July 3, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:27:52
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Recreate, but without bullshit. | ||
| It's very important when you recreate, you have no bullshit. | ||
| So, it's Eric Weinstein. | ||
| Weinstein, not Weinstein. | ||
| Yeah, I think it was originally Weinstein. | ||
| Weinstein? | ||
| Weinstein. | ||
| Oh, Weinstein. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| German. | ||
| Yeah, but we came from a town between Odessa and Kiev called Umein, and that's where the Weinstein family came from. | ||
| We talked about how many people mispronounce Weinstein instead of Weinstein. | ||
| It's epidemic, and yet nobody ever says Albert Einstein. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Strange, right? | ||
| That is a weird one. | ||
| The Einstein is... | ||
| Is there a guy named Mike Einstein? | ||
| Oh, Mike Einstein. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Einstein. | ||
| Is there a guy like that? | ||
| Do you remember the old... | ||
| It was Blazing Saddles with... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Mel Brooks. | ||
| Yeah, Mel Brooks. | ||
| And Harvey Korman's character was Hedley Lamar, and everyone would call him Hedy Lamar. | ||
| That was like the running joke in the picture. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I fucking loved Mel Brooks' movies. | ||
| Do you remember the Yiddish-speaking Indians? | ||
| That had to be the best. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's right. | ||
| He had some great movies, man. | ||
| There's fun fucking movies, man. | ||
| Just silly, fun, outrageous movies. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he was transitional, right? | ||
| I guess it was the Borscht Belt being updated for the modern era. | ||
| Yeah, into film. | ||
| Yeah, but it was also... | ||
| It was... | ||
| You know, for the time, much more contemporary, but with that sort of borscht belt, sort of sticky, sort of... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the writer's room, I guess, from Sid Caesar's show of shows, was this legendary factory before Saturday Night Live for all of these kind of crazy talents behind the scenes. | ||
| I think he came out of that with Carl Reiner. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| How old is Mel Brooks now? | ||
| I don't want to ask the question because maybe something will happen. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| I think I saw recently that he turned 93. And I thought, shit, is he dead? | ||
| Because they were saying all these great things. | ||
| Mel Brooks. | ||
| I'm like, fuck! | ||
| Did we lose Mel Brooks? | ||
| But it's like one of those things where it's going to happen. | ||
| I mean, he's 93. I know, but every time it does... | ||
| I know. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I guess Betty White is another one of these people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so we need these very exotic links to our past. | ||
| And they become more important as time goes on if they're still vital. | ||
| Because we want desperately to be connected to something before our current era. | ||
| Given that I think a lot of us sort of don't believe in anything that happened before Google. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Imagine kids today. | ||
| Imagine trying to describe... | ||
| To kids today what it was like to grow up without the internet. | ||
| Yeah, or not being able to reach people. | ||
| You have to make extensive plans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, backup plans. | ||
| Well, if you're not there at this time. | ||
| Yeah, you used to have to yell. | ||
| Open out your window and yell for your friends. | ||
| I remember when I first got an answering machine. | ||
| I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. | ||
| When I was in high school, my family got an answering machine. | ||
| And I was like, this is incredible. | ||
| And you would leave stupid music to let everybody know you were cool. | ||
| You have some cool music. | ||
| Like, hey, it's Joe. | ||
| Not here right now, but if you leave a message, I'll get back to you. | ||
| Probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably. | |
| And then you've got like old people who are... | ||
| I think someone in my family still has one of these cutesy messages from like the late 80s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, on their voicemail. | ||
| But then who leaves voicemail? | ||
| And the thing that marks me as an old person is that I actually call people. | ||
| But that's... | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I've been doing that more lately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I call a lot of people now. | ||
| I just feel like it's just... | ||
| It's better. | ||
| The texting thing, the problem is, it's very interesting how we separated ourselves into this electronic communication world where I will, during the day, be in communication almost constantly with a stream of people. | ||
| The only thing that stops it is a podcast. | ||
| Podcast is my rest home. | ||
| For three hours, I'm not talking to anybody other than you. | ||
| So all those texts that come through, I'll get at the end of the podcast, I'll go and look at my phone, there'll be 40 texts sometimes. | ||
| Like, this is madness. | ||
| If I had to make 40 phone calls, it'd be impossible to manage. | ||
| Calls would constantly be coming in. | ||
| You'd never really be able to say anything. | ||
| So we're feeding into this weird loop where we just have these short form things. | ||
| Like, hey, dinner tomorrow? | ||
