#747 - Eric Weinstein - The Collapse Of Harvard, Truth & Independent Thought (4K) - Modern Wisdom: Summary & Transcript

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Podcast Notes: Modern Wisdom Episode #747 - Eric Weinstein - The Collapse Of Harvard, Truth & Independent Thought (4K)

Episode Overview In this episode, Chris Williamson interviews Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and economist, discussing various pressing topics including the state of Harvard, the stagnation of physics, the implications of increasing information overload, and societal narratives surrounding truth and independent thought.

Key Themes and Discussions The State of Harvard

Crisis in Academia: Weinstein notes a significant decline in Harvard's standing and how it is viewed by its own students.
Narrative-Driven Academics: He criticizes the way Harvard manipulates narratives to maintain prestige, drawing parallels with the media landscape, particularly the New York Times.
Insider System: Weinstein discusses the opaque processes within Harvard that often dictate who succeeds and who fails, highlighting a mix of brilliance and power at play.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): He argues that DEI policies are compromising academic rigor and integrity, creating a culture of mediocrity.

The World of Physics

Stagnation in Progress: Weinstein expresses concern that physics has not made meaningful progress in decades, attributing this to the dominance of narrative-driven approaches over empirical evidence.
String Theory Critique: The discussion touches on string theory as an area where significant investment has yielded little progress, emphasizing the need for new paradigms in physics.
Elitism and Intolerance: Weinstein suggests that academia must return to being elitist in terms of scholarship to thrive.

Societal Issues

Fear of Speaking Truth: There is a pervasive fear within society that prevents open discourse, often leading to a chilling effect on sincere expression.
Cultural Reflection: The conversation reflects on how societal norms and expectations shape individual identities, particularly in the context of changing views on gender and sexuality.
Compassion and Authenticity: Weinstein describes "toxic compassion," suggesting that well-meaning efforts to protect certain groups can lead to harm and neglect of others.

Predictions and Future Considerations

2024 Election Speculation: Weinstein shares thoughts on the political landscape as the 2024 elections approach, discussing potential candidates and the implications of their policies.
Crisis of Meaning: He emphasizes the need for society to regain purpose and direction, particularly in the face of overwhelming information and confusion.

Key Takeaways

Importance of Truth: The necessity of independent thought and truth-telling in academia and society is crucial for progress.
Balance in DEI: While inclusivity is important, it should not come at the expense of academic rigor and excellence.
Historical Reflection: Learning from historical examples, such as Churchill's leadership, can provide insights into current challenges and inspire future actions.
Human Experience Complexity: The conversation underscores the intricacies of human identity and societal roles, advocating for compassion while recognizing the need for boundaries and clarity.

Notable Quotes

"We're fighting the last war because we got male homosexuality wrong."
"You can't afford to lose your universities, your media, your political parties."
"It’s about managing reality."

Conclusion This episode of *Modern Wisdom* presents a thought-provoking dialogue with Eric Weinstein, addressing crucial issues that resonate within academia, societal narratives, and the broader context of human understanding and progress. The emphasis on truth, rigor, and the complexities of identity highlights the ongoing challenges faced in a rapidly changing world.

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Transcript

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0:00You got your PhD from Harvard. How do you feel given the most recent fallout? These open questions are incredible.

0:15It's amazing. It's amazing that it came to this. As a person I know studying at Harvard said, I wonder if we are the last generation who will continue to see Harvard as this shining city on a hill. And that's somebody who's there now. I think it's a disgrace and we can't talk about it, which is the fascinating part that we are effectively losing our society because we're afraid to say certain things because we're being made afraid to say certain things. What do you mean? Well, okay, so it's a Harvard alum, you get the Harvard magazine, and this thing is incredible because it's just always, Harvard people promoting other Harvard people in this sort of PR, the Nepotism magazine.

1:12Yeah, PR Fest. And I think I remember that the article introducing Claudine Gay was entitled a scholar's scholar. And I knew from the get -go that this was not going to go well because you know I don't think people understand what Harvard is and how it functions and why it's different. Harvard is really the fusion of two separate institutions. One is about brilliance, and one is about power. So you can think about this as the sharpest minds and the sharpest elbows. And the sharp mind crowd gets tons of resources because the sharp elbow crowd makes sure that power is used to perpetuate Harvard's place of privilege.

2:12and the sharp mind crowd contributes prestige to the sharp elbow crowd. And so by virtue of the fact that you can't deconflate the sharp minds and the sharp elbows, Harvard continues to have this very special place. Now what is this special place? Why isn't it just a university like any other? I think sort of two or three principal reasons. One of which is that Harvard is sort of an extension of the US government, the government department, which is sort of Harvard's version of Polly Psi, is kind of an extension of the State Department at times. The economics department ends up setting economic policy in many ways for the United States.

3:00And above all, there is this concept that in every field, there's usually one institution that sets the narrative. So for example, in journalism, the New York Times is different than all other newspapers and news organs because of its focus on what we sometimes hear of as narrative driven journalism. Now, people now talk a lot more about narrative. But 15 years ago, I don't think this was common knowledge that the editorial room at the New York Times is a place where people thought about what the long arcs of stories were. And you figured out what the arc of the story was before the facts came in.

3:43So for example, Hillary is inevitable. Was a long arc in narrative -driven journalism. It wasn't true, But all the information that came in when Hillary was running against Donald Trump was fed through this prism of the inevitability of Hillary Clinton. In the same way Harvard practices narrative driven academics. It tells you what is happening, what the grand arcs are, and those just like the 2016 election are very often untrue. And so that's a way in which Harvard serves power. It brings people in who are brilliant, and then it takes the ones of those who are willing to play ball with the engines of power, and it enters into the storytelling mode in which Harvard sets the tone for everyone.

4:46So when you lose Harvard, it's very important and very different. The last thing that I would say that really distinguishes Harvard is that Harvard, there's the open part of Harvard, the classrooms, and there's the closed part of Harvard that you can't see at all. And it's sort of a system of star chambers. And I don't think people who have not tangled with Harvard would comprehend how much of what Harvard gets done, it gets done behind closed doors because it can't be done in the open. But like, what do you mean? I'll give you a crazy example. I was not allowed to attend my own thesis defense.

5:33Now, you're not an academic by training. If you tell this to an academic, they don't even understand what you're saying. They think that you're making a joke or you must not have understood something or maybe you were sick that day and you had to zoom in or who knows what. But I don't mean that at all. I mean, when I tried to get my PhD, the Harvard math department instituted a rule that said you could not attend your own thesis defense. You could not determine who would present your thesis, your dissertation. So basically what happened is if you had an advisor, which almost everyone did, your advisor presented your thesis behind closed doors.

6:23Nobody's ever heard of this in the history of academics. With this how clothing gay got away with it? No, I don't know. Clodding gay was taken down for two different reasons. One reason she was taken down was for not having CRISPR statements about the uniformity of application of rules of codes of contact when it came to Jewish students. So it's one thing whether you have a free speech policy, or maybe you have a code of conduct where you say we can't tolerate certain kinds of speech, whatever that is. There's certainly a question about the differential application of that on behalf of different groups.

7:08So that was one of the ways that she got in control. The other way she got into trouble was the vulnerability of plagiarism in a weak academic record.

7:20And, you know, let me just say this early and you'll come, everyone will come to it late. plagiarism is the tip of the iceberg of attribution bullying, where effectively you have these people who determine who did what in the narrative driven storytelling that is academic. And what papers get cited, which papers don't, what discoveries are named for certain people is determined largely by a tiny number of institutions Harvard preeminent among them. And so Harvard just plays games, morning, noon and night, with writing stories that put Harvard at the center and particular individuals at the top whether or not those individuals have earned it or not.

8:11And what's hard for me is most people are now thinking, okay, Harvard is just full of it, but it isn't. It's half full of it and half of the best place on earth to do anything important. And though that tension is not what's not recognized. Now, power has to take a back seat to academics and to discovery and to brilliance. If this game is to be maintained, you can't constantly just exercise power and tell stories. So in my history with this university, I've tried to figure out why does it behave so differently than every other institution of research. Is DEI the boogeyman that everyone is worried about?

9:02You know, I'm... This is so hard to even get into it. Are universities one World War Two in large measure? I mean, if you need codes broken, if you need new weapons developed, you're supposed to have SEAL Team Six of the human mind that you can call on, and that's supposed to be MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Harvard. It's a very small number of super prestigious universities. Part of the problem is, if you think about, I don't have to say this exact, if you think about a university as a kin to an exotic car, a lot of people buy a McLaren or a Lamborghini or Ferrari because they like the styling status.

9:53But the soul of all of those cars is racing. Right? And the people who buy the cars for the racing sometimes are really annoyed by the fact that the cars are status symbols. And that's what a research university is to me. I'm interested in the racing and other people are interested because it's sort of what you do to show that you've got a $2 million bonus from your investment banking job. If you don't race it, I don't know what you're doing there. And I'd prefer that you'd leave. The purpose of a university is not teaching. Purpose of a great university is training and research. And we can't afford to lose that.

10:37I don't think people have any idea how important it is to be able to call on your own nations top academics when you need the truth. You need something done, you need help. And so whatever it is that is denaturing our universities that's turning this into a night club where the whole trick is to get past the bouncer for the cool kids, has to be stopped. But what does it say that the ex -president of Harvard is someone whose academic bonafidees to have found out to be plagiarized, largely. I'm trying to say, the balance between the sharp elbows and the sharp minds is wildly off. And why is it nobody wants to say what everybody is thinking, which is this person is not fit to be the president of Harvard University.

11:36And why is that because they're going to get called a name? This was made all about race. Oh What you can't tolerate scholarship of this quality from a black female You're starting I wasn't even questioning this before but now you're saying a scholar scholar me think that that's for test too much We'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute but first I need to tell you about element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning, your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is salt, acts, and your adrenal system. This is the best way to start the day.

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12:50That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. There was a quote from Howard Jacobson that said, I hope Claudeine Gay marks the start of people who know nothing losing their jobs.

13:14Look, we need to bring back exclusion. We're talking way too much of an inclusion. Inclusion and exclusion are two halves of a normal process. Clotting gay needed to be excluded from that office, not included. Now, if you told me that Condoleezza Rice was the president of Harvard, she's black, she's female, and I don't agree with her political. But I don't think many people would have a qualification issue with Condolee Sirice. Or let's say James Gates is a black man, a distinguished physicist. This has to do with people coming from weaker subjects, particularly activist subjects, subjects that didn't exist before the late 60s, early 70s when all of these things were created.

14:07You know, to an extent, when you had, I don't know if you recall the pictures of, what is it, will it straight haul at Cornell with the black students emerging with weapons. You know, there was a revolutionary fervor at the end of the 60s or at least 70s and you have people creating women's studies, you know, black studies, African American studies. And these departments were basically born of activism more than scholarship. I'm not saying no scholarship gets done there, but scholarship and activism are essentially fused. And many of us think activism is great. Just don't do it next to our physics and math and computer science and music departments.

14:54You know, if what you're really there to do is to ignore certain things and accentuate others and not search for the truth, that's not an ignoble pursuit. It's just that's not what scholarship is. scholarship is about understanding things and getting them right. And we've gone down a terrible turn. But just consider, I think your listeners might enjoy googling the string, cook something up to who ease him out. That was a phrase that was used internally in documents within Harvard when a Kenyan was ejected from the Harvard Economics Department back in the 60s. And what had really happened is that this guy had passed all of his exams.

15:54He was fully qualified. He was working on his dissertation to become a Harvard PhD in economics. And the university, I think, decided that it didn't like an African man sleeping with white women in America. And it got rid of him, even though he was in good standing. The only reason we know about that is that turned out to be Barack Obama's senior. So Harvard conspired 100 % with the State Department to destroy the career of Barack Obama's senior. And that's how Harvard worked. In the Star Chamber, it cooks. What does it do? It cooks things up. It cooks up stories. It cooks up attribution. It gives people credit for things that they didn't do first.

16:42It takes credit away from other people. I was there in the mid-'90s when it destroyed my wife's career through something a Star Chamber called the Harvard Jobs market meeting. And all the economists go into a closed room, they lock the door, and they say, who's got a good student? And my wife was the student of a Nobel award winner in economics, and she had done something which was to bring an entirely new kind of mathematics into economic theory to replace something called the marginal revolution, a new form of differential calculus called Gage Theory. And a guy named Dale Georgon said who recently died said, nope.

17:28So even though a Nobel -level economist was promoting her and saying this is great stuff, she should go anywhere in the country, a woman of color from the developing world.

17:41An old white guy just said, no. And in a second, her position in the world is reordered in the pile. And why were they doing this? Because they wanted to fix the CPI. And I don't mean fix as in curate, I mean fix as in fixing a baseball game. Because the CPI is used to transfer wealth. What's CPI? The consumer price index. And the reason it's important is that mostly what the government does after its military is entitlements social security payments, Medicare payments, and those are indexed to inflation and The way in which it takes in money is through taxes and those tax brackets are indexed to inflation So it's very funny everybody focuses on like central banking and the Fed But the Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains the statistic that transfers billions and billions of dollars and if the CPI is overstated, it pays out a lot of money and takes in very little money.

18:43And if you can get it to be understated, then you get to take in much more money. You don't have to pay old and sick people. And that's what the Harvard Department was doing. There's a single figure that mediates everything to get squeezed through. How funny. And so what we were doing as a collaboration was showing the right mathematical framework to calculate the CPI. But that would have allowed less fuckery. It would have allowed less, yeah, to use the technical terms. So, uh, but the point being that the Harvard Jobs market meeting inside of the Harvard economics department is a start chamber the way the immigration status of Obama's father was a star chamber as was the way in which my PhD was over and over again.

19:30Harvard closes its doors and it makes stuff up. This sounds unsalvageable as somebody. No, no, no. It sounds like we've got the people leading it have gotten in through some combination of diversity, equity, inclusion, nepotism, game playing, harsh elbows. It seems like the pictures higher to guy named Daniel S. Freed was one of the greatest mathematicians alive in my area. Dan and I might disagree about string theory. We can have scholarly disagreements, just head lunch with him in Austin, Texas. That guy's a scholar through and through. I can disagree with him. I can fight with him. I can have my differences.

