any of this stuff is, but they're also not putting any theoretical physicists, you know, like Eric's colleagues, on any of this stuff. Like, it just feels sort of... Here's the thing. The government is going to tell the aerospace company, we, okay, this is hypothetical, but this is how it works according to my two industry sources. Okay, the government says, here's a craft. We want to know how it works. The industry contractors say, okay, and they think in terms of engineering. They're not going to do fundamental physics.

2:19:24They might have experimental physics. It's not out of the realm to have an experimental physicist working there, but they're not theoretical guys. So they'll have to know some theory, but they're mostly experimental. You've given no... Hang on, hang on. So they get the tasking that they've got to take apart a craft and they've got to figure out how it's made and how it works. That's it. That's the tasking. So that leaves out any need for a theoretical physicist. They don't know that they would agree. Wait, wait, wait.

2:19:54Eric Weinstein:That made absolutely zero sense. That's how they operate. No, no, no, no. You said, but because of that, that's why they don't, no, you absolutely need a theoretical physicist if you're going to take apart a device. I don't disagree, but that's how they operate. That's what the program manager and the government says. So the program manager and the company is going to say, okay, here's our solution to that problem. So here's our bid. They get a sole source contract. No, there's no bid. It's a sole source contract. So they get the sole source contract and they've already laid out what the tasking is to be done on that contract.

2:20:29And the tasking is to be done, that needs to be done, is the engineering to take this thing apart piece by piece, reverse engineer it, put it back together again and try to figure out if they can make it work or not and understand how that happens. and that's all they do. They don't have tasking to hire a theoretical physicist to sit there and start thinking about the standard model, beyond the standard model. They don't go there. They don't go there. These are engineering companies. They're not universities. And they aren't even allowed to talk to universities about this because the compartmentalization is horrible.

2:21:05Eric Weinstein:Sorry, if an iPhone fell into the hands of a villager in some far-flung developing country, the odds of a cobbler or a carpenter figuring out how an iPhone worked is negligible. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. So the same thing is true on your engineering. I mean, look, the Manhattan Project was an engineering project. There was a deliverable. It was a device. but they had to have physicists for both projects you're not giving me any understanding of why there were physicists in one and not the other wouldn't the same even if you had a wrong sorry it just doesn't make sense to eric that's just what all the evidence goes down to um comes down to i should say it's i i haven't met us well i asked my sort my senior vp said oh we didn't have any physicists.

2:22:03They had Bernie Heisch working in that company. He is a physicist. He's an astrophysicist. He was a Max Planck Institute fellow. He was a fellow of that company. And he did astrophysics work because that company built spacecraft for NASA.

2:22:16Eric Weinstein:But an alternate hypothesis is that this is a dummy program masking something. And the last thing you would want ever on such a program is a physicist, because the physicist is going to tear right through this thing and say, there is no Bifield-Brown effect here. Let me show you, you know, whatever. So my claim is that avoidance of physicists might be necessary to keep a dummy program going just the way the presence of physicists was necessary to get a deliverable for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Interesting. Okay. Just on another note, the five people I knew of at that one legacy company, two of whom I met with and dined with and met, and one of whom I met with routinely through the ASAP and after.

2:23:09So the woman was a mathematician, but she worked as a chief of security. There we go. The other one was a material scientist. Okay. And that's a four, that's a discipline in engineering. The other three were engineers. One of them was involved with the development of the F-117 fighter. And I don't know what the other guy's roles were, but they were all engineers. That's what they were described to me. And I said, no physicists. He said, no, not really. It's insane. Both you guys, what do you hope for the next year or two of disclosure? I mean, I think it's clear that you think the brain dead way in which this is run without theoretical physicists.

2:23:47Eric Weinstein:I would like to meet adults on this project who are not grooved into thinking that we can just repeat things that never made any sense. into the future as if they make sense. The idea that we are being visited by crafts that dominate our airspace that we cannot understand, do not know their origin, defy the laws of physics, and we avoid the one specialty that could help us at all costs and that this makes sense to anyone is a fairy tale that should not be... I think that a mentally retarded golden retriever should not repeat this fairy tale. Dr. Davis, what do you hope for over the next few years?

2:24:27Well, I'm actually, what's the word? I don't want to say I'm, I'm looking for a negative term here. And it's, I'm not enthusiastic. Well, it's not enthusiastic. That's not the word. I think the presidential emergency action directives are so strict. They were instituted in the White House, in the Eisenhower White House administration. So Eisenhower instituted that, and that's been carried forward on many different topics, but specifically Jim Semivan and I know that they were instituted for this topic that we've been discussing. So I am not hopeful, I guess that's the word I'm looking for, I'm not hopeful that there will be meaningful disclosure because of the presidential emergency action directives.

2:25:15And I'm also not hopeful because I don't think that this topic has risen to a level of urgency in the White House as the Epstein files have. And the retribution that Trump wants to execute against his political enemies, those are at the top. He's got his economic agenda. He's got his foreign policy agenda, tariffs and all that. Disclosure of UAPs at this level, it's just not rising to the top. That's your prognosis, but your hope is that we get full transparency outside of national security trade secrets. I'm hoping that he and I could get the keys to the door with Hal and we can walk in and we can talk to people and say, where the fuck are your physicists?

2:25:58Or we can say we're going to volunteer our time or you can pass to work for you. I would love for both of us with Hal and some others to be able to go in and take a look at the hardware, see it ourselves. I've heard physical descriptions from Jim Lekowski. Who said that he breached the hull and walked inside of a UFO. Yeah. And you believe him. Yeah, because there's no reason not to. You told us, because you were allowed to tell us, that our government has a UFO in its possession and has been able to access the inside of it. Right? Yes. I mean, when you work with people like that, we know that we're not trained to lie and make up bullshit.

2:26:38Yeah. Just for the sake of lying and making up bullshit. But no, we are people with clearances. We are responsible people. Jim Lukaski was a missiles engineer, I believe he was. So, and there are other missiles engineers I knew who worked at the DIA back in the 80s and, no, back in, yeah, 80s, 90s, and 2000s until they retired. So there's a lot of engineers in the DIA, not too many physicists that I ever ran across. So anyway, it'd be nice. So my point is, Jim Lekaski wouldn't say that just to pull it out of the air and throw people off. He's telling you the truth. That was during his time. This is exactly the truth, and this is exactly what he experienced working at the DIA.

2:27:16At some point, I don't know whether this happened during the OSAP, because he certainly didn't tell us. All of us in the OSAP, Kelleher, Bigelow, Puta, Vali, myself, we never heard this come from Lekaski before. Was this at Lockheed or when he stood inside the crack? No, no, I don't know where it was. It's just that you don't know where he stepped. Yeah. He didn't say in his book. I don't know if you read the book or not. I haven't read the book. OK. So he didn't say where he went into that craft or who had it. But I have a general idea based on conversations I've had with Jay Stratton. But the point being is that he was able to get it, touch it.

2:27:52I also know four star general from the Clinton administration who was able to go there, use his authority, his power to go see the program and get inside, talk to the program employees and leadership. touch the craft look inside the crowd so that's two and then there's admiral wilson who said i tried to get in the program i met the program manager the corporate security chief the legal council and the chief scientist and they told me after a lot of resistance and arguing they finally said this is what you're looking for it is a crash retrieval non-human intelligence non-human technology off world but we can't let you in because you don't have a need to know beyond that You know, it's like, oh, but that's how it works.

2:28:36I mean, that really does work that way. The head of the NRO doesn't know what the hell a lot of the stuff that's going on beneath him because they're WUSAPs or Saps or hidden SCIs. He doesn't have a need to know unless there's a reason that he has to. Then they have to brief him. On that mind-blowing but also baffling note, and I'm glad we ended in a sort of, you know, collegial way. We share mutual hope that we can, you know, bash down the doors. And I love this guy's mind. I love the way he was going in the last hour or so. Yeah. This has really opened my mind a lot more, my eyes on some things I want to start looking at now.

2:29:12Thank you for that.

2:29:13Eric Weinstein:Thanks, Doc. Thank you, sir. That was an interesting conversation. Wasn't it? Yeah. What's your, I don't know, do you have kind of a gestalt sense coming away from that as far as an update, where you were before the conversation, where you are now? So first of all, it's interesting to see somebody who believes in aliens and craft in some deep level and doesn't believe in going beyond the theories that are blessed with holy water by the physics community. And so, you know, I take general relativity and standard model quite seriously, but he takes it almost as a constraint. so i think one of the things i didn't understand is that the physics output is rec seems almost recreational and it seems like what is the closest you could get to science fiction using known science right yeah and the idea is that it's all extremely implausible vague scenario like if we could come up with huge amounts of matter and energy, then we could do this Alcubierre space-time solution.

