#2503 - Eric Weinstein

21:18On second. Halfway in. He's like, oh, fuck this.

21:22Eric Weinstein:No, a lot of these people who survive jumping off the Gold Gate Bridge, they learn like I love life. Yes. Yes. Most of them. They're reborn. Yeah. So what I would say is the problem is that I am – this is not a boast. As you know, I don't usually put my credential first. I'm probably the most blue chip defector from the institutions, mutineer. Let's call it that. I have essentially perfect credentials and that's the problem. So it's not a question about you're going to legitimize. I already legitimized myself by Harvard PhD, MIT postdoc, NSF postdoctoral fellow, ONR top in the country, Sloan Foundation grantee.

22:11Eric Weinstein:I've been in math, physics, economics departments. I'm so bulletproof. So that's the problem. That's the problem. That's the problem. It's not that you're a kook. That's what I was trying to say. You didn't understand. No, I do understand. I just don't understand why they want to do that too. That's what's bizarre. Narrative. Okay. I am the greatest danger to the narrative. I'm the most followed mathematician in the United States. Maybe the world, Hannah Frye, maybe above it. That danger to the narrative is the problem. Well, specifically for people who don't know what we're talking about, what is, to make this a stand-alone show, the people that are not aware of your work, What is it about you and your ideas that they are so hesitant to platform or legitimize or why you're such a danger?

23:02Eric Weinstein:OK. So in 2001, I said mortgage backed securities were a great danger to the world. I have one of the first published papers on the danger of illiquid of the pricing of illiquid securities. I went on Chris Williamson's show and he asked me who's going to win Biden or Trump. I said, you don't even know whether Biden's going to make it to November. I said that the people, representatives of the Democrat Party reached out to me and said, stop talking about Biden's dementia. You need your affirmation that you're seeing something real. We've put in three people as a committee to replace the president.

23:36Eric Weinstein:And I said, like, I'm supposed to feel good about that. So I keep what they told you. Yeah. Put in three people. They put in a committee of three people. And if you knew who those people were, you'd be pleased as punch. So shut up. That's what they said to you? Yeah, correct. You would be really happy, so shut up? Yeah. They didn't even tell you who the people were? I think that they did, and I've conveniently forgot them. One of them might have been the chief of staff. Wow. But I say this, right? And I'm not trying to... I mean, I keep lots of secrets that people ask me to keep that I should keep, things having to do with national security, for example.

24:20But these people are incompetent and they're a danger to us.

24:24Eric Weinstein:And right now the string theory narrative is a complete danger. It's not string theory that's the problem. It's the only game in town. And so, you know, there was a – look, people are willing to spend their entire credibility just to make me go away. Could you briefly just describe like what is the – so there's not a problem with string theory? or is string theory not complete or is string theory reaped actual results? Mathematically, it's reaped results. And string theorists have occasionally done really great work in a subject called quantum field theory. But quantum field theory isn't about the quantum field theory of the world.

25:09Eric Weinstein:Quantum field theory is like calculus. It's some thing that's very useful and it grew up in physics. But we've now found out that quantum field theory has to do with pure problems in mathematics that have nothing to do with physics. And what they haven't done is they haven't dealt with the physical world. So if you take physics, why do we care about physics so much more than really almost any other aspect of the sciences other than biology? I had to give a talk at the New York Deep Tech Week. Shout out to those guys. And I put it on the slide as three things. There's boom, vroom, and zoom. Easy to remember.

25:48Eric Weinstein:Boom is weapons. Physics will create weapons. You'll dwarf everything else, with the possible exception of biologicals. Zoom, vroom, is energy. And the story of energy is basically the story of prosperity and control. If you look at wealth and the amount of fossil fuels burned, it's more or less like a one-to-one correlation as to which nations are rich and poor per capita. And Zoom is everything else. It's propulsion. It's computation. It's communication. And those things, if you take them together, more or less define the economy and the world order. Physics is the center of what makes us modern humans.

26:40Eric Weinstein:And it became too dangerous in the 1950s. Even the 40s, you know, atomic weapons are extremely bad, but they're not hydrogen bombs. Somehow in November of 52, everything changed. And we became too dangerous. The community of physicists is the most powerful group of people made into completely ineffectual humans. And do you think this is by design? Partially. And what was the purpose of it? By saying that physicists became too dangerous, the ideas became too dangerous, is the idea that the weapons would become so immense and powerful that they had to do something to stop and curb that? Well, we didn't know how to control it, right?

27:27Eric Weinstein:So in other words, for example, in 1940, we set up something called the Reference Committee, which I'm sure your listeners have never heard of. And the reference committee lived inside of the National Resource Council. Now, why was it important? Because chain reaction physics was so hot. Once the neutron was found, right? So think about neutrons as bullets. They can go right into the middle of an atom because they're not positively charged, so they're not going to be repelled by the nucleus. And they can bust apart atoms that are barely being held together. And that's why you get bullets, be getting bullets, be getting bullets, and that's what a chain reaction is.

28:05Eric Weinstein:The people who were doing that in the 30s suddenly found that when they mailed off a paper to a journal, if they weren't part of the secret group in Los Alamos, their paper got held up and sent back for revisions. And there was no money in it. We secretly set up this thing to shunt real research into the National Resource Council. I think this was organized by a guy named Bright, B-R-E-I-T. and that was the beginning of this whole peer review control mechanism and this control do you think is this ego-based that the people who are the gatekeepers want to remain in the position we all want to survive joe i mean this is a real problem so you and i can hate on the institutions all we want from the safety of the jre but what are you going to do when it becomes really really easy for people to commit like mass murder.

29:06Eric Weinstein:If you think about all the really bad mass, like the Vegas shooting that never really got sorted out, it's very hard to kill large numbers of people using things like bullets. If you want to really kill a large number of people, you're going to go to biologicals and you're going to go to nuclear. And what happens when that becomes easy? Like maybe it's a lot easier to build these weapons than the way we currently do it. Right now we're bottlenecked on things like centrifuges. And by the way, who knows what the next innovation in physics is going to bring? So I always say this thing about if you're not tracking everybody at my level, what are you doing as an intelligence service?

29:45Is this part of your concern about the missing scientists?

29:48Eric Weinstein:Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the missing scientist narrative for people that aren't aware of it, I think they're up to 15 now. And a lot of people say that some of these connections are baseless and that some of them, it's just - We're not really up to 50. No. Okay. So what do you think we're actually up to? I don't know. Probably five or six. But I saw someone online did a breakdown of it. And essentially they were saying that the odds of this being a coincidence are off the charts. That the people that are all involved in very specific types of technological research, different things that are top secret that all of these people either wind up missing there's a lot of murder in math and physics first of all people don't really appreciate that you know the unabomber was a famous phd mathematician uh he's a big story though there's a there's a lot sure there was a guy named canter who broke into david rittenhouse laboratories in the university of pennsylvania where i was an undergraduate and shot up a seminar there was you know this situation in Iowa where a relative of mine got a seat in the physics department because somebody was killed by one of the graduate students I think it became a movie like dark matter so there's an incredible amount of murder the ball peen hammer killing of was it Carl DeLue by Stralesky at Stanford.

31:18Eric Weinstein:So first of all, there's just a lot of death because mathematicians and physicists are somewhat close to unhinged. And it's a really nasty, there's a lot of nasty culture and sometimes it becomes violent. Why do you think they're close to unhinged? You spend that much time in your head? I'm amazed that I'm as well grounded as I am. No, seriously, you're just way out in the stratosphere. I completely forget who I am, where I am, that I'm even a human being. When you're using your body as an instrument, as you do in combat sports and training, you become a different thing. You know that archery thing where you have to twist your arm?

32:02Eric Weinstein:A lot of people don't know that they can do that initially. Just a small thing like that. What are you talking about, archery thing that you twist your arm? If you have an old style bow, you often get burned by the... Oh, you have to twist your arm like that so that you're not like this and get hit. But you don't see what you're saying. But then you twisted your wrist. You keep your wrist straight. I don't do that kind of archery. That's why I'm confused. Well, okay. Sorry. You do real... This kind. Yeah. You keep your hand like that. Okay. That's a torque issue. But if you're a sniper, there are all sorts of things about breathing and how you adjust your eyes.

32:39Eric Weinstein:You use your body as an instrument as a mathematician or physicist. One of the reasons that I wish I were in better shape is that in order for me to keep my mind in a particular way, I have to not think constantly about suppressing food. So you're doing a very unnatural thing. And that unnatural thing, not everybody can handle it. Right. I see what you're saying. And we snap. And also our minds are more perfect. The messiness of the world and the perfection of our minds is at odds with each other. And I love disappearing into math and physics because it's perfect. But how does that lead to violence?

33:21Eric Weinstein:you're upset because people are lying you know like the Unabomber had really interesting points he wasn't a dumb guy he was really correctly you know he has an amazing story called Ship of Fools I highly recommend anybody read it just the way Charles Manson's Look at Your Game Girl is a great song it's a great song okay yeah

33:49Eric Weinstein:we're not comfortable in part with coming back to the half measures and the special pleading that sort of characterizes normal life. So to get back to the missing scientist narrative, I don't think there are 15 missing scientists in this data set. That's bullshit. It seems like they're adding as many as they can. Yeah. They're trying to make connections that don't seem to. Don't do that. Yeah. It's like the junkification of the UFO narrative. All of these narratives have a junk to them so that – and I believe a lot of the junk is affixed to the narrative so that those who want to follow the institutional instruction to ignore the fact that this is happening can point to the crappiness.

34:34Eric Weinstein:right and so that's the out and the really difficult thing that you do and you do really well is you try to piece together okay what's bullshit what's real there's a lot of real in the ufo story and there's a lot of nonsense there's a lot of real in the covid story and a lot of nonsense the same thing is true for physics but physics is more dangerous and the fact that we're not tracking like i always wonder why they allow me to come on the jre and say stuff i know a lot of stuff that i don't know what it unlocks well it's easy to dismiss anybody who comes on here sure but china is smarter and by the way the llms i mean look there are a lot of threads here to get back to the physics um and i'm giving a talk tomorrow on at the at the UTexas Austin on supporting science, math, and physics, and renewing our commitment to it.

35:32Eric Weinstein:I don't want to give the impression that it isn't dangerous or that the gatekeeping is stupid. It's really important to do great gatekeeping around mathematics and physics. It's cryptography, it's weaponry, it's propulsion, it's a sudden change in the world economy. if you figured out how to do fusion it would have immediate geopolitical results so these specific scientists that are missing how whatever the number is five six that you think are legitimate what what specifically are they working on that's so dangerous well the fusion guy obviously is uh at mit is anybody who might i i don't know fusion isn't my thing plasma isn't my thing but that is unquestionably dangerous if you imagine how much depends on oil and is there is it a good assumption that if you have one incredibly brilliant person that's at the head of this thing and they make a breakthrough if you kill that guy the whole thing is in disarray because the people that are under him whatever people he has working with him aren't as fully immersed in it as he is that you can kind of like handicap a problem it's like let's say if there's top five people it's an energy thing let's say if it's an energy thing let's say if someone has some new technology that's going to completely disrupt the fossil fuels industry right and they go listen we can kill this fucking guy and uh it's still coming down the pipe but we'll delay it by 10 years and make$15 trillion?

37:09Eric Weinstein:So this is the question about the far right tail, like the extreme right tail of human intelligence and ability. And if you think about certain areas where you have a dominant figure, Rodney Mullen in skateboarding, for example, what percentage of all tricks derive from Rodney Mullen? You couldn't have stopped skateboarding, but you could certainly have held it back by getting to Rodney Mullen. When it comes to guitar, the amount of impact that Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen had is just wildly disproportionate. When I was doing my podcast, I was really excited to do Rodney Mullen and Eddie Van Halen together.

37:52Eric Weinstein:I wanted to get them totally different sports. But those two guys are sort of the same. They just created so much vocabulary you can't even imagine it. and Eddie Van Halen doesn't get the credit he deserves either oh tell me talk to me well it's just Van Halen became Van Hagar and it became a different kind of music and I think a lot of the original hardcore fans left but a lot I think it got more popular with sure Sammy Hagar but it was a different kind of music and not that it's bad but it's different and then I think a lot of people just went yeah but like if you go like to you know some of the like big Van Halen with David I think Van Halen with David Lee Roth in his prime was a literally a perfect band it was phenomenal that was they were the shit when I was in high school I mean it was everybody had Van Halen on their notebooks.

38:53They made the VH. I remember it. They were awesome. And they were so good. And Eddie specifically could shred so hard in some of those classic riffs. I just don't think in the mainstream world he got the credit that he deserves.

39:11Eric Weinstein:I see it differently. Well, people mention Clapton, who of course is a great wizard. Always it's number one is Hendrix. Most people have Hendrix as number one because he was so revolutionary. Well, nobody's going to say Alan Holdsworth. Yeah, I don't know who he is. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, my point is that David Lee Roth kept Eddie Van Halen from becoming Alan Holdsworth. And that's... Who is Alan Holdsworth? Oh, it's interesting. Alan Holdsworth, like if you talk to your hot shit guitarist friends, they will very often, like everybody will just pause and say, well, yeah, that's Alan Holdsworth.