20:11I would support him 100 % as a scholar to take over, you know, as a provost or dean if they were interested. There's no shortage of absolutely fantastic people at Harvard. But is that unable and willing to play the political games that are required, unless they're prepared to file their elbows down to a sharp point? Well, this is what Bill Ackman is doing, so confusing. I have the feeling, I don't know this guy at all. Don't have positive negative feelings. I thought we would have crossed paths with him at some point. You would think there are various people who I don't cross paths with for whatever reason.

20:45I don't even think we follow each other. Maybe I follow him, but I don't think he follows me.

20:54I think that the problem is that a lot of these people don't know how the research game works. They think about this in terms of the Harvard Business School, the Law School, the Undergraduate Alumni Network. They don't see the part of Harvard that actually produces the mystique, you know, the analog of the racing for the exotic car. And I worry that the right thing to do right now is to appoint a curmudgeonly Research -oriented person in a super rigorous field that doesn't even have to be stem like music is an incredibly rigorous field But what we need right now is rigor. We don't need another person from the social sciences at this moment We need somebody to reestablish that Harvard is an intolerant place that it has the highest possible standards It's unabashedly elitist.

21:46It's unabashedly American. And it cannot live with DEI. DEI is a parasitization of our best hopes and dreams. And we have to recognize that DEI has to be destroyed so that goals like diversity and getting the right people into the room are not sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity and lack of ethics. It's interesting that at places like Yale, they had made some changes to the ways that grades and diversity account for admissions, but they didn't get rid of legacy admissions. Which kind of tells you everything that you need to know about what's being protected? No, I don't think it does. Is this not another way to ensure that the people, just to ensure that power is held in the people who already have it.

22:45But very soon this thing isn't going to be worth very much. I don't think the people can. I think this is the same as looking at why Marvel are going downhill. Yeah. Same more. There are a lot of movies coming out at the moment. I think the most recent Star Wars director openly said, I enjoy making movies that make men feel uncomfortable. To John Stewart. Star Wars. Yeah. Maybe one of the most male dominated audience movies that I can think of. Well, yes, it's self -destructed. So what I'm trying to say is that you can say, we're going to keep things open for legacy admissions, right? But very soon, you're not going to want to be associated with.

23:29I mean, already Yale has mismanaged its research university for years. It made a very bad decision not to go hard on on sciences and STEM and Focused in my opinion too much on on softer fields You know, so what happens when Harvard is no longer that prestigious if people start laughing at Harvard What good is it going to be that you can get your kid in I don't disagree, but I think people are so out of touch The people who are in power are unable or unwilling to see just how quickly the stock price is plummeting. I don't think that they're able to see this. Thinking about it, especially using the Marvel example again, or some of the things that are coming out of Disney, you have a quantifiable figure.

24:26What was the opening weekend at the box office? You didn't know exactly where this is. There are fewer places to hide when it comes to that. Here's the number. What did it cost? What did you make opening weekend? Right. And you have projections and you have targets presumably that you want to hit. If that number doesn't cause people to think, maybe we don't need another narrative about an all -female cast that is better than the man without coming in. What you're not looking at is, you know, if you look at Mike Hopkins work on the curvarian variant in the mathematics department, that's like opening weekend statistics.

25:10Man great stuff happens at Harvard. Make no mistake about it. Harvard is an amazing and horrible place. And we're going to all now focus on how dumb it is and how horrible it is. And like, then you're not seeing the tragedy. You're not seeing.

25:32Look, I didn't have an advisor. I was one of the only people you'll ever meet with a PhD that had no advisor. But the guy who saved me was named Raoul Bot. And Raoulbot discovered something that's so important called bot periodicity that if I could convey it to you, your mind would be, you'd think DMT was for children. It has to do with the fact that there are only four systems of numbers that have particular property and one of those sets of numbers spins a merry go round with the other three with an eightfold sort of symmetry. who knew that this thing was even possible? It's just it's an incredible fact about the world.

26:15I associate him with Harvard. That's unfudgable. There's no there's no one in the world who can tell me that bot periodicity wasn't one of the most important things that happened in the 20th century. And to have a person like that, you know, just feet from John Tate, I could go on and on about all the real things that happened in Harvard. What we need right now, I would love to run for President of Harvard. If Claudine Gay can be President of Harvard, so can I. What we need is somebody who has been wronged by Harvard. You need somebody who has not been on this kind of escalator to power who has constantly shown love by the system.

26:58There are all sorts of people that represent what I call Blacksheet Harvard. You've got white sheep Harvard and black sheep Harvard and black sheep Harvard is no less important But it's the people who are not loved by the system who don't know when to shut up The people who will take a stand and who will zig when everyone else's eggs. Why would that be useful? Because we've got to purge the University of the things that don't work and it's gonna be ugly It's gonna be unpleasant It's gonna be a civil war on the faculty

27:31I was learning about an idea that Abelene paradox. One of my favorite ideas from last year. The Abelene paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the size of the group's members because each member assumes the others approve of it. That explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together, kind of like the Emperor's new clothes. An acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend. And you attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there. At a business meeting someone suggests an idea that he thinks the others will like, recruiting a trans influencer is the face of the brand.

28:09Each member has misgivings about this but assumes the others will consider them transphobic if they speak out. So everyone approves of the idea despite no one liking it. Abelian paradox. Yeah. I like it. It has a lot to do with Timor Koran's theory of preference falsification. I think that that's not exactly how it happens. Awesome. Most of the way these things work is that you're afraid to speak. Like, let's predict what's going to be said when this dibues. Sour grapes, grifter, charlatan, Eric doesn't like women, Eric doesn't like black people. Oh, such snobbery. What has he ever done? You know, we know what every action brings about in terms of its response.

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29:03And that's kind of why we don't speak up. It's just not worth that there's horrible people that follow you around looking for you to say anything like I don't know, I don't know if she's qualified. Did he say it? We get our knives out. That thing has to driven out of the university. We can't have these people. It's not just in the university, though, right? No, but I'm saying the universities are special because if everyone is going to take power later, passes through them. You can't afford to lose them. You can't afford to lose your news media. You can't afford to lose your universities. You can't afford to lose your political parties.

29:44I'm three for three at the moment. That's right. Yeah. But look, it's worth fighting for. So, you know, they'll call me a bunch of names. They'll try to deface my Wikipedia entry. That's what they'll do. What do you make of the most release of Epstein documents? You tell me. Oh, man. I mean, surprising to see Stephen Hawking on there in some ways. Why? I wouldn't know what Jeffrey Epstein would want with Stephen Hawking. What are you assuming is so terrible about Stephen Hawking being in these documents? I didn't say that it was terrible. Okay. I'm surprised that Jeffrey Epstein would have an interest in Stephen Hawking.

30:36beyond him being somebody that is well known influential, powerful, and potentially leverageable, which is, that makes me think, what? He took an interest in physics, and I don't know why, and you do. At least you have an idea about why he took an interest in physics. Jeffrey.

30:59But I don't know why. I don't know why Jeffrey Epstein was interested in physics. or what would you guess? There's some special mathematics there that allows him to, or the people that he is associated with, to better be able to predict things, to be able to use it in some sort of a way around financial markets, around new technology that's emerging, to just be able to see the direction that the future of technology is moving in, perhaps? Hmm.

31:31You know more about this than me. One. Well, I'd go back to this conference to the held. I think it's 2006 or 2004 called confronting gravity. So he holds a conference. I don't think he holds it on this island, on his island. I think he holds it on St. Thomas, maybe. And this is entirely consonant with an earlier meeting that he had with me where he wanted to know about what I was doing with mathematical physics.

32:10And I have to say, look, why gravity? Gravity is in some sense about the fabric of space time. And if there are things about the fabric of space time that you can unlock that are not contained in general relativity nor in the standard model, how much power do you think is in that? You saw what the neutron did to unlock the strong force. You can take out a city with a little bit of physics.

32:48I'm going to turn this around Chris because we had a great dynamic the last time and I want to see you play with ideas too.

32:57Tell me what you imagine might be the power beyond the standard model in general relativity. If we can already destroy all of humanity, I'll be it with some complications. You have to engineer a bomb. What do you think might be on the other side of the next great discovery? Well, I mean, this gets into sci -fi and speculation around, probably fits the next Marvel series. They should use this as the tagline. I would guess things to do with being able to move across space. Okay. Wormholes time. If there are other higher dimensions, if that allows you to access, if the multiverse theory holds, if that allows you to access different universes and to move between them.

33:48It might be limitless power. It could be limitless power in the form of energy,

33:58it could be limitless What if it allows you to control neutrinos in a new way? I mean, like people don't think about neutrinos. It's very hard to send a particle through planet earth unscathed, but neutrinos do it, right? So in some sense, if you were a sovereign nation, wouldn't you be focused on physics? I mean, look, here's the thing that I just don't understand. I'll be totally honest about it. Who isn't interested in this stuff? You have to be crazy to do what we're doing with physics. We're running physics into the ground. Physics is, you'll go to a Marvel movie about some guy trying to collect rings or stones to get infinite power over the universe.

34:44That's physics. That's not stones. When you see somebody talking about limitless power, think physics. Don't think money. Think physics. Physics is the source of infinite power. And is Jeffrey Epstein sufficiently versed in physics to know that he needs to be at the forefront of this? No. But this is what we dealt with last time. So kids, if you haven't seen last time of the episode, I don't think it was Jeffrey Epstein. I don't understand why we're so focused on this man. Why are we focusing on whatever created him? Like, this is really weird. We can't think. Take half of all the time you spend thinking about Jeffrey Epstein talking about Jeffrey Epstein everybody talking about And spend half of that time saying What do we what do we think about whoever was behind Jeffrey Epstein?

35:45Whatever was behind Jeffrey Epstein is what I think cared about gravity cared about space time cared about physics And you get to use this supposed financier as a wedge to be able to start to break this open. Well, this is the thing. If I'm looking, you know, there's a picture of Lisa Randall at this conference. Nobody's worried about the sexual depravity of Lisa Randall. This is stupid. Lisa Randall's an amazing physicist. He was interested in physics. Jeffery Epstein, whatever he represented cared about physics. Is that making more or less nervous? Well, you have to appreciate, I have no idea why my country, the United States of America, doesn't care about physics anymore.

36:35It canceled the SSC in 1993. Superconducting super collider. It's Bet the Farm on String Theory, which is completely not worked out. So now in 2024, this is the 40th year anniversary of the Green Schwartz anomaly cancellation, which basically handed the keys to the liquor cabinet of physics over to the String theorists. and they've been drunk on these stories about the first super string revolution, the second super string revolution, all these things that they're going to do, the theory of everything. And they just had a panel discussion at the World Science Festival with Brian Green moderating between David Gross, Edward Witten, and Andy Strattinger.

37:23And this thing is delusional. Why? I don't know. I mean, physicists, I know are calling me up and saying, you're right, Eric. I can't believe how crazy this is because they're pretending that they didn't flush 40 years down the tubes, driving physics into a ditch. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. The reason that you started a business is not to learn how to build a website or to code or to do inventory management. It's to sell the thing that you care about and Shopify helps to move all of the other stuff out of the way so that you can focus on the thing that matters most.

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38:39That's shopify .com -modern -wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Can you explain in an accessible way what the problem is with string theory? worry. Sure. It doesn't work. We can go a tiny bit more that level of advancement. A little bit further. Explain it to me as if I'm too. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, I keep golden Retrieva.

39:07The problem with string theory is it sociology, not its equations. The sociology of a string theorist.

39:25Do you mind if I play you a recording? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The following clip is from a podcast, which probably has the highest IQ guests of any podcast on planet Earth called the universe speaks in numbers. Nobody listens to this podcast. But this is Edward Witten and he is talking about is being asked about string theory by Graham Farmello.

40:06What do you see the status of that framework in the landscape of mathematical physics? I'd say that strange slash M theory is the only really interesting direction we have for going down the established framework of physics by which I mean quantum field theory at the quantum level and high school general relativity at the macroscopic skill. So, where we've made progress has been in these strengths, such as M3 from work. For a lot of interesting things have been discovered, I say that there's some interesting things we don't understand at all. But you've never been tempted down the other routes of other options.

40:38A lot of you enjoy what you would mean by other routes. There's no gravity. There's just words. There aren't any other routes. Okay, alright. There aren't any other routes. There are words. There are no other routes. There are just words. words. That is the world's leading theoretical physicist opining about strength. Can you imagine anything less scientific coming out of the mouth of Edward Witten? And by the way, this is the world's scariest individual to go up against. And I've had it. I've just absolutely had it. Can you imagine being a scientist and saying, there are no other roots when ask, are you ever attempted by other roots?

41:22They're only, they're only words, no other roots. I don't even know how to respond to that. What's the difference between dogmatism and conviction? You tell me. A fifth of Jack Dan. The guy sounds like he's convinced. Why you so sure that he shouldn't be. I'm convinced the geometric unity is correct.

41:51And I am open to being wrong. I am open to ethical colleagues talking to me about their misgivings. This is an unethical position to hold. What's wrong with strength theory? I mean, I say the same thing again. First of all, if you asked me technically what's wrong with it, I would say to you that, let's say, the explanation for three generations of matter based on an index of six on a colabia manifold at every point in space and time is not the right explanation. You're not going to be able to handle that. I understand that, so we can't have that conversation. The problem is you have a group of people who don't feel that they have to listen to anything else.

42:41And if anything else happens, then they say, well, we'll just call that string theory. And you're thinking, so heads, you win and tails, I lose. And that's science. These people need remedial ethical training in science. I'm convinced of my own theories. I have to be open -minded that I'm wrong.