2:30:32Eric Weinstein:Or, you know, maybe we could engineer an Einstein-Rosen bridge. You know, and like, again, I heard somebody say this thing about maybe the black hole information paradox is a key that because it doesn't fully make sense that that's where the technology is. and you should use quantum gravity as a guide. Maybe you go into a black hole and you somehow get shot out someplace at a speed that you couldn't imagine otherwise. Whatever these things are, this is garbage. I hate to say it that way, but it's not that he's, maybe he's doing the best that you can do, assuming general relativity and the standard model, trying to reproduce something that clearly goes beyond it if it exists at all.

2:31:20Eric Weinstein:another thing is that i was sort of surprised that he wasn't nearly as read in at a primary level um so that he's able to talk because he didn't actually make primary contact with this well that's the thing we were just commenting on off camera which is like this funny dynamic of everybody seems to be circling around this program and nobody seems to be in the program. It's a little like the Epstein list or something, which is not at all, you know, we'll stop the analogy there, but it is this weird thing where it's like, you know, uh, no one, no one, no one's gone to the Island, but like, you know, or not me rather, but everybody else has or whatever.

2:32:02And these are, everybody's demonic or whatever. And in, in this case, it's this weird thing where everybody's this Mr. Smith goes to Washington character who stumbled into this in this sort of hapless way. And they have no idea how the thing actually sort of functions and works. And that allows them to talk about it.

2:32:19Eric Weinstein:Or even if there's a thing as described at all. I mean, I'm convinced that there's a thing. And it has a boundary. And it has some structure. And there's some money in it. Whatever. But I don't know that what's inside that container is what is indicated on its surface to the extent that anyone can even see the boundary. Yeah, well, that's a question. It's like, you know, does the tip of the iceberg look like, is it actually an iceberg? And are we looking at a tip of the iceberg where you can say, we have a crash retrieval reverse engineering program, but that's actually some sort of intelligent sleight of hand.

2:32:59And in fact, the body or a structure that is underneath, you know, submerged in the water is obfuscated and that changes everything.

2:33:09Eric Weinstein:Yeah, it's like you have a kelp forest which has a top which looks like an iceberg. You know, something like that. I was just trying to figure out the right analogy. Well, there isn't a good one. There isn't a good one. Yeah. And you have unreliable narrators to contend with as well and you have unprepared ontologies to contend with as well. So you have these voices giving you information. You are Eric Davis in this situation. You have these witnesses or these sources getting you information, but they are a filter unto themselves. They're an ontology filter, and they're a reliability filter. How much can you totally bank on what they're saying and use it to build a model for whatever is hiding in this boundary?

2:33:50Eric Weinstein:So one of the questions that we were discussing is, if you believe in the legacy program, and I think all three of us are in a position where we've talked to too many different people with different backgrounds that are talking about a something in common. And, you know, in my worst fear, it's the jackalope where everybody sort of believes the jackalopes are real because there's an industry around a myth. But assuming this thing is real, because I can't imagine how you would fake it. What is real is a program with a boundary. So there's something where you're inside the program and there's something where you're outside the program and people have to go back in and out unless you imagine that there's a secret facility which you enter once and you never leave, just physically.

2:34:46Eric Weinstein:This means almost certainly this thing is hidden in plain sight. I don't mean to say that there may not be deep underground facilities on our bases. I don't mean to say that. But people have to go home, right? And you have to have plumbers and you have to have housekeeping staff. I don't understand how this thing exists. Well, on that note, you attempted at some instantiation of at least the theoretical physics component of the whatever we're calling this UAP legacy program at Renaissance Technologies. And I thought it was interesting that in 2022, NASA had this, you know, UFO review panel. 16 researchers will spend the next nine months studying the UFOs.

2:35:44They will use unclassified data in their research and release a report to the public next year.

2:35:49Eric Weinstein:And this follows the Pentagon's announcement in July that it would create an office to track reports of UAPs or UFOs. And they were seeing if there's anything to all this stuff, and they were looking into it in an official capacity. And the person overseeing that panel is this guy, David Spurgle. Of course, Jim Simon started Renaissance Technologies, and Spurgle was head of his foundation. So I find that to be very interesting overlap. So there's this concept in Washington of steady hands. And steady hands, I never really found all the different meanings for it. But one meaning for it was, who can we trust when the pressure gets insanely high to do what we expect needs to be done, which may involve obfuscating, lying, evading, prettifying, all of the things that don't have to do with disclosure.

2:36:45Eric Weinstein:the world of steady hands is often a very small world. So they reuse the same, you'll notice that the same people in Washington, D.C. somehow show up on eight different issues. They're like, because the government knows that they can trust that person in a crisis not to buckle. They've sort of given their life for the team. Would Fauci be sort of analogous? Sure, right? the idea that you're going to stand up to Rand Paul in an open hearing, and you're not going to call for your mommy, and you're not going to say, okay, I admit it, there was a whole thing, and we screwed up, and I feel terrible, whatever.

2:37:27Eric Weinstein:And so maybe the idea is we're dealing with the steady hands phenomena, that you need people to deny the obvious. You need people to spend credibility. And there are very few people who want to do that job. One other connection I was thinking of, speaking of, you know, the intersection between institutions that are well-respected that nobody can deny have power in the country, like the Jasons, which, you know, they meet in Santa Barbara. It's the elite of the elite when it comes to military industrial complex and specifically figuring out kind of its frontier physics, but it's also weaponization.

2:38:14And so you have that committee that you brought up, and then you have the UFO world, which seems kind of more quacky on the face of it. And you have this guy, Ron Pandolfi, who seems to be a part of the Jason Advisory Committee, but also seems to show up in UFO world constantly. And so I think it's really interesting as a heuristic to look at the intersection between quacky UFO world and more institutional, undeniable military industrial complex.

2:38:45Eric Weinstein:Well, that was why the golden age of general relativity was such an important thing to mine, because that was the last major moment where the lunatic quacks and the super respectable people were seeing each other after hours for cocktails. Right. And, you know, there's a different version of this, maybe where, um, David Kaiser, I think wrote this book, how the hippies saved physics about what gets done at Esalen, you know, with entanglement and, uh, bell inequalities and all that kind of stuff. So I think that there's this weird way in which the quack world and the respectable world are, are always intermingled and we don't really admit to this uh i've called the passion for let's say string theoretic physics and other official uh mass delusions knarks which is crank spelled backwards a knark is a crank inside of the institutions who would be ridiculed for their belief structure, but for the fact that they are upholding the institution.

2:40:01Eric Weinstein:Right? And so we have them. And by the way, the mass delusion isn't the string theory might be interesting. It's that 42 years in, you're still not seeing this. What do we have wrong? Does anyone else have an idea? There is no conference that brings together the critics and the proponents to try to get to ground truth. Well, you have an idea about, you mean, you mentioned this in the interview, you said, you know, we have been beating Einstein to death, trying to kind of quantize gravity. You have an idea about gauging gravity and how, you know, maybe we fell into the kind of quantum gravity cul-de-sac when we could have thought about gravity in this other context.

2:40:43Eric Weinstein:Well, so this is a very strange point. So I just turned 60. Happy birthday. Thank you very much. what I realized about myself is that I am the youngest person to see the transition between old style physics and the string physics in terms of the community so I got to college in 1982 I started going to seminars essentially immediately which was unusual and I was 16 at the time so that was my claim to saying that that's why I'm the youngest things change in 84 so there's really only 82, 83. And I happened by complete accident to be at the first lecture of Ed Witten on string theory at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, which I didn't know until very recently that my memory actually is because I fell by accident into the beginning.

2:41:38Eric Weinstein:They changed the entire culture of theoretical physics, and there's nothing they can do to hide it. If you go back to research articles before 1984, you see an entirely different culture of inquiry as to what are the problems of physics? What might we try to do to solve them? And quantum gravity was just thrust down everybody's throat as the Holy Grail from 1984 to 87. And by the time of 87, everybody had accepted this. So what you did is you retconned a story where nobody mentions the phrase quantum gravity until 1972. And you say, well, that's always been the holy grail ever since gravity and general relativity in 1915.