| Sure, what time? | ||
| How about nine? | ||
| I can do seven. | ||
| Okay, let's do it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like these weird little bursts of information. | ||
| Remember this program, California? | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| Was it Californication? | ||
| That television show, yeah, with the X-Files. | ||
| David Duchovny, right. | ||
| So there's this scene where he's having some really hot intergenerational sex, and this gal says, like, LOL, and it kills it. | ||
| She said it out loud? | ||
| She says, LOL, and he loses total interest. | ||
| There's no amount of heat in the moment that can compensate for the fact that she's using, like, verbal emojis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Well, he needs to fucking get over that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It depends on how hot she is. | ||
| And it also depends on how you say it. | ||
| If she's really funny, she's like, LOL. You know, and she's like being silly. | ||
| You know who I learned that from? | ||
| I learned that from Jim Norton. | ||
| Jim Norton will always say, LOL. He'll say something really ridiculous and then say, LOL. But he's just mocking himself. | ||
| When you're over 50, it's intrinsically ironic. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But, you know, in terms of this weird thing about Islands of Time, one of the things that we do is we have Shabbat dinner. | ||
| And every Friday, No matter how atheist and militant people are against any kind of organized religion, they will leave us alone if we say we're going into Shabbat. | ||
| And so there's this thing about, like, people will pester me in all sorts of situations, but if I invoke something that is vaguely religious, even Sam Harris probably wouldn't call me during that period of time. | ||
| I find that very interesting. | ||
| Could you create a religion that was simply there to make sure that you had some time offline? | ||
| Yeah, I know if I text Ben Shapiro, I'm not getting a text back on Saturday until it's dark. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But when it's dark, he texts you back. | ||
| No, as soon as there are three stars in the sky that has been on Twitter, it's like, what did I miss? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's so weird! | ||
| It's so weird that people – I mean, on one hand, I think it's probably a really good idea to just take a break from all that electronic shit and just connect with humans in a very old-school type of way. | ||
| I think it's probably very good for you. | ||
| Or connect with yourself. | ||
| I had this experience. | ||
| I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years. | ||
| And we landed in this Orthodox-run hotel and on Friday night everything shut down, you know, like the textbook. | ||
| And I then moved into an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood right on the boundary of a place where the secular and the Orthodox met. | ||
| And what was really fascinating to me is I started telling people, you know, you'd never think that it's great not to be able to find a restaurant or a nightclub. | ||
| But it's amazing that this is enforced downtime. | ||
| And about a month in, somebody said, oh, you're in the wrong place. | ||
| Of course you can go out on Friday night. | ||
| You just go to the Russian compound and everything's hopping and you can go dancing and drinking and all these things. | ||
| After I knew that, I went dancing and drinking, and I was much less happy than believing that somehow Israel actually shut down on Friday nights. | ||
| And so, very weirdly, I appreciated the constraint. | ||
| As soon as I knew you could break the constraint, I was less happy, and I would never actually obey it anymore. | ||
| Yeah, I think having a rigid rule, even though it seems counterintuitive in that it would provide you some freedom by having restrictions, but it does. | ||
| It gives you some freedom like, okay, now we don't have to think about all these other things, so now we have the freedom to just be alone. | ||
| Now we have the freedom to be relaxed. | ||
| Now we have the freedom to just talk to human beings. | ||
| You know, I think constraints, and it's like, you know who Jocko is, Jocko Willink? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Everybody knows Jocko. | ||
| Discipline equals freedom. | ||
| Discipline equals freedom. | ||
| It doesn't seem like that makes sense. | ||
| Like, this motherfucker's up at 4.30 in the morning, throwing heavy weights around, grunting, and acting like a savage, running, goes out to the beach, and he earns a sunrise every morning, goes He goes out and takes photos. | ||
| Takes a photo of his fucking watch at 4.30. | ||
| Hits the gym like a savage. | ||
| And then takes a photo sometimes of the sunrise. | ||
| Earning the sunrise. | ||
| But you would think, God, it's like a prison to force yourself into that. | ||
| But no, no. | ||
| There's freedom in that. | ||
| Because he knows. | ||
| He doesn't have to make any decisions. | ||
| At 4.30, he knows what he's going to do. | ||
| He knows what he's going to do. | ||
| You just go do it. | ||
| And that way, I mean, you look at the guy. | ||
| He's a fucking tank. | ||
| Why is he a tank? | ||
| Because Because he's always up at 4.30 fucking throwing weights around. | ||
| He never stops. | ||
| He never takes self-indulgent time to lay in bed and beat off and pick his nose and fucking check his text messages. | ||
| He's probably listening to this right now and thinking, yeah, I do a little bit of that. | ||
| I don't think he does. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