43:10Their theories have had all of the money, all of the minds, all of the years, the conferences, everything, the praise, the PR articles, you name it, for 40 years straight, and it's done what? It's destroyed physics. You can't have this ethos. Look, there's no one more accomplished in quantum field theory than Edward would. He doesn't belong in the lead position in a science. He's doing math. Fine. But you can't be a leading physicist and say there are no other roots. Your dog doesn't hunt. We're not allowed to see other dogs. I don't understand. end. Your dog's been dead in the backyard for years, and you're still talking about how you're going to go take it hiking.

44:03So this has been in 40 years, basically no progress in string theory, no meaningful, no useful internal to string theory, but functionally outside of that. I mean, that's 40 years of string theory. In 50 years, the standard model of particle theory hasn't moved. There are no young people who have ever walked on the moon, and there are no young theoretical physicists who have contributed to our picture of the universe in a way that's been confirmed. If it's the case that the underpinnings of string theory aren't accurate, if it's also the case that for such a long time there hasn't been any progress that's been made, why are so many people continuing to cling to this.

44:56They're afraid of that man. That one guy? Oh yeah. He's the tyrant that's pulling the strings, pulling the strings. He's the string theorist. No, no, no, no. Everybody who's gone up against this guy, in essence, has lost.

45:15He's terrifying. Why? When you mean, when you say go up against what you mean? You'll bring up a point.

45:28Well, you might have an argument with him and he'll solve the problem you've been working on for two years in an hour. If it takes him that long, you have to understand how vertical human achievement can be. And this guy is at the very top of the human mind.

45:49I mean, he's just... he's utterly amazing. And he's completely scientifically outside of his ethical boundaries with statements like this. You can't do that to science. Even Edward a magician that he's allowed to take out theoretical physics. And you know, if you ask me like about my own theory, in terms of like what has happened to me, talk, try and talk about it for 40 years, more or less, the field says, well, what does that think? What does that say? What was Ed's feedback? Because everyone was afraid of him.

46:41You have to understand how dominant a single individual can be in order to understand this effect. There was a great string theorist named Joe Polchinsky. And Joe once said to me, Eric, you talk a lot about string theory, but I'm not sure it exists. Sometimes I think we're just running subroutines for Ed. That's how dominant this person was. It's that even one of the top figures in the string theory movement, a guy who basically introduced brain theory above strings. His point was we don't even quite know what we're doing. Ed just tells us to do things. And it's time for Ed Witten to actually face the other theories that are out there and stop drawing off about how it's only just words outside.

47:29It's almost hysterically funny. Will that ever happen? Do you think that when where does he? Hey Ed if you're out there when I have a chat. I loved it What happened why? Because it's a spell Because he's casting a spell Because if he actually had to face a real critic somebody who has some knowledge of what the history of string theory was. He would have to take into account all sorts of things he doesn't have to take into account when he peers on a stage of colleague. He has a right not to face unethical people. He has a right not to face people who are badly informed or not trained in the subject that's fine.

48:23But I don't see these people as having gone up against their technical critics. In a Feynman was a huge critic of string theory. Sheldon Glashow, who won a Nobel Prize for symmetry breaking, was a critic of string theory. Their string theorists who have defected like Dan Friedan, there's no shortage of very competent people who have said, what the hell is going on? Why are we doing this? This is madness. I've never heard Ed Witton face one of these people. When I think about somebody like Brian Green. Sure. He doesn't strike me as sort of guy that needs to bow at the feet of this person. Brian Green's got a successful career.

49:03He's a bug hosting these events on and so forth. Is everybody dancing to the tune of some super smart tyrannical string theoristly? It's not tyrannical. Look, I don't know how to say this, right? Because I'm obviously a critic. I revere this person. This is very painful for me to say. You know, if you ask me of all the people's minds on planet earth that I revere, the wonder that is Ed Witton's brain is beyond almost anything I can communicate, at least when you have a Beethoven or an art Tatum or a Picasso or a modig Leon, you can see what it is that they're doing. This guy has done so much for us and he's done so much to take science out of physics.

49:59And it's almost impossible to talk about the profound nature of his contribution and the enormity of the destruction he's caused.

50:11It's like he gave us everything he took away everything.

50:18Because you see quantum field theory under Ed Witten with help from particularly Michael Latia and Graham Seagal was revealed to be just math. We thought quantum field theory was about the physical universe, but it's much more general than that. And Ed Witten is largely responsible for showing us what quantum field theory really is. But in so doing, he also divorced it from mathematics. And so what Ed Witten did, he effectively showed us that what we thought was the physical universe was just like calculus, just a framework. But, you know, keep in mind that my view of it is if the universe is traversable, the only way to get there is through the study of physics, because in time.

51:11And these guys are guarding the exit. To me, a previous generation threw a lit match into a room filled with kerosene. And this is the generation that's blocking the exit. So, you know, Teller and Ulam gave us the hydrogen bomb. It's a Geometer and a Particle Theorist. And I would expect that Ed Witten was taking responsibility for trying to figure out whether the cosmos are traversable and whether we can leave Earth. Is there any way we can get access to more energy? Is there any way that we can reveal space time to not be fundamental so that maybe we can do something that would be confused with going faster than light?

52:00Maybe we can reach the stars through methods that we can't understand using what we have. Why is Ed Witten guarding the exit? Ed, there are other theories. There have been theories for 40 years. I met you in your office in 1984, 85, and Princeton on a snowy day. And you threw me out of your office for what reason because I started talking to you about the fact that I didn't think you were right About three generations for for particle theory and you claimed that Calusacline theory couldn't work Because of chirality considerations you were wrong. You have one claim as to why there are three generations I have another do you want to meet let's talk?

52:41Nothing will happen They don't show up. How long can the world of physics be captured by an idea that no meaningful progress is made inside of before more people say it's time to look at something else? That's an interesting question. The problem is that there isn't going to be much of physics left when this group dies. It just retired, I believe, from the Institute for Advanced Study because it has a capped age of 70 and he was born in 1951.

53:20No, there isn't much physics left. People have forgotten what the original problems are. He swapped out one set of problems that we all agreed on. Why is nature left right asymmetric? Why are there three copies of matter rather than only one? why the particular set of symmetries that generate the strong weak and electromagnetic forces, all of these problems that are all about the physical world in which we live. And he swapped them out for different problems like how do we quantize gravity as if that's definitely what we have to do. Those were sort of mathematical analytic problems rather than physical problems.

53:58And so as a result, two generations of physicists have been brainwashed washed into not caring about the physical world and being totally devoted to various abstract areas of mathematics. How long can the legacy of that continue for? Well, how do you rebuild theoretical physics when almost nobody's doing theoretical physics? And I don't mean, look, there's some technical wiggle words that if I don't say them, my colleagues will go crazy. But in the field of fundamental physics beyond general relativity and the standard model, There isn't much of a field left. You go on a random day to the archive where people post papers.

54:37And the papers aren't really about charmed quarks or muons or realistic models of the universe. They're about weird esoteric topics and mathematics. And that has everything to do with transition between 1983 through 86, 87, where the field lost its mind. Rediscovering the problems of physics can't be as hard as discovering the problems of physics. If you're not paid to work on physics, the way they've got us is by their hands wrapped around our wallets. We can't afford to do physics. It says if there's a force that says if you want to work on the world's most important problem, we're going to make you poor.

55:26We're gonna discredit you. It's almost like there's a force field Trying to get us not to unlock this power and I've been very curious about why that is And nobody like with all the rich people in the world nobody's funding the stuff at the level that it needs to be funded This is the most important funding priority on planet Earth Because otherwise you're all sharing one atmosphere with a bunch of idiots and really powerful to us

55:58It's unless we can somehow channel the technology of interdimensional space beings. Please never say those words. Hey, interdimensional space. Interdimensional space beings. David Grush didn't say extraterrestrial. You said interdimensional. Yes, but Eric, Eric and David talk and this is not fear to David Grush. David Grush knows that he's a physics BA. He knows he's not a PhD. He's repeating things that have been said to him. He had the presence of mind to try to give an example of what interdimensional might mean in a used holography. And so as a result, everyone's making, oh David Grush says holographic interdimensional beings.

56:43This is absurd and it's not fair to David Grush. I'm telling you, I mean, we can call David up right now and I promise you he's not going to back this madness and stupidity. So what's going on with this most recent update about aliens? Which one? Well, I saw this frustration that lawmakers had because they were getting compartmentalized if you don't ask precisely the right person, precisely the right question, and precisely the right way. You're not allowed to get an answer, you don't get an answer. But you couldn't even eat. Look, if you don't know what a Ramani and Mana Fold is, if you don't know what a determinant line bundle is, is there's no way you can ask intelligent questions about alien visitation.

57:30How did they get here? There are no scientists. There are no relevant scientists in this story. Does anybody find that at all odd? Even the situation with David Grush is fantastic. He goes into a hearing. He says a bunch of completely bachelors crazy stuff. Right? Can we agree on that? All right. And then weeks later, some representatives go into a skiff and they say, well, it certainly seems like it confirms some of what Grush has been telling us. And you're thinking, okay, so you separated the confirmation, which you did abstractly because it was inside of a skiff, but you can only talk to people who've emerged from the skiff who are willing to save vague things and the crazy claims.

58:23Now, what is this really all about? Nobody knows. Now, what I've been saying for about four years is there's way more to this story than I had understood. I thought UFOs were total nonsense. I thought this was a waste of time. And I was wrong. It was just wrong. Why? What do you mean? In what ways were you wrong? Why are you now convinced in a way that you weren't previously? Well, I didn't know. So I'm not convinced that UFOs like shiny metal craft are real at all. What I didn't know is that there are almost certainly are large programs inside the federal government that are denied that are labeled UFOs don't tell anyone.

59:05Now whether those programs contain anything about non -human intelligence or aliens or spacecraft or anything like that is anyone's guess because I haven't seen anything. However, the programs almost certainly exist. What gives you that impression? Talking to four million people who tell stunningly similar stories.

59:28In other words, there is a weirdness. And the weirdness is tremendous circumstantial evidence that these programs exist, have existed for a long time and have involved extraordinary, in particular, physicists way back in the day. And on the other hand, that there's no credible proof that there are craft or aliens or anything like that. How do you square that circle? How would you get? Look, the coordination problem of all of these people is immense. There's that, but secrets have been kept much more effectively than people imagine. I don't want to. No, but I mean there are organizations that you cannot Google.

1:00:26There are organizations that have club houses and members that you cannot Google.

1:00:34So I know that secrets are durable. What we don't know is what these secrets are about.

1:00:46See, let's create a decision tree, which is there are little green men, shiny space crafts and all this kind of cool stuff, and there aren't. If there aren't, what's the best explanation for why there's so much energy and activity and so many claims around this? And I would guess, and then again, this is a guess, and not a particularly good one, that But there was a clearinghouse program for everything under the sun. If we needed to retrieve somebody else's plane behind enemy lines, we had a UFO cover story. If we were trying at new aerospace equipment, we had a UFO cover story. If we were trying to get our rivals to misspend their precious treasure on weaponry and strategic countermeasures.

1:01:38We had a UFO cover story. If we were up to no good, we had a UFO cover story. Whatever all these things are, imagine there was a kitchen sink approach, and that's what UFOs are all about. It's about a black SAP Special Access Program.

1:02:06As It's an extra terrestrial scapegoat. Yeah, an extra terrestrial scapegoat program. Okay. Now, whatever that is, if you imagine that leg of the decision tree is real, it's all very funny because now you're like, all these people have taken it seriously, but it was the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians were supposed to take it seriously. You're like, it's nay on the UFOFA, you know? It's like people are going to blow this beautiful cover story that we've created for everything. That's one possible. Another possibility is that we're on the other leg of the decision tree and that we have no programming for it and so everything about it seems impossible.

1:02:53It's what you said about physics. Physics is science fiction. The physics that you just learned is almost always about science fiction.

1:03:05What if you have multiple time dimensions and people can circle around in time. And if you find out about them, they can circle back to the point where you didn't know. You have a Neuralizer built into the successor to Space Time. Is that real? I don't know. All I know is that physics will always blow your mind. It will always do something that seems impossible. And that's why it's the coolest subject around. Now I don't know what's going on, but I can tell you that the circumstantial evidence that there's been a program that has been long running and involved very high -level people. It's almost impossible to imagine that this is fake.

1:03:47There's a 1971 Australian document from the Australian Intelligence Service that has been declassified and made public, which clears up all sorts of mysteries about what was going on with physics in the 1950s and 60s. And it names names. It says that Freeman, Dyson, John Archibald, Wheeler, Pascal, Jordan, and Nazi. All of these people were working on anti -gravity. And the only reason to be working on anti -gravity was is that there was reason to think that something had gone beyond an Einsteinian relativity. In other words, mostly we learn about physics from colliding. Yeah, it's like breaking rocks together.

1:04:40You're going to smash two rocks and then maybe you'll see a little spark and you'll study that. Except we do it with protons. This would be like some different thing where there was a more advanced species in your looking at its machinery to try to figure out, well, what science does it know that you don't? How much truth do you think is in that? I've seen rumors on the internet of leaps forward in technology throughout the mid -1900s that people suggested was due to reverse engineering if something that had been discovered. Do you think that the technology movements that we made through the 1900s were self -created?

1:05:18I'm not clever enough to solve the UFO puzzle. There's almost no topic where I can't generate multiple explanations. This is the only topic I've ever met where I can't generate a single explanation for what the hell's going on. Nothing I can think up makes sense.

1:05:42Look, I'm very focused on this because if there are aliens here, I might be the only guy who knows how they're here. How so? I don't think it's practical to traverse the cosmos using general relativity in the standard model. You can use time dilation, you can hope for wormholes, you can imagine generationships, there's a whole bunch of stupid stuff that people talk about when they talk about interdimensional travel and all this kind of nonsense. Why? Because they can see the night sky and they can't get there. So you think, okay, in terms of the science that I've seen Carl Sagan discussing or on cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson, how would I get to a distant planet using the science I know?