39:51Eric Weinstein:Really? Yeah. And it's sort of like listening to a modem for normal human beings. Right? That's why it's just not popular. So Eddie Van Halen was this. Who did he play with? I don't know. Alan Holdsworth. Just by himself? Yeah. Okay. Can we just actually weirdly put Alan Holdsworth? Just like choose something with it. Yeah. Yeah. We'll listen to some of his music. So we might have, we'll edit it out of the episode because otherwise we get dinged. Okay. Well, I don't want you to. Okay. But we'll play it. We'll play it. And then we'll just come right back to it. All right. Let's do that. Give me some Jamie was it is any specific song that you'd like no at all It's all mind-melting I'm gonna see if he's got anything popular we might have known so I could tack tap into that but I don't see nothing Like is there a song that you like that you could recommend?

40:36Eric Weinstein:I just listen to a certain amount of it and then I don't listen to it again I'm not at that level where I need Alan Holdsworth Okay, no one. What does that mean? Thank you, Jamie I'd rather see some guy flying through the air with his pants on fire than listen to Alan Holder. Panama! Town, town. Okay, here we go. Live in Tokyo. 1984, live in Tokyo. Tokyo dream.

41:05Eric Weinstein:See if you can use the histogram to figure out where the nerds are going. Histogram? Yeah, it shows you where people spend their time on a video. Oh, really? I would go right into the middle of it or something. I'm already checking. What's he doing?

41:29These concerts sell out? Nothing's going on right now. Put it in the middle, Jamie.

41:59What is that? You've heard this before though? Yeah. Is that a bass? What is the other guitar I'm hearing? Because that is not matching up with what that bass player seems to be playing. Do you hear that extra guitar?

42:14Eric Weinstein:That's slower and off time. I don't know.

42:25Eric Weinstein:That's a bass, I think. It doesn't sound like a playing move. My guitarist friends would just salivate. And I'll look at them. They need help. Stuck shit shit. I mean, no offense, but it's...

42:41Can't be very... It sounds like jazz, right? So it's like jazz guitar. Like there's no there's no singing. I apologize sir. Well look if I put on if I

42:55Eric Weinstein:No more Jerry

43:01Eric Weinstein:Jamie you were gonna have so much nerd hate People okay agree with me too. I believe 100 % That was my point. I think David Lee Roth had some comment about if it weren't for me the brothers would be playing biker bars in the Far Valley or something. And so David Lee Roth came up with what we would call the syntactic sugar. The thing that made Van Halen fun and listenable and danceable. Like dance the night away. I didn't like Van Halen. I loved that song. I never liked Van Halen. Oh how dare you. But I loved Eddie Van Halen. You didn't like Van Halen? I didn't, you want to, I'm not even embarrassed about that.

43:48Eric Weinstein:The one I'm embarrassed about, I completely dismissed ACDC in real time because I'm an idiot. I've never been more wrong about something in my life. How did you dismiss ACDC? Good question. They had a dumb thing going on with the school pants and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap. What fucking song? What great song? Well, you know, like musically, Hot for Teacher is an amazing composition. Yeah. Unbelievable. Right? But it's the key thing that they figured out is making things marketable. Right. Right? And that's David Lee Roth. And I think it's David Lee Roth. No, he was so charismatic and did jumping splits.

44:30Yeah, he was amazing. Amazing.

44:31Eric Weinstein:Amazing. And he had a secret weakness for old-timey music. Right. Right? Like, Just a Gigolo, Ice Cream Man, all that kind of stuff. So he's like almost a throwback to 1930s, even earlier, vaudeville. He's an odd guy. Have you ever met him? I've wanted to so badly. I'm so jealous. But I don't think you ever really get to him. It's always the show. Like, in podcasts, I really enjoy talking to him, but it's a little odd. I didn't love the way he was. I would go the Jewish angle. I would connect to him based on shared cultural heritage. But what I think about Eddie is that Eddie wasn't just a guitarist.

45:16Eric Weinstein:He was an electronics guy. He was a keyboard player. He was handsome as the day is long, bursting with charisma. And you and I mostly don't know whether guys are good looking. I know Eddie Van Halen was good looking. Tell me more. he was the whole thing yeah for sure yeah and so my feeling is that those two guys really you know it's one of those things where you have two guys in a band that you know both of them are one in a billion kind of people and they happen to meet

45:54Eric Weinstein:I I'm happy to be wrong about Van Halen but I didn't do it in real time I came to it later but I remember the first time I heard Van Halen won I had the same mystical thing what is that nothing sounds like this I've almost never had that in music you know the first time I heard Smells Like Teamed Spirit what is that there are these moments where something discontinuous happens but you heard like Ain't Talk About Love and That Never Got You no Panama doesn't get me Ain't Talk About Love is a fucking jam When was the last time you listened to it? This year? In nothing? It's not that. Well, okay, so part of the thing is, is that do you play an instrument?

46:45Eric Weinstein:Yeah, that is a problem. Yeah, I don't play anything. You know, the thing about Eddie Van Halen is that he accepted the geometry of the neck of the guitar. And very often you see musicians say, I don't care what key it's in. I can figure out how to do anything. And even Halen didn't do that. He said, look, there's certain things that this thing makes possible. And I'm going to accept the limitations of the instrument and figure out how to push it in all sorts of ways. Another quote of his that I just love is this thing about, if it doesn't cry, weep, moan, I don't care. he wanted all of those noises and figuring out how to get those noises figuring out how to make the guitar into more this is a thing that obsesses people like jeff beck or roy buchanan or eddie van halen where they're just they're in some other space where it's no longer an instrument the way you and I see it.

47:49Eric Weinstein:I've never wanted a whammy bar on my instrument until I saw Jeff Beck do crazy stuff that just isn't possible. Did you ever tell you I drove him around once? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had that car on air. And that... You've never had Derek Trucks on the program, have you? Tedeschi Trucks? Yeah. No. That guy is not a human. Oh, he's amazing. Amazing. And has a bunch of different people sing songs. So, yeah, look, I care tremendously about the guitar. And the funny thing that I realized is that I stupidly mentioned guitars on JRE, and I got sent amazing guitars. And I had Jamie send a quad cortex. I should have mentioned, like, Lamborghinis or, like, Jules or something.

48:44Eric Weinstein:It doesn't work. I've mentioned all those things. Okay. But I became friends with the greatest guitarists of our time. And they're all suffering because nobody cares. And I heard, and I haven't seen it, that you had Marcus King on and talked about the death of rock. Well, I talked about the death of rock before, and Marcus reached out. And that's why I had him on. He's like, man, rock's not dead. We're doing it every fucking night. And I was like, all right, come on, man. Let's talk. And did you get to the blues, which he excels at? Well, we mostly just we're talking about just music in general in his life and he's in it Boy, did he give you a nice guitar?

49:21Yeah, it's beautiful, right? He's a cool motherfucker.

49:24Eric Weinstein:He's a cool guy And he's super talented too. Never met him. Well, it's like these these This is what my my conversation was about like this is what's what prompted it rather is that when I was a kid Rock and roll music was the big popular music hundred percent. It was all Rolling Stones, ACDC, these bands were huge. Zeppelin, they were fucking huge. They were the biggest bands. That's not the case anymore. That's right. And that's weird. And what I said is I don't understand how a music genre that's so popular can stop being popular when it's still so good. Like when we have Protect Our Parks and we'll play Freebird, we still go nuts for that guitar solo.

50:11Eric Weinstein:what happened to Freebird? I'm pretty sure if you looked at Google's data, Freebird was in, it went away for a long time. And then it got resurrected as a meme. Right? Because you can feel, all right, this insanely long intro. Just so luxurious. You can't believe anybody would put up with it anymore. And then - It's two different songs. Right. Lord knows I can't - Boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? All of a sudden it becomes alive. Right. Fly high, free bird. Yeah. And then suddenly you're on fire. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just like you want to fly an American flag. You want to shoot lasers, whatever it is.

50:55That feeling, I think, went away.

50:58Eric Weinstein:And I think that free bird, I'd love to see the data. It came back. and in part it was probably Trump and Elon and this re we're in a masculinity crisis world over and the masculinity crisis originally killed Freebird and it brought it back I think Freebird was brought back by protect our parks okay you think so I mean as Google trend says it's never really gone away. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What is... There's a peak in 2010. Sorry. There's a peak around December 9th to 2010. Wait, wait, that's 20... A peak in 2010? That's weird. Something could happen. We could look it up. I wonder what it was.

51:43It probably was in a movie or something. Yeah, it seems pretty steady.

51:46Eric Weinstein:Well, the reason that I said that is that I would make this reference because you used to be able to refer to Freebird. It was a meme. Right, right, right. Everybody knew it. Yeah, people would yell it out. And then there was a period of time where no young person had any clue what I was talking about. And I know, oh, that's interesting. Because they still knew Stairway to Heaven. If you remember these like top 500 songs of all time. Yeah. And then it would always come down to the last two. And it would always be Freebird and Stairway to Heaven. Those would invariantly. Right. Then suddenly nobody knew what Freebird was.

52:20Eric Weinstein:And now everybody knows again. So I. Yeah. I I will be I will stand corrected But there was a period of time where young people didn't know it. Well, is this Google trends? Is that what that is? Yeah So it's just people looking I could even go like that's probably when they put the video on YouTube for the first time or it became Available on Apple for the first time to download and it was right on Napster or something like that to go back to the the blues aspect of it It's blues based rock that feels like that thing that you and I relate to mm-hmm and This episode is brought to you by Manscaped.

52:57Wondering what to get your dad on Father's Day? The beard and dome bundle from Manscaped is a really solid option. I've been using their dome shaver for a while now, and the thing I like about it is how easy it makes everything. You don't have to think about it. It just glides over your head, gets everything clean, no weird patches, no going over the same spot 10 times. Honestly, it's so much better than any of the other brands I've tried. And then there's the Beard Hedger. It's got this zoom wheel with 20 different length settings that's built right in. So if you want to get your dad something he'll actually use, the Beard and Dome bundle for Manscaped is an easy pick.

53:35Get 15 % off plus free shipping with the code ROGAN15 at Manscaped.com. That's 15 % off plus free shipping with code ROGAN15 at Manscaped.com.

53:48Eric Weinstein:You know, we're not most I'm really into the blues, but that's it's its own controversy because when black audiences stop showing up to blue shows, the performers got worse because the audience was a huge part of the experience. I tell you about this argument I got into with John Mayer about the blues. No. So I ran into John Mayer, San Vicetti Bungalows, and I've been in awe of that guy intellectually. When he talks about music, I get so much out of it. It's just very perceptive, very brilliant guy. And so I was really excited to meet him. And we get into this discussion, and I said, you're like a huge Stevie Ray Vaughan fan.

54:35And I said, I really don't get it.

54:38Eric Weinstein:I like him. I think he's a great player, but I don't understand the focus. And he said, oh, I can explain that. He said, I came from the MTV generation. And he was the blues packaged for us. Like a genius guy, for sure, but packaged for MTV. He said, but, you know, blues isn't really,

55:01Eric Weinstein:blues isn't a real musical form. It's an ingredient. I said, what are you talking about? He says, well, you would never go to a blues show. I said, I can't believe I'm saying this to John Mayer, but I don't think you know what you're talking about. House of Blues. It's literally a bunch of different venues. Well, he meant something. So the thing is, is that I caught the end of black audiences, like old black people listening to the blues and paying for it. So there's who pays and who plays. And black people are still paying for blues, but a lot of them aren't – are still playing blues, but a lot of them aren't paying for it.

55:41Eric Weinstein:So when I go, for example, to see Cadillac Zacks Maui Sugar Mill show every Monday night, I go occasionally in Tarzana. It's like 70-year-old and up white people. So you see like hot chicks in their 80s in crop tops dancing. And that's what it is now. It's like a really old crowd keeping this thing alive. And I can't understand it because it feels great, Joe. Right. And that's the thing. It's just like, you know, Bonamassa, he does these cruises keeping the blues alive. My feeling is like, F that. We've got to actually get people back into understanding what it is. So if you picture those huge bands in your youth, stop thinking about the band on stage rocking out and pan in your mind into the audience.

56:37Eric Weinstein:And what do you see? Young people. Young people. What are they doing? Dancing, having fun. They're dancing. There's some chick in a crop top on some guy's shoulders rocking out. Freebird. When hot chicks stop dancing to your music, it starts to enter its death throes. Damn. And that's true with jazz. It's true with traditional R &B. And it's true with the blues. It's true with rock. And so the important thing, and I keep telling people, is that you have to get people dancing. Once you start becoming intellectual, like Alan Holdsworth, nobody's dancing to Alan Holdsworth. Maybe you are. That's not my shit.

57:20You have no idea. I know you're dancing to it, Jamie. What do you think? Dude. Honestly, you guys sound old as shit right now. There's so much music and rock music in arenas right now that's selling out. What is rock in arenas right now? I mean, there's a bunch of bands. I could say, like, Bad Omens, Beartooth. Korn just posted a video in front of, like, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 50 ,000 people going crazy. Yeah, like Meshuggah.

57:44Eric Weinstein:It's out there. Yeah. But it's not what you guys don't like it either. Yeah, but it's not the big popular music that it was when I was a kid. There's only five artists in the world that are popular all over the place right now. Because it's now micro. Right. Right, because there's too many bands, there's too much music, too much content. The control of the institutions to tell us what we like has slipped. Right. And so in part, you know, like it was our version of payola that, you know, when I was growing up in in L.A., it was KMET and KLOS that determined or KROQ. Those are the three stations that mattered.