2:42:27Eric Weinstein:And the quantum, let's say by 1928, when you have quantum electrodynamics, we're both realized to have this kind of incompatibility. So if the incompatibility between the two is real, but it's not really quantum gravity. What is it? So what I said was, most people don't realize that due to work of Jim Simons and Sien Yang, which got written up as Wu Yang, as if Simons was Wu, we know that underneath the standard model is a classical geometric structure. And we don't talk about the classical differential geometric nature of the standard model. And that is the subject of the Wu-Yang Dictionary. So that unearthing of a geometric origin for the particles and fields that are not gravity, but all the quantum fields, is a very important clue.

2:43:26Eric Weinstein:That geometry has a property, which is that it is gauged, which means that you can keep yourself from being fooled that many different versions, you know, that problem with the elephant, with the blind men going around and it's all one elephant and the blind men aren't wandering around the elephant stupidly. They're just staying in one place. So a gauge orbit would be, let's get all of the information from all of these people and decide that it's one elephant and they're just looking at it from different perspectives. so it's kind of a unity of knowledge general relativity can't be gauged now there's a lie that says well that it's a type of gauge theory because there's a different kind of symmetry which has nothing to do with gauging called a general coordinate invariance or diffeomorphism invariance so we make up a story to pretend that einstein's theory can be gauged and it can't.

2:44:23Eric Weinstein:And so now you have this weird question. Why did Ed Witten tell us that the incompatibility between this, the standard model and general relativity, was that one was fully quantum and the other never quite grew up and that we had to grow up general relativity? So general relativity and the standard model have two separate attributes. Einstein could do two things that the standard model cannot. These things are called contraction, where you take two indices on either side of a separating barrier called a tensor product, and you get them to mate and tear off. So he contracted the Riemannian curvature to get the Ricci curvature.

2:45:03Eric Weinstein:He contracted that to get scalar curvature. He spun the scalar curvature around 180 degrees, plugged it back into the formula, and got rid of this vile curvature. Whatever that operation was, that was the central idea of general relativity. there's no ability to take the full curvature tensors that occur in the standard model and break them up into components you can't do this contraction game and the other thing Einstein had that the standard model didn't is that there's a central reference object called the Levy-Civita connection and there's no analog for that as in the connections that give us photons and W and Z particles and gluons.

2:45:42Eric Weinstein:So in the case of the standard model, you've got, if my arm here is spacetime, and this is the data of the particles, the data of the particles can move around without moving spacetime. In general relativity, if you think about this as the XY plane, moving the x-axis affects the y-axis.

2:46:10Eric Weinstein:The incompatibility between the advantages of those two different pictures, gauge equivalence in the case of the standard model, and contraction and a specified Levy-Givita connection, that difference gives two sets of advantages to two different theories. Now, my work, the reason it's called Geometric Unity, nobody ever asked that question really, is that I said, are there any places where you get to use the advantages of both systems? And the answer turns out to be, well, certainly in general, it won't work. But for some completely absurdly narrow class of theories, you get all the benefits of both systems.

2:46:50Eric Weinstein:And then you check the particle table of the standard model, and you're exactly in that freak class. So like, how can you not devote your life to that fact? I just don't even understand it. So that thing is having to do with the fact that we didn't gauge gravity properly. And there's old work about this with Einstein and Cartan, with McDowell and Mansouri, with a bunch of other people who've had versions of this idea, but it all got blown away by quantum gravity. Do you think that was by design or emergent? It sounds insane to say by design, but let me give you something that is insane, although modern people won't see it as such.

2:47:41Eric Weinstein:It is insane to spend 42 years under the spell of a group of people you call leaders who've stagnated a field. In general, you have to ask the question, why is no one allowed to say, what is going on with David Gross, Lenny Suskin, Edward Witten, Andy Strominger? Why are these people still our leading physicists? I mean, this program failed. It's not the first failed program. We had a program associated with Reggie called the Reggie Calculus that was supposed to do great things and didn't work. There was a guy named Jeff Chu who had a bootstrap program and the S-Matrix thing that didn't work. We've had lots of ideas that don't work, and it's part of the game.

2:48:32Eric Weinstein:And it's not a question of these are bad people, but they they failed scientifically. We can't say that. We can't say that we are slavishly devoted to making sure that we don't offend our leaders and we're going to insult everyone else. And literally, we're just going to professionally insult everyone who's been saying for 42 years, this is not sensible. You saw what happened with Eric is, I sort of had to say, you know, none of these ideas are remotely plausible that you're exploring. It wasn't personal. It wasn't mean. He sort of said, yeah, I know that now, but you can kind of tell at the beginning, none of this is going to work.

2:49:14And so both in string theory and in what he's doing,

2:49:18Eric Weinstein:which is accepting that craft exists and are retrieved and can do miraculous things. And the constraints are he, he takes for himself. I'm not going to challenge the standard model or general relativity. What's the closest I can get to science fiction from known science fact? And the answer is you're a million miles away, buddy. You're not in the right zip code. Is your sense that there is a vital core that does have either geometric unity or some frameworks that are closer to ontological truth than general relativity and quantum field theory? You can't ask me because my feeling is I wouldn't have spent the same 42 years on geometric unity if I wasn't pretty confident that this is right.

2:50:07Eric Weinstein:Okay. So then the question would be, do you think that somebody else or some other entity on the inside of all of this? Because what's interesting is you have a similar thing going on in UFO world as what seemed to go on with Epstein, where you have this bizarre telephone game of terms being, you have like in UFO world, it's like extended electrodynamics and all these like weird frameworks that nobody knows how to define. and then you read those Epstein emails and he's like, boost your physics. He's like, you know, time is actually just a function of the vibration of cesium atoms. And he's infiltrating the math department at Harvard and somehow has a lot of sway with these people and is speaking like a person who was maybe told some real stuff.

2:50:57Eric Weinstein:This is the thing that's very hard to convey because particularly academics and PhDs PhDs don't want to be conned at all costs. My feeling is this is an extremely dumb way to go through life. You're going to be conned for sure. Try to figure out who's saying something interesting by listening. And in my estimation, Epstein was saying interesting things to me that didn't originate from his mind. It's like they've hired an actor to play a hedge fund manager. I only met him once. It was probably for about an hour or so. But he was an absolutely terrifying person to encounter. It would be surprising to me if I was alone in that I immediately had the suspicion that I was looking at somebody who had been constructed rather than something that had organically arisen within the financial community.

2:51:57Eric Weinstein:It was like somebody who'd learned a phrase in a foreign language and he was repeating it as best he could. I don't think people really have a clear idea of how crazy that interview he gives to Bannon or the media training he was doing. He gets like eight things wrong in a row and people said, well, Eric, you were wrong. He clearly is a much better spoken, much more informed person. So he founded the Santa Fe Institute in 1990 to 93 when it was founded in 1984 by other people. So bizarre. Or this was around the time that Murray Gelman was naming quarks from a poem when quarks were named many years earlier.

2:52:38Eric Weinstein:Says he was a good Wall Street trader because he had calculators. We had Texas instruments back then. Okay, so this is what I saw with Bob Lazar. you know, Eric latched onto the fact that Lazar is lying. Okay, so fine. He's lying. It doesn't mean it's uninteresting. Not only is it not uninteresting, but it's, I think it's simultaneously, it's a little strange to say, I know that there is a long term legacy UFO reverse engineering program than the one guy that comes out where I think a lot of his stuff checks, to be honest. And I think you can easily character assassinate the person by saying, you know he was involved in xyz but a lot of his details check my point is assume that assume that he's uh schizophrenic assume that he's uh got delusions of grandeur i don't know i i'd never had the thought before that the topological instanton sector of qcd based on the pontriagin class could be transgressed to a churn simon and churn simon is as close to Einstein Hilbert.

2:53:49Eric Weinstein:Um, and I only had that because I was just so sickened by what Lazar was saying as if he's talking, I'm going to explain the world to you kids. And he starts talking garbage. When, when did you hear that and have this idea about the theta sector and then look at it? It's an interesting question. Joe Rogan, it was, you know, a friend wanted me to sit down with Bob Lazar and, you know, I sat down with Terrence Howard. Um, and I have a great deal of fun with Terrence and Terrence and I get on, although sometimes he threatens me and I hate that. But Terrence, you know, I was praiseworthy in the one or two areas where Terrence was doing something really new.

2:54:28Eric Weinstein:And in general, I had to pour cold water on most everything else he said. And, you know, that's the price of being taken seriously by somebody like me. And in the case of Bob Lazar, Joe once said, let's sit down. Now, I didn't, I wouldn't have done the Terrence episode if I didn't have something to say, which Terrence, which is positive, which is Terrence found one remarkable thing, at least. He just did. So with one remarkable thing, I'm willing to do it. Otherwise, it's a character assassination. I did not want to sit down with Bob Lazar and do a character assassination. Just characterologically, I don't like going after human beings.