1:06:35And then you have to sort of do it with masking tape and, you know, chicken wire, whatever, whatever that is doesn't really appeal to me. They're not here if they're here using standard physics. Now I've tried to make a list of everyone on Earth who has a distinct theory of physics. Right? So you have, you know, Julian Barbour has a theory or Stephen Wolfram has a theory or Peter White has a theory. So I go through all of these other theories and to the best of my knowledge, nobody else does that. Like, we've stopped talking to each other, we stopped thinking about this. So in the world of theories about how something might be here, there are very few theories of the universe.

1:07:27And why is that? It's because the constraints are so profound. There's no room to move, to imagine, to let, you know, human creativity take over. We're in a straight jacket that is so tight nobody can think. And we're there because our theories are so good. The standard model and general relativity are astounding theories, but they're also a straight jacket. So I'm very interested in, you know, if you're a Obama, you just reach out, grab it and kill it. Yeah, exactly.

1:08:05Yeah,

1:08:09I'm very interested in this topic specifically. because the universe is either traversable or it isn't. And if it is, it's not surprising that anyone's here. And if it isn't, we die here in short order. So it's a hugely consequential question.

1:08:29But there are almost no theories. I can't imagine, like, look, Chris, in part, I'm almost reluctant to do podcast anymore because I don't understand why we're behaving the way we're behaving. What do you mean when you say we? No one on planet earth is behaving rationally with respect to physics and UFOs. You have a claim that is being heard at the highest levels in Congress that we've lost control of our airspace. You either clear this thing up in an afternoon or you call in SEAL Team 6? Yeah, that's a really good point. How is it that we've got such an outlandish claim, which is being accepted, not necessarily accepted, which is being received without the justified fanfare?

1:09:26It's like either this is completely crazy and needs to be thrown out, or this is absolutely wild and we need to do something about it.

1:09:39Why is it the case? That's a really great point. That's a really great point. Why is it the case that this has made, it hasn't made more fanfare in terms of people mobilizing governments and such, or hasn't made way more criticism in terms of it being thrown out? I don't know. Why does the diffuse proposal from the eco -health alliance not get properly adjudicated scientifically? I don't know what that is. The eco health alliance is this group run by a zoologist who got 50 million dollars from the defense department to help a lab in China work on coronavirus and making them more humanized I mean Like we should be able to adjudicate.

1:10:25Did we start COVID? But we can't All of these very simple things we don't adjudicate it. Look, Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that the consumer price index is based on a cost of living measure. I claim that's not true in order for that to be true, you have to take in consumer preference data and you claim that you don't work with consumer preference data. I mean, either right or wrong. It's usually consequential in terms of billions. I claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is completely lying that it's working on a cost of living framework. And that the academic responsible for it, a guy named Erwin Dijwort, his theory of super live index numbers is hogwash.

1:11:11It doesn't work. It's based on homothetic preferences. That takes an afternoon to a judekin. I claim that there is no labor shortage of scientists and engineers, despite claims that it's been going on since the 50s because large market economies don't have labor shortages. That's feature of centrally planned economies. There is no possible way. That's a four -minute discussion. We are just lying. Lying, lying, lying is the substrate of our society. We're lying about physics, we're lying about economics, we're lying about finance, we're lying about coronavirus, and biological research. We're lying about monetary aggregates.

1:11:56How many different hills are you waging a war on? There's only one. It's called managed reality.

1:12:08This is all managed reality. What's that? I have this image of a tanker that is flipped over on a freeway and there's a body scattered and people are bleeding and the tanker is on fire. There's a cop, maybe a special forces guy with an automatic weapon. It says nothing to see here, folks. Move along. You're like nothing to see. There's like a severed hand on the pavement. And you've got a tanker in it. It says, you know, danger flammable hazard. And it's, is it about to blow and tell me what's going on? Nothing to see here, folks. Well, the nothing to see here, folks, is managed reality. We all know what that is.

1:12:59Policemen is actually saying act as if there is nothing to see here and move along. It's an instruction to pretend. So we are being given instructions right now to pretend on everything. Pretend that you don't understand the CPI, Eric. Oh, okay. Pretend that you don't understand immigration and labor market, Eric. Okay. Pretend that you don't understand physics. Pretend that you don't understand plagiarism. Pretend that you don't understand biology and gender.

1:13:37Well, it's one hill. It's in force pretending by a class of people that thinks that it is in a position to tell us all how to think at this level. Now I don't disagree that that policeman has a right to say, move along folks, nothing to see. There's a very clear reason why that person is saying that. But when you start to say that to your experts to the hazmat team who's telling you, you know, don't put out an electrical fire with water. When you are telling nothing to see to the mother who sees her child on the pavement. When you're constantly telling everybody who has a stake in something and particularly everybody who has expertise in something, You're a Charlotte and you're a grifter, you're a fake, you're a fraud, you're a, it's like, shut up.

1:14:29Just shut up. There's one hill. Are you the only person on that hill though? Because as you've said here, there's a bunch of different the CPI stuff to do with physics, this stuff to do with the I appreciate what you're saying. Funnily on you. There are lots of people on the hill. The problem is that you have to visit all of these fields to know it's in that field too. You know, I was complaining about narrative driven journalism before people were talking about narrative at the same level that if you go back to my written output or speaking output, you'll find that in 2011 I was talking about professional wrestling and K -fabe as the model for underlying reality that this is what's going on in our society.

1:15:16It's because I visited all these different fields. I've been an immigration expert. I was spent in the middle of the 1990s in Washington trying to understand why we passed the immigration act of 1990. I've been a finance guy. I have the first paper that I know of on mortgage -backed securities in the danger they post the World Financial System from 2001 -2002. I rang the alarm on the Chinese using our universities as an espionage program. I said that Hillary was not inevitable and that Trump was in much better position to win because of Tim Orcoran's theory of preference falsification. I said this thing about physics.

1:15:57You're all out of your mind. I switched my field from physics to mathematics because I could see what was going to happen. And I think that what you're trying to ask me is, are you the only person who's visited all of these fields to see the pattern? And why are you at the center of all of these stories?

1:16:17Well, narcissism.

1:16:21This is the personal and uncomfortable part. I think I didn't understand that my principal means of trying to figure out where I'm supposed to allocate my efforts is wrong. I just detect that something doesn't make any sense.

1:16:41Autism is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a competitive advantage in the right dose. There's a sweet spot. There's a sweet spot of autism. I think I'm beyond the sweet spot. I think that what happens is that I become convinced that somebody is wrong and I start trying to tell them about the fact that they're wrong. And you know, as the joke goes, I thought I would be greeted as liberators. But in fact, you're actually causing a huge problem. So, you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they're sitting duck. Obviously what they're doing is completely ridiculous. But if I say that and everybody's agreed to keep their mouth shut about it, it's not like they don't know what I'm saying.

1:17:26It's not like they don't know that I'm right. It's that we've all agreed to act as if I'm insane. What I keep doing is I keep using the same stupid algorithm saying, hey, that thing about UFOs doesn't make sense or we could clear this up in an afternoon or, hey guys, what if we roll up our sleeves and just fix the problem? Many problems are owned. A problem that's owned, you know, does the person who rebuilds homes want fewer homes to burn down? No, their business is building homes after they burned down. Doesn't, doesn't arms maker want a more peaceful world? Does a healthcare system want nutrition to decrease the number of patients who walk through their doors.

1:18:17All of these are owned problems. And my problem is I keep trying to solve somebody's owned problem. That's why I keep ending up in all these places. Can I teach you about Milgram questions? Tell me about Milgram questions. This is an idea from Jay Sanalag. So what makes a woman attractive is a Milgram question. In other words, the social penalty for an unflattering answer is much higher than the reward for telling the truth. Hmm. Because of this, we simply can't trust the answers we receive, even if they're coming from friends. The best known trick question is, when did you stop beating your wife?

1:18:57Any conventional answer to the question confirms its assumption to escape the trap. You need to call out the question. This type of question isn't that common in practice, it's really just a rhetorical gimmick. The most important and most common type of trick question sounds more like, do you love big brother? It's a question where an unacceptable answer, regardless of whether it's true or false, will be punished, and the punishment is greater than the reward for the true answer. I'm going to recall these milgram questions after the famous psychology experiment, where electric shocks were administered for wrong answers.

1:19:29And there's an associated idea called the chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to throw it. So that's closer to the airship experiment. Thus limits on speech become limits on sincerity. It's an interesting problem.

1:19:50Tell me about why you brought it up and what do you find interesting about it. It is one way that explains how a group of people from the outside can look coordinated, But it's actually a common trend, a common motivation working below the surface that motivates them all to behave in a way that appears coordinated from the outside. From the inside, it just looks like perhaps cowardice, perhaps compliance. So, yeah, I've been very interested in these sorts of issues. I try to tell people why the truth can't work. When people are always confused by this, I say, okay, tell me I have mildly bad breath.

1:20:48And some people will say, you have mildly bad breath. And I say, well, you just told me that my breath is so horrendous that you were willing to cross a social chasm that essentially no one ever crosses to tell me that I have mildly bad breath. So obviously, my breath must be as bad as a sewer. Then they say, would you like a stick of gum? And I say, sure. And I'd show no cognition that you've actually told me about, you know, you can't transmit that piece of information easily. It's very akin to this. Yes, now our society hinges on these things. On the other hand, there are ways of getting at these questions through language.

1:21:31So for example, you're not allowed to say that you like cleavage, but you are allowed to say that was an incredibly dramatic necklace, right? And so why is it that one phrase is penalized? It's because there's a Russell conjugation that works for a Russell conjugation that doesn't. he sweats, she perspires, they glow. Right. And so in such circumstances, the key question is how you are allowed to discuss the truth as well as whether you are allowed to discuss the truth. Many times there's a penalty for not being skilled. The skilled person is allowed to say something. Definitely. The appropriate nuance with the appropriate social graces.

1:22:17Yeah, but then the question becomes why can't you say certain things? And, you know, this is in part, I believe in these social norms, but I believe that it is necessary to create spaces in which you can actually talk about the truth. And increasingly, what we're doing, this white inclusion is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard in my life, is you put somebody to create a low -trust environment in every high -trust environments discussion group. So diversity is good so far as it goes. Inclusion is good so far as it goes. Equities that disaster can't even discuss it. But the reason that inclusion has become terrible is that we're trying to create a low -trust environment in all previous high -trust environments.

1:23:12And that thing means that we can't actually have any serious discussions. Like if you have knowledge about why a venereal disease is spreading, it may require that people tell you that they're having sex with animals. That's it. You can't have somebody who's going to giggle. You can't have somebody who's going to shame. You have to have completely dry as desk conversation about how venereal diseases can leap from non -humans to humans. And we need experts and we need closed doors not to become star chambers. You mentioned before about being able to have an insight into what was happening in 2016.

1:23:56Yeah. What do you think happens in 2024?

1:24:02I don't know. I don't know. You know, I met with Robert Kennedy Jr. not too long ago and he was nice enough to have my wife and I to his house. It was very clear that he's trying to harken back to a previous remembered America through his family and he's willing to die for it. There's no question that he's willing to die to seek the presidency. I think that Americans are going to have to come to grips with the fact that our two political parties, either one of them could win if they wanted. But the problem is that they want to win as a trough. So in other words, Imagine that what America wants is no more trough.

1:24:53You don't want to win playing to that aspect of America if it means getting rid of the trough because the trough was your entire reason for running a political party. What do you mean when you say trough? Assume that your party gets into power. Now you get to hire all of your friends into government positions then they get revolving door contracts with whoever they were regulating or dealing with. So effectively everybody's going to pick out and help themselves. Okay, we got Democrats into Congress now. They can trade their personal accounts and pass legislation and do far better than the market.

1:25:25You know, whatever it is, imagine what Americans want is like, hey, stop the corruption. I don't trust why we're in Ukraine, the way we're in Ukraine because I don't trust White Hunter Biden is being given a cushy salary from a Ukrainian company. Well, what you're telling, what the population is telling the two political parties is, end the troughs. And the political parties are saying, okay, what else do you want? We can't give you that because that's the whole point of why we do what we do. We're not public -spirited. We're not thinking about America. We're not thinking about the future. We're not thinking about the good of the world or the environment or any of the stupid stuff that we are forced to talk about every four years.

1:26:05We're talking about swimming pools. We're talking about third wives, fourth homes, you know. You're getting in the way of that. So tell us what else you want that doesn't interfere with the trough. And Americans are pretty clear. It's like get rid of the goddamn troughs. You're slapping each other. You're pigs at a trough and now the idea is that since you're not doing anything, I want my ethnic group to be at the trough too. So this has nothing to do with anything. We have to clear these people out. They're just bad people. Well, way too close to the 2024 election for anybody to be cleared out now.

1:26:47Really? I mean, what's going to happen between now and November? I don't know. I mean, how old is Joe Biden? I don't know. Okay. What are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November? So he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that. So I don't think you know whether he's even going to make it to November 81. Yeah.

1:27:20You have no idea what it's a million years between now and November. I don't know whether Donald Trump is going to be, you know, facing jail time. I don't know whether there's going to be an insurrection by MAGA people that who feel that the Department of Justice is going after a candidate for political reasons. I don't know if people are going to look at Kamala Harris as the likely commander in chief. Where you laughing? Kamala Harris is like, she's become a meme of a meme. It's so so absent from public life as far as I can see that it's hilarious. You don't think it's hilarious? Oh, it's hysterically funny.

1:28:14You're talking about Kamala Harris being in charge of the world's greatest nuclear superpower. It's it's a scream. You're talking about Joe Biden being in charge of it or Donald Trump. Trump will be older than Biden on this next reelection than Biden was when he first entered office. Well, yeah, Biden began at 29 in the Senate in 72.

1:28:45This whole thing is... Chris, let me just be more forthcoming. People wonder know why I've somewhat retreated from public life. I have no clue how to talk about this stuff. This whole thing is so incredibly stupid. Nobody has ever done this in the United States. We had an election 1980 because Ronald Reagan was 69 years old, age was central. We've never been in this territory before. Does that not mean that you should spend more time trying to grapple with ideas if you're not sure about them. What does that mean? That if your concern is you mentioned people have asked why you've stepped back from having more public conversations.