58:24Eric Weinstein:And they told us, here's here's the offering, boys. This is what's on tap right now. You know, are you into math core? Do you think that's it? It's the death of, because, wow, now that you're saying that, I'm thinking, the death of radio and the death of rock and roll, they sink. Because radio really stopped being a thing.

58:51Early 2000s? Early 2000s, radio stopped being a thing.

58:55Eric Weinstein:Well, remember when LimeWire came through and everybody could get all the songs that they wanted. Right. That was an issue. But it felt like, if anything, I thought at the beginning when Metallica was railing and Lars Ulrich was railing against Napster, I'm like, these are just your fans. They're just your fans that are getting your music for free. You're going to have to adapt, but they still love you. And don't you make most of your money touring? I don't know. I don't know what the economics of it are, but they're going to change. This is a new thing. Right now, micro markets. Just in prog metal, there are so many different flavors.

59:29I understand, but what we're getting at is that the radio sort of dictated what became popular in a lot of ways. Now video games. So things become popular in more of a sense of a viral way.

59:43Eric Weinstein:Sure. Well, one thing is that these clips, if your clip gets picked up by TikTok and Instagram reels, that's some tiny fraction of a song is the catnip that leads everyone to your door. 100%. I've downloaded many, many songs that way. But I was hanging with Misha Mansour who was making the Jamie claim like you got old grandpa. And his point, yeah. The thing is, I have at least the courage to hang out with actually cool people. He said, you know, his point was, you're just not even watching it correctly. And I said, what do you mean, Misha? He said, video games. The music in video games matters much more than you imagine.

1:00:26Eric Weinstein:And it's like totally right. That makes sense. And so, you know, what we are thinking about in get off my lawn mode is there was something lost. And it hasn't been reborn anywhere. So that's the part that young Jamie is not getting correct. Something was just lost. Now, lots of new stuff sprouted up. But like EDM and DJing is really where a lot of that dancing hot chick energy went. That makes sense. Yeah. Right? And that's where guys want to go, where the dancing hot chicks are. They will follow anywhere. Right. Right, and that's the whole... I was in... What's this, Jamie? This is EDC Vegas 2026.

1:01:13This is just the example of what you're saying. Is this electronic? Yeah. This is as big as it gets. If I look at the stage, look at all these lights. I wonder if Molly didn't exist, how much of this would be out there? It's a good question, right? LSD didn't exist. How much of that music wouldn't have gotten big, too? Oh, a lot. Yeah. But yeah, this is where all the girls hang out.

1:01:33Eric Weinstein:Right. So I found myself in Vegas. Except for Ella Langley now is sort of antithesis to that. What is? Ella Langley. What's that? She's the biggest country artist in almost ever now. First female with like two top 100 songs ever. How am I so out of the loop? What is her? What's the big song? Oh, I know that song. That song's great. She's got another one now. And has she been around for a long time? Nope. Pretty new. She's like 24, 25. And she's killing it. Murdering it. so part of what's going on is there's no way to monitor like even if you have really current young people they're monitoring a subset of what's going on nobody nobody's tracking the whole thing right and why country though why is country exploding the way it's exploding well because we're all in a meaning crisis if you think about the way in which uh country music for example, can develop a story through tropes very, very quickly.

1:02:35Yeah.

1:02:36Eric Weinstein:Right? And so in part, the idea is that story songs and a return, try that in a small town, is transgressive. Try that in a small town is a really powerful message. Right. You don't have to say a lot. And we all want the cowboy. We all want the girl at the county fair. We just don't know how to get back to her. Right. We don't want a wholesome existence. I got a barbecue stain on my white T-shirt that's Tim McGraw. She's killing it in that miniskirt. Heart don't forget something like that. Beautiful story. Very, very quickly told. That's old now. But the point being, hip hop and its storytelling and the return to spoken word and poetry and the legacy of the talking blues had a great run, spread worldwide.

1:03:41Eric Weinstein:You know, you talk about whites taking over. What do you mean whites? Like Tamils and, you know, indigenous Peruvians have taken over hip hop in their local sectors. so hip hop was just this great platform that once every local culture figured out some version of that and i talk about um when i entered bollywood there was a song um you know mama look your child is being ruined and it has this like um hey mom hey dad don't moan and groan why don't you learn to live with the times and please leave us alone. Which is every generation's message. Yeah, but it's like it's delivered in, you know, boogie woogie, reggae rap, rock and roll and bhangra.

1:04:30Eric Weinstein:You know, and it's like trying to, it was the first lame attempt at rap that I saw in a Bollywood film with Jackie Shroff. And they've all made it theirs. And so I was hanging out in India now with a DJ on his program, Untriggered.

1:04:50Eric Weinstein:and it's changing the developing world at a level that rock and roll changed us. It was the music of liberation. John Mayer's point, of course, is that the guitar, the electric guitar, retains the stylistic characteristics of cars in the 1950s. And that thing was the twin experience of having a car and having a guitar was personal expression and liberation for American males in the 50s.

1:05:21Eric Weinstein:So, yeah, but I think a lot about our guitarist friends because they're suffering. The world's greatest guitarists are living today and nobody cares. They all follow each other. The funny thing is if you start following these people on Instagram, as I do, I look to see which of my friends are following the great guitarists, and it's other great guitarists. It's none of my normal friends. Like how many of my normal friends know who Tim Henson is, a great Texas guitarist? I do. This man. Do you? Yeah. What kind of music? I can't even explain it. He pretty much invented a genre that only he mastered and can explain.

1:06:04It's like Tex-Mex melodic.

1:06:09Eric Weinstein:If I had a glass and I broke it, If I took Tex-Mex and I broke it on the ground and I reassembled it from different things, it's completely angular and an idea will last. It's like a psychedelic thing where it'll last for five seconds and it'll be on to the next thing. And it's just angular and fragmented and sewn together and beautiful and inspiring. Give me some, Jim. Yeah, I have to play it for you because the drummer and bass player are also awesome, but it pretty much revolves around the guitar. And you see, the thing is that they're so tight with each other that, you know, a better example, even than this, would be this thing that they released called Goat, which was the thing that put them on the map.

1:06:49Eric Weinstein:And. That was great. Right. Let me hear Goat. Also, Tim is just like the loveliest human being. Oh, I love Tim as a young boy. Boy, it's him before he got all the crazy neck tattoos. Oh.

1:07:07Eric Weinstein:Well, that's just broken out. I don't know. It's not Tim, is it? They posted it. It says it's him. This is a different human. Let's hear the song. Okay. I think that's someone posting a riff. That was their account. I know, but maybe he just put it up there. By the way, do you hear the Mexican influence? Yeah, definitely. So, like, this is... Very unique. Very unique sound. This is who I hang with. I love these guys. This matters to me. And this is new, right? And just the way this... Like Antoine de Potrain that's taking over the world is basically you hear the Middle East. But these guys are basically into microtones.

1:07:56Eric Weinstein:If you take 24 beats, you can divide it by sixes. You can divide it by fours. so the mathematics of rhythm um you know the stuff that like only vinnie cauda was able to do before people are sort of getting hip to things that were happening on oud are now happening on microtonal guitars and what it is as i see it is it's like this violent birth of people bored by standard western forms and i'm i'm for this i'm not for all of the slop that you know like young people are always into the coolest stuff no they're not there are lame times they're cool times there's really cool stuff happening now but it's it's it's the fact particularly this quebec kind of thing that broke out with these guys in costume um huh you don't know this antoine de portrain something like that there's some back costumes yeah look you remember the residents who were this art group from San Francisco and nobody knew who they were.

1:09:00Eric Weinstein:They would have giant eyeballs as heads and they would play completely insane things like Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, but in angular, bizarre ways. I missed that too. Okay. Did you miss it? I don't know where we're going. So Antoine de Poitrine is this thing that took over, which doesn't sound like anything. It's like that new thing. so you know you because

1:09:44so look at that guitarist friends

1:09:59Now, the mathematics of this is that there's this freak fact,

1:10:05Eric Weinstein:which is that if you take the octave, which is doubling a frequency, you take the 12th root of it, break it into 12 semitones, and then take 19 of them stacked. 2 to the 19 over 12 is equal to 2.996 something. It's almost 3. And that means that you can force people into this quantized music where you come up with this number 12, which is magical for number theory reasons, and you can fool the ear into thinking that 19 of these 12 semitones is a complete tripling of frequency. And because of that, we've been in even-tempered music since the time of Bach. And these guys are breaking us out together with Jacob Collier.

1:10:47Eric Weinstein:They're saying, why would you accept that as a prison? And so how does stuff like this become popular? Is it just viral? Yeah. Yeah. Because suddenly you see two guys in costumes that don't look anything like anything you know, making music. There's a moment where it switches into six beats per unit, into four beats per unit because it's on a 24 cycle. and suddenly you just feel good. And also, if any of these guys get cocky, you could just swap them out. Put a mask on some new guy, get him in there. No, but it's anti-egoic. It's anti-egoic. Right. So in part, it's like Buckethead. Buckethead didn't want to be, like you have trouble being Joe Rogan.

1:11:34Eric Weinstein:I even have trouble being Eric Weinstein. I'm a fraction of a Joe Rogan. It's hard to be well-known. And these guys are erasing themselves. And that idea of, you know, it's very funny. Tim Henson, I think, has a song called Ego Death with Steve Vai. Ego death is really hot because people erasing themselves is what everybody isn't trying to do who's chasing clout. And people like that. Yeah, because it's a form or they don't just like that. They also don't mind if you're chasing clout and you say, I'm chasing some clout. Right. I'm trying to get that bag. So what they don't want is somebody saying like Bill Gates.

1:12:20Right. I'm just looking out for humanity and global health. So what I'm doing, I'm engineering ticks so that they bite you and you get allergic to red meat and I'm dropping them off from helicopters.

1:12:34Eric Weinstein:We're going to administer vaccines involuntarily through ticks. Yeah, and mosquitoes. Yeah. So all of this stuff really bothers people. It's the disingenuous. Well, it's also he doesn't have any friends. And he can't get any pussy anymore because he keeps getting caught. He can get it. But if we were smart, we'd feed that guy pussy. We did. Keep him happy. We did. We? I wasn't involved. Neither was I. Yeah, allegedly. What do you mean allegedly? Just kidding. I didn't go to that island. You didn't? No. No, you were one of the people that saw through him right away. No, but he offered me partnership, and I didn't take it.

1:13:16Eric Weinstein:And I regretted that for a while. Because you would have been cha-ching. I would have been made rich or deceased. Probably both. Probably both. yeah a couple times I've been offered real wealth and with crazy stuff but the Epstein thing I don't know that I've actually said that on a podcast um yeah he offered me partnership and the only condition was that I had to get rid of my existing partners like I had to stab my partners in the back in order to become his partner oh yeah so he'd own you yeah yeah you It's like, show me that you're... I don't want to sidetrack this, but I'll come back. But these two are 333-year-old aliens, time travelers.

1:14:01Yeah. So they cannot be easily replaced. Yes, they can. That's horse shit. Look, I'll make a prediction.

1:14:08Eric Weinstein:If these guys haven't been unmasked, that you're going to unmask these guys and you're going to find out that they've got Middle East inheritance. Well, please don't unmask them. They already unmasked Banksy. Can't we have some fucking mysteries in this world, damn it? I think they're cool. I like that music. That was fun. That was fun. I like viral things too. I like things that just spread just from weirdness. You know, someone sends it to me. That's one of the things that I love about Spotify. If I'm listening to something weird, it'll suggest something weird, you know, like that I've never heard of before.

1:14:37Bands I've never heard of before. And all of a sudden I click on it. The suggestion thing. That's how I get new music now. Or I use, what's that fucking app? Shazam. I use Shazam. If I'm at a, you know, pool hall or something, something cool comes on. I'm like, ooh, what is that? See, I do that, but then I can end up in these ruts.

1:14:57Eric Weinstein:Like, for example, I really like songs that go between A minor and E major. And that is, so it just gives me more and more of them. You're a nerd. You're a music nerd. Listen, that's your algorithm. There's nothing wrong with that. Okay. You're a mixed martial arts nerd. I am. I know. And also, there's a lot of things that are way more boring than that. Pool. I watch professional pool probably three or four hours a day Yeah, yeah That's how I escape I escape in the geometry and the movements the patterns Dude, you should have seen the comedians in the physics department yesterday. Oh Amazing Duncan Duncan and Kurt together first of all together.

1:15:40They are the fucking dynamic doer They are such a good duo because they're both sarcastic and they're both like heavily They were so well behaved as far as they could. Yeah. But then, I don't know whether I can tell these stories.

1:15:55Eric Weinstein:Tell these stories. Tell them. What happened? What did Kurt do? So part of the - Fuck, I love that guy. He's so awesome. I love that he's a real person. Whenever he comes into the mothership green room, I'm like, yes, give me a dose. Oh, he got real. He gave me some wild anti-Israel stuff, I think. I couldn't tell whether it was pro or anti. he so at the end there was an experimentalist who was like come to my come to my parlor i'll show you my uh etchings no no cryogenic giant vacuum tubes from hell or whatever so we all went down there and so we're in the basement of the physics department you can tell the difference between the theory floor and the like the part where they actually do things and these guys were just you We're effectively at 77 degrees above absolute zero with conditions that only occur in deep space inside of this thing coated in tinfoil.