2:55:05Eric Weinstein:I go after institutions. Well, he would say he's not, he would say these are frameworks that were given to him. No, but he said that he was at MIT, let's say the physics department. So immediately the problem is, is that whenever you get to real academic physics, the world shrinks to a tiny number of people. And I don't think that the outside world either appreciates one of two things about frontier physics. One, it's a tiny world because it's so difficult.

2:55:37Eric Weinstein:and two, how vertical it is in terms of human ability. Did he say he was in the physics department, though? I don't think he did. I don't think so. I think Joe told me. There's a statement somewhere where he said he had physics at MIT and Caltech. Going back to the early 90s, that was part of the early. I think it was just MIT, but I think my read on it is that MIT is university-affiliated research center, UARC, and they do spooky shit and draper for example in lincoln labs right m.i.t lincoln labs yeah are are different sorts of entities exactly you know so the the issue is are you are you at at m.i.t or are you really at draper or lincoln yeah if you're talking to somebody from m.i.t lincoln labs you're not talking to m.i.t faculty i don't know but my sense is he was put there to work on something defense related.

2:56:39Again. So like more like functional, not high level theoretical, but.

2:56:46Eric Weinstein:So you're asking me the question, how did I come to think about this thing from Bob Lazar? Yeah, when did Gravity A's come sounding like? In order for me to sit down with Bob Lazar, according to my own rules for I don't hunt human beings in general unless they hunt me or unless there's no other option. I hunt institutions that are failing. I don't hunt people. I just don't like the ethos. So in order for me to come on with Bob Lazar, I would have to find one thing credible in what he's saying. So I went over it and I tried to say, is there any way of making this make sense? And originally I couldn't do it.

2:57:25Eric Weinstein:I couldn't figure out this gravity wave A, gravity wave B, because he and I would get into it and it would be a very short brutal you know it would be askrin versus musvidal i don't want to do that um and then i found that and that was the thing that was going to allow me to sit down with bob lazar as you could be saying something problem is i don't think he'd be able to hang with okay but it's a it's a formal possibility yeah yeah yeah i also don't think he would try as an author of the material, to your point, he would convey these are frameworks provided to me elsewhere. He wouldn't try to take technical ownership of gravity A and gravity B.

2:58:05Eric Weinstein:Well, the other thing is, is that I would say that even mathematicians and physicists really get this wrong. And the person who didn't get it wrong, bizarrely, was Jeff Epstein, which means that he's talking to somebody. In general, we do a bad job of counting the degree of a differential equation. So if differential equations are how we tell how the world develops, the standard way of figuring out the degree of a differential equation is saying take the fields that are in it and count the maximal number of derivatives that are taken of those fields before you get to the equations. And that would say that the Einstein field equations are second order and the Maxwell's equations are second order.

2:58:50Eric Weinstein:There's a different thing you can do, which is you can say, okay, in fundamental force law, first spot the curvature tensor, and then tell me how many derivatives I take of the curvature tensor. In that case, those are no longer the same. Einstein's theory would be zero with order in that way of writing it, and Yang-Mill's theory would be first order, because you take one differential in Yang-Mill's theory, you take zero difference, you just do linear algebra. to the curvature tensor in general relativity. So I don't think most people realize the extent to which the Chern-Simons and Einstein-Hilbert are basically playing very similar roles in the two theories.

2:59:37Eric Weinstein:One of them is Romanian, one of them is Erismanian. And the key features, they're both zero with order in the curvature when you take the Ola-Lagrange equation, which is very hard to do. that thing, that property, means that there's a very strong tie, which is more broadly accepted, between Chern-Simons, which currently lives only in dimension three in its most strict sense, and Einstein-Hilbert, which can live in any dimension. So, you know, look, there's a hope. I just don't think that most people think about geometric physics in this way. Well, interesting connection. Chern Simons is named after who and who?

3:00:25Eric Weinstein:S.S. Chern and Jim Simons. And Jim Simons. And that takes us back possibly to Renaissance Technologies, what has the largest concentration of differential geometers in the U.S.? Well, so look, I more or less accused Jim Simons of this shortly before he died. And I told him. i mean it was very collegial and very positive but i said you do realize that you have the closest lagrangian to einstein hilbert we don't usually talk about simons versus einstein what did he say well then we have this completely bizarre interchange so he wants me to tell him more so i explain that essentially in dimension three your object which is actually a transgression misinterpreted as an action or a Lagrangian, as the closest thing to the characteristics of the Einstein-Hilbert action, which is the integral of the scalar curvature integrated over the space-time manifold.

3:01:29And I said, in dimension three,

3:01:33Eric Weinstein:you don't have any vial curvature to get rid of the way Einstein had to get rid of the vial curvature and discard it as he filleted the rest of the Riemann curvature tensor. and you don't have the gauge benefit of your action, you Chern-Simons, in the Einsteinian case. But otherwise, they're extraordinarily similar. Did you know that they're both inside of a parent theory? And the parent theory combines Einstein-Hilbert and Chern-Simons and new stuff. And that's what geometric unity does. Geometric unity gauges gravity effectively and gives you contraction. So you're both contracting and gauging, which you're not supposed to be able to do under most circumstances.

3:02:29Eric Weinstein:and I said you're going to have a role in life that is much closer to Albert Einstein's when this is all done not that not that you're making an Einsteinian discovery but the thing that will replace Einstein will also explain the work that you did and he said this is unbelievably fascinating you have to come to State University of Stony Brook to the Simon Center for Geometry and Physics and spend a year and teach us this. So I said, okay, I'm moved, but I would like nothing better. I said, you're just going to have to understand that I have a family and I have a son who's finishing his last year of high school.

3:03:15Eric Weinstein:So I'm going to need a little bit of help with the heavy lifting of relocating the family for a year at a time when we can't afford a lot of tumult. And he looked at me and he said, okay, well, do you have any idea where you'd get the money? Isn't he worth$20 billion plus at that time? Yeah, yes. That's crazy. And I looked at him. I couldn't parse it.

3:03:50Eric Weinstein:It just doesn't add up. So strange. Did you, I mean, you just didn't want to grovel at that point and you kind of. Well, I'm not going to grovel. Yeah. And that's so crazy. Did you get the vibe that he was genuinely hearing about this technical detail for the first time? This is the first of two meetings that sound like this. The first time I had a meeting with him, I spent three hours.

3:04:16Eric Weinstein:with him going over a gauge theory of modern economics. Now, he happens to be married to an economist. He obviously works in the markets. And gauge theory, just so it's not thought to be intimidating or too cool for school, is really just differential calculus done correctly. And unfortunately, we call it gauge theory, and we only teach people who are very high up in pure mathematics or theoretical physics. Nobody else learns gauge theory. We should teach gauge theory in high school. It's just, it's an indispensable way of looking at the world, and it's just differential calculus done right. So in economic theory, there was a thing called the marginal revolution, which Tyler Cowen borrowed for the name of his blog.

3:05:03Eric Weinstein:And that was the penetration of the differential calculus into economics. so what what i did uh together with pia malani was to show that modern neoclassical economics is a self-evident gauge theory at multiple levels and that was not taken well by the harvard economics department particularly by one man named dale jorgensen who was the chairman of the department and basically went nuts trying to make sure that my wife was unemployable. And the reason that he did that is that he was tasked by Senators Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan with pretending there was a 1.1 % overstatement in the consumer price index to transfer a trillion dollars because all tax receipts and all social security payments are indexed.

3:06:01Eric Weinstein:So tax brackets, and you can raise taxes and slash benefits both at the same time by making a technical adjustment in inflation. You'll notice that many of us are experiencing inflation that's not fully reflected in our statistics. So there was a crime going on, which the Boskin Commission was committing against the American people by putting in a 1.1 % overstatement in the CPI by hand at the same moment that Melani and myself were showing the economics as a gauge theory, and there's a completely different way of looking at this. And Jorgensen didn't want any competition. So anyway, I talked to Jim.

3:06:45Jim said, look, this is amazing.

3:06:49Eric Weinstein:I've never thought about this but you're right about bundle theory and derivatives and projection operators I said well you have to have to ask a question your returns are so off the chart you have to have some explanation for why you're able to do this much of a better job and I said are you using this your wife is an economist you're a differential geometer you're in the same situation I am did you get here first and he took a drag on his cigarette. It was a very long pause. He said, Eric, if you knew how he actually made money, you'd be so disappointed.