1:29:30One of the reasons is that a lot of the topics that you try to grapple with don't seem to make sense that much anymore is that not the time when you're supposed to grapple harder with them? If somebody says to you, Eric, you know, a previous election, are you supportive of the hillside strangler or Ted Bundy? Go. Well, I don't know if Charles Manson might run as a third party candidate, so it's too early to say, this is also pathetically crazily stupid. What am I supposed to do to just say get off my lawn every four seconds? I don't know how to react anymore. There's no part of this world at the moment that looks same to me.

1:30:23And you know, I've done the requisite work, which is if that's the way it feels to you, then you should look at your own sanity. Okay, let's entertain the idea that I've lost my mind. Like, no, No. No. This is all completely one problem of managed reality. One of the things that I am concerned about toward the back end of this year is whether or not whoever wins is going to be accepted in even remotely a peaceful way. It doesn't mean the same thing as it used to.

1:31:06Look, there's some mystique and some majesty necessary to make these things work. You have to believe that the Supreme Court is a bunch of incredibly smart legal money. You have to believe that the president of the United States is an exalted being who has power to make decisions on the behalf of the country. You can't afford Nancy Pelosi's husband trading up a storm like this Everything's become Instagram stories behind the scenes of the Kardashians Nobody trusts experts exist When your kid needs a life -saving surgery You're gonna find out that all you're drawing off on Twitter about screw the experts doesn't mean anything to you like save my child We need experts, we need institutions, we need lies, we need fictions, we need stories, we need adult level, public spirited, fictionalizations of the truth.

1:32:12I'm not claiming we don't, but now you've got this different class of people who says, okay, you don't want the truth, we need to have stories, let's just make up stuff and put stuff in our pockets. How much of it is coordination? How much of it is cowardice? Well, I would Refraise that a little differently maybe I would say Nobody smart has gotten anything to work like this in a long time The reason we have Donald Trump versus Joe Biden is that everybody failed I failed I've been podcasting reaching millions. I've been teaching people about all sorts of things One of the things I find very funny is that there's a, if you look at the negativity that follows you around, there are these very conserved things that one of them is Eric goes on forever and says nothing.

1:33:03If you look at the sheer density of information I've dropped on podcasts, I'll put it out up against anybody, you know. But it's like we want Eric to disappear. We want Eric not to say things. Who do you think is behind that? Don't know. You stopped your podcast. Yeah. I was a fan of that podcast. That first episode that you did with Peter I thought was was fantastic. I can't tell you how many people every day. Where's the portal? Bring the portal back. What does it take to bring the portal back? Attempted. Mick Jagger said something about Brian Jones that has just haunted me. And he said, fame doesn't sit comfortably on anyone's shoulders, but there are shoulders upon which it appears not to sit at all.

1:33:47And I thought, okay, if there's one guy who's good at being famous, it must be Mick Jagger. And for him to say, it doesn't sit comfortably on any shoulders. If you just parse it, you think, oh, he's telling us something. It looks like I'm good at being famous, but it's not easy and it's not something that's comfortable. And then he makes the second point about Brian Jones. And he says, there appear to be shoulders upon which it does not sit at all. And I think I don't like the fact that you can't turn it off. It's one way straight for a very long time. That's right. And, you know, there's a point where you're wandering through Istanbul and somebody yells out Eric Weinstein and you're like, there's no way to get away from this.

1:34:32And you didn't like that? But wonderful guy. Most everybody I meet is fantastic. I like lots of being well known. But the toothpaste hasn't, I've hoped that the toothpaste would sort of go back in the tube. I could do a little bit of podcasting here and there and it just doesn't work. So you don't want to, oh, you at the moment are not prepared to bring the portal back? No, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it because I can't get back to... Look, I have fantasies about not being well -known, and I don't think it's too late.

1:35:14Deeper into the breach. Look, but also nobody wants to listen to this. You know, remember what you're saying before? Milgrim questions. I don't know. Let's play with it, because I think it's a fun idea. Yeah. You ever heard somebody say something, oh, the paparazzi. You're like, yeah. But actually I believe it. I wouldn't wanna live with paparazzi. The problem is that nobody's gonna hear it for what it is. If I really dislike somebody, I want them to become famous. See how they do. I came up with this idea. I put it in my newsletter last week. Titanic problem. You'd also call it a champagne problem.

1:35:58Okay. Titanic problem is an issue that everyone says you're in such a privileged position to deal with. This is an extra special type of tragedy, a tragedy that unfolds while everyone cheers. Like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin, with everyone telling you you're so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time, and the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can't help but agree. But also you're feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment And you're not sure why it's from Adromas Rihani. I, uh, I didn't know you had that up your sleeve. That's really good.

1:36:31Yeah, yeah, I think look, I like my ideas being well -known. There's tons of being well -known that's fun. But in the aggregate, it's like somebody tells you you can have, you can have an orgasm every three minutes, but you can't turn it off. There's some people who have that. I know. It's a neurological disorder and except it's 30 seconds, right? And you can quickly see that you wouldn't sign up for that. Right? And so famous like that is that do you really want to never know who sees you when you go out in public? I've been fascinated by the price that people pay To be someone that most of the world admires and Elon was recently on Lex's show and he said my mind is a storm I don't think most people would want to be me.

1:37:20They may think they would want to be me but they don't. They don't know. They don't understand. I love that. I love that. A friend of mine said to me, very dear friend, said, I'm, Eric, I'm always jealous of where you end up. But then I think about it and I'm, I realize I'm never jealous of how you get there.

1:37:53Right? Like at some level. The easiest thing is somebody who's ripped. Wow, that must be awesome. Well, did you just figure in how much work that took?

1:38:09You know, I have this guy that I think the world of Ryan Williams, who was a scooter kid who then did BMX and does these crazy tricks, three seconds in air, or what he can do, was amazing. And I worry about him. He's comp me tickets to nitro circus, which I very much enjoy. I don't see anybody I know there because it's a different slice of the world. I think I don't understand why we all don't go to nitro circus every monster truck. I'm all in. But I look at how many times he fell doing this trick where he got the bike to rotate and an opposite direction. He and the bike did opposite circles before they came back together.

1:38:55And I said, that's your Mona Lisa. And they started putting out a reel of like how many times he didn't succeed at that trick. Hundreds of bailouts. Yeah. There's no way in the world you could get me to do that. I want to do the trick. I want to know what it feels like. But he's one of the world champion fallers, right? And so in large measure, I'm divided. I like having my ideas well known. 95, 98 % of the audience figures out how to be respectful and reasonable. And there's just this hardcore 2%. There's an article by Tim Ferris called 13 Reasons Not To Get Famous. Is that right? One of my favorite articles.

1:39:45It's over 10 years old. So Tim Ferriss, if you think about his trajectory, it's really interesting. He sort of gets thrust into fame with the 4 -hour work week and has this sort of very unique angle on life where he's so intensely curious about the way that you do something. So you would mention that you have a gratitude practice and you wouldn't just say, oh, what time do you do it in the morning, it would be, what pen do you use, what notebook do you use, which prompt do you use? Do you have a timer? Are you doing this in the sunlight? Are you doing this indoors? Outdoors? What sort of a seat is it?

1:40:20All of these things, right? He's very, very interested in the particulars. Right. Then he gets this TV show. And he's part of this TV show where he tries to sort of hack his way very quickly through lots of different things. Do you know that he managed to make himself into a Thai boxing champion? No. So Tim read the rule book of a particular subset of K1 tie boxing kickboxing, something like that. And he found out that if your opponent goes out of the ring three times in any bout, you win by default. So he just sprinted across the ring, grabbed his opponent through him out of the ring three times, and became a champion by doing that consistently.

1:40:57They then carved that back out of the rules and got rid of it. But he just had this... This hacker mentality. Yes, yeah, hake mentality, it was life hacking and Then he talks about What actually happens when you reach the size of audience that most people aspire to have and That there are strange externalities. There was a guy that camped outside of his house Most of work out where his house was maybe from metadata and photos of some kind right and had camped outside of his house For a while Adam and that Tim was sending him secret messages in his podcast thing that he wanted to be with it exactly He had to start checking into hotels and desuudinums.

1:41:39He no longer posted photos of where he was going when he was going on trips because people were reverse engineering it. He uses this example that million to one odds happen eight times a day in New York City because if you have any sufficiently large data set, the law of large numbers, suggest that within the catchment area of 100, how many people just, how many people just rogan, reach per year, you know, individuals, A billion? Individual people maybe? But he's surrounded by security. Of course. So, you know, in part, one of the things that I'm trying to think about is you have to become rich enough to make use of the tools and then you have to decide, okay, I'm going to go behind walls and that's not what I ever wanted.

1:42:24I wanted to be able to go to Starbucks, not tell anyone, work on stuff that I care about. And you know, there was something about being contacted by killers. It was a Colorado killer. I think it killed five people and tattoo parlors who was trying to get in touch with me. Why? Don't know, because I'm a lightning rod for crazy people. What do you think it is? Is it something to do with the ideas of... Well, let's see. Almost everything is fake. We have to get off of this planet. The alien story has much more to it than you could imagine. Take. Jeffrey Epstein is a construct of somebody. Take. We're going to go through all of these.

1:43:13The world is an incredibly interesting place and we're pretending that it's incredibly boring and I have the stupidity to say, hey, can we go back to reality and claiming that we should go back to reality in a world which is suffused with delusion means that I think we also don't understand how many people are driven crazy by small amounts of sanity. If you imagine the Robert De Niro character in taxi driver, you imagine David Byrne of talking heads doing psycho killer.

1:44:03It's somebody who's seeing through the world and they're creating their own illusions, but they're not aware that they're creating their own illusions. They just see that the world is fake and you know filled with sludge and sewage and

1:44:21you don't want to meet the taxi driver character. Yeah, this idea, the champagne problem or the Titanic problem of almost everybody has less wealth and less fame than they want. which means that anybody who complains about the externalities that come with wealth or fame, the total addressable market for sympathy is basically zero. The total addressable market for envy is very high. Who is going to say when lots of people aren't as well known or aren't as wealthy or are suffering in one way or another that you seem to have somehow figured out, it's very difficult to garner sympathy for seemingly crying from your gilded counts.

1:45:01Again, it's not about fame. Think Think about it in terms of privacy and insulation.

1:45:09Everybody wants privacy when they want privacy. If we had a toilet here and said, I feel free to use it, nobody's using it. But there was no walls. You would not think that that was being offered to you seriously.

1:45:26That's the way that you explain what this is. It's a complete absence of privacy. It's something similar, but it's about music, so you might be interested. I must have brought this up 10 times. It's so fascinating. Louis Capaldi, the Scottish singer, did a documentary for Netflix that he does this first album. He's singing songs that he made when he was a teenager. The same songs get recorded and released, and he has just the most phenomenal success. billions of streams worldwide tour. He then has to write a second album. COVID happens. And he starts to develop a Tourette's Twitch like this because of the pressure that he feels.

1:46:17Some of it very rightly coming from the world, but some of it being internally generated as well. He can move at his own pace. And it's interesting watching him go through it because he think, Yes, there is all of this pressure and the world is expecting so much of you and you didn't ask for this, you just wanted to sing the songs that you sang and so on and so forth. But also there's not the same type of pressure that you're imbibing this and then starting to spin it up yourself as well. And he is the perfect example of somebody, I think, who has the ability to become world class but doesn't have the ability to be world famous.

1:46:58Hmm, yeah. And I think that those are two different skill sets. The ability to be world class and the ability to be world famous. Yeah. Um,

1:47:12I don't know. I think I like people too much. I really enjoy just being able to be a normal human being in the world and move around and try out ideas and you know I sued in him nice pseudonymous substack account okay so like for Christmas do you know how Wilkin Feld is she was the bass player with Jeff Beck she's an amazing talent friend of mine came over for Christmas two Jews we start hanging out she wants to sing the song the gospel song the last month of the year she just come off tour with the Almond Brothers band. So there I am trying to follow her. Some song I've never heard. I can't sing and playing guitar and we're just clining around and somebody's taking video of it.

1:48:05And she's like, we got to release this. I'm just thinking, if you release this, I'm going to have to listen to how everybody Eric thinks he's the world's greatest guitarist. And it's embarrassing because she plays with Jeff Beck and now Eric is making an ass out of himself. So I didn't release it. I mean, it was joyous. It was fun. It was silly. And it's just like the constant stream of moronic abuse. I don't even know how much of it is from humans. I think a lot of it's from bots. I think Elon is very misguided. He has this idea of like anybody who shrinks from criticism or or jokes, it's tooth -in -skin.

1:48:47It's like, you have no idea what your product is. Your product allows stalking. You don't know how, this isn't about people yelling you suck. This is about people combing all your public records saying, oh, love, you didn't, if you didn't want us to know where you live, you wouldn't have thrown that check into the trash or... So I was going to bring this up before we started. It's such a shame that we can't play music on YouTube without getting copyright struck. It's so annoying because I'd love to get you to react. Well, I'll do it once we finish. Yeah. I want to get you to react to my favorite band of 2023, all five of my songs from my Spotify Raptor from the same artist.

1:49:26Okay. To the band called Sleep Token. Don't know it. Okay. So they, I don't even know how to begin to describe what this particular genre is. Okay. They're listed under metal technically. But they have elements of rap, they have elements of hip hop, they have elements of jazz, a lot of elements that are off key, that are also brilliant. Completely anonymous. Every single member of the band completely anonymous. Oh, I love that. They have law around the band. They use what look a little bit like Nordic runes on the album artwork. And if you track all of the different runes and then reverse engineer what they are, sometimes in the corner of tiny little pieces of album artwork, there's notes and things that The first song they made made the songs or they made the albums in eras and this one was this last one was a trilogy The first song of the first album of this particular trilogy which was released in 2018 There was different members in the band on the backside Has the exact same melodic progression and sample is the last song of the last album Wow These guys are just another level and absolute other level last week They're not named either.