1:16:53Eric Weinstein:So these guys are just cracking jokes about growing weed and what happens if you put hydroponic weed in that chain? But the other thing is that comedians are really intellectual nerds. and a lot of them, not all of them. Those two guys are, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And they really wanted to know, okay, what is it that you guys are doing down here, and how do I understand? The good ones. The good ones are very curious. Well, Duncan's amazing. Very curious. Although he drew a completely pornographic. I know. He was making notes, yeah. Let me send it to Jamie, because Kurt sent it to me. This is the notes Duncan was taking during the physics.

1:17:32Eric Weinstein:Because I'm, like, doing battle a little bit with the, There's one extremely smart string theorist in the audience named Jacques Dissler. And so almost all the interactions between Jacques and myself were – we were both being very collegial. But it was pretty hot. I said it to you, Jamie. And so he says, while you were doing that, I did a little sketch of you. I can figure out your exact anatomy. It's a gift.

1:18:03Well, you need something like that. That's the last talk he's ever coming to.

1:18:07Eric Weinstein:No, I'm kidding. No, actually, I was really trying to hook. So he's taking notes. Oh, no, please. Give me some volume. Joe.

1:18:19Eric Weinstein:Thank you, Joe.

1:18:25Eric Weinstein:Hey, guys, I got some other things to do this afternoon. It's been great. Okay, bye.

1:18:38Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus.

1:18:42Eric Weinstein:But, yeah, I wanted... You know, C.P. Snow did this famous essay called The Two Cultures. And it was about how literary intellectuals and scientific intellectuals used to be one group. And then they moved apart. And so now we can't hear each other across the chasm. I really wanted to create a pipeline of not the seven scientists we see on all of the podcasts, but like choose who you want to talk to, who's doing cool shit. The comedians belong in our science departments.

1:19:23Eric Weinstein:Otherwise, how are people going to know what's going on? There's funny shit happening. Well And by the way the UFO thing that's now blowing up There's gonna be some crazy science collision with the UFO narrative There's no way of stopping it at this point So you've turned a corner on this Let's talk about that because I saw you on Jesse Michael's show And you were talking about how just a few years ago you thought that the entire narrative was complete nonsense Probably five six years ago by now And what changed?

1:20:03Eric Weinstein:Um, there was no way to explain. So Jesse was going on and on about it. I said, Jesse, you're a smart guy. And you know, I often would call him the back alley scholar. So he knew a lot of stuff, um, that was sort of forbidden knowledge and he wouldn't be quiet about it. So I said, okay, I'm going to disabuse you of the idea that you're actually into something. And I realized very quickly, at a minimum, there is a massive denied program, usually called a special access program. One or more. There's no way to synchronize that number of people who've had experiences that are so similar. And there's a lot of stuff that I couldn't make sense of.

1:20:51And what attracted me in a certain sense was I couldn't come up with any explanation.

1:20:57Eric Weinstein:So rare. I usually have exactly the opposite problem, which is I come up with too many explanations. I can't come up with a single explanation that makes sense of what I now know. And also the fact that the government outreached to me and to Sam Harris and to Lex Friedman. And, you know, there was this thing where these guys who checked out said there's going to be a massive disclosure. and we need people to disseminate these things to the public and you have a share of the public who listens to you. And we need to get you informed so that you can help mediate the disclosure. So what prompted this change in narrative?

1:21:36Eric Weinstein:What's going on behind the government? Yeah. We don't know. We don't know. Look, we don't know what the thing or things is are yet. But some of it is, again, so low quality that it's embarrassing to be seen with it. So my colleagues who don't want to take this seriously use that. Like, okay, so you're now on the little green men train? And I said, no, I'm on the special access program train. There is for sure special access program or programs that have UFO on the side of them that may or may not have aliens or craft or non-human intelligence in them. It may be that it's decoys. It may be – I don't know what it is.

1:22:18Eric Weinstein:There's no way to deny that there's like a giant lump under the carpet. And what prompted you to change your opinion and decide that there is some sort of a special access program? When I started coming in contact with totally sober people from reasonable walks of life who would say the craziest things to me and a lot of them checked and they didn't yet know each other. Like what kind of crazy things? Let me take somebody who's public. Brandon Fugel, for example, was at a dinner where he started talking about being visited by a craft a few feet over his head that came over the mesa. And his head of security was catatonic standing in the back of a pickup truck, unable to move.

1:23:08Eric Weinstein:And it was just way too specific. and a shared experience that multiple people had had. And so the joke, of course, is that the secrets of Skinwalker Rance or whatever this is. There's real stuff going on there, and there's nonsense BS that the History Channel has packaged to come up with the Salacious Series, and one is funding the other. So I don't know what that is, but like some of these injuries are real. And, you know, yeah, like Gary Nolan talking about people reporting, you know, Gary Nolan told me the story that somebody had said that a ball of energy would come and enter the body and move around and then leave.

1:24:01Eric Weinstein:and he said you know the craziest thing is is that when i inspected the tissue there was a path of necrosis that can't be explained like something that shows up on imaging and it's gary's a really smart serious guy i can check a lot of the things that he says scientifically why would he say something like that i mean i didn't see it myself but Well, he's also done some very strange work on material science. Right. Where he's analyzed particles or little pieces of metal and alloys that have come from wreckages from the 1970s and 60s. Yeah, that I don't know the providence. Like he'll carry around a little thing and he'll show it to me.

1:24:48Eric Weinstein:And I'll say, you know, there's no combination of materials and alloys that this matches that we know how to produce. and I say, okay, it doesn't mean anything to me. Again, it's just, it's all, I have no, at this point, I have no primary contact with anything anomalous. I just have all sorts of secondary stuff. And by the way, the thing that you saw with the Jesse Michaels in American Alchemy, boy, did that get a response inside the government, that particular episode. How so? I had a lot of people who had stopped talking to me about UFOs who suddenly – I had like eight calls immediately after it aired.

1:25:33Eric Weinstein:Hey, Eric, just thought I'd catch up with you. I was like, oh, OK. There was a huge discussion inside. And the first – without getting into particulars, the first official outreach, like really official outreach, the checks in the wake of that episode. And I'm not under any NDAs. Nobody's told me anything that I can't discuss. But that may change. One thing that's very clear to me is that when I hear something from many sources, I don't need to protect it anymore. It's already out. Okay? I have now heard the white sand story from many sources. this is the one where the crafts hovered over the base shut down the nuclear program is that it i'm just going to say what i can say that's fuzzed out that can't be traced to anybody okay um i was very upset with this shutdown of the el paso airspace that was recently yeah it was supposed to be supposed to be we had a problem with cartel drones.

1:26:42Eric Weinstein:I don't believe that. I think Texas is another name for New Mexico. I think El Paso is a name for white sands. Can we get a map of the United States that can focus on white sands in El Paso? I think we have a problem that we've lost control of our airspace. You think this was part of what happened in New Jersey as well? I can't say as much because what I know, no. What happened around New Jersey, I don't have from as many sources that I feel comfortable saying that this is fuzzed out. I can fuzz out the El Paso store. Nobody has told me that El Paso was shut down because of the problem at White Sands.

1:27:28Okay.

1:27:29Eric Weinstein:People have said things about New Jersey that is... All right. All right. So there's El Paso. El Paso here, White Sands, right above it. How far away is that? My guess is about an hour. By driving? Yeah, let's see. It's probably 60, 70, 80 miles at most. Okay. So I don't know what's going on, but my guess is...

1:27:55Eric Weinstein:So on Pierce Morgan, I said this thing, which is that New Mexico is the connector of the nuclear story, the Epstein story and the UFO story. They're all going to come together.

1:28:15Eric Weinstein:Remember when we were only talking about the island?

1:28:23Eric Weinstein:Somehow, I think I was the first person to seize on this. There's this thing that isn't an interview, which is Steve Bannon trying to train Jeffrey Epstein how to respond to rehabilitate it. And if you can find this, this is - I've seen it. Okay. Very weird. So he says,

1:28:45Eric Weinstein:you want to know about why I got Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. Can we play this clip? Can you find? I think Jesse repackaged it after I pointed it out.

1:29:00Eric Weinstein:But this is the story that – like somehow we're so hung up about sex. We're either angry about trafficking or we're getting off on the idea that all these rich people are going to get their comeuppance. We keep turning the Epstein story into something other than a scientific espionage story, which is one of its facets. It's one component. It's one component. Right. Yeah, but it doesn't excite us that this is a guy spying. Control of science, Joe, is not something that is officially a big issue, and it is a massive issue. It's not publicly a big issue. That's correct, yeah. And he clearly had a big interest.

1:29:45So why did I buy a ranch in New Mexico in 1993? So that gives you some sense. So I would have funded it in 1990. Los Alamos, which was the high energy lab up in New Mexico, was losing all its scientists. And Los Alamos, it was where Oppenheimer and where a lot of the nuclear weapons were, the bomb. That's where the Manhattan Project. Manhattan Project was Los Alamos and you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that? Yes, because the scientists were going to be, they cut the funding for high energy physics. but the people who worked in Los Alamos would still be in the Santa Fe area.

1:30:24They cut that because this was the Cold War dividend, right? I don't remember exactly why. It was because, again, people thought that physics and high-energy physics really wasn't that important. Because that was about nuclear weapons. No, it was because they decided it was maybe not right.

1:30:40Eric Weinstein:This was the same time that Murray Gell-Mann came up with the term quark, Q-U-A-R-K. He picked it out of an old poem, the word quark. But it was something, it was mysterious. So they were starting to understand in the 90s that in our world of the physics world, there was things that were just unexplainable. They called it strange things. You gave it a name. You gave it some characteristics. You called it, it had charm. It was one of the terms. It had a charm. It had a flavor. It had a color. But nobody really, no one, Mr. Bannon, understood what it was, just like the financial system. And you wanted to investigate that?

1:31:22Eric Weinstein:I wanted to see if we could build tools so others smarter than me could help investigate it. And that was the beginning of your concept of the Santa Fe Institute? Yes. And Santa Fe Institute was founded to do study in this type of... Can these areas of strange things be described by some form of mathematics? Okay. Now, what you're seeing there is fascinating. Just take, by the way, very well isolated, exactly the bit that I wanted. In that interview or that training, he claims to have founded the Santa Fe Institute. Santa Fe Institute was founded, I think, in 1984, not 1990 or 1993. Bannon clearly knows more about why these scientists were being defunded than does the person who buys this property.

1:32:17Eric Weinstein:Now, that property is not only close to Los Alamos. It's also close to Sandia National Laboratory.

1:32:25Eric Weinstein:What you – like people said to me, Eric, you said he was an idiot. He's clearly very knowledgeable. You can see there that you were wrong. I was like, that is an actor. That is not anyone smart with proximity to Murray Gell-Mann and others. Like he knew Murray Gell-Mann well. Murray Gell-Mann didn't name quarks in 1990. That goes back to like the 60s when George Zweig called them aces and Gell-Mann called them quarks for three quarks for Muster Mark that came out of James Joyce. So he's just repeating stuff that he doesn't understand. And why did he buy the house, Zorro Ranch? To be close to the scientists whose funding was cut.

1:33:13Eric Weinstein:The people who make weapons and who do high energy physics, who had the rug pulled out from under them by the United States when they won the Cold War by putting this pressure on the Soviet Union. Like, there's no thing more important than theoretical physicists, you idiots. and you don't fund these people and you don't watch them. Like the Department of Energy is supposed to have counterintelligence to stop creeps from hanging around the national labs, which is America's secret university system. Hello.

1:33:51And that's what he was doing.

1:33:55Eric Weinstein:He was buying a property to be close to the national labs in New Mexico that make the weapons and that are in charge of trying to figure out the future. So if you think about the national labs as this parallel thing to the university system, but it's the secret part where you have to be American and you have to have a security clearance and all this kind of stuff. Epstein set up a listening post. Now, what's the UFO story? The UFO story is all about nukes. And what was Epstein doing in Cambridge, Massachusetts? sits. The analog of Zorro Ranch is named One Brattle Square. It's right in the heart of Harvard Square.

1:34:35Eric Weinstein:I know it like the back of my hand. It's a seven-minute walk to the science center. The Harvard Science Center on floors three, four, and five is where the math department is. And who was Epstein's initial contact in the math department? It wasn't Martin Nowak who he funded. There's a different guy named Benedict Gross. Dick Gross was an expert in number theory and elliptic curves. And elliptic curves are what power the cryptography behind Bitcoin, behind public keys. You're talking about a guy who was setting up listening posts next to extremely sensitive stuff that we've stupidly left unprotected in the open university system.

1:35:23Eric Weinstein:or defunded in our national labs. And when you say listing posts, what do you mean? He's going to hold. No, no, no. No? You just remained in contact with these people? Joe, you've got real money. Guys with real money use dinner. Dinner is an incredible thing. I watched Peter Thiel use dinner. Fly people in for dinners. You put people up in a nice hotel for three nights. Serve them amazing food from a private chef. You get a black car to collect them and they'll tell you anything. I don't think that mean that Peter was doing this in an evil way, but I watched dinner after dinner after dinner as people disgorged all they knew because they were so happy.