| Total discipline? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, did you – I think I remember reading his inner dialogue about going to a birthday party and breaking down and having a scoop of ice cream or something or a slice of pie. | ||
| And it's like the drama of there it was. | ||
| Temptation. | ||
| I held out for 45 minutes. | ||
| But eventually I became weak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I don't fuck with that. | ||
| I just do it. | ||
| If I'm in a party, I just eat that cake. | ||
| I mean, I just feel like I do enough. | ||
| I'm alright. | ||
| I'll be fine. | ||
| There's this story about Jackie O, that she got this cancer diagnosis, and apparently her first words upon finding out that she had metastatic cancer was, then what did I do all those sit-ups for? | ||
| Isn't that an interesting comment? | ||
| That's an interesting comment. | ||
| She thought, if someone needs to talk to her... | ||
| JFK was keeping her in the dark. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, it must be. | ||
| What's happening over there, Jamie? | ||
| Something happened to DV? Yeah, like telling her that sit-ups, you want no cancer? | ||
| Sit-ups. | ||
| That's the way to do it. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think we all, we have so many days of our lives that we build this pattern that this is going to go on forever. | ||
| And there's some first moment. | ||
| I think I recall it. | ||
| Where the phrase popped into my head, I can see my death from here. | ||
| And it has to do – there's like this weird thing when you hit 40, you start to be able to have analytic thoughts that are uninterrupted by sex. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| When I turned 40, I found that – Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| start to realize, like, when your testosterone starts to go down, you don't feel like yourself. | ||
| Yeah, you become a different thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, when your chemical composition changes, the way your body feels changes, the way you interface with the world changes. | ||
| Like, I wasn't feeling all that great yesterday, and I was sort of clowning around with the person behind the bar at Starbucks. | ||
| And she said, oh, why are you down? | ||
| I said, I don't know. | ||
| Just tell me something nice about my hair, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she says, she looks at me and she says... | |
| Oh, I love salt and pepper. | ||
| I thought, damn. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Worst. | ||
| You're barely salt and pepper. | ||
| I can barely see any salt in there. | ||
| Yeah, she's talking about the salt. | ||
| She's bullshitting you. | ||
| No, she just didn't want me flirting with her, so she just shut me down by saying, you want me to talk about your hair? | ||
| Okay, you crossed the threshold. | ||
| Here it comes. | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| Yeah, as soon as someone says, say something nice, that could get ugly for a girl. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and she was in a captive situation. | ||
| It wasn't being fair to her. | ||
| Oh, yeah, right? | ||
| That was the worst, when someone was stuck behind a bar. | ||
| But we'd established a rapport before that. | ||
| I actually think she thought it was a kind and sensitive comment. | ||
| But I don't see any salt. | ||
| I'm looking. | ||
| Now I'm just fishing, John. | ||
| There might be a few in there, but not like... | ||
| Somebody's going to screenshot it and they're going to count all the hairs with arrows. | ||
| This is something I've learned when you come on your show, that your audience is so large and active that they will pinpoint every time stamp. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of people in cubicles right now wasting their employer's time. | ||
|
unidentified
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To those people, we salute you. | |
| Cheers. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| I should say for the folks at home, that before we started this, you asked me, did I want Laird Hamilton coffee? | ||
| And I said, Laird Hamilton coffee? | ||
| What's Laird Hamilton coffee? | ||
| And you gave me something laced with turmeric, which may turn our lips funny colors. | ||
| Nah, it doesn't. | ||
| No, I drink it every day. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| It's really good, though. | ||
| But it does give you a little phlegm. | ||
| A little bit of that. | ||
| Because it's got all sorts of MCT oil and all sorts of great stuff in there. | ||
| Laird Hamilton's a real freak. | ||
| Really interesting guy. | ||
| What a pioneer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just talking to him and hanging out with him and seeing how his brain works. | ||
| You got to do that? | ||
| Yeah, I had him on the podcast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was really, really fun. | ||
| Okay, this is something I'm totally curious about. | ||
| I don't surf, but because surfing is, in my estimation, going through some kind of a renaissance right now, I'm super keen to understand what the series of innovations are, given that lots of other things aren't innovating at anything like the surfing innovation rate. | ||
| Well, the big one is that new type of surfboard. | ||
| What the hell is that called? | ||
| It's like a sail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The foil? | |
| Foil. | ||
| Yeah, foil. | ||
| That thing is amazing. | ||
| And it's so weird looking. | ||
| If you look at it, you're like, what are you standing on? | ||