1:50:37There's Vessel, that's one, then there's two, three, and four, and then there's backing singers. And they're referred to as like I -I, I -I, and IV. Love it. Three's birth certificate was discovered and released on the internet through a telegram chat. Yeah. They'd reverse engineered based on some, they'd looked at this particular American recording Copyright Association website where you have to legally list some of the names of the people and you can reverse engineer who that is and oh that person used to be in this band and that's that, that his voice sounds like that person and then we go back and see the live recording from that we can work out where these people live.

1:51:21This is exactly it, right? And I tell a joke about this that's not funny at all, which is, well, if you didn't want us to understand your bracket gene status, you wouldn't and publish it on the front page of the New York time. You wouldn't be throwing out your dental floss. Yeah, look, okay. So I get it. You went through my garbage. You picked out my dental floss. You took it to a lab and you came up with a cock and bull story that because no particular link in this chain may have been technically illegal, everything you do is fine. And I also joke about this under the heading of perfectly legal.

1:52:04If you ask somebody whether something is legal and they say it's perfectly legal, you know that you should be doing it. I've never thought of that before, but that's so true. An interesting one that I heard recently is any website, this is from Kevin Kelly, any website that has the word truth in the URL you can immediately discount. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there is this very funny sort of Newton's law that I also talk about with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris that Ben Shapiro is always talking about the need for reason in areas which seem normative because he doesn't want to make an appeal to religious norms so much because he's known to be an orthodox Jew, whereas Sam Harris is always talking about spirituality and morality because he's an atheist who is suspected of not having a moral code because he doesn't come from a god.

1:52:59You've got a counter signal. You have to counter signal. And this is one of the reasons, for example, why people with unusual beliefs often take down other people with unusual beliefs because you've already pulled out so many blocks out of the jingotaro. You can't afford anymore. I was reflecting on the odd horse shoe that we've seen from people like Douglas Murray and Sam Harris who were very critical of religion at still are in a large degree. But especially 20 years ago kind of breaking down a lot of these walls being involved in being skeptical about the role of it. And yet, there's now almost a return to nostalgia for a grand narrative that unifies everybody.

1:53:49There's a concern about what has come in in its place. Is it wokeism? Is it drumpism? Is it... How do you see that? It's too tried to say baby in bathwater. It's easier to say we don't know the second -order of the things that we do. Perfect example of this is after the introduction of the contraceptive pill, abortions went up and single motherhood went up. That's like a third or fourth order effect that nobody could have predicted. I don't think. Nobody would have taken an unbelievably sharp mind to have gone, okay, so if before contraceptive birth control is available reliably for the woman to use an accidental pregnancy is seen as the man's obligation as opposed to the woman's choice, but after that it's reversed, which means that the shotgun wedding goes out of the window because the owners can always be put on the woman.

1:54:50All right, that's interesting. I just think that sometimes you don't know the like better the devil you know in some ways. I have a different take on it, but that's interesting. Can you take it? Well, okay.

1:55:15So one of my riffs is that if you look at the declaration of independence, the language says we hold these truths to be self -evident. You have to say because you have to say we are not going into an infinite sequence of wise statements.

1:55:39And by saying, we hold these truths to be self -evident. You're saying, you may not hold them to be self -evident. Bugger off. We hold these truths to be self -evident. If you can't hold these truths to be self -evident, it's exclusionary in some way. Absolutely. And so very often, when you imagine that you're going to put everything on reason, And anybody who's had an intelligent child knows why daddy? Why is that? Well, why is that? And eventually it's infinite rigor. Well, I joke with my son and I say either the parent eventually says because where you end up is the theoretical physicist because that's what that's the exterminate.

1:56:20Um, you have to have an organizing principle that scales. And you know, Sam's mistake is not understanding that even if Sam Harris can be a moral and ethical, somewhat rational human being at times, on his best day, take Sam Harris as a reasonable rational memorial here moving. You can't scale that. It doesn't scale. That's a big difference between saying it's impossible for an individual and saying it's impossible for a society. The next part of that, part of the document is that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator, you have to make a reference to ground assumption where you are not going to go below.

1:57:19And if you don't do that, you end up in the infinite regress. That's what it calls. Yeah. And if I ask you as a computer, divide one by three to infinite precision, give me the answer. It'll say 0 .3 and it'll blow up. It's called a resource leak. You can't allow these infinite recursions seeking truth. And as a result of that, we didn't understand the load -bearing nature of religion and the atheist movement. Now, I say, we, that was never my problem. I'm an atheist who prays, as I've said. And people get very confused. Well, who do you pray to? And what do you mean? Your brain knows how to pray.

1:58:05Your or there is no God. How important is belief. I don't know. But I've never met an atheist who never believes.

1:58:18And I've never met a religious person who always believes. Humans flit in and out of belief and non -belief. It is the nature of our beast. And as a result of that, you know, I feel like, we're just not honest. if you claim as an atheist that you never entertain the idea of an Almighty and the Creator, I don't believe you. And if you're a religious person, it says, like, my belief in my Lord is 100%. I was like, nope. There's a line from George Janko where he says, every man knows God when he's at his lowest place. Okay. The foxhole. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. very interesting to think about what's going to come next as a whether it does descend into this sort of poster for the next one that you want to do the post -apocalyptic blow -out windows spring mattress in the back corner world where nothing is unifying given that what we spoke about for the you know first 90 minutes is the world is confusing it's hard to make sense we don't know what's real we We don't know what isn't, we don't know if we can trust the information that we're getting that's in front of our eyes.

1:59:28We don't know if we can trust the people that are around us to have our best interests are heart. How do we make sense of the world? Religion provided a pretty good tool for that. And I'm not sure whether it's possible to be a cultural Christian or a cultural Muslim or a cultural Jew. you, I wonder how important the belief bit is to the religion bit. Do you pray? I meditate. Jesus closes. You're going to get, what do you mean?

2:00:11I don't know enough. I mean, I took my mum to rip in Cathedral on Christmas Eve and we went through a full service of 90 minutes with 13, 14, 15 hymns and a bunch of prayers in between. A lot of Christmas trees and decoration and stuff, but I think that would have been the first time that I would have heard something like that since primary school since I was 11 or 10. Yeah. Is there religious music that moves you?

2:00:54See, you have the major scale of the centerpiece of Western music. Do you need guitar? We're okay.

2:01:05Why do you have a guitar? We have a guitar. Can we get the guitar? Come on, we need a need to be able to hear this

2:01:16Principal reason for bringing out a guitar would be to stop me from singing which I think is an excellent idea Okay, well hey, no, but look I can't sing I can't play the guitar. I enjoy doing it to the internet There you go. Well look this is a full -size one last time we gave you one that made you look like you were a giant Okay, so if you just take the major scale, right?

2:01:41That's not really music, but try just the descending major scale.

2:01:52What is that to you? Sounds like Mary had a little llama, something similar.

2:02:02Now what is it? Where do I know that tune from? What is that? Joy to the world the Lord has come. Right now if you take a different scale, right, and you go, the blues scale. I'm a little bit meaner. So you can ask the same question. If I do the descending scale, you know, what is that? Like the intro for messing with the kid.

2:02:39Or it's close to sunshine of your level.

2:02:45Right? So is a descending scale music? Not much, but when it's made music by pausing or by emphasis, one of the great tunes of Western civilization is created, Joy to the World, you know. My feeling about it is that song should move you and all of these religious songs They mean something. I was in a car train going from Bulgaria to Kiev and all of these Siberian minors. I brought my harmonica. They had a transistor radio and at some point the radio gives out. They want to drink and dance because this is their holiday. They started getting really rowdy. And I realized I had the ability to make music so I pulled a harmonica out I start playing some blues and everybody's dancing and having a great time and they're like more I'm gonna know whatever and I'm paralyzed and I don't have that much of a repertoire on the harmonica and The one thing I could do was I start playing Jewish songs and This woman comes up to me and grabs me by my lapels is you know in Russia.

2:04:08Where do you know this from where do you? I'm like, I'm realizing that I'm in an anti -Semitic environment, I think. And I've got a Siberian minor who recognizes that I'm playing Jewish music. And I'm terrified. I'm paralyzed. I don't say anything. I pretend that I can't understand her in Russian. And she reaches into her bosom and she pulls out a giant star of David. Right? And like, she's just looking at me in the eyes like, I know you. You know me. There's a way in which religious music is incredibly powerful and prayer is incredibly powerful. And I think we're afraid to pray. You know, you say this in terms of meditation.

2:04:51We're afraid to submit to something bigger than ourselves to use the programming that we have, that makes us feel good. There's something that feels disingenuous about praying if you don't believe. There's a line from Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, the movie, Tom Hanks is speaking to the Kamalengo and he's trying to get access to the Vatican Archives. He wants to get down there to work out some secret that was left that he needs to find out who's killing everybody. me. Nikano Lengo asks him, played by you and McGregor, and he says, do you believe Professor? And he starts giving some politicians answer where he skirts around the question.

2:05:39He says, I didn't ask that. I asked if you believed. It looks him straight in the eyes and he says, faith is a gift that I'm yet to be given. Hmm.

2:05:53I don't believe it. We all have the gift of faith. What we don't have is the ability to sustain it. We don't have the ability to import it into all quadrants of our minds. Look, I'm saying that I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the stories about the deity.

2:06:14But that's not constant. You know, you flit in and out. You know, Mike, do you believe in Ray Charles? I do. Do you? No, no, I'm sort of joking. But if I think about what did I say by Ray Charles, why was that song so powerful? He's basically bringing Saturday night and Sunday morning together. Right? There's a religious sort of gospel choral aspect to it. And he's got the relettes in the background echoing it. And he goes, and they go, he goes, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. That's pretty, that's satanic grunting going on on Saturday night, right? And then you're going to show up in church, and you're going to turn it into something else.

2:07:10Ray Charles was scandalous because he fused the secular in the sacred, the profane in the sacred. Do you believe in the devil? One of the, you know,

2:07:22you know the song Crossroads by Robert Johnson? Nope. Well, I can't. Let's see if you do. I don't know that I could do a Robert Johnson for a week country blue, but like, This were an electric guitar that you probably know Went down to the crossroads try to flag myself around I went down the crossroads, tried to flag myself around.

2:08:15All good people, they just passed me by. He's talking about going to the crossroads to bargain for his soul. He wants to learn how to play the guitar.

2:08:32And that's powerful because you have this myth. You know, if the devil goes down to Georgia or you go to the crossroads to gain something in a Faustian bargain, how are you going to believe that with no Lord? You're going to screw yourself out of the ability to listen to folklore, to mythology, to great literature.

2:09:02And that makes me sad. You know, it's like, are you making a point of saying that you can't understand the religious person? We need churches and mandirs and muskids and synagogues. And we need them to behave non -psychopathically. And you can't hate on the psychopathy and divorce yourself from the power of the word and of song and of communal prayer and... It's something it's something I'm whistle for and I whistle for a belief that I never had in a way. Yeah. Yeah, there's a I think there's a particular Latin church. Chase, can you grab this big get -to -lailey for me please? Because one of the quickest growing denominations, I think, of church attendance in America is this thing that's all in Latin.

2:10:08Mm -hmm. Have you heard about this? No. I can't remember what it is, and it's growing massively in the, in a young age demographic, under 30 or something. The whole thing's in Latin. Which can be awesome, right? Well, I think I'm wondering that a can -to may have been a kind of a big mistake.

2:10:32That's so. Because when you're forced to actually contend with what the words are in a modern context, they don't have the power that they sometimes have as a spell. Well, it's difficult to switch off a very particular type of critical, vigilant, analytical mind when what you're looking to try and do is allow the experience to wash over you. So perhaps, yeah, not being it unless you have fluent in Latin, being able to just enjoy the experience and just be, maybe that is most of what you're trying to, maybe that's most of what religious service was doing. Maybe it wasn't really anything to do with the words.

2:11:24Very often it isn't. I mean, it depends, you know. So we're actually meeting on Shabbat. This is the, I should have traveled here. We shouldn't be using electronic devices, but I'm not practicing Jew at that level. But I think about what we say over the wine when we pray, you know, we have this thing where we begin Vai hier, vai vokeryom hashi shi, vai hulwasha mai vahara, it's ve cold siva hum, Vai halalui me yom hashi vi me laktua sherasa, like this is the sound of Jewish prayer, right? And then you're thinking about what it says, and it's very moving to me, because what it is is it's taken directly out of Genesis.

2:12:15Vaheer vaheevokar yom hashi shi and it was evening and it was morning the sixth day. Right? Yom is day and shi shi is six and Arab is evening and booker is morning. So you know what the words mean and you're actually recapitulating God's shifting from work to rest. So as you come to understand what the words mean, it's not destroyed by knowledge. You know, that old song by the rivers of Babylon. That's related to the grace that we say after meals. These are references that matter. And I think people are shocked.

2:13:12They don't know how much of their life comes from Scripture. You know, you have a round of firings at a company. Somebody says, I can read the writing on the wall. Well, do you know that that's Daniel 525? Do you know what the wall says?

2:13:32I think many, many take a little far -scene. You know, you've been measured and found one, and your lands will be distributed to the Persians or something like that. These are incredibly powerful references that we live with. You know, you think about the birds, to everything, turn, turn, turn, repeat the ears on. There is a season and a time and a purpose under heaven. It's Ecclesiastes.

2:14:02You think about Jimmy Hendrix going off about two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl. It's Isaiah. Where are you? Where are you with the power of the word?

2:14:18Are you afraid to welcome it in? Are you worried that you'll lose your atheism? Hmm. What are those two writers approaching?

2:14:31They come with news. That's the fall of Babylon. Who are the Joker and the Thief? And that's all.

2:14:47I believe they're on either side of Christ being crucified.

2:14:59Religion is interested in you whether or not you give a shit. It knows about you and it finds its way into every aspect of your life. And if you're going to be an honest atheist, you have to admit that. Talking about younger people, have you seen the data showing the movement of teenage boys politically to the right? Have you been looking at this? Where else are they going to go? It's a good question. I mean, I had a teenage boy. I still have one, but he's 18 now. And I watch them be pushed farther and farther right by their schools.