1:36:07Eric Weinstein:They're getting a$200 bottle of wine and being treated like humans, you know, like respected. So in part, you have to understand that dinner in and of itself or a mansion or first class ticket is all it takes to get people to start talking. Jeffrey Epstein was CIA. The communications network at Zorro Ranch prove it. The DOJ's own file showed Epstein built a military grade encrypted link to satellite orbit at Zorro Ranch. The contractor who built it now holds a Pentagon missile defense contract So remember Jeffrey Epstein is a construct You know there's this whole question about like why won't Jews talk about Jeffrey Epstein and the sex shit Like as if I haven't been on this since 2004 Yeah, no one can accuse you of not talking about it If they can they're just being ignorant No, they're being a bitch because it used to be super dangerous.

1:37:12Eric Weinstein:This was like one of the really costly things. So what do you think that was though? This satellite encrypted? All right. Let's go there. But I'm a little bit nervous. Why was Jeffrey Epstein able to get all of these people much richer than him into his orbit? That's the question you should be asking. So here's my theory. Okay.

1:37:43Eric Weinstein:Just be careful. Okay. What happens when you become a billionaire? I don't know. Not there. Nowhere close. What happens is that you find out that it's not what you thought it was. First of all, you now have staff everywhere. You can't move around easily because you need a security detail. right I first met Peter Thiel I said wow your security detail on this beach is amazing I can't even tell where they are he says am I supposed to have a security detail Peter you've got to be kidding now he's got one so the first thing is that you find you lose your privacy you lose your freedom of movement you've got a retinue of people who have to be constantly maintained they're under your roof this isn't what I signed up for I wanted to be rich well you are rich you can buy things.

1:38:36Eric Weinstein:Well, you can't buy privacy. You can't buy freedom. You can't buy anonymity, all these things that you want. And you can't buy the ability to do fun, naughty stuff. I'm not talking about little kids. I'm saying like, if you're going to take drugs, you're at risk of having everybody want to tell the story. If you want to have a menage, you're at the same risk. So the question becomes, what do I do to get what I thought I was going to do, which is the right to have freedom over my own life and to misbehave in fun ways, whatever. Nobody can figure out how to do it. Jeffrey Epstein could do it. Now, why is it that he could do it?

1:39:17Eric Weinstein:Who's spoken to the contractors who built his island? It's the most obvious thing to do. If I was an investigative journalist, that's what I'd do. I'd talk to the plumbers, the maids, all of the people who are just working for a living. Those are the people who constantly leak information about their employers. Well, who's the only person who has the ability to build something? The CIA has its own construction company.

1:39:52Eric Weinstein:Sovereigns, countries, nations have the ability to do stuff where they know how to keep things under wraps. If you think about S4, I guarantee you there's a men's room at S4. Well, who cleans it? That's a really important question because that's the weak link. And so rich people haven't figured out how to be rich. That's what everybody was attracted to in that upper income bracket. That he would provide them with experience. He would provide them with things that they couldn't figure out how anybody could provide. because they were dealing with a state.

1:40:36Eric Weinstein:I assure you that the Sultan of Brunei knows how to do stuff because he's both an individual and a state. Most of us are either in this sort of black ops world or we're dreaming about being very rich. Or just normal human beings. The very rich are very disappointed. Epstein felt rich, as I said before, in a movie sense. He had freedom. He could say and do things that other people couldn't. You know, Elon is constantly tripping over the fact that I think he's a wild guy. I'm up for wild guys. I want cowboy billionaires, cowboy physicists, cowboy everything. But in general, we don't want cowboys.

1:41:37Eric Weinstein:And, you know, again, this has nothing to do with little kids. That's a different thing. But if you want to go take drugs, take drugs. If you want to have a menage, have a menage. Fine. I don't want to hear about it. Don't spill the tea. I can't stand this culture. Epstein knew how to keep quiet stuff quiet. And why is that his product, as I've said before, was silence? If you want a really dangerous question, ask the question, what did the people who were in his direct orbit have an unusually high number of disappearances around them? Did they? I don't know. But it's a dangerous question. I've never investigated it.

1:42:22Eric Weinstein:But that's – have you ever seen – everybody talks about eyes wide shut now. You notice that nobody talks about crimes and misdemeanors? Where Woody Allen was directly in his orbit? I don't even know. I've seen that movie. There is a scene where Martin Landau and Jerry Orbach's characters are a pair of brothers. I think that they only meet on screen once. And Martin Landau is having an affair and the woman has decided that she has rights. and Martin Landau is a very wealthy ophthalmologist or something like that. And he has a brother who's a starker. Starker being the Yiddish word for a tough guy.

1:43:06And it's one of the most, can we find Jerry Orbach,

1:43:11Eric Weinstein:Martin Landau, Crimes and Misdemeanors is the most blood curdling, so well done. Which the scene description though, you didn't really get to it. Well, they're only in one, if they're only in one scene together, they'll be at a, I haven't seen it in ages, but my memory is that they're at a house walking around a pool and then they walk inside to the pool house. And there's a resentment that the brother who's in the life is only called to the house occasionally. right and it's this way in which the genteel and the people who can get things done that you're not allowed to do in the within the law are connected and so woody allen is clearly writing this from personal experience he has some interaction between being in high society and knowing starkers and i actually knew um his old woody allen's old producer is the father of a friend of mine.

1:44:13Eric Weinstein:So a guy named Jack Grossberg and Jack Grossberg was an epitome of a tough Jew in Hollywood who would deal with the teamsters or when there was a labor dispute. And, you know, he wasn't in the life, but he was a guy who could stare down a mafioso. Um, I think that in part, Woody Allen is writing about what Jeffrey Epstein was providing, which was a measure of silence. Is this it? No, no, no. Okay. I don't know. No, we're looking for Martin Landau and Jerry Orbach in Crimes and Misdemeanors.

1:44:54Yeah, I don't know. It's going to be hard to find because it's... Oh, that one. Anybody right there? Yep. Okay.

1:45:02Eric Weinstein:I think that this is the scene that nobody's talking about.

1:45:17Eric Weinstein:Can you turn that up? Okay.

1:45:35something like this.

1:45:37Eric Weinstein:You called me because you needed some dirty work done. That's all you ever call for. Look how bitter you are. You've staked me plenty of times. I don't forget my obligations. Threatening will only make it worse, Jack. Okay, forget about it. What do you want me to say? How the hell can I forget about it? I'm fighting for my life. This woman's going to destroy everything I've built. That's what I'm saying, Judah. If the woman won't listen to reason, then you go on to the next step. What? Threats? Violence? What are we talking about here? She can be gotten rid of. I mean, I know a lot of people. Money will buy whatever's necessary.

1:46:19Eric Weinstein:I'm not even going to comment on that. That's mind-boggling. Well, what did you want me to do when you called me? Not to do dirty work, despite what you think. Anyway, it's gone beyond just Miriam now. She's talking financial doings. I'm out of ideas. I don't know what I expected from you, Jack, but... You know, you're not aware of what goes on in this world. I mean, you sit up here with your four acres... Don't give me anything. ...and your country club. I don't want to hear about my success. ...and your rich friends, and out there in the real world, it's a whole different story. Come on. I've met a lot of characters from when I had the restaurant.

1:46:57Eric Weinstein:I know you have. I've heard these stories before. From 7th Avenue, from Atlantic City. and I'm not so high class that I can avoid looking at realities. I can't afford to be aloof. When you come to me with a hell of a problem and then you get high-handed on me. Jack, I don't mean to be high-handed. I haven't been sleeping nights. I'm irritable, okay? Okay. Okay, forget I said anything.

1:47:23Eric Weinstein:Let me just get something straight here. Am I understanding you right? I mean, are you suggesting getting rid of her? You won't be involved, but I'll need some cash.

1:47:43What will they do?

1:47:46Eric Weinstein:What will they do? They'll handle it.

1:47:51Eric Weinstein:I can't believe I'm talking about a human being, Jack. She's not an insect. You don't just step on her. I know. Playing hardball was never your game. You never like to get your hands dirty. But apparently this woman is for real, and this thing isn't just going to go away. I can't do it. I can't think that way.

1:48:29So while everybody's watching Kubrick, this is a guy in Epstein's direct orbit.

1:48:35Eric Weinstein:This is what Epstein was. He was a starker. He was a science spy. He was a starker. He had buttons. And we're just all pretending like we have no memory of this, no idea about how we're all connected, how the highest in society are connected to the people who get things done. And blackmail. blackmail is a lot like we're over indexed on in my opinion again who am i i'm just a guest but but this is this assumption well is that i was very early saying he was a construct when nobody would listen here's the next piece of it i think he had buttons he had button men at his control He made problems disappear.

1:49:22Eric Weinstein:Things went away. That's how you make sure that you have the experience of being a king rather than a billionaire. The billionaires had more money than him, but they didn't have the ability to make their problems go away. And by the way, I'm not suggesting that all the people in his orbit were availing themselves of this as a service. But if I was a competent investigator, I would be talking to Woody Allen and saying, what did you mean by that scene?

1:49:57Look, because you think that scene is directly connected to Woody Allen's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?

1:50:02Eric Weinstein:No, I think that that scene is directly connected to the connection between Hollywood and Teamsters and unions and organized crime. There are people who know how to make things happen that aren't within the law. What is the mafia? We watch all these mafia pictures, right? The mafia is about contract enforcement when you can't use the courts. That doesn't sound like what the mafia is, but that's what it is. It's a business. What happens when you're in an illegal business and you can't enforce a contract?

1:50:39Right?

1:50:40Eric Weinstein:Yeah. You have to use muscle. So we use genteel, like he says, you want me to talk to her? We can handle it. This is the genteel language of roughing somebody up, killing somebody, and making problems go away. So the mafia is about business. It's not about violence.

1:51:12Okay. So his connection to scientists, though, was the purpose of that?

1:51:17Eric Weinstein:We don't know, but I keep saying - What's your assumption? My assumption is that he was a clearinghouse, that somebody set him up at fair expense. I'm going to say nine-figure expense. So I think this was a nine-figure fortune, hundreds of millions. and what it had was it had the trappings of multi-billionaire it had trillionaire written all over it for a nine-figure fortune so it's orders of magnitude off of what it was and i believe that that that was only possible because there was a collection of sovereigns behind him. I don't think it was one nation. I think it was a bunch of countries. And the most obvious country is not Israel.

1:52:05Eric Weinstein:It's the US because he was operating on US soil. Do I think Israel was involved? Certainly. Do I think that the UK was involved? I do. Saudi Arabia, I do. I think that this was a massive piece of structure confused with a sex scandal and a blackmail operation. We're all sort of taking the bait. So the sex scandal and all the sex stuff was sort of to keep people happy and give people a place to go to where they could have these experiences. If you're dealing with physicists or some high end scientist guy, they don't have access to this. They probably never been with a beautiful woman in their life.

1:52:46All of a sudden they're hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. I'm not talking about you, bitch.

1:52:49Eric Weinstein:No, I'm not talking about me. I'm sure you're fine. Ain't talking about love. But let's be realistic. Most these guys aren't they're not hot right and then all of a sudden they're around tens who are giving them back massages and drugs are being used and there's this feeling of anonymity yeah of safety you can get away with this everybody else is doing it it's been going on for decades it's fine this is the place you go and it's fun and they look forward to it and they probably also do have intellectual discussions because you are surrounded by who wouldn't want in right right and so that's how he ropes you in that's right.

1:53:23So what is his – why scientists and what would be the benefit of having access to these scientists and having this place on Zorro Ranch and being able to talk to these people?

1:53:34Eric Weinstein:Think about it from the perspective of who is doing the constructing rather than the constructed. So he's the construct. He's an incompetent. He just lied to Steve Bannon. You see him touch his face, classic tell of lying. Touching your face is a classic tell of lying? If you looked at what he just did. The way he did. 100%. So he's lying about the information or he's lying about his depth of knowledge? Yes. He's lying about his depth of knowledge. Okay. So how did I know he was a construct? In part, one of the things, like they're dumb tells that we give away. One of his was he was supposed to be a currency trader.

1:54:12Eric Weinstein:And when we say we're trading currency, we're not trading currency. We're trading what are called spot contracts that are to be settled with an exchange of currency in two days time. Right? So in other words, if I do a euro trade, it's really a dollar euro trade. And you and I are going to trade dollars for euros and we agree to do it in two days time. And then if you want to keep the position on, you exchange that contract for a contract that will follow to erase that contract and form a new contract which pushes it out two days. You call that rolling things over. He didn't know that Dollar Canada was on a one-day contract rather than a two-day contract where everything else.

1:54:49Eric Weinstein:So in other words, there was an anomaly. And anybody in currency trading would have known that. Or I forget whether he didn't know that trading pounds for dollars is called cable in the business. So there were just dumb tells that he didn't know about foreign exchange. Yeah? So he's claiming to be an FX hedge fund manager to me, and there were stupid tells like that. And then he knows way too much about my exactly particular specialty in mathematics. Like the number of people could have come from would be five or fewer. So technically what I did my thesis on is something called self-dual Yang-Mills theory, which is about every force other than gravity is a Yang-Mills force.

1:55:42Eric Weinstein:Except my thesis was really about gravity. And I didn't disclose it. And only people very, very close to me knew that that's what it was about. He was obsessed with gravity.