| Why is it elevated? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's a magic carpet of the sea, let's be honest. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| And I am obsessed. | ||
| I was asking you before. | ||
| There's this guy, Kai Lenny, who for me is just redefining surfing by taking these monster waves and he's turning them into his private little skate park and doing tricks off the top of skyscraper waves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And... | |
| I'm just thinking, do you even know what you're doing or where you are? | ||
| He keeps saying this one phrase, which is, I'm just scratching – what blows my mind is I'm just scratching the surface. | ||
| He knows that he's making that discontinuous jump. | ||
| And if you think about sport from the perspective of when did things just change, like almost overnight, Bob Beeman arguably is one of the great – Moments in all of sporting history, and it happens in the long jump, just because you have an incremental sport that suddenly, you know, somebody jumps a foot more than anyone's ever jumped before, something like that. | ||
| So it's really interesting when somebody changes the game. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And when you find out that there's stuff that you can do in other sports... | ||
| Like skate sports, like different crazy flips and stuff, and someone figures out how to do that on a wave. | ||
| The consequences are so fucking grave. | ||
| If you make a mistake and you're on an 80-foot wave, and that bitch comes slamming down on you. | ||
| But part of the innovation is safety, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| With these vests. | ||
| Inflatable vests, yeah. | ||
| And with these water safety courses for big wave surfers, I think that what's fascinating is... | ||
| You think the innovation is in the tricks, maybe, but maybe the innovation is actually in, hey, you can afford a two-wave hold-down in a way you couldn't before, or you're going to survive all sorts of things that might have been fatal. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So you have this open area to innovate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, surfing's fascinating to me. | ||
| I don't do it. | ||
| I haven't done it. | ||
| But I went snorkeling when I was in Hawaii a couple weeks ago. | ||
| And I'm such a pussy. | ||
| I'm snorkeling with my kids, right? | ||
| So, of course, I'm trying to figure out how to be the mama duck and corral everybody. | ||
| So if the shark's coming, it gets me. | ||
| I'm just looking around. | ||
| Because some guy, he got jacked, I think, snorkeling. | ||
| In Maui, just a couple months ago, like right off of a resort. | ||
| Tiger shark, probably. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Some lady got it yesterday, not yesterday, a couple days ago in, was it the Bahamas? | ||
| Three sharks. | ||
| One took her arm off and the other two just ripped her apart in front of everybody. | ||
| College kid from California. | ||
| Well, I'm very interested in situations that change with sharks. | ||
| Like Reunion, for example, in the Indian Ocean off of Madagascar used to be a surfing hotspot. | ||
| And they had a bull shark problem where the bull sharks just sort of learned how to eat humans or attack humans. | ||
| But... | ||
| The great thing is we have got some weird thing going on with the true apex predator of the seas, which is the orca. | ||
| We have one recorded bite in the wild ever. | ||
| Now, how does this make any sense? | ||
| Like, great whites are not apex predators because orcas will just take them out. | ||
| And I had this poll on Twitter the other day, which is orcas, colon, best species ever was number one. | ||
| Then the other possibility was the dicks of the deep because they're such assholes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I didn't know that there was a recorded bite of anyone in the wild. | ||
| I thought it was all in captivity. | ||
| No, there was a surfer who got a bite. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, but on the other hand, how are you going to make contact if you're an orca? | ||
| You don't have opposable thumbs. | ||
| It might be, for all I know. | ||
| Well, it has to be a joke, because otherwise the guy would be dead. | ||
| I mean, if an orca wanted to kill you and you're in the water, that's like if you let an ant go. | ||
| Okay, but why have orcas never attacked us? | ||
| There's so many recorded instances of swimmers, paddleboarders, surfers running into orcas. | ||
| Some weird thing is going on, and we have to work this out, Joe. | ||
| Yeah, let's try. | ||
| Because we've got... | ||
| Well, first of all, what assholes are we that we have those goddamn things in captivity? | ||
| And a big fucking shout out to Canada. | ||
| Because Canada, mostly probably through the noise that my friend Phil Demers has created in trying to get marine land shut down, Canada has banned all orca and all dolphin captivity. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And I hope the United States does it as well. | ||
| I hope it goes worldwide. | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| I think it's slavery. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think it's a different kind of slavery. | ||
| They're almost us. | ||
| They're like a cross between us and wolves in the ocean. | ||
| Well, they just don't have the ability to manipulate their environment. | ||
| But they have a cerebral cortex. | ||
| A dolphin does. | ||
| It's 40% larger than a human being. | ||
| That's what is going on there. | ||
| Like the cerebral cortex, there's thinking happening there, like really complex, high-level thinking. | ||