2:15:38You suck. All of your instincts are bad. These girls are amazing. Look at you. You're pathetic. Be less masculine and more attractive. You're just barking at them constantly. They're not moving right. They're moving out of your stupid way. You've given them what? Nothing. Nothing. One of my son's friends died recently by his own hand.

2:16:10And I don't know what kind of pressures he was put under. But I watched those kids go through this pressure cooker created by this crazy parasitized left -wing educational movement. Get away from our sons. Get away from our daughters. Get away from our sons and away from our daughters. It's not left or right. I don't have a Republican bone in my body. Get the crazy people who do not understand human development away from our children.

2:16:48Stop giving our daughter's terrible life advice. Well, like...

2:17:01That's one of these Milgrom questions. What am I supposed to say? Let me speak abstractly so we don't get distracted with stupid stuff. Gender is about reproduction. And it's paired and there's nothing you're going to do that's as good as the male female pairing that produces families. Yes, there's a ton of problems with it. There's a ton of problems with traditional femininity, with traditional masculinity. I actually believe that toxic masculinity used to mean something before it meant nothing. Right now we are allowing our children to be parented by people who should be nowhere we're close to a child because development for humans is different.

2:17:43We're not like wildebeests where you come out with programming where you can walk on day one. We're basically not blank slates but self -assembling computers. And what you put into a developing mind, what normal child trying to figure out gender your identity.

2:18:09Does not go through a process trying to figure out, oh, I like that dress. Do I want to marry somebody who's wearing it or do I want to wear it myself? That's a normal process that you go through in development. And if a parent hears that, they usually, you know, try to guide natural gender identity. Now, what happens when an administrator says, Oh, he said he wanted to wear a dress. He's a girl. Everybody respect his choice. You're thinking, wait, wait, what? You took a moment that happens in every boy's life and you turned it into a trans affirmation moment and then you tried to like freeze it in and, let me guess, you really just want to protect something, which is great.

2:19:03Some people want to protect trans kids. Trans kids exist. They have life very hard on them. Okay, let's ask how many trans kids got manufactured by this DEI movement? Versus how many would occur naturally? And you have type one and type two error. You have a trans kid who was always going to be a trans kid that wasn't properly treated. that's terrible. I agree with the DEI people about that. You have another collection, huge collection of normal kids who are never going to be trans and you push them towards this. I had Jay Michael Bailey on the show who his paper on ROGD, Rapid Onset, Gender Disphoria, was pulled very, very rare that this happens.

2:19:55And I learned during my research for that about the left -handedness argument for both gay and transsexual people. So in the Middle Ages it was seen as being a mark of witchcraft being touched by the devil that you were left -handed, which meant that people who were hid their left -handedness. Yeah, I think about 12 percent maybe if the population is left -handed something like that, but during the Middle Ages, it was significantly less. The ceiling gets released and people are free to be there, true left handed selves, and more people become left handed. I can now fully manifest that forward.

2:20:35And that is an argument that gets put forward a lot. Well, now that we have released the lid on the pressure cooker that was tamping down, people's natural trans or gay proclivities or whatever, they're now free to be themselves, but that doesn't explain why gender dysphoria appears to occur in clumps. It's not evenly distributed across all stores. You linked two things that I think have to be unlinked. We are fighting the last war because we got male homosexuality wrong. I'm old enough to remember when it was a lifestyle style choice.

2:21:17Right? And I had gay friends in college who it's not a choice. You know, it's like a quiet, I didn't choose this. Um, we're lumping a bunch of stuff together. I don't think male homosexuality has almost anything to do with female homosexuality. I think calling them both homosexuality is very confusing. There's something that seems is much more obligate about male homosexuality. It's highly conserved. I don't think it's unnatural. I think it's part of the design of humans. We haven't quite figured out why it's there. I don't disagree, but I think the left -handedness argument makes sense when it comes to homosexuality, but not when it comes to the trans issue.

2:21:57No, it makes sense in both, but the size of the effect is the problem. You're claiming, I have no doubt that there were some people who had transgendered brains, who were closeted transvestites and that had to closet somewhere in the basement where they got to be their true selves. No question that that exists. The issue is that you created an enormous amount of type 2 error so you could go after a much smaller amount of type 1 error. You created all sorts of negative stuff by not balancing type one and type two. And that's unforgivable. You're not actually the defender you think you are. You're somebody who's destroying some lives to privilege others.

2:22:46And why have you made that decision? I completely agreed with you. Like I won't say there are only two genders. You know why? right?

2:23:00Because it's not true. In humans? Yeah. Two genders or two sexes? Well, first of all, the gender and sex used to be largely synonymous before we decided that one was in some sense obligate biological and the other was software program. Well, that was a lexical game that was believed in the 1950s. It was played to try and replicate it. Yeah, but you You could make an argument that you need a term. I don't think the gender should be purposed for that, but you could make it an argument that just like abstracting male and female into top and bottom had some utility. Okay, so what do you mean when you talk about?

2:23:38That intersex is a really important category to me. I know people who are intersex, and they're screwed. They were screwed because our society had no way of dealing with them. The gender binary is so strong that somebody, through zero fault of anybody, is born with ambiguity in their genitalia and their chromosome something. So yes, there are two intended sexes or genders, but nature isn't good enough to hit that mark all the time. And those are human beings, those are souls, and the sloppy right -wing thing, which is to find the shelling point where you just sit there and you say, there are only two sexes and two gender.

2:24:23I understand why you're doing it. You're trying to stop this crazy conversation that's taken off. So it's not like I don't have sympathies with why you're saying that. But when I bring up, you know, my favorite example is persistent, ulirian duct syndrome where somebody goes into their doctor having trouble having a kid and it's like, well, you have twigs and berries, but you've also got a uterus. You're female Does that person produce both sperm and eggs? No, right. But surely that's the definition. That is the line in the ground around male and female, large gametes. Yeah, but sorry, the gentleman who goes into his doctor and to find out that he's got a uterus, who is he?

2:25:10If he wants to be male, I understand why he wants to be male. If he wants to be able to talk about the fact that he got handed some very strange cards by the creator and her infinite wisdom. I want him or her, however that person conceives of self -to -beat. That's a soul to me. And I don't like the energy of saying there are only two sexes and two genders and that's it. It's like, I get it. I understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to say that there are two intended sexes and genders. It's reproductive. It's nature. I get it. It depends on how we're going to define sex. Because if it comes down to gamete size, that is binary.

2:25:50Sure. Okay, but what do you do about the edge case? But no one's producing both. So there are none. I don't know that nobody's producing both. Maybe that's a fact. You know, usually the issue is that you have this list of homologues, right? So that the clitoris maps to the penile shaft and the labium adora map to the testicles and what you're doing is you're taking a common female template, I believe, and you're treating it through the S .R .Y. cascade differently during development so that the default is female, but you also have this ability through this one protein to create a cascade that creates male out of female.

2:26:31Okay, that doesn't always work out. Now you've got an ambiguous situation and you've got a culture that basically can't think in ambiguities. That's where a lot of this frustration with the gender binary comes from is that you know somebody in this in a category where they're not really one thing or the other at a hardware level. I believe that beyond that there's also a software level. There are people with male brains and female bodies and conversely. I don't understand this stuff but I believe that that's true. If you ever have the opportunity to interview D. D. D. McCloskey who used to be I think Dennis McCloskey very famous economist.

2:27:11I had the pleasure of speaking with her a while back and you know one of the things that she said was that she wasn't doing this to be hotsy -totsy. She was going to she wanted to die an old lady, not an old man. It wasn't a sex thing. It was just the fact that she'd been uncomfortable in a male body her whole life. So I'm using the term her. Do I have to use the term? No, I could use the term him or his. But why would you do that? Don't you have enough compassion that somebody ruined their family life and went through hell and in public because it was so painful to be in the wrong body? I get it.

2:27:55Okay. Now you have that compassion and how many lives are you going to ruin over that?

2:28:05How many lives are you going to ruin pretending that this is an enormous cohort? So to the extent that I have a slogan and I basically never speak about trans, my slogan is make trans accepted and rare.

2:28:27Make it rare means use the developmental environment in order to give good coaching about male strategies and female strategies for life. Don't relitigate the fact that we screwed up male homosexuality. Just take your lumps, we screwed it up. It's a part of the human condition. It's never going to go away. It's different from female homosexuality almost certainly. We don't exactly know why it's here. We've been blessed with untold riches particularly in the mamedic realm from male homosexuals. It is what it is. And now we're going to refight this over trans, where no, I think you have tremendous opportunities through development to assign behaviors is the skirt a female object.

2:29:23No. The lungi in South Asia is a skirt. Men wear it. I have a lungi. It's like telling a Scottish person that he's a he's he's he's cross -dressing. What are you an idiot? You ever you ever dealt with a Scotsman? You do not want to make that mistake they will let you know very quickly who they are.

2:29:51We're out of our minds. We're out of our minds. We're creating so much misery for these young men and young girls. And you know, it just, it makes me upset because we don't love our children enough. We don't love our children enough to tell these teachers hands off my kids. Go work out your weird stuff. I get it. Get away from our children. I came up with this idea of toxic compassion, which was something I was looking to name. Metastatic maternity. Yes, yes, like an eatable complex. Like the need to smother and protect something so badly that you just want to do violence to somebody because you want to get your rocks off.

2:30:36that there is this problem with compassion.

2:30:44But if you prioritize short term emotional comfort over everything else, you end up with some very strange externalities. No, such as that though. I mean, what if we're talking about the same thing? Let me read you mine. Toxic compassion is the prioritization of short term emotional comfort over everything. Over truth, reality, actual long term outcomes, flourishing, everything. It optimises for looking good rather than doing good. This is seen in much of popular culture as the desirable, fair and empathetic thing to do, and it's everywhere. People would rather claim that body fat has no bearing on health and mortality outcomes to avoid making overweight individuals feel upset, even if this causes them to literally die sooner or have a worse quality of life over the long run.

2:31:27Parents would rather allow children to play computer games or watch screens and access social media every night, instead of dealing with the discomfort of taking it away from them, even if it ruins their brain development, social skills and self -esteem. People would rather say that children growing up in a single -parent household suffer no worse outcomes than those from two -parent households, even if this misleads parents, children and teachers about why kids behave the ways they do. Elon Musk recently responded to criticism about his political alignment and contribution to climate change. He identified how big of a shift Tesla had caused in the electric vehicle market and the downstream impact of that, on the environment, saying that he's done more for the climate than any other human in history.

2:32:05What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Telling people what they want to hear, giving them immediate gratification and avoiding saying anything that could cause distress, prioritizes appearing good over actually doing good. It's dangerous. I'm with you. You are in an area I think a lot about and I don't want to I don't want to attack something that you're saying but I conceive of this differently. There's a point about sanctumony and appearing to do good while doing evil. That is different from the need to parent and protect.

2:33:00Part of what's going on is a redistribution of empathy, which is being called an expansion of empathy. So the idea is we are going to be extra -specialy sympathetic with some groups and empathic with their trauma, their pain. And we are going to take away compassion from other groups. So for example, if you look at suicide statistics in the United States, from all of the rhetoric you would think that young black Asian females would be at the top of the suicide statistics, but it's really middle -aged white men who are killing themselves incredible numbers. And you bring up the statistic.

2:33:57And there's an exchange rate in terms of human misery that is measured in suicide. It's a pretty unfudgable thing. When you kill yourself, you're probably in an extremely negative state of personal trauma. So what does the compassion group think about the fact that the group most likely to end their own lives is exactly the group that is faltered? You know, for the patriarchy, it's astounding. Oh, poor little white men in the Midwest had their privilege taking away. What the hell are you talking about? You're talking about people killing themselves. You're talking about fathers and grandfathers dying.

2:34:40What we're talking about is a redistribution of compassion.

2:34:47We're talking about taking compassion away from people of European descent. We're talking about taking compassion away from men. We're talking about taking compassion away from a business person like Steve Jobs who might have pancreatic cancer and be dying from it in his fifties because he had the privilege of building billion dollar companies. Who the hell are you? What is your problem?

2:35:21Come out of the shadows and admit to what you want. You want a redistribution of compassion. You're calling this empathy. It is anything but empathy. Empathy would be an expansion of our understanding of each other's problems and woes. This is basically saying that these people are worthy of compassion and these people aren't. The child who might have been wronged for not having a clear gender identity, and that would have happened under any error in any circumstance. That's one life. Then you have a bunch of lives over here that are children who are pushed towards sexual reassignment surgery and are sexually mutilated for no reason at all because of of developmental reasons that they got bad advice from adults while they were trying to assemble themselves.

2:36:13And you're compassionate about this and you're not compassionate about that? I don't want you anywhere near a school.

2:36:22If you're not willing to deal with type 1 and type 2 error, you don't belong around our children. If you don't understand the human development is important and that it is very hard to improve on the gender binary that is. Even if there are edge cases, the gender binary is there for a reason. And you don't have a clue how complicated the gender binary is. You probably haven't even studied sexuality in different species that assign gender, you know, flatworms assign it based on a contest. The winner is male and the loser is female. You don't like that tough luck. You know, bed bugs only practice traumatic insemination.

2:37:04You don't like that? I'm sorry. How are you going to engineer the entire world around your crazy theories of gender and sexuality? We need these people away from children. They're working out their own stuff.

2:37:21We need to recognize that homosexuality, particularly among men in an obligate fashion, is a normal, conservative part of the human experience. Basically, there is a gender binary. There is a small number of edge cases at a hardware level. There is a small number of cases meant at a software level. We have to be compassionate about all that, but we can't take compassion away from everyone else

2:37:52That's a message to both the left and the right. Stop saying they're only two sexes, it's a fencer. And stop forcing people to say something so simplistic because you're threatening their children. There was a story about Winston Churchill's father, I wanted to tell you about. In September 1893 Churchill was admitted on his third attempt to the Santerst military college. He wrote to his father, I was so glad to be able to send you the good news on Thursday. His father, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, wrote back a week later. The full text, the reply, doesn't seem to be available but we do have glimpses.