1:55:55Eric Weinstein:And he shows up, I think, in the Harvard Math Department in 2002 with Dick Gross. And clearly he was talking to people in the Cambridge mathematical physics world who would have been, you know, there's something called the Chern-Simons theory. which is mistakenly associated closely with Yang-Mills theory, but is really all about gravity. And my work really shows that there is a parent theory that has Chern-Simons theory and gravity as its two consequences. He knows about that without knowing anything about the structure and the subject matter. He knows about the history of my stuff and something called cyber-Gwitten theory.

1:56:42Eric Weinstein:He doesn't know anything concrete. How does he know all this stuff? He was in my world. And he was very focused on... I met him through Jess Staley, who was at J.P. Morgan. Now, Jess Staley is deeply implicated in this. I didn't know that at the time.

1:57:07Eric Weinstein:And Jeff Epstein has been mirroring my entire life, everything that I do. And I became well-known when I was writing these essays for edge.org, and he was in with John Brockman at the Brockman Literary Agency. When I got married, the rabbi came from Harvard Hillel, which was a building now called Rosofsky Hall, which he put together with Les Wexner's money. He was funding probably the conference at the Perimeter Institute that we did on the financial crisis. at every turn in my life since I was a young man Jeffrey Epstein was there in the background even though I only meet him once why do you think that is because we're interested in the exact same thing and well the most powerful stuff in the universe why is he interested in that why doesn't know the so what do I care about I care about finance and financial markets I care about the CPI I care about evolutionary theory.

1:58:09Eric Weinstein:I care about mathematics that goes like geometry, like the geometry of elliptic curves, but really more differential geometry. I care about physics. Every time that I care, and I care about the world's smartest people at a functional level, not the people with the highest IQ, but the people who are irreverent enough to actually move the needle. So he and I were just, we're interested in where's the action, where's the high-end intellectual action in the world that actually moves things? And, you know, quite frankly, he was meeting in my offices in San Francisco while I wasn't aware of it in 2017.

1:58:56Eric Weinstein:I didn't know that. Meeting in your offices. Yeah. He went to your office and met with who? With Peter. That's in the records. About you? No, I don't know. Hopefully not. I know that I'm in an email that he sends Peter late in the story, but I'm not going to discuss specifics. But no, I was telling Peter not to deal with him, and Peter thought I was overblowing the danger. He scared me because...

1:59:28I know what element he came from.

1:59:32Eric Weinstein:That was not a refined person. That was a scary, scary person. That was a person who came, you know, like the Hesh character on The Sopranos? Mm-hmm. Or Mo Green in The Godfather? Yeah. That's that element. And you recognize that immediately? That was my point in bringing up crimes and misdemeanors. It's not like I don't know people. I understand all this. But what do you think his purpose was? So getting connected to all these scientists, being around all this knowledge, the New Mexico, I still don't understand. What was the end game? Can I get another drink? Absolutely. Thank you, sir. Can I share this article with you?

2:00:18Please do. Okay. This was the one I just pulled up a second ago.

2:00:22Eric Weinstein:If we could get another ice cube, too, that would be great. How about this? Jeff, can you get us a nice cue, please? I would just down here, this is a long article. I believe most of this comes from the Epstein files that came out on the DOJ's website. The woman who wrote this, she's a former Boston Globe and New York Times reporter, also LA Times. The summary here is what I was kind of getting at because it's two or three paragraphs, but it explains a lot of what you're asking here. Standard framing of Jeffrey Epstein as a Mossad asset is well supported. Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, sold Israel backdoored Promise software to Sandia National Laboratories in 1985.

2:01:03His eldest daughter, Christine Maxwell, built the FBI's post-9-11 counterterrorism data warehouse through her company, Chilliad. Isabel Maxwell, Christine's twin sister, co-founded CalmTouch with Israel Unit 8 ,200 alumni. Galane ran the human intelligence operation the Israel intelligence network around both Maxwell and Epstein is documented and substantial But the intelligence infrastructure supporting Epstein and Maxwell at Zorro Ranch points somewhere else or to somewhere additional It points the United States military intelligence plain and simple The contractor who built his encrypted link to orbit is American Headquartered in Georgia now holds a missile defense agency contract The satellite uplink was authorized by an American FCC license.

2:01:53The project was managed out of New York office. The man who recruited Epstein as a child served in the American OSS, and his own son was in charge of the Federal Justice Department when Epstein died or didn't in its custody. Bill Barr and his father is who that's referring to. The man whose ranch provided the ideal relay point was OSS, built American missile guidance systems and military drones, And just up the road, another former OSS guy, Carl Ingwer, sold his New Mexico ranch to the strangest duo of all time, Donald Rumsfeld and Dan Rather. Hmm.

2:02:31Eric Weinstein:So this is what I've been trying to say all along. The only country that I'm absolutely positive was behind Jeffrey Epstein is us. You can't operate here.

2:02:45Eric Weinstein:look right now we are in the middle of endless anti-semitic christmas just goes on forever and you can you look at jeffrey epstein i have no question he was directly connected to israel you know um but first and foremost i believe that he and i i hate when we use the word asset you should use a vaguer word because those technical things like who's an agent who's an operator uh agent is a word used differently by the fbi and cia every time we try to sound like we're cool like we know what the intelligence community actually is we make mistakes because we say something that becomes deniable you know so like there's a concept of knock non-official cover.

2:03:39Eric Weinstein:If you say somebody is a knock and you guess the wrong distinction, they can say, no, he wasn't. Was he an asset? I'm sure that has a technical meaning. You don't mean it technically. You mean, was he in any way affiliated with the intelligence community? And it's not just the intelligence community. One of the ways that the intelligence community functions as a cover for the special operations community, right? Covert operations, is something the CIA does through Ground Branch that is not intelligence. So we call it intelligence and we give them a free pass all the time. No, those are the guys who do the wet work.

2:04:21Eric Weinstein:That's a paramilitary organization. Right. So my claim is that Epstein is a major piece of structure and having nothing to do with the actor that they hired. Okay. So you think Epstein is essentially just a construct figurehead of an intelligence gathering organization? No? Epstein is a construct, first of all. Okay. Second of all, there is an intelligence part of the intelligence community, and there is a covert operations part of the intelligence community. Okay. Covert operations is not intelligence. I know it's under that roof. Right. That is totally wrong. Got it. Right. Okay. So if you want bad things to happen to somebody, you don't call intelligence because that's just human intelligence or signals intelligence or whatever.

2:05:16Eric Weinstein:You're not going to call a cryptographer to make a problem go away. Right. What does this have to do with the science community? One, we have huge amounts of power. The United States is terribly configured because we pretend that we're okay doing everything through our university system, which shouldn't be done in an open setting. Like you have to be honest about the fact that we're badly configured. What do you mean by that? We didn't know how deadly physics was. When Rutherford in 1911 said that there's a neutron, nobody – I'm sure nobody said to him, oh my god, you've ended the planet. Now new humanity is doomed.

2:05:59So it used to be the case that physics was something that was like interesting and fun.

2:06:04Eric Weinstein:But now it's like the most deadly thing you can imagine as well as being interesting. And a quick timeline too if you stop and think about that. 41 years. Yeah. So literally. Yeah. 41 years. So my claim is that we are walking around right now with all of these extremely deadly ninja priests in our physics departments, in our math departments, who don't even know that they're deadly ninja priests. They've never worked on something classified. They've never solved problems for our government. But in part, we fund our scientists as part of a complex cryptic arrangement worked out by Vannevar Bush that is now remembered by essentially no one.

2:06:49Eric Weinstein:So the idea is you people, Teller, Ulam, Feynman, Oppenheimer, von Neumann, you are dev group you're SEAL Team 6 of the human mind you're Delta and most of the time you're going to teach classes you know it's like Indiana Jones you know an archaeologist with a bow tie and then he's running around with a whip and you know killing people and right okay that's what physicists and mathematicians are that's why we're funded That's why the Department of Energy funds physics. It's not the Department of Energy. It's the Department of Nuclear Weapons. It's the Department of Physics. So they let the physics people work out all these problems, and then they take whatever their findings are and apply them to weapons.

2:07:41Eric Weinstein:Boom, vroom, and zoom. And that changed the economy. It changes the ability to compute. This is who I really am. This is what I really do. And I will not mouth this narrative that all of my colleagues will mouth. Physics is interesting. Yeah, a lot of the time it's dull. You know, physics is international. Oh, really? Why do you think the American taxpayer is funding this international effort just to educate Chinese? For all I know, we're trying to sterilize the Chinese and the Indians with string theory. So because nobody's talked to me about this, I can speak freely. But if you ask me, you know, the Indians are some of the most aggressive string theorists on Earth.

2:08:29Eric Weinstein:And my question is, do we import them in such large numbers so that they'll go home and be ineffectual?

2:08:39That's crazy. So that's a real possibility?

2:08:42Eric Weinstein:Yeah. That string theory exists as a distraction? Joe, what do you think the odds are that a scientist can say my failed theory is the only game in town and not get laughed out of town? Not so good. Yeah. I would imagine in a free thinking world. In a free thinking world, I would say Ed Witten, you're full of shit. Who talks like that? You're the smartest person I've ever met and you have not earned the right to say that your failed theory, your disaster of a catastrophe. of a theory is the most failed theory in history in physics. And you're saying it's the only game in town. Who died and left you King, sir?

2:09:23I want to bring you to one of the weirdest theories that you have, which is you talked about this very overly supported physics department in this upstate university, upstate New York university that's attached to a hedge fund.

2:09:40Eric Weinstein:SUNY Stony Brook's mathematics department and physics department. Yeah. This is a weird one because it's attached to a hedge fund that does Bernie Madoff type numbers. Bernie Madoff is a loser piker.

2:09:57Eric Weinstein:Joe, Bernie Madoff was regular and that's why they called him the Jewish T-bill. T-bill? Yeah. What's a T-bill? A treasury security that allowed you to just earn some very boring, very high rate of return where you were supposedly having your money at risk, but you essentially never lost. There were like almost no down months. Renaissance Technologies is like, no, no, no. Hold my beer. We're just going to make numbers like nobody's ever made in human history. There's nobody in second or third place relative to Renaissance Technology Medallion Fund. And how is it connected to this university and what do you think is going on up there?

2:10:41Eric Weinstein:One, I don't know. But something weird. It's weird as hell. I knew Jim Simons personally. Jim Simons is a genius. But a lot of other people are geniuses. I hate to say it, but you can't swing a cat in my world without hitting a genius. So he was great. But he wasn't that much smarter than every other genius at that level. So I would say, you know, top 100 minds in mathematics and physics clearly better than that.

2:11:25Eric Weinstein:Jim started off working for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Unit, supposedly quit out of outrage over Vietnam, becomes the super young chairman of the SUNY Stony Brook Mathematics Department, holds a lunch center seminar with a guy who will become the world's smartest living physicist, a guy named C.N. Yang. And they discover over lunch a connection between differential geometry, Jim's specialty, and C.N. Yang's specialty, which is the standard model. Jim then quits forms a hedge fund long before it's cool with the father of another guest of yours on this program Brian Keating and the two of them both have medals so they call it medallion because they've won prizes so what is his name James Axe not Keating and the two of them start this thing and it takes off at some level that nobody's ever seen numbers before.

2:12:40Eric Weinstein:And then they institute this policy, which is we're not going to hire financial experts. We're only going to hire math, physics people. So we're going to hire geometers. We're going to hire particle theorists, general relativists, and machine learning people. It's like, who came up with this story? Do you buy this story? This is so strange because it sort of also mirrors Here's a second story that was not associated with Brookhaven, which is the national lab near SUNY Stony Brook, but associated with Los Alamos, which is a story called The Prediction Company. Except, in that case, the name of the person isn't Jim Simons, it's Doin Farmer.

2:13:24Eric Weinstein:And The Prediction Company is the Analog of Renaissance. So what you see is that once people have a pattern, it seems like these patterns repeat. So my point is, if you ask the question, do we have a Manhattan Project in the current era? We don't know. You don't know. I don't know. But if we're allowed to speculate, the question would be, where would it be located? So how would you find, for example, the existence of a boys' school in rural New Mexico where all of these super smart people are holed up? That's a real puzzle. How would you figure out that Los Alamos was happening if that was your goal?

2:14:08Eric Weinstein:You'd look for indirect evidence. Jamie, can you call up an article called Forbidden City from 1944 by a guy named, unfortunately, Jack Raper, R-A-P-E-R? Change your name, bro. I know, right? Please call yourself Rapper. Add a P or something. so in 1944 the craziest thing what G Graper Graper right exactly there it is okay so this article appeared Monday March 13th 1944 Santa Fe New Mexico the story of a secret city with a mayor who is the second Einstein working on a doomsday weapon where nothing leaks. And this is from what year? 1944. Okay. So the entire Manhattan Project leaked because a Cleveland journalist named Jack Raper happened to vacation in New Mexico and stumbled on the greatest secret ever kept.

2:15:21Really?

2:15:22Eric Weinstein:Dude, how can we not know this, Joe? Wow. And it's all about Oppenheimer. Residents must stay. Dr. Oppenheimer is a Harvard graduate, attended Cambridge. She's a Ph.D. from Göttingen University in Germany, professor of physics, University of California, California Institute of Technology, and is a fellow of too many organizations to enumerate. And so they were recognizing that Oppenheimer was doing something. They knew that he was working on a doomsday device. Uncle Sam has placed the city in charge of two men. The men who command the soldiers. I can't read it. You see that the garbage and rubbish are collected, the streets kept up, the electric light and plant and the waterworks functioning and all other metropolitan work operating smooth is Colonel Somebody.