3:07:32Eric Weinstein:What do you think he meant by that? You can imagine. I have no idea, but there's certainly, look, so far as I know, I'm the first person, because I come from a math physics background, to say I'm not really positive that this thing is just a hedge fund. The returns are too impressive. You know, they're like North Korean returns. And then the dear leader, you know, ascended to the mountaintop and wrote the seven most beautiful symphonies before descending on a winged unicorn. It's like, in the early 2000s, I didn't believe the following four funds. Bernie Madoff, Renaissance Technologies, D.E. Shaw, and Jeff Epstein.

3:08:15Why D.E. Shaw?

3:08:17Eric Weinstein:It was a strange thing that I knew people who worked there. They were so highly compartmentalized that they basically had the sense of they had no idea how the whole thing worked. And so it had, as you know, there is a very strange property of government secrecy, which is the only thing people really trust is compartmentalization and stove piping. the general belief is is that people will always talk and you have to have the people sharded with enough granularity that nobody can put together what's actually going on do you think because i mean brookhaven national labs is the site of cosmetron which is the largest particle accelerator in the u.s it is do you know that no i didn't yeah i thought formula would have been no it's interesting yeah yeah so so so they they're doing you know they have a particle accelerator that's, you know, pretty powerful up there.

3:09:11They have Stony Brook, which, you know, is definitely punching above its weight class when it comes to physics, which has some interesting also. Particularly mathematics. Particularly mathematics. Also some interesting architecture up there as well that you've noted. And then you have this fund, which seems to get 30 % year over year, no matter what, you know, up years, down years, you know, it's just always sort of, you performing at the same clip. And I guess my question would be, do you think this was sort of a slush fund for secret science?

3:09:46Eric Weinstein:I think it's not irresponsible. You know my thing about responsible conspiracy theorizing, which is that you go back in the history of actual conspiracies and you say your new thought about a conspiracy should be within a standard deviation or two of something that's known to exist. So if you take Los Alamos as a good example, you have a protected campus and compound, you have top math physics talent, you have duplicitous filings. For example, they didn't want people to know that plutonium and uranium were the two main radioactive elements that they were focused on so that I believe Harold Urey may have been sent to promote others.

3:10:38Eric Weinstein:They didn't want people realizing that it was as easy as it turned out to be. So there was a lot of disinformation scientifically because you had to explain why you have all of this focus on chain reactions and then suddenly interest just stops. okay so my claim is that if you believe that los alamos exists and if you believe that the rad lab exists the radiation laboratory at mit and you believe a bunch of these things it is not hard oh and then you believe like dummy companies and shell companies like Southern Air Transport or Air America, you know?

3:11:22Eric Weinstein:That's not the problem. The secret squirrels in Washington, D.C. don't want smart Americans turning this into a parlor game. So they've decided that, okay, we're going to spread one idea, which is that everybody who speculates about the secret world is a loser. There's only one reason to speculate about the secret world, is that you're fucking stupid. Right. And I really despise this. So what I said was entirely responsible. If you were trying to call the National Security Agency, no such agency back in the day, that would be bad because I would say, tell me where number theorists go who don't get academic jobs and let's map the zip codes.

3:12:08Eric Weinstein:oh, look, there's this little cluster. I don't know, Maryland or Delaware or wherever it is. And you'd find Fort Meade. Okay, well, there's a cluster of Renaissance technologies. Yes. So are you actually, I'm not telling you what's in it or not. I'm telling you, if somebody told me tomorrow there is a Manhattan 3.0, and it's about gravity and UAPs and post-Einsteinian engineering, where is its brain trust with 95 confidence i would tell you it's renaissance technologies on the other hand if you asked is there such a program i don't know that i don't know that my confidence would be so high if there is a secret program i'm pretty sure it's renaissance technologies some percentage times 95 or something well that's the thing it's likely it might be it might well not be but you know if you asked me um hey tell me what are fineman beta uh john von neumann doing at a boarding school at a boys school in the new mexico uh wilderness i'd say that's a really strange place to find those guys it's an odd concentration of the country's top physicists Oh, well, they're investing in secondary education for young men because they have self-image issues.

3:13:36Eric Weinstein:Oh, okay. Exactly. Well, you also, you know, you've noted that, or this isn't even something you've noted. This is something, you know, in the age of disclosure or, and by the way, this movie came out and you have DNI level people. You have James Clapper, you have Brennan. Wait, wait, wait, one second. I just want to say this thing. Yeah. I don't want to speculate against Renaissance technologies if they're just really good traders. In other words, I'm not trying to bring darkness to their door, but if we're going to play this cat and mouse game about what's true and what's real, and I'll just get very, very pointed about it.

3:14:19Do not mess with your expert class. Right.

3:14:24Eric Weinstein:The current strategy of dealing with the expert class who's not read in to whatever this is, is to just pretend that we're all incapable thinkers, that we've got some personal problem that we're working at. I want to terminate that program with extreme prejudice. You do not go after your expert class because you were dumb enough not to read them in, and then they figured out something of what you were doing yeah i don't know i don't know the specifics but i'm not i'm not stupid well the other issue with the way things have gone if we take eric davis at face value on there being no physicists in this vital secret core program how did you react to that jesse let me turn it around i it's crazy i mean it's it's um it's outrageous it's uh if that is the case it's a it's extremely irresponsible and it's not being run well at all.

3:15:24It makes no sense. Why would you be operating within a boundary that has been set? Historically, you have, you know, every century or two centuries, you have an overturning of our physical model of reality. And if you're telling me that you were getting slag, discs, you know, whatever it is, material that you were saying, you know, with 100 % confidence is not ours because it's been atomically bonded or has isotope ratios with heavy elements or any of the stuff that we're hearing before Congress, a lot of these guys saying. And then you were saying, but we're operating within the bounds of the constraints that we've set on ourselves in this century.

3:16:08Eric Weinstein:No make good to sense though. It makes no sense. It's absurd. I'm following my contract. It's like, this is nonsense. No, no, no. And everybody repeats this as if, as if they're, I mean, it's like if you gave the excuse, well, no, because it's Wednesday every week and everybody said that you sort of get a nerd to it, but then you realize, yes, there's a Wednesday of every week that had nothing to do with anything. You have to be highly disagreeable to basically say, you know, Eric, what you just said, no, no, no offense makes no sense at all. And what's so weird about it is I am cynical. I think, I think national security runs the day on all this stuff.

3:16:46And so once something makes sense from a national security standpoint, it just happens. And so if this were this grave national security issue where you think you might be able to do anything with any of this material, obviously you'd put your best and brightest on it. Obviously the stove piping of it would be an immediate, urgent issue that you would figure out.

3:17:11Eric Weinstein:Or you'd put the best and the brightest on top of the stovepipe system, which is what we did at Los Alamos. almost the white badges. Look, man, we have cowboys still. It's not tracing physics. Yeah. You're, you're castrating the people who can do this work. Well, that's, that's the other, you know, thing, which I think is even worse than the program being dysfunctional is you have this narrative of in UFO world of, you know, restricted data. and all of this stuff getting relegated to, you know, your Lockheeds and Northropes and aerospace contractors, because if they retrieve a thing, it's born secret under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

3:17:57And this is, you know, it's sort of DOE jurisdiction, right? Then you end up with, you know, 1980s, 1990s world where, you know, not only is that, you know, Whatever program is going on there seems to be sort of inert and neutered and not particularly impressive, all the stuff we're talking about right now. But you end up in a world where DOE security is so lax that Epstein can move to Zorro Ranch with the explicit intent of being near retired Los Alamos physicists so he can gain knowledge. You saw that clip I broke out.

3:18:41Eric Weinstein:It's insane. I broke it out for a reason. Nobody around me, they're going right through that clip. So why did I buy a ranch in New Mexico in 1993? So that gives you some sense. So I would have funded it in 1990. Los Alamos, which was the high energy lab up in New Mexico, was losing all its scientists. Los Alamos was where Oppenheimer and where a lot of the nuclear weapons for the bomb. That's when the Manhattan Project. Manhattan Project was at Los Alamos and you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that? Yes, because the scientists were going to be, they cut the funding for high energy physics.

3:19:21Eric Weinstein:Look, I'm just going to be more forthcoming. I have had a thankless job of saying the strength theorists are horrible, get them more money. People wonder, it doesn't make any sense. And now I'm going to spell it out because Epstein said the thing that I was trying to I was trying to be Straussian about it and sort of speak so that it's not evident. He was listening. At the end of the Cold War, you fucked over your physicists. Who thought this up? How dumb are you? How dumb is the United States of America? I just don't grasp it. On October 30th, 1993, President Clinton signed into law the death blow to the superconducting supercollider.