| Well, am I right that they have menopause? | ||
| Like they're essentially the only other species with menopause. | ||
| And you're only going to get menopause likely if females are contributing some sort of intellectual labor past their reproductive system. | ||
| How is that? | ||
| Because, well, I thought menopause was just a shift in the hormonal balance of the female. | ||
| Well, what is the purpose evolutionarily of continuing life beyond... | ||
| That's a good point because that's not the case in mammals. | ||
| In mammals, deer in particular, can breed deep into their old, old age. | ||
| Well, if you have a resource that's limiting, you'd be better off in terms of systems of selective pressures of shifting something that is continuing. | ||
| I think it was Henry Ford who used to go to the dump to see what broke down on the cars and what was still working. | ||
| And he would transfer materials and resources from things that were dependably found to work to the things that would be the limiting feature that would break so that the cars would all break down sort of uniformly at the end. | ||
| And you see this like with salmon, where salmon disintegrate because it's a discretized product. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| They also have a massive infanticide. | ||
| That's the horrible thing about dolphins. | ||
| They're ruthless. | ||
| They kill their babies. | ||
| The male dolphins will kill female dolphins' babies in order to force them into estrus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the strategy that the female dolphins have acquired to mitigate that is that they become sluts. | ||
| Because the male dolphins don't know whether or not the female's baby is theirs because they don't have 23andMe under the ocean. | ||
| So what happens is the female will have sex with as many males as she can. | ||
| So that way she's protected and her child is protected because then all the males think it could possibly be their baby. | ||
| They don't want to kill their own baby, which is really interesting that they differentiate. | ||
| Because many mammals that also participate in this don't. | ||
| Like, bears don't differentiate between their babies and someone else's babies. | ||
| If the females, if she's carrying around cubs, the male will try to kill and eat the cubs to force her back into estrus and perhaps just even for food because they're so ruthless and cannibalistic. | ||
| But dolphins, who we think of as our beautiful, charming, wonderful little buddies in the water, they kill babies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They kill baby dolphins. | |
| And killer whales are, of course, dolphins. | ||
| Yes, they're a type of dolphin. | ||
| So, you know, the issue is, you know, I think about why do we not get attacked? | ||
| It's like professional courtesy. | ||
| Assholes recognize assholes. | ||
| I don't know, man, but every time I go to Hawaii, we swim with, we either not swim with dolphins, but if you're in a boat and you go fishing, the dolphins find the boat and they swim with the boat. | ||
| I've never done that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, dude. | |
| Here, I'll show you a little video. | ||
| It's kind of wild. | ||
| Because what they do is they literally go and they hang out with the wave of your boat. | ||
| So as your boat is tuning along, they ride the wake. | ||
| They figure out a way how to do that. | ||
| They figure out a way to get in front of the boat. | ||
| And as the boat is pushing the water, it helps them along, almost like reverse drafting, because they're kind of in front of it. | ||
| So as you're pushing the water... | ||
| Let me find it here. | ||
| It's really interesting, man. | ||
| They're an incredible little animal. | ||
| I mean, it's so... | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| See, that's us in the boat. | ||
| That's way cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just wild. | ||
| They just hang out with you. | ||
| I mean, wild fucking dolphins, middle of the ocean. | ||
| They don't know you. | ||
| You could be an asshole. | ||
| They trust you enough to... | ||
| They're trying to get our technology, Joe. | ||
| They want the boats. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| They think we're trapped by that shit. | ||
| They're laughing at us. | ||
| Hey, watch this. | ||
| We can do this. | ||
| Yeah, they don't have to carry anything. | ||
| We're carrying everything. | ||
| By ourselves, we're almost useless. | ||
| Naked, useless. | ||
| We have to have clothes. | ||
| You have to carry the clothes. | ||
| You have to have shoes. | ||
| That's how we roll, man. | ||
| We're extended phenotype guys. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They think we're fools. | ||
| They think we're fools. | ||
| Yeah, they're out there with free food. | ||
| They don't have to worry about carrying credit cards, Bitcoin, all that nonsense. | ||
| They're out there in the ocean. | ||
| I bet they have Bitcoin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You think so? | |
| Bitcoin of the deep ash. | ||
| I don't think they do. | ||
| I think they're probably pretty pissed that we've killed all the fish, though. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| I think that they're actually, you know, the orcas figured out how to use our fishing boats and just wait for us to get stuff on the line. | ||
| And then they're like, oh, cool, thank you for organizing my dinner. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, some orcas are not that smart because they're not adapting. | ||