2:16:11I don't know his name, but it isn't so important because the Mr. Big of the city is college professor Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Called the second Einstein by the newspapers of the West Coast.

2:16:22Eric Weinstein:So what I'm trying to say is Jack Raper never got a Pulitzer Prize, died in obscurity. Leslie Groves, who was the other guy who was running the town, decided to send him to the Pacific to punish him for being the best journalist in America. And when he found out he was 60 years old, they decided, OK, we're just going to ignore this story and hope everyone else does because it's too crazy to be real. Now, what I'm telling you right now is Raper never figured out what Los Alamos was, but he knows that it doesn't make sense. I'm telling you Renaissance technologies doesn't make sense. So these different what?

2:17:04Another widespread belief is that he's developing ordnance and explosives. Supporters of this guess argue that it accounts for the number of mechanics working on the production of a single device. And there are others who would tell you tremendous explosions have been heard.

2:17:18Eric Weinstein:Oh, that Jack Raper with his overactive imagination. The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they say the darndest things, Joe. Okay. So what do you think they're working on? These people at this upstate New York university? Well, what are we not working on? In other words, how do you discover what we're actually up to is in part, you listen for the holes. What do I work on? I work on the ability to get out of the solar system. That is my life's mission.

2:17:53Eric Weinstein:I think Elon is a bit of a pussy.

2:18:00Okay. How so?

2:18:02Eric Weinstein:I don't know. He won't meet with me. Well, it's okay. Maybe because you call him a pussy. Yeah. No, but... Maybe he's busy. Maybe he's trying to make chicks pregnant. No. He eats with me. That's something he does with recreation. Elon's a genius. And Elon is trying to replace scientists with Grok. And one of the things, I was on an Indian podcast called, the guy's name is Beer Biceps Guy. Ranveer, the Joe Rogan of India. What's his name? Ranveer Alabadia. Can you find him? Shout out to Ranveer. Yeah. So Ranveer is a friend of mine in Versova, and I went on his podcast, and before SpaceX and XAI merged, I said, look, I don't think SpaceX is Elon's space program.

2:18:57Eric Weinstein:His space program is Grok. Elon doesn't trust scientists for good reason because they're weak. so he's building his own scientist from when when we were strong he's going to have it read the corpus of physics done by competent physicists who actually care about the physical world so he doesn't have to deal with any of us that's why he won't meet it's not because he's not interested not because he doesn't know i invited him to the talk as i did you yesterday the goal is to get out of the solar system and we're so far away from everything good that there's no way of doing it under relativity. So why are we not researching the only thing that can save us, which is diversification?

2:19:43Eric Weinstein:We need to spread out to the largest number of habitable worlds possible. So this implies some sort of a new propulsion system. This implies new science. Stop thinking technology. There's no way to, you can't engineer your way out of a science problem. You have to science your way out. What would be that science? Post-Einstein, post-relativity. That's what I do. And how would that apply to us leaving the solar system? We don't live in space-time. Space-time has a speed limit. Explain that. If you can only go the speed of light at your best and you can't even get anywhere close to that, how are you going to get to something four light years away in a fantasy world?

2:20:26Eric Weinstein:By the time you go and come back, even assuming all— You'd be dead. Everybody would be dead. No, no, no. So assume you can go at under the speed of light, just under. You can use time dilation and relativistic effects to your benefit. But it's going to cost you eight years to go and come back. Okay. I don't want to do that. If I'm going to explore the cosmos, I don't want to use – I don't want to live in space. So what are the alternatives? The Observerse. The successor to Spacetime, I'm happy to predict this on your show, will be named the Observerse, which is a combination of not just using a four-dimensional space-time manifold, but a 14 - and a four-dimensional space simultaneously.

2:21:04Eric Weinstein:This was what I was talking about at the university yesterday. And how would that, like when you say the difference between science and technology, how would that science be applied? If we look at the surface of this table, I can't do this to it. Can't spread it apart, move it, right. It's called pinch-to-zoom. Right. It's a multi-touch gesture invented around 2003 or something, debuted at TED. But if I come to this device, I can do that. Your phone. Right. So imagine that this is space-time. Okay. And this is the Observerse. So if I want to go to a distant star, there's no way I'm going to just go really fast.

2:21:45Eric Weinstein:Right. That's dumb. And I need an energy source, and I need to do things that we can't normally do. You have to jailbreak space-time. If Einstein is in force, we all die. If we go beyond Einstein, some of us will live and some of us will die. And what would be the energy that you would need in order to do this? So how do you unlock this? One is maybe it's not that energetic to do these things. Energy is technically time momentum. You can talk about momentum in the x direction, momentum in the y, momentum in the z. Fine. What's momentum in the time direction? It has a different name. We don't call energy time momentum, but that's what it is.

2:22:33Eric Weinstein:So first of all, I don't believe that there's one direction of time. There's no arrow of time. That's not true. I believe that time is multidimensional. The only dimension that has an ordering is one dimension. So in other words, if I say to you, Joe has two cigars, Eric has none. Who has more cigars? Joe. Okay. Joe has two cigars, but Eric has three glasses and no cigars. Joe has one glass and two cigars. Who has more stuff? Well, now it's not clear because Eric has more glasses than Joe. But Joe has more cigars. So in two dimensions, we no longer can say this is better than that for things where you have more of one and less of another.

2:23:24Eric Weinstein:Time is like that. In one dimension, there's an arrow. There's an ordering. We call it – it's like a well-ordered set or something. In two dimensions, all bets are off and two and higher. The number of dimensions in total is going to be either five or seven. and each of those dimensions has a different kind of energy. So in other words, energy is unique because there's only one time dimension. But as soon as time has multiple dimensions, you can talk about multiple forms of energy, just the way you can talk about momentum in the X direction, momentum in the Y direction, or momentum in the Z direction.

2:24:09Eric Weinstein:so in part what i'm trying to do is to jailbreak space-time that's what i'm actually doing and i'm doing it with zero support with no confirmation that this is real because something is controlling my entire community to make this funny haha just like forbidden city was jack creper jack raper has gone mad he thinks that there's a city in new mexico where there's a mayor who's a second Einstein developing a doomsday weapon. Is that funny? What a loon, that guy. What an idiot. Ha ha. That's what's going on, Joe. So how do you think that technology could be applied to these ideas in order to create some mode of travel?

2:24:57Eric Weinstein:Pinch to zooms, Joe. Right, but how? How would that be done? So right now we're in a four-dimensional world. Call that flatland. Okay. Imagine that there are 10 perpendicular dimensions called symmetric two-tensors. Four of those are spatial directions and six of them temporal or four of them are temporal and six of them spatial. I can't tell you one of those two. Okay. But there are additionally either four or six extra time dimensions or six or four space dimensions. We have to gain access to break out of flatland. We live in flatland. We don't know we live in flatland. And I know what that – technically the name is fiber dimension.

2:25:49Eric Weinstein:What it is, we have to gain access to it, which is discovering that somebody gives you an obsidian rock that has a property that you've never seen before called pinch to zoom. So I need to make the distance to the nearest star small so I can go with reasonable speed. Or instantaneously. I don't need instantaneously. If I have something four light years away and I can make it 100 feet away, I can walk 100 feet easily enough. I can push something. So the idea is if I can gain access to the fiber, the distance becomes relatively immaterial. So if you think that these physicists are working on this and all these - No, I didn't say that I think.

2:26:36Eric Weinstein:Okay. I'm saying if anybody - Is working on this. Either one of two things is happening. Either we have become the stupidest nation on earth, destroying our own ability to do physics. We gave away the store. We're morons. That's possible. or we're doing it in private. And you feel like it's possible to hide all this from the general public? Well, my point is you're not going to hide it. No, no, no. The same way they did it before would be spoiled by satellites. Right now, if you tried to do Los Alamos, you couldn't do it because of the satellites. Right. So it has to be hidden in plain sight. It has to look like something that it isn't.

2:27:19So if you ask me, let's imagine you asked me a different question. Let's imagine you asked me, Eric, nobody's willing to give you money.

2:27:26Eric Weinstein:Nobody's willing to employ you. Nobody's willing to have you speak at their seminar. Despite the fact that you have complete blue chip credibility. How would you organize a secret team to get control of our adversaries, the world, and the ability to traverse the cosmos? I sure as shit wouldn't build a chemical rocket company. It's dumb. But I'd do it as cover. And I sure as shit wouldn't do things in an open university department. Here's what I'd do. I'd build an organization that could rationalize billions passing through it with almost no footprint. because what I really need is whiteboards and coffee and smart people and a secure campus and a story.

2:28:15Eric Weinstein:That's all I need. God, wouldn't you love to have access to what they're doing? No, because I'm going to do it myself. How are you going to do that? Because I know really smart people, Joe. Don't you need insane amounts of money in a laboratory somewhere? You know what? It's funny. Sam Altman is racing. Dario Amadai is racing Elon Musk for super intelligence. So I asked myself, if you could have premium subscriptions to Grok, Gemini, XAI, sorry, Grok, Gemini, Claude, all of them, or you could have Edward Frankel's home phone number, which would you choose? I'd choose Ed Frankel's home phone number.

2:29:04Eric Weinstein:So I get to call Ed Frankel whenever I want to. That's smart. Look, there are people that you don't even know about who are just terrifyingly smart. Who allow me to assemble that team. Is that literally what you're trying to do? Oh, yeah. And how are you doing it? I don't know. I stayed with Ed for five days in Berkeley. I got him and another colleague who's also terrifying. I'm using Soviets, Joe, ex-Soviet. Okay. Because those guys haven't lost the magic.

2:29:47Eric Weinstein:And, you know, I had Frankel and a guy named Misha Kapranoff come down for five days to kick the shit out of my theory. It was crazy. Absolutely crazy. We're drinking vodka at 10 a.m., having insane meals and just working our asses off the way we're supposed to. How'd it go? Amazing. What do they think about your theory? So far, all systems go, Joe. Okay. So. In other words, the story. Can we just pull up? I just want to do this for my own reasons can we pull up the lead the pinned tweet on my Twitter profile which by the way thank you for retweeting no problem love you what is it go to it real quick

2:30:44so

2:30:45Eric Weinstein:first of all I want to show off the header can we go up to the top of the header before we do that

2:30:52Eric Weinstein:those two formulas. The bottom one says CFJ. C is Sean Carroll. The middle F is fields and J is Roman Jakiv, a professor at MIT. Sean Carroll's second most cited paper has this as its action or Lagrangian. Right above that is my action or Lagrangian. And what you see, all those zeros is things that Sean Carroll doesn't know how to handle. And that thing where you see a P, you see star parentheses P in the bottom line, not the bottom, the second from the bottom, is Sean's relativity violating hack. Sean Carroll did not disclose that geometric unity is a direct competitor to his most cited work.

2:31:52Eric Weinstein:So now if we can roll the clip, it'll make more sense as to what's going on.

2:32:01Eric Weinstein:And let's blow that thing up to full screen. Your misportrayal of the situation is nearly constant for reasons that completely elude me. Sean? The good news is I have read Eric's paper. Here it is. I actually have it here, right here. First thing you got to do is make sure that your theory makes contact with modern physics as it is understood. If you have a new paper out, physicists are going to look at it. They're going to look for, you know, where's Lagrangian?

2:32:33So this is for people that are just listening. This is showing that you have Lagrangians in your.

2:32:40Eric Weinstein:It's showing Sean Carroll lying. Right. Did you. The interactions are in there as well Did you call him out on this On the show? I couldn't believe that he'd do this I was stunned Proton stability, that's in there as well So essentially he's lying To make it seem like your theory doesn't work When you have all the things that he's saying Your theory doesn't have One of two lies, we don't know which lie There's a lie that says I read your paper I'm willing to entertain the fact that he's lying that he read my paper. Okay. And I'm willing to entertain the fact that he's lying that he read my paper and he's going to deny that these things are in there.

2:33:25Eric Weinstein:But I don't know which lie he's telling. Right. One of them is a lie. Either he lied saying you read your paper or he lied saying, he definitely lied saying those things aren't in there because he did say those things aren't in there. That's a lie. Right. He just says there's none of that. None of that. None of that. Okay. So my claim is - Why didn't you respond? Like right there. Joe, what am I saying? Just let's just one second. I'm in a world that makes absolutely no sense and I don't want to disappear. I'm not suicidal. I have been the major competitor of string theory for 42 years. I'm not a podcaster.

2:34:00Eric Weinstein:I'm not a guest. I'm not an entertainer. What I really do for a living. I'm not paid to do. Okay. I understand that. Yeah. When he's saying - I don't know what to do. You just didn't know what to do in the moment. I mean, what do I want? Do I want a legal battle? Right. I've got a defense contractor. One of the world's largest companies is a defense contractor, which has a campaign against me for reasons I don't understand. Just no clue why anyone would say you don't have a Lagrangian. So he's attached to a defense contractor? No, no, no. But there's a – by virtue of the fact that the conspiracy against me, and I literally mean technically a conspiracy, is organized through these Discord servers.