3:20:10Eric Weinstein:You have all of these deadly ninjas running around. Tell me something. Who were the first people the Israelis killed in Iran when they went in? Nuclear scientists? Yeah, physicists. The Iranian Leon Ledermans. Yeah. Now, I was not happy about that. You know, my feeling is don't shoot us with the piano players. But the Israelis made a decision that the first thing you do is kill your scientists. The thing here is, if you look at the scientists, they look like a joke. They're playing around with toy models, lying about all the progress they're making. And my claim is, is that until you pay these people, until you stop making them afraid, until you remove your hands from around their throats with their grants and their respectability, you're not going to get any physics so the alternate interpretation of this i hate to say it is that somebody soft sunsetted the world's most vital intellectual community which is frontier theoretical physicists and basically these people are now kind of almost buffoonish the epstein thing is a giant tangle and i'm just gonna say more because i said it before these last this last tranche.

3:21:30Eric Weinstein:Epstein was running many different programs. It wasn't even Epstein probably running it. So call the name of the organization or the project or whatever you want to call it, Jeffrey Epstein. But that does not mean that it was Jeffrey Epstein. He was not a policymaker. I don't know who he was. And one of the things about responsible conspiracy theorizing is that you don't constantly answer the question, well, if not X, then what? Why? No, I don't know. get used to I don't know there's a lot of I don't know in the story I don't think he was running the Jeffrey Epstein special access project or whatever it was if it was in the US government it would be a special access clearly yeah somebody was running that thing they hired the wrong actor because he wasn't that great of a friend end many different things were going through it at the same time so that plane of his is not the Lolita Express.

3:22:30Eric Weinstein:It's the plane that belonged to the project. And it ferried different people for different purposes. And that island is not Pedophile Island. That island may have had a tremendous amount of pedophilia and horrific things going on, but it's simply a container for whatever was going on through this project. So now you have the question about to what extent were the scientists implicated? To what extent was Jeffrey Epstein doing one thing, saying he was doing another. So let me...

3:23:05Eric Weinstein:The Department of Energy has counterintelligence assets and directives. You're not supposed to let a super rich guy with no ostensible means of achieving his fortune buy an enormous ranch, a stone's throw from los alamos with the intention of talking to high energy and weapons physicists at the end of the cold war as they lose their funding who blew this and and who blew the fact that in the entire released information this is the first thing i i found you know i was looking for this, which is the guy set up listening posts. He had another listening post called One Brattle Square. Where is that?

3:23:58Eric Weinstein:It's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138. So let me explain. Let me spell this out for the kids at home.

3:24:11Eric Weinstein:The analog of Los Alamos is the Harvard Math Department. The analog of nuclear and theoretical physics and high-energy physics is number theory. The benefits of knowing about this, in New Mexico, it's weapons. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, it might be cryptography. In New Mexico, you work with Murray Gelman. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, you work with Martin Nowak. Your base of operations in New Mexico is called Zorro Ranch. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's called Office 610 at One Brattle Square.

3:25:08I have no idea what we just did.

3:25:11Eric Weinstein:but whoever is supposed to be smart enough to protect our crown jewels has to recognize that just because the thinking is is that he was going to make a baby manufacturing facility at zorro ranch and that he was doing evolutionary dynamics at harvard i see no reason to think that those aren't cover stories. Well, what you just articulated, I think only a specific milieu of people could even strategize for, like clearly Epstein himself wasn't making that calculation. Listen to what Bannon asked Epstein. He said, so wait a minute, you bought this ranch and you founded the Santa Fe Institute? Yeah, around 1993.

3:26:00Eric Weinstein:Okay, who founded the Santa Fe Institute? Not Jeffrey Epstein. What year was it founded? 1984? Then he says, Murray Gell-Mann, at the time that he founded, that Jeffrey Epstein founded the Santa Fe Institute, founded fund, I'm not sure. He did give money, but he's not behind the Santa Fe Institute. He says, Murray Gell-Mann was working out the word for quarks around then. Quarks were named much, much earlier. He has no idea what he's talking about. Right, so there's some telephone game at play. Yeah, and then he says, you know, quarks had a certain, they had color, they had flavor, they had a charm.

3:26:44Eric Weinstein:He says, nobody knows what these things mean. Okay, yes, SU3 flavor was a failed scheme for lumping the up, down, and strange quarks into a multiplet in complex three-dimensional space. charm and strange are the names of second generation

3:27:10Eric Weinstein:quarks qcd we very well understand what a lot of it means because in part it has this property of asymptotic uh freedom so that it becomes a free theory it's one of the it's the only theory we have that's physical that extrapolates all the way to the plank level this guy had no idea what he's talking about. He didn't have an idea what he was talking about in currency trading. And yet he knew to infiltrate Harvard's math department. Or somebody did. That's what I'm saying. Somebody behind him knew that, clearly, because what you just articulated about particle theory and number theory and those two places.

3:27:51Eric Weinstein:But nobody's thinking number theory because the emphasis is on the program on evolutionary dynamics. Martin Nowak doesn't know anything about number theory. My claim is, is that who started the program in evolutionary dynamics? There's a different guy named Dick Gross, who's a number theorist. And Harvard references an imaginative proposal by Benedict Gross and Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, so his initial contact was a number theorist. How interesting. So strange. And then he's, you know, he's funding Joyito and this, you know, Bitcoin initiative. Well, that's about crypto. I'm just saying, look, I don't know what happened,

3:28:45but I hate saying it this way.

3:28:47Eric Weinstein:Are there no smart people? Like a hundred of my friends in mathematics and physics should be on this thing. And they've got everyone scared that to utter the words that are obvious to any one of us. Like, why were all of these super smart people hanging on Jeffrey Epstein's every word? So weird. Well, no, it's not weird. have you ever noticed how interesting astrology becomes when it's explained to you by a woman in a really low-cut dress right suddenly it's like virgo i never knew that wow oh retrograde that makes everything make sense when when rich people around you has much the same effect.

3:29:36People blow smoke up rich people's backsides all the time.

3:29:43Eric Weinstein:That is so insightful. That's what all these people were doing. We were all starved for funding because the Vannevar Bush arrangement has been welched upon. And so you've got all of these starving ninjas who have skills that are pretty advanced and dangerous fawning over this crazy guy because he's got an island and a jet. Where do you think, moving on to higher ground, where do you think all this UFO stuff goes? Because you have more official disclosures at a very high level going on than ever. You have rumors of Trump saying things. You hear smatterings of people, at least peripheral to the admin, pretty interested in the issue.

3:30:36Donald Trump Jr. interviewed Ross Coulthart last year, you know, who's a UFO investigator journalist.

3:30:43Eric Weinstein:Do you remember how Trump wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein files? Yep. You could forgive me for wondering what happened to that zeal. Do you think the same thing will apply to secret physics UFOs? This is what people don't understand about Washington, D.C. You have all sorts of people who don't understand what Washington, D.C. is or how it works, who outside of the Beltway form beliefs about what they're going to do once they get to Washington. And they change almost instantly. Well, it's like the Drain the Swamp guy, turns out, met his wife, Drew Epstein. You know, it's this thing where I think in that world, everyone got tagged.

3:31:33And so maybe this is the same thing that goes on with the UFO stuff. I don't know. But like. There's something that will cause you not to want to reveal things. Right. Like it's somehow Trump gets implicated in the UFO thing in some weird way. Or it's insanely lucrative to control instead of to disclose.

3:31:53Eric Weinstein:Sure. It could be that. Yeah. Or maybe the idea is that whatever this information is, assume it's the cover story for a weapon system that is easy to create and completely dangerous. I keep giving the example of a thing that doesn't exist. The thing that doesn't exist is an energy beam that can be focused on the opposite side of the planet at any particular latitude and longitude that you give it. So you point a mythological gun into the ground in a particular direction. You calculate the effect of the Earth on the beam, and then you vaporize it. You have somebody's cell phone coordinates, suddenly that person is no more.

3:32:41This is like a scalar weapon in the ufology.

3:32:44Eric Weinstein:I'm not going to talk garbage stuff. I'm just going to say, imagine that this existed, right? So you know that you can transmit energy and hurt something, and you know that you can transmit neutrinos through an entire planet, and they'll go through. You just don't know how to recombine neutrinos on the other side, right? So, you know, it's theoretically, I don't want to get into it, just trying to say, imagine you have some imagination. You say, if I can have a beam of neutrinos because I could direct a charged particle and then I get a decay and that gives me the momentum in this particular direction.