| Like, there's a particular pod in the Pacific Northwest that relies on Chinook salmon. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And they're trying to figure out... | ||
| because the salmon population is massively depleted due to a bunch of different factors, including they put dams up and they've done a bunch of stupid shit that they did a long time ago and they didn't really understand the consequences of it. | ||
| It's really been devastating to the salmon population up there. | ||
| And Chinook salmon in particular because this is what these orcas eat. | ||
| Now, they also have this migratory pod that comes in that relies on marine mammals. | ||
| And the migratory pod is doing great. | ||
| They're doing great. | ||
| They're eating all the seals, and they're having a good old time. | ||
| But for whatever reason, the pod that stays in that area doesn't want to eat marine mammals. | ||
| They only want to eat Chinook salmon, so they're fucking literally starving to death. | ||
| You know, I think they read this book on fixed versus growth mindset, and the transient pods are like, hey, every day is a new day. | ||
| We could do something different. | ||
| And the other ones are like, no, I'm kind of a creature of habit. | ||
| Maybe the salmon are coming back. | ||
| They just have a very specific diet that they just won't deviate from, which I find to be really weird. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| That pod's missing right now. | ||
| They're probably all dead. | ||
| They haven't been seen in over three weeks, which is the longest they have been gone for. | ||
| Oh, Washington's resident orcas go missing. | ||
| Oh yeah, I remember that no new babies had been born in the Puget Sound area. | ||
| Yeah, it's really bad. | ||
| I hope they're not dead. | ||
| Man, that's horrible. | ||
| It's just sad because they can't figure out a way how to teach them to eat marine animals. | ||
| There's all these different strategies. | ||
| They've tried to figure out a way to teach them to eat seals, but they're not interested. | ||
| And they've also decided to try to figure out a way to farm-raise Chinook salmon and reintroduce them to that area. | ||
| But then again, you don't have to, like, how do you designate those salmon specifically for the orcas and not for fishermen? | ||
| Like, what do you do when people, you know, they catch fish? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Do you tell them, put it back, it's for the orca? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Joe, I don't have any actual expertise in this area. | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| I'm just talking. | ||
| Well, you know, we went down to Hearst Castle, and there's this elephant seal colony there. | ||
| And my family decided that this is the worst species ever of mammal. | ||
| Elephant seals? | ||
| Oh, man, they're horrible. | ||
| Like, first of all, in terms of sexual dynamics, you know, one beach master, he's got a couple lieutenants who are trying to take over his role, and the lieutenants seemingly can have sex with one or two of the females. | ||
| Like, not too much, but... | ||
| Just enough to keep them happy. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And then the beach masters have to fight each other and they're all these dead babies all over the beach because the giant bulls just trample them on their way to fights. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so then you have like the females, if they lose the pup, they've got to get rid of their milk so they steal somebody else's baby. | ||
| So the whole thing, if you transpose like human, if you anthropomorphize, you just think, these people are horrible. | ||
| This is a crack house on the beach and there's no way. | ||
| How do we get some great whites in and remove these mammals immediately? | ||
| They're making the family look bad. | ||
| Yeah, maybe we could get the orcas to start eating them. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because orcas are... | ||
| We have a deal. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a big animal, so it's a good meal. | ||
| Look at those dead babies. | ||
| That is so fucked up. | ||
| I don't know if they're all dead, but they might be. | ||
| Yeah, and they are lazy. | ||
| They are not an industrious... | ||
| I mean, they are when they're in the sea, but when they're just on land... | ||
| Oh, they're just laying there? | ||
| Oh, they're not dead. | ||
| They're just chilling. | ||
| Yeah, they're chilling. | ||
| Look how many of them there are. | ||
| Well, you've seen when orcas do beach themselves to get those things, right? | ||
| It's wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's wild. | ||
| It's right on the edge. | ||
| They hydroplane onto... | ||
| And then they waddle back in. | ||
| Look how, like, scratched up they are from the ground and everything. | ||
| It's a weird-looking animal, too. | ||
| What a weird fucking thing that is. | ||
| William Randolph Hearst was a real piece of shit. | ||
| He really was. | ||
| You know, he's the reason why we have wild pigs in California. | ||
| That dipshit imported wild boars and released them on his property so he could hunt them. | ||
| Okay, so we're driving down the highway, and my son says... | ||
| Look, Dad, wild zebras! | ||
| I said, haha, son, that's very cute. | ||
| He says, no, no, no, really! | ||
| And I look up, and there's a herd of wild zebras. | ||
| What?! | ||
| Hearst Castle has wild zebras. | ||
| They closed down the zoo. | ||
| They let the zebras out. | ||
| We have a herd of wild zebras in California that no one told me about. | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| I've won the Joe Rogan experience. | ||