2:34:51Eric Weinstein:And there's an engineer at Google who, for example, can't get a paper against me that lies about what it is that I'm up to, published on the archive, which is where physicists share their stuff. So the engineer will say, how about you do a talk at Google, Sabina Hassenfelder, and Sabina Hassenfelder will come to Google. And she'll be given her thing if he will be allowed to post an anti-Eric screed or paper or whatever you want to call it against me. So what I'm trying to say is I'm acting as Jack Raper in some way. I'm doing stuff and saying stuff like Epstein is a construct. Well, okay, now you can say that, but you couldn't say that when I started saying it.

2:35:39Eric Weinstein:You can't say Ed Witten is driving theoretical physics off of a cliff. You can't say the reason that we have the particles that we do is that there's a 10-dimensional fiber in a fiber bundle above space-time that isn't acknowledged. For some reason, the things that we're talking about on this show are dangerous. We're having dangerous conversations. Joe. That's what JRE does. And sometimes you go all the way and sometimes you puss out, but like, this is a dangerous place because they can't tell you what to do. And that's why they put you in like a different color on the screen during COVID because you went against the narrative.

2:36:21Eric Weinstein:The narrative was go get vaccinated. The narrative was, if you think that COVID came from anything other than a wet market, you're a racist. Every time you've gone up against the narrative. They try to destroy you. You're still here, but you've been badly bruised at various times. You are a danger to the narrative as I am a danger to the narrative. That's one of the reasons why this is like, I don't know what is this, my eighth, sixth, some large number of appearances. We are scary to the narrative and the narrative can no longer be held together. I want to bring you back to the technology that's involved.

2:36:59So when we're talking about this program that may or may not exist, and when we're talking about UAPs, for lack of a better term, do you think that these are connected? Yes.

2:37:16Eric Weinstein:Yes. So one of the things that I've suspected, and I'm not the only one, many people suspected this, it's very odd that a lot of these sightings, that these Air Force pilots and Navy pilots, that they find they're over and near military bases. That's right. Which is where you would practice. Or restricted airspace, which is where you'd use your stuff. And when they see these things and they have these experiences with these things, the people that they report them to don't seem shocked. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is what Ryan Graves experienced. This is what Commander David Fravor experienced, that they tell these people about these things, and no one is like, what the fuck are you talking about?

2:38:01Eric Weinstein:Right, because they know. Because this might be ours. So some of this is ours. Okay. Some of this is foreign nations, and some of this is not understood. it that's what i believe okay so some of these things there's think they're seeing is a part of some undisclosed program i believe that for example some of this is not craft but the ability to create the illusion of craft okay some of this i believe is craft so the ability to create like a hologram? I don't know. Plasma? Projected plasma? That's right. Okay. Which we know they can do. We've seen them. We've showed videos. We've seen limited versions of this.

2:38:50Eric Weinstein:Imagine that those things scale up. Okay. Okay.

2:38:56If there were no aliens or craft, I would want to create a program if I was in the disinformation

2:39:06Eric Weinstein:business, I would want to create one of these things, right? Because there's a God-shaped hole in all of our souls and minds. And so aliens and spacecraft fill that hole. Right. It's God for atheists. Yeah. Yeah. It's God for atheists. So first of all, I would think that we were incompetent if we didn't have something that created UFO ghost stories. Why wouldn't you use that? I also believe that there are foreign nations that may have leapfrogged us. Clearly, we saw that where we invested in aircraft carriers and other people invested in drones and they realized that this was about economic warfare.

2:39:46Eric Weinstein:It costs too much to shoot down, cheap stuff to make. so we're in the process of having our suez moment if you will in iran if we're not careful where it is revealed that our lead in aircraft carrier groups is not what we thought it was so we can get to iran in a second if you like but what i believe is that we've been dumb We've been extremely stupid since the end of the Cold War. Bill Clinton and Dick Morris ushered in an era of stupidity that I cannot even believe is so antithetical to my notion of my belonging to the smartest nation on earth. That we've just basically gutted our smart people.

2:40:34Eric Weinstein:The smart people don't even know each other. Now, what is going on with the technology and what we're seeing? We've lost control of some airspace. That's what I believe is. I don't know that to be true, but I believe with very high probability. And you think that's what San Antonio is about? San Antonio. No, I'm sorry, El Paso. Yeah. I believe that El Paso is not about cartel drones. That's true. Okay. I mean, that's not to say that there isn't a cartel drone here or there, but I don't think we shut down airspace in El Paso to deal with cartel drones. Right. So what were the experiences that people were reporting?

2:41:11and like what what do you know about what happened in El Paso?

2:41:16Eric Weinstein:Well there's what I know which is all second hand so what I know, what I can say I know first hand is the reporting of various things by various people but I've probably had five plus conversations about White Sands people who don't know each other, not connected so whoever is supposed to be keeping White Sands a secret failed okay so So I believe that White Sands has an infestation problem with stuff that is either not ours or is being blue team, red teamed ours and not told to our people. How would you deal with the following puzzle? So maybe we're putting our own – one group is putting our drones or something in the air.

2:42:04Right.

2:42:04Eric Weinstein:And another group is being told, how would you deal with this problem? We've lost control of our airspace, but something is going on in New Mexico. What was the descriptions of these drones? What does it say here? Airspace at the center of the brief but highly publicized incident, February 11, 2026, FAA abruptly announced a 10-day shutdown of the airspace over El Paso International Airport. The restriction was lifted after just a few hours. Pentagon anti-drone testing. The Pentagon was testing high-energy laser counter-drone technology out of the nearby Fort Bliss military base. The FAA grounded commercial flights out of an abundance of caution because of the unannounced testing.

2:42:45Cartel drone activity. Officials from the Trump administration cited incursions from Mexican drug cartel drones breaching U.S. airspace as the primary reason that the defense systems were deployed in the first place. Lack of communication. White House officials later noted that the FAA administrator implemented the surprise flight ban without notifying the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, or White House officials. That seems crazy.

2:43:10Eric Weinstein:The story doesn't hang together. That part doesn't hang together at all. Well, that's the thing. The FAA administrator implemented a flight ban without notifying the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, or the White House officials. That doesn't even seem legal. Joe. But I don't know.

2:43:29Eric Weinstein:You and I both have at least 105 IQs. These are like 65 IQ stories. Yeah. Well, the Mexican drone cartel one seems like a dopey narrative. But maybe there are actually Mexican drones. I'm sure the cartels have drones. Okay, so the cartels have drones. And we're going to use the fact that El Paso is close to white seats. But what was the reported drone activity? Do you know anything about it? I do. Yeah? Not going to say. Ooh. No. Mysterious. Hardly being mysterious. I'm saying as much as I can. I understand. But here's the thing. I'm joking around. Okay. But I mean, I'd like to know. Like, what?

2:44:10Eric Weinstein:Right. But I'm. Tell me later? No. Shit. No, it's not like that. Look. Oh, fuck you both. Let's play that awesome music again. There's a video from the AP posted out just four days ago that says there is a. a cartel attacking lots of people. Well, I'm sure there's cartel drones. What I'm trying to say is that, of course, every single person who knows how to keep a secret knows how to use the truth to hide a lie. Right. Of course. And that's always been done. So the thing that I'm doing is I am so grateful to this country. I love my country. I am going to maintain the ability till my dying day to help my country and advise my country.

2:44:58Eric Weinstein:My country is a bitch. I don't know why she's acting this way. I don't know why she's been stupid since 1992. Right? But she's been acting like a moron since the Clinton administration. We're bad at being America. And I can't stand it. So I'm going to... I would love to tell you everything I know. I would love to penalize people for being bad at their jobs. but I'm going to retain the ability to advise my government until my dying day. And so I'm not going to say what I know. Okay. It says, this is from New York Times. Inside the debacle that led to the closure of El Paso's airspace, FAA citing grave risk of fatalities from a new technology being used on the Mexican border got caught in a stalemate with the Pentagon, which deemed the weapon necessary.

2:45:52Whatever. Okay. Who knows? Bullshit. Come on. As many stories as you can spin, right? Right. Throw them all out there. Right. Throw a bunch of them.

2:45:59Eric Weinstein:Look, our press was largely set up in World War II to go to war. And it's been that way ever since. And during the Walter Cronkite era and the Eric Severides and all that kind of stuff that nobody really remembers, we had a measure of freedom to talk about things. And it got too much. And in the middle of the 1970s, we had the Church and Pike committee hearings. And we freaked out. we found out who we really were we are both the super naive squeaky clean state and the baddest of the bad mfs we're both things we're a hybrid we're extremely machiavellian we're extremely naive there's no way of stopping that being what we are so you think that it's very possible that that there's a foreign nation that has some sort of technology that can invade our airspace at will.

2:46:57And that was what the shutdown was.

2:46:58Eric Weinstein:I believe that somebody may have leapfrogged us as they have leapfrogged us in drone technology. So they may have leapfrogged us in some propulsion technology. I believe that there's a nation in Asia, China, which puts on amazing drone shows and buys up our academics who aren't being paid because we're sitting around bitching. What have you technical people done for us? Why do you deserve to be paid from taxpayer dollars? And the answer is, oh, shut the fuck up. We created your economy, you stupid bitches. we're the baddest of the bad we are the source of your wealth and your strength and you come to us bitching about your taxpayer dollars you deserve to lose to china you little i have no words for the also the new crop of tech billionaires who were bitten by covid who think that you mean by that well they think that anthony fauci was a scientist and so they They believed in science before Fauci and now they don't believe in science.

2:48:10I don't understand what you're saying. Oh, my God. I literally don't understand what you're saying. All right. Silicon Valley had a huge about face when they figured out that Fauci was full of shit.

2:48:23Eric Weinstein:A lot of them bankrolled our universities. They supported science. They were Democrats. And then somehow COVID happened. And because they had this childlike belief in universities, science and the Democratic Party, they ran to the Republican Party like children, not understanding that Anthony Fauci was not a scientist. COVID is a giant lie. Collins and Fauci and Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak are menaces to the credit of science. The credit rating of science went into the toilet with Silicon Valley. And a new idea was born, which is that the engineer is everything. The scientist is nothing. Everything should be a for-profit, not a non-profit.

2:49:17Eric Weinstein:Artificial intelligence should replace our best people. I mean, this is the spell that many of our – like I would like to think that I count Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel as friends, Sam Altman as a friend. I don't know what happened to all of these people. They're just wrong and they're rich and somehow we – like our public intellectuals became our billionaires. What does Naval say? What does Mark say? What does Elon say? Everybody who's talking in their book is now our public intellectuals. And quite honestly, they're all brilliant. But they're all highly motivated.

2:50:07That's fact.

2:50:08Eric Weinstein:Yeah. But where are our scientists? Where are our intellectuals? Where are our people who care more about, how do I say this? glory and immortality rather than private jet travel. You could not get me to give up my claim on immortality for private jet travel. I don't understand the fascination with private jets. They're cool. Mildly.

2:50:46Well, it's not just private jets. Well, what is it? I think they attach monetary gain to success and above and beyond needs. So it becomes a way of measuring success. They look at numbers above and beyond everything else. My craziest brilliant friend who's completely insane is a guy named Michael Vassar.

2:51:16Eric Weinstein:and michael vassar had made a point to me as he often does which is really dangerous and he said when did the world's smartest people stop caring about their own game and their own prizes and start focusing on the prizes of the people pursuing wealth and status and he said somehow Now, when scientists care about McLarens and Lamborghinis, something terrible has happened. Boy, is that like a splinter in my mind turning over. I can't get rid of it. He's right. He's just right. By the way, this is a guy who also told me that Dario Amadai was like a really important person. I needed to pay attention to him when he was just some guy that I knew.

2:52:06Eric Weinstein:So Vassar's point is the scientists stop having their own game with their own prizes. And so they've started caring about things that they should be completely ignoring. I don't have a McLaren and I couldn't care less. I do care about immortality. I do care about recognition. I do care about my name being removed from things that I've done and other people's cherry topping going on top of it. Quite honestly, we're a different game. We're a different species. You know that song, One Night in Bangkok? Mm-hmm. It came from a musical about chess. And he says, in the lyrics to that song, which we don't remember, he says, I'd have you over, I would invite you, but the queens we use would not excite you.

2:52:57Eric Weinstein:So you can go back to your massage parlors in Bangkok. The whole point is that the chess world doesn't care about who got laid. Chess world cares about the evergreen game, the immortal game. What did Fisher do to Spassky? What's going on with Magnus Carlsen? Somehow the science world stopped caring about our own stuff. And we got to make sure that the public intellectuals are not dominated by billionaires. I love these guys. They're my friends. I think you're right. Yeah. They're smart as hell. They wouldn't have gotten to be billionaires otherwise. But they're always talking their book. Always.

2:53:40Eric Weinstein:Look at, you know, people are like famous libertarians and they become surveillance people. You know, Bill Gates, you know, is he just buying farmland for to be, he wants to make sure that we have a steady supply of food, of something. we've got to stop the addiction to billionaires as the only people we trust because at least they're rich let's end it there gotta wrap this up but I appreciate you very much this was very good yeah? yeah it was a good one great seeing you Joe great seeing you too and I think the last point is it should resonate with a lot of people it's dead right look forward to seeing you soon Joe well maybe we'll go to another planet love it bye everybody

2:54:38We'll see you next time.