3:33:16Eric Weinstein:Now, can I refocus the neutrinos and get them to convert on the other side? Is there any way to induce that? That's a theoretical idea. I don't see any way of doing it. But what if you had such a weapon and it was easy? now you'd say okay are you telling me that everyone on earth can build their own and just point it and vaporize stuff right that'd be terrifying what if you could unhook the uh the true vacuum of the of the higgs field and get some kind of vacuum decay like we don't know whether hidden in physics our power is so vast that anybody who sees what could happen keeps their mouth shut

3:34:05Eric Weinstein:we just don't know now the one thing that i believe and again you guys don't have to to believe it but i believe that if geometric unity is as rich as i say it doesn't even have to be correct. It just has to be rich. It is inconceivable to me that there is no interest in it from the very people who funded my education. The Office of Naval Research funded my graduate education, and the National Science Foundation funded my postdoctoral position. I believe I was put on a Department of Energy grant, which is very unusual for a mathematician because Isidore Singer had one. None of those people have any interest whatsoever in what I'm saying, which is fascinating because even if it's wrong, I wouldn't take the chance.

3:35:02Eric Weinstein:It's a studied level of disinterest that doesn't really add up. Like I can tell you lots of people whose theories are almost certainly wrong. If I were the government, I would want to keep tabs on every last one of the competent people. Doesn't matter whether they're wrong. They're just dangerous. What if they're right? Do you have a mental model on why this stuff is coming out more now? Post-2017, this New York Times article. Well, things are breaking. There was a regime that is breaking. Like, I was thinking about posting an interview between Brian Greene and Ed Witten that was done recently, without editorial.

3:35:44Eric Weinstein:Just to indicate how crazy the level of string theorist madness is, because it's, you know, this phrase in Latin, res ipsa loquit, or the thing speaks for itself. I don't have to throw potshots at it. the claim that, you know, string theory is about to figure it all out is a joke in and of itself. So imagine that that was the cock blocking mechanism to keep people from doing, you know, dangerous physics work, as per Andreessen and Horowitz. It's expiring.

3:36:26Eric Weinstein:and i think that a lot of things are happening right now because the old order that was set up to manage all this is two generations three generations out from the architects we have these genius administrators like vannevar bush and they set up these structures and the structures work pretty well but then they didn't pass the knowledge of what the structures were and how all these tacit understandings and cryptic arrangements worked so that the modern people who've inherited the structures basically don't even understand what they're for. You know, I talked to the provost of a UC university, major research university.

3:37:05Eric Weinstein:He had no idea how the laws had been changed to secretly benefit universities for doing particular kinds of work. So very often what happens is that the architects die and they leave a zombie. We seem to be in a zombie era. It's a little cargo cult, and then you probably have people at the top freaking out, saying we need to get in front of this and actually reorganize as our multipolar nuclear world gets more and more hot. But how strange that you can't talk to your own top people. Yeah, it's weird. And as it pertains to Legacy Program, the people at the top panicking might also be disappearing such that awareness of the problem could be dying.

3:37:52Well, I'm explaining modern UFO disclosure through this idea of, you know, national security that we would we would actually try to get this stuff out. But yeah, it is this weird cloak and dagger, tongue in cheek sort of like it's not over at all. It's still like like even, you know, you mentioned this sort of, you know, theoretical directed energy weapon where you could take anybody out remotely in this perfectly precise way across the world. I don't know if you caught this part of the Age of Disclosure. Eric Davis says in 1989, we should have brought this up with him, 1989, the Soviets engaged in a UFO crash retrieval where they were able to derive a directed energy weapon from this particular craft.

3:38:38And that's a fascinating claim, right? Like, I don't know what to make of that. You know, how do you know that? A. B. So you are saying some of this stuff is functional and it works its way into weapons that we now know, you know, the Department of War are scaling up publicly. And so like this whole idea that we haven't made any progress is actually kind of bogus, but it's being used in these extremely dystopian ways. okay but let me just ask how do we reconcile the fact that all three of us have talked to so many

3:39:14Eric Weinstein:people which can't all be lying about what they're saying it's just i see no world in which that's possible and nobody has any firsthand incontrovertible stuff that would make this a done deal. It does weirdly feel like the Epstein thing. You know, how is it that there is? Either a lot of people are implicated that are publicly appearing around this topic who are talking about it and they're implicated, but they don't want to say they're implicated. Or the tip of the iceberg doesn't look like the rest of the iceberg and intentional vagueness is being used with words like crash retrieval and biologics.

3:39:58And I don't err on that side of things, given how just how high up the people are saying this stuff, how overwhelming the circumstantial evidence seems. It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. But you have to think probabilistically. And I, you know, I always try to, you know, put a healthy check on people who are hardcore in UFO world who are sure about discrete, you know, org charts in the reverse engineering problem. How can you be sure of anything? You know, I think you have to think probabilistically about all this stuff. This is not the most imaginative solution, but another alternative to reconcile that fact is that some of them are lying, and they are firsthand.

3:40:37Eric Weinstein:Well, that's what I was just saying. Because that's the red line, maybe. I think they're telling stories that are more than one about what could be going on so that we don't get committed to one. Yeah, excellent idea. So I think the taking everything at face value story is that there is this decades-long UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. It probably existed prior to 1933, but it became formally instantiated in the 33 Magenta crash in Italy. This is all hypothetical. In the Magenta crash in Italy, and then that was transferred to the U.S. under FDR. You had Roswell in 47. You had Trinity in 48.

3:41:20You have these sort of sequential nuclear related UFO crashes. You have the Office of Global Access under the CIA in the early 2000s under Doug Wolf doing rapid response, you know, retrievals all over the world. and this kind of convoluted org chart structure where the Lockheeds and Northrop's are the tip of the, kind of the fingertips and CIA, science and technology and DOE and DOD are kind of at the top. And so you could have that entire narrative and just take that at face value. I think another possibility would be something like aerial phenomena show up around nuclear weapons and energy grids.

3:42:13And that is this clear pattern. It's global. It's ubiquitous. It exists in the U.S., but it also exists totally outside the U.S. those aerial phenomena also seem to be provoked by weird high energy physics experiments so lasers high energy lasers you know high voltage experimentation particle accelerators things of that nature seem to attract this weird aerial phenomena we don't really know what the aerial phenomena is we actually have some prosaic, you know, human terrestrial physics breakthroughs that have led to novel propulsion modalities from some of these kind of, you know, topological physics anomalies that we figured out mid-century.

3:42:59And we actually do have propulsion based on them. So we have, you know, real craft that seem like they fly like UFOs, but we're running this tech protection thing by intentionally conflating this aerial phenomena that is very, you know, bizarre and worthy of scientific inquiry, but we just don't understand. We are conflating that with just this, you know, kind of more exotic black, you know, not reverse engineering program, but a craft program that is human craft. So that would be number two. And then number three is like mick west territory or something where it's like you know there is no aerial phenomena around nuclear sites you know there are no anomalies there all the topological physics you know byfield brown ning lee stuff is all bs uh you know all you know conventional physics models you know are going to run the world for forever and um you know this is all a psyop like it's literally all like, you know, this crazy sort of, you know, government lunacy thing.

3:44:06I don't know. Would you guys say there's an option four or five that you'd like to add?

3:44:10Eric Weinstein:Hard to say. So one possibility is let's imagine, let's imagine that the atomic weapons were not developed during war, but during peacetime inside of a national lab. there'd be a question about should we reveal that this is possible right there would be a huge debate as to how to how to do work on this thing

3:44:42Eric Weinstein:um and whether we should reveal it to the world or should reserve it as a zero day exploit so that would be option four i guess your taxonomy Is that option agnostic of where the technology came from? Well, so imagine, for example, that the government figured out something in physics that isn't the whole thing. But it's powerful enough to do one or two things that haven't been done before, and we wanted that in reserve. You can imagine that the entire system would say, would you please stop digging? We want to keep the zero-day exploit. It's a matter of national security. Don't make us reveal this.

3:45:25That thing, though, would need to be neatly adjacent to UFO crash retrievals. They would need to intersect. I don't want to talk about crash retrievals until I've been to one. But you know what I'm saying? No, I don't know what a crash retrieval is. What I'm saying is if that's being used as passage material for some other secret weapons program, the two probably need to surface level lookalike somewhat for that to be an effective cover so that's that's the thing right

3:45:56Eric Weinstein:so you remember when we attacked iran we sent one squadron of b2 bombers in one direction one another that was my principle an example of whenever we do something cool we do something fake. So the invasion of the Operation Overlord and D-Day in the beaches of Normandy was cool. And Operation Bodyguard and Fortitude were fake because we never actually invaded Norway, as we said we were going to do.