| I finally told you something you don't know anything about. | ||
| Especially about invasive wildlife species. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Zebras in California. | ||
| Does that change your mind a little bit on Mr. Hearst? | ||
| No, he's a piece of shit. | ||
| He's one of the main reasons why marijuana became illegal. | ||
| Was he smoking too much? | ||
| Well, it's all conspiracy theory and conjecture, but the story is, the traditional told by stoners with some education story is, that William Randolph Hearst along with Harry Anslinger conspired to make marijuana illegal when DuPont It came up with a chemical composition for nylon and when it was a combination of several factors and the decorticator was invented. | ||
| The decorticator was a way that they could effectively process hemp fiber without the use of slavery. | ||
| See the reason why they switched over from Hemp clothing and hemp sales and canvas. | ||
| Canvas, which actually comes from the word cannabis. | ||
| All canvas was made from hemp. | ||
| All that stuff is made from hemp. | ||
| It's far superior to cotton. | ||
| Far superior in terms of strength, in terms of its durability. | ||
| Better than jute? | ||
| I don't know what jute is. | ||
| Jude is what burlap bag... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's way better than that stuff. | ||
| No, hemp is an alien plant. | ||
| If you had a piece of hemp, like the stalk of hemp, and you cut it into boards, like this table, it would be as hard as this oak, but as light as balsa wood. | ||
| It's incredibly strange. | ||
| I... I've seen the actual stalk of a hemp tree when it gets really big. | ||
| And you'll have it thick around like a man's shoulder, right? | ||
| But it weighs like nothing. | ||
| It's really strange. | ||
| It's a strange, strange plant. | ||
| Not like any other plant. | ||
| It has all the essential amino acids. | ||
| It contains protein. | ||
| You can cook with the oil. | ||
| The oil can sustain you. | ||
| It's got essential fatty acids in the oil. | ||
| No wonder we have to ban it. | ||
| Oh, it's a fucking amazing, amazing plant. | ||
| But anyway, they came out with this decorticator. | ||
| And the decorticator, because the way they used to do it, it was like a very labor-intensive process of breaking down the hemp fiber and turning it into something that you can make clothes with and paper. | ||
| So, Popular Science Magazine, and see if you can find the cover of this, in like the early 1930s, it had a cover that said, Hemp, the New Billion Dollar Crop. | ||
| And because they had this decorticator, right? | ||
| So... | ||
| William Randolph Hearst, on top of having Hearst Publications, he also had paper mills. | ||
| Because, you know, he wanted to make his own paper. | ||
| So he had these forests, and he had paper, and he would make paper out of wood. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Well, there's a cover of it, though, that says hemp. | ||
| Hemp the new billion dollar crop. | ||
| That's just the inside part of it. | ||
| Let's see if you can find it. | ||
| Anyway... | ||
| So, William Randolph Hearst would have had to shift over, because hemp paper, I don't know if you've ever played with it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It's incredibly durable. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's hard to tear. | ||
| It's really fucking strong. | ||
| Like, it's a fucking alien plant. | ||
| There's nothing like it. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| Like, you see a piece of paper, you think, oh, look at this light piece of paper, I could tear it. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Fucking really durable. | ||
| So, they were saying this was gonna replace all paper that's made out of wood, and William Randolph Hearst was like, slowly roll, bitches, I got an idea. | ||
| So he starts putting together all these stories about Mexicans and blacks that are smoking this drug called marijuana, and they're raping white women. | ||
| When Congress made marijuana illegal, they probably didn't even understand that it was hemp, because it was the same goddamn thing. | ||
| Marijuana was a Mexican slang for tobacco, for a wild tobacco. | ||
| So they repurposed this name and called it this plant, called this marijuana. | ||
| Like, it was this gigantic conspiracy so that this fucking piece of shit could save money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| That's really what it was. | ||
| Because he had access. | ||
| He was like the YouTube and the Google of, you know... | ||
| He belonged with those elephants. | ||
| The 1930s, man. | ||
| He did belong with those... | ||
| He had access. | ||
| He was the one who could decide what gets distributed. | ||
| And that was a big part of the whole Reefer Madness film campaign and all that shit. | ||
| All that stuff was all about economics. | ||
| The whole thing was about economics. | ||
| American farmers are promised a new cash crop with an annual value of several hundred million dollars, all because of a machine has been invented which solves problems more than 6,000 years old. | ||
| It is hemp, a crop that will not compete with other American products. | ||
| Instead, it will displace imports of raw material and manufactured products produced by underpaid peasant and cooley labor. | ||
| Cooley labor? | ||
| Wow, what does that mean? | ||
| I don't even know what that means. | ||
| Let's not talk about it. | ||
| Do you know what it means? | ||
| Nope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| It will provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land. | ||