2:38:35You should be ashamed of your slavently happy -go -lucky, the Haram -Sgaram style of work. Never have I received a really good report of your conduct from any headmaster or tutor, always behind incessant complaints of a total one -to -vaclication to your work. You were failed to get into the 60th rifles, the finest regiment in the army. You were imposed on me an extra charge of some £200 a year. Do not think that I'm going to take the trouble of writing you long letters after every failure you commit and undergo. I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have had during your school days, you will become a mere social wasteroll, one of the hundreds of public school failures and you will degenerate into a shabby and happy and futile existence.

2:39:23You will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes. Your mother sent her love. Churchill was 19.

2:39:34What do you make of it? Come on. Tough to read. It makes me think about what drove Churchill to be the person that he became. It makes me think about the price again that people pay for the successes that others look at and have envy of, revere, admire, remember. We don't know what drives people. They often don't know what drives them as well when they look sufficiently deep. But that's rough to read. Same more about that. The guy goes on to be perhaps the greatest leader of the 20th century, one of the greatest leaders of all time. He stops Nazi Germany on just this domino fall as they move through Europe every single country that they come up against and the first one that they hit, that they find some proper resistance from is the battle of Britain up against Britain.

2:40:32He is prepared to play a game that nobody else in the British government is prepared to play. There's a great book called Churchill's Ministry of Ungenital Money Warfare. And basically the Brits saw as they entered World War II. They saw the way that guerrilla warfare tactics were so uncouth that one of the other military leaders was quoted as saying, if that's what it takes to win, then I am prepared to lose. And Churchill took whatever the opposite approach of that was. So he begins to find renegade scientists and inventors, people that can do guerrilla tactics, they can break down bridges, they can so distrust, and they create the first limpet mine underwater magnetic mine.

2:41:21And these guys are doing it by buying up all of the condoms in villages so that they can and water protect anisee balls that they know will reliably dissolve at the particular. All of these different things, just this crazy insight. That man, the slovenly happy go lucky, harram, scarron style of work. If you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless and profitable life you have, I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say. I don't know, it makes me sad to think that Churchill may have done so much great in his life and yet never felt enough because of the source code that he had programmed into him.

2:42:02Yeah. Unwinnable. But unwinnable. Parental love is an incredible engine. But I also see love in that letter. You see, imagine there was no World War II. Imagine there was no Nazi regime.

2:42:28What was he supposed to do with his life? Open a dry cleaner?

2:42:36Was he supposed to become a vice president for inventory at a large company? What was Winston Churchill supposed to do? Absent Adolf Hitler.

2:42:55God, this is just so hard to even talk about and think about. Greatness. You're supposed to have great people under glass. I call this, you know, break glass in case of emergency people. We don't have any. If you had trouble now, who would you go to? You know, you're from the UK. I don't think you're a biologist, but you know who David Attenborough is. What is the UK's opinion of David Attenborough? Almost universally loved. Universally loved. I don't know. You must know an ex -girlfriend because you said all of that. But yeah, he's a national treasure of the UK. We're supposed to have tons of those people.

2:43:49I don't know of any. We've beaten up everything we have. And if somebody attacks, you know, I've made this point before, but everybody focuses on the wrong speeches of Neville Chamberlain. You want to get choked up, look at his resignation speech. That thing is a thing of wonder.

2:44:13His point is, this is the move that Hitler doesn't see coming.

2:44:22Hitler does not see that I'm going to resign for the good of my country and that Winston Churchill has asked me to stay on.

2:44:34So you guys better know what you're doing because you're gonna have to you can have us to deal with the UK needs to get back in the game. Let's just be honest about it. I don't know what the hell's going on to UK. It makes me very angry and very sick. How so? I don't know, I was it... Do you know Ditchley? Some estate that Winston Churchill was at in the UK not far from us. It sounds like every other estate that exists. I was there for a meeting, was a quiet meeting. There were lots of people in the British Foreign Service there. And they were all impeccably educated and spoke multiple languages and all this stuff.

2:45:15And they were all like moping about. You know, oh, well, you know, of course with the US, there's nothing really for us to do. And this is no longer the UK of the previous blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, what the hell is wrong with you, people? You have this incredible role to play. Yeah, there's definitely a degree of not defeatism, but yeah, like playing second string. Walk it off. Dude, your special forces are still the envy of the planet. it. Everybody knows how tough the UK is when it comes to special forces. Your facility with the language of second to none, and it's not just that accent.

2:45:54It's the fact that you live it culturally. There's so much quirkiness, tolerance for eccentricity, for brilliance, not just excellence, that is deep in the English soul. And I have no idea what the UK is doing. Yeah, you're smaller, you lost your empire, tough luck, and walk it off. It feels a little bit like someone who's given a ceremonial... Oh, stop it. No, when you look at, let's say there's a large debate that's going on, there's some sort of meeting of countries and the UK is there and it seems like that there is a token gesture to some bygone dynasty. We must remember to invite the Brits because it's important that they have a seat at the table.

2:46:52I don't know. I don't feel like we're forging forward in the world. I don't know. You aren't doing enough. You aren't doing enough.

2:47:06But you You're incredibly important. So you're relatively small as a market. And so what why did Jim Watson have to go over to the Cavendish laboratories to do DNA? You know?

2:47:25Think about all the things that came out of the UK. I'd kill for the Direct Equation to have been invented in the US. Yes. Have some pride in yourselves. There's a lot of criticism at the moment about multiculturalism in the UK. What does that mean? That as you enter, maybe he throw it, maybe Gatwick, maybe one of the tube stations coming out of there, it's something like diversity as our strength is one of the taglines. And there are a lot of people that have got... Okay, so let's fight this out because I want to do this. We really do. you. Undoubtedly, you know many people of Indian Pakistani origin who speak with an Oxbridge accent.

2:48:13Right? And they have all sorts of mannerisms. Head and notice. The UK is also a software product. You can teach people to think as if they've always been, I mean, let's be honest, your royal family is partially German.

2:48:40Think about the UK as a software product. Imagine that you can load that software into a mind no matter what the skin color looks like. It's the software that we're attached to much more than your hardware. I don't think we're getting that level of integration. It depends with which groups. You have plenty of Ashkenazi Jews who are completely English. I mean, I just brought up Paul Derock. Derock isn't a typically British name, it's French.

2:49:17Right? They're all sorts of people who are quintessentially English, who aren't. Historically. Now I have a good friend from way back Marcus De Soto, who never really thought about the fact that his last day was totally French. You know, what is he? A fellow of the Royal Society and OBE, whatever it is that he is, you know, It's just, yeah, and I think you guys are much better than you think you are. And I don't know what got into your tea, but we can't afford for the UK and the Anglophone universe to keep sobbing like this. You know, I chew out the Australians all the time. It's like, my God, you have this great country far away from Europe.

2:50:14This is your time to lead these. You have to stumbling. Do something with it. Do something with it. New Zealanders, come on guys. No, look, I'm incredibly happy to be part of the Angelfone world and not just in terms of the language, in terms of cultural norms, in terms of all of the things I say we've contributed to the world. I'm not British. I've never held a British passport, but I very much feel like, you know, the great science that came out of the UK is part of my heritage. And by the way, look at a map of the names, surnames in Scotland and Ireland. And it's like, who's who of everything that happened?

2:51:02It's just, I'm so proud at some level of this tradition. I sometimes tell somebody that you can tell that a man is only partially educated if the word Hamiltonian means something. Because which Hamilton? The Hamilton of mathematical physics, the Hamilton of biology, the Hamilton of US historical fame. I'm very bullish on pride in the Anglophone universe. And we've got to stop moping around and the UK is supposed to lead. It's been a while that there's a really awesome Netflix series, World War II, from the front lines. I think it's cold, so they've used a combination of AI and archive footage to recolor and put into 4K this entire series and it's outstanding and there's one about the Battle of Britain.

2:52:00And it's been a, I moved away from the UK and I had my problems with it and I tried for a long time to try and sort of nudge the culture as best I could from within my business or whatever I was doing. And then just thought, I can't, I'm trying to shovel sand away from the seashore here and it's just not working. So I've come over to America, I've flourished since I've been here, but that was the first time watching that and looking at that degree of spirit. That was the first time in quite a while where I've thought to myself, fuck yeah. Like that's that's something that I can genuinely be proud of.

2:52:39It's been Almost as long as I can remember since I genuinely thought I'm proud of being British. Come to St. Helena

2:52:52Seriously, you've got to spec in the middle of the Atlantic ocean below the equator. I just spent a week there. Do you know about Saint Helene? No, it's the first time I've ever had those two words put together in my life. Okay. They're the remnants of the British Empire, called the British Overseas Territories, right? And you have like Gibraltar and Diego Garcia, ascension, Tristan, D 'Acoona, Pitcair, and all these sort of bits and pieces that are what's left. It's an island of around 4 ,000 people where Napoleon died during a second exile after Elba because it was so secure. Apparently it's the second most fortified island in the world after Malta.

2:53:35It's an unbelievable place. People are incredibly proud of being British. And I believe that William is going to visit at the end of this month and there it's been 20 years since a royal visit of Prince Anne in any event. One of the things that I loved about being in James Town, St Helena, is the pride that people have in being British and being under the British order.

2:54:08And we just can't afford for you guys. I mean, look, when I say lead, it doesn't mean the US isn't going to lead. You have a different leadership role. Use it. We're in crisis right now. We all remember what it, you know, it sounds like to be Winston Churchill. Right? We know what that voice sounds like. And it's very painful for us that, actually, you know, I'm thinking back at... The problem is which diversity is our strength campaign. It's like some visual diversity. If you fly British airways and you look at that Safety reel. It's a joke. I mean, they're just trying to find everybody who they could find You know who displays some kind of visual diversity.

2:54:53No, the power of it You know the name Michael atia. He was the The master of Trinity College Cambridge One of the greatest mathematicians of all time certainly of the 20th century The name of T is what Lebanese? Nobody thought about him as Lebanese. We thought about him as British. I Think you guys are much better at this stuff than you think and you've fallen for the wrong kind of diversity this kind of Visual diverse shallow diversity. Yeah shallow diversity Don't be afraid to be British

2:55:35What are you working on next? What's next for you? Yeah, it's a problem. I'm supposed to say something like, I've got a special coming up where a book, I'm thinking about writing a book, but the most important thing that I have of is I have a possible expansion of our two main theories and physics.

2:56:05And nothing else compares to that. Even if it's wrong, a decent probability, which could be, you know, imagine it were one and a hundred or one and a thousand, which I, it's far north of there in my estimation. Did it's wrong or it's right? know that it's that it's right. I think it's much greater than those odds. And of course, you have to believe that or you wouldn't be working on it. But it's also the case that there aren't that many people who have even ballpark level skills to say what a theory would be.

2:56:40That's hope for me. Can you imagine if let's just imagine next week somebody He said, you know, actually this looks right.

2:56:53We could start dreaming about looking up at the night sky and seeing it as a bucket list. Where do you want to go? You could ask questions about is there any way to harvest the zero point energy from all the quantum oscillators? You could say, is there dark chemistry? Well, you have dark matter. We could have dark matter. At some level, this room is filled with dark matter. Neutrinos are effectively dark matter. The only thing that can grab them is gravity, which is way too weak. And the weak force, which is too weak. So, in general, we're just being irradiated by neutrinos morning noon and night.

2:57:43Imagine that you had slower moving particles than you could build things with them, and they just weren't coupled to the matter that we see here, so they passed through ordinary matter. If my theories work, they'll be incredible things to play with. And one of the things that I find fascinating is that it becomes this issue of psychology. Like, why is he pretending that he has a theory? I'm not pretending. Why does he think, you know, who does he think he is? And I just, I look at it and I just think, my gosh, you guys have all lost the plot. The world right now needs hope. And it needs a quest.

2:58:24It needs something for people to dream about that isn't the same set of questions. One of the things that I don't love about podcasting is that people tend to ask clustered questions. And I'm always looking for that interviewer who's going to ask me things that are just like people haven't heard.

2:58:47Mostly what we do is we just do retreads of the same old questions. And it's not a critique of either one of us as interviewers. It's just we don't know how to get out of our traffic circle where we go around and around. I'm trying to build the most exciting thing in the world, which is hope and a future and access to the source code of reality through differential equations and geometric structures. That sounds crazy to people. Yeah, well, look around you. How much of this was here in 1700s? Now go away. If you're not understanding that we've changed and we've progressed, you've lived through a time of stagnation and I'm sorry about that and I can't help you.

2:59:38Computers were the only thing that really, really took off during this period of time. So think about if science progressed the way computers progressed over the last 50 years. Your world would be completely unrecognizable. Now what do we have? We have a wood table, mugs, exposed brick, glass, metal. There's nothing here that's astonishing except the computers. That thing that iPad or whatever it is is the only astonishing thing to somebody who's looking at this from the point of view of 1971.

3:00:21That's terrible. Okay, so you've all lost the plot. Don't blame me that I have it. That's what I work on. I'm gonna try to make sure that you have options that your kids don't have to die on this planet. Elon is exactly right about this stuff. The only thing he has wrong is chemical rockets and Mars. I'm sorry he used it as an advertit for SpaceX, but he was right about everything else.

3:00:51Eric Weinstein, ladies and gentlemen, Eric, I appreciate you. I always enjoy coming and sitting down with you. These ones fly by and I'm looking forward to the next one as well. Thanks for having me, Chris.

From the publisher

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, former managing director of Thiel Capital and a podcaster.
It's a rough time to be a human. The massive increase in information we have access to has made understanding the world harder, not easier. Whether it's higher education, culture, physics, or pretty much anything else, life can be very confusing.
Expect to learn what Eric thinks about the most recent furore coming out of Harvard, why the world of physics has made no progress in decades, why Jeffrey Epstein was interested in Stephen Hawking, how much truth there is in the recent flurry of stories about inter-dimensional extraterrestrials, Eric's predictions for the 2024 election and much more...
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#747 - Eric Weinstein - The Collapse Of Harvard, Truth & Independent Thought (4K)

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