3:46:27Eric Weinstein:This could be the fake program to something super cool. and another aspect of this if we're going to just talk about crazy stupid theories is there's a strategy with i think like malarial mosquitoes or where you release a bunch of sterilized males into the world and sterilized males effectively mate with the females but leave no offspring and it's a way of controlling mosquitoes one possibility is that one of the reasons we kicked all of the americans out of our physics programs and science programs is that we wanted to sterilize the world so that it didn't catch up to us what we'd already done it's a crazy idea but why else should you be you know having 27 of your phds granted to chinese nationals in sensitive areas just doesn't make any sense so one possibility is that we use string theory to sterilize India.

3:47:31Eric Weinstein:Let's say there are lots of Indian string theorists and they're not making any progress and they're extremely arrogant about string theory. You know, these are crazy ideas. Another possibility is somebody once said to me, or somebody said to me relatively recently, you know, Eric, you don't need to rely on the government. You can just go up and look for yourself. The key idea being that you just need to get adjacent to sensitive places and you'll see these things everywhere like this isn't that big of a deal they're always there well that's what i always find so frustrating is for the you know the mc west option the mc west scenario the super skeptic thing you spend like a few days on this or literally like you probably walk around one of these sites or something you go to the bar near one of them, something's going on.

3:48:24The amount of smoke without fire is insane.

3:48:28Eric Weinstein:No, no, no. The question is, when you see smoke at this level, the question is, what is the nature of the fire? There are different fires. But there is a fire. Or there's a smoke machine. Or there's a smoke machine. Right, right. Like, in other words. Or there's a really good spoofing technology that we're all not aware of or something like that. Well, exactly. And so, you know, my feeling, unfortunately, is that the UFO world is so polluted that I just don't want to deal with it at all.

3:48:59Look, I believe we can leave.

3:49:03Eric Weinstein:And if you believe you can leave, you have to imagine that you're being visited.

3:49:11Eric Weinstein:So it makes sense for me that I'm being visited. I can't understand why they keep interacting with governments and nobody can get good footage and we don't have more. But on the other hand, I would have to say that the Epstein story was pretty contained. And you were seen as a little kind of crazy if you created a worldview out of the Epstein, like the Pizzagate people seemed ridiculous four or five years ago? No, no, no, they didn't.

3:49:50Eric Weinstein:pizzagate looked to me like an amalgam something real something fake like for example the particular pizza parlor and the guy who shot up the roof and all that you know it was perfect you don't be like the guy who brings a gun into a pizza parlor and shoots the roof thinking that he's tracking pedophiles also what does it really mean pedophile like do do we even think about this is there such a clamoring to do horrible things to children and these people are natural leaders of the world well now we're getting into weird territory because not only was pedophilia which alone is just disgusting, disgust in the context of Epstein, but like weird, like conditioning rituals and things to like dissociate.

3:50:46This isn't weird at all. This is normal. You see,

3:50:52Eric Weinstein:it used to be that, uh, homosexuality could play the role of pedophilia. That two gay guys would be so terrified of having their secret revealed that they'd be willing to do almost anything to avoid that revelation. It's a stain that can be used, weaponized. Well, but I would say utilized. Like hazing rituals, it's easy to see them as brutal, but that's not the function they serve. It's like people don't understand what the mob is. the mob is a contract enforcement service for enterprises that cannot use the courts it's not violent because it's recreationally violent it's not violent because these people love violence the idea is you have to enforce a drug contract or a loan sharking contract you know or a gambling some somebody has to pay up so the notion would be pedophilia was used as an enforcement system pedophilia is trust right and nobody wants to say that but that's what i think it is you force people in that circle to commit these crimes and then how do i know how do i know i can trust person a it's always a question do we come from the same ethnic group that's not trust that's black that's low trust no it's blackmail no it's consequence it's shared consequence And the key point is shared consequence is a resource and ritual and all of these things are used to direct that resource.

3:52:31Eric Weinstein:What you're seeing in the Epstein world is a high trust network. I think it's, yeah, I guess it's an enforcement network. It's like a, you know, made man mafia system sort of thing. There's an email from the girlfriend that alleges that he got in deeper than he meant to. He was told to do this. He didn't really mean any of it. It just came out in the latest trench. And it speaks to this notion of an enforcement campaign and enforcement infrastructure but my claim is is that in general most of us are unfamiliar with how effective silent systems work if you think about the valachi papers and you know how the mob lost omerta and the innovation of the rico acts and all that kind of stuff that was about i think that the rule was that you killed every informant up to second cousins Jesus Christ.

3:53:30Eric Weinstein:Yeah, like completely over the top and insane. But that's how it worked. And what was the way that these people referred to each other as men of honor? Honor is the proxy system. Of course I'm going to honor you and you're going to honor me because it's too dangerous. It's too dangerous to contemplate anything else. My guess is that right now there's no one that can be hung out to dry because the first person who gets hung out to dry. You saw Bill Clinton saying, of course, I'd love to talk to Congress. Bring them on. It's crazy. Well, why is that? I don't think he wants to talk to Congress. What I think he wants to do is to say, if you make me the fall guy, think about what you're saying.

3:54:13Eric Weinstein:It's a little shot across the bow. I think Trump's dump of these documents was 3 million shots across the bow. Yeah, I think so too. Also, we should note, this was probably the sanitized version of these documents. No, no, no. This isn't even the sanitized version of these documents. They've also set up the idea of, okay, well, these 3 million of the last year are getting ever good, but the other 3 million. So then what is everybody going to do? They're going to chant, we want the other 3 million. Okay, okay, fine. Fine. We'll give you the last of them. And you just fell into the trap. Who said there were 6 million documents?

3:54:52right tell me something if this guy ran a hedge fund that was a multi-billion dollar currency

3:54:59Eric Weinstein:trading hedge fund how many documents does a hedge fund throw off just due to compliance right nobody's making any sense at all what you're seeing is a bunch of deeply grooved people not thinking for themselves and they're happy to repeat the heterodox version of the script that they're handed. But it's not the heterodox who are writing that. It's really crazy. Well, I'm officially demoralized and depressed. Don't do that, Jesse. No, I appreciate, I mean, sometimes, you know, the truth sucks and you're a very incisive thinker and you have a way of elucidating things. Sometimes they're dark truths and realities that others don't.

3:55:50So I really appreciate your brain. And can we just finish it positively? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. How do we do that?

3:55:58Eric Weinstein:Well, if you don't mind, imagine that we threw off this UFO yoke and imagine that we just pushed on one, one particular place, which is Eric Davis saying, we have things that defy the laws of physics and no physicists. Imagine that the UFO community got really smart instead of doing what it always does and said, we're going to push on this one thing. How can you be threatened by craft that do not obey the laws of physics and make sure that the one type of person who could possibly help with this is to be found nowhere on the scene? right? So the opportunity is that if Tulsi Gabbard or J.D. Vance or any one of these people sees this and says, I could change that tomorrow.

3:56:51Eric Weinstein:I could snap my fingers and get an allocation of several million dollars. I could get a few theoretical physicists. It would change absolutely everything because one of the top theories has to be that the reason you can't have a theoretical physicists on this is that there are no graph that defy the laws of physics. I hope they put that to the test because Eric Davis is actually on record as part of James Fox's last movie saying, if you give me blanket immunity, I will say everything I know. And so I hope that they are able to just, you know, dress these people down nicely. We could, in a better world that we're not that far from, push to have the one group of people who could crack this case for us, the detectives of our choice, insert it.

3:57:41Eric Weinstein:They were trained on our dollars. They're supported on our dollars. We have an arrangement with them. It's basically like not calling Delta Force when you've got a hostage rescue situation. Can I up the ante? Yeah. An interdisciplinary symposium where maybe the physicists are at the top. they're hanging out, but you also might have some other people. Don't bring in the mushrooms and the consciousness. Let's just do theoretical physics and leave the rest for Burning Man. Fair enough. Well, to be continued, that's its whole other debate we can have or whatever, but I agree with the Burning Man issue.

3:58:19Okay. Well, thank you, Eric. This was awesome. Jack, appreciate you. It's a lot of fun. I think this is going to be a historic episode.

3:58:27Eric Weinstein:Thanks, Jets. All right. Cool.

3:58:58Oh, oh, oh, oh.