| So this was all in February 1938. They thought they were going to change the world with this shit. | ||
| And then you had all these people that were a part of the whole prohibition for alcohol. | ||
| They just shifted those motherfuckers over to hemp. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| It's like over the period of, you know, 10, 15 years. | ||
| If you had 10, 15 years ago, you know, we're talking about like 2004. You know, you had a bunch of people from the Bush administration that were really into banning certain drugs, and you still have them hanging around, you know, a la that dipshit that was the attorney general for a while. | ||
| What the fuck's his name? | ||
| That little weasel? | ||
| The little weasel that Trump got rid of? | ||
| Sessions? | ||
| That piece of shit? | ||
| That guy? | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| These little weasels. | ||
| Good people don't smoke marijuana. | ||
| Well, then you know he's a viper. | ||
| He's a viper? | ||
| Isn't that what they used to call people who smoked weed back in the old days? | ||
| Yeah, he's not smoking any weed. | ||
| Look, anytime I see somebody who's really against homosexuality, I set a clock. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you have to ask yourself, who in the modern era... | ||
| I found it astounding that when Elon came on this program and had a blunt, that it was an issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And can you imagine if Elon had a glass of Chardonnay? | ||
| Well, he did. | ||
| I know, but just the fact that our language and our thought process around this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| I had a dinner at our house a while ago where we took some of the most knowledgeable people on psychedelics and related substances to just have a discussion about what is the state of Schedule I pharmacology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we asked a question. | ||
| Of the interesting substances, what are the three that you find were most informative in terms of self-revelation, changing your understanding for the better, etc.? | ||
| I was astounded that of the people who seemed to be very knowledgeable about mind-altering substances, almost everyone put cannabis in the top three. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Well, I thought it would be sort of commonplace. | ||
| I wouldn't have guessed. | ||
| Somebody would say 5-MeO-DMT. Somebody else would say ketamine. | ||
| Somebody else would say LSD or DMT or ayahuasca. | ||
| But the common thread throughout all of these people, many of them were researchers, was that they felt that cannabis was a miraculous substance. | ||
| Well, it certainly is. | ||
| The deal is it has two different forms, right? | ||
| It has a smokable form, which, you know, you can get really fucking high, or it has the edible form, which is like a psychedelic. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like a psychedelic. | ||
| It's very much so. | ||
| It actually is more psychoactive. | ||
| There's something called 11-hydroxy metabolite that is only present when you eat it. | ||
| It's processed by the liver. | ||
| There's something called a one-pass. | ||
| And when it goes through the liver, it produces this 11-hydroxy metabolite that's somewhere between four and five times more psychoactive than THC. And it's responsible for people thinking that they got dosed. | ||
| Like, a lot of times when people eat edibles, they're like, oh my god, this isn't pot. | ||
| Something's in there. | ||
| Well, it's just the 11-hydroxymetabolite. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| You know about it. | ||
| Yeah, it's way different. | ||
| It's way different. | ||
| Like, that's why it's confusing to people. | ||
| Like, oh, I can't fuck with edibles. | ||
| It's a different drug. | ||
| It's a different drug. | ||
| Because 11-hydroxymetabolite is not present in psychoactive form when you smoke it. | ||
| So when you eat it, that's when you get that really fucking weird body high and interdimensional relationship. | ||
| Is it better? | ||
| Worse? | ||
| Is it more interesting? | ||
| Well, for the tank, it's bueno. | ||
| It's the best for the isolation tank. | ||
| That's my favorite. | ||
| My favorite is a good stiff dose of an edible and then wait about 45 minutes and then get in the tank. | ||
| Because 45 minutes, the way I describe it is with certain psychedelic drugs, and I do consider edible marijuana psychedelic, especially when you get into the 100 milligram, 200 milligram doses, it's very psychedelic. | ||
| Especially in the tank, because in the tank, in the absence of any visual stimulation, when your eyes are closed, you have these wild, almost like neon visuals. | ||
| You start seeing these strange dancing cartoons and weird, weird shit. | ||
| Unrelated to other substances? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| You can get similar situations on other psychedelics, especially in the tank. | ||
| The tank is a really unique way to experience anything. | ||
| Even normal state of consciousness that you have without any drugs at all. | ||
| Inside the tank, it transforms, right? | ||
| Because in the absence of any sensory input, and you don't have anything coming your way, you don't feel your skin, your brain starts really getting free and loose. | ||
| And you start... | ||
| It gets very confusing as to what's reality and what's not. | ||
| What are the boundaries of vision and interpretation and just creativity? | ||
| Like, how much of this is your imagination? | ||
| How much of this is not... | ||
| When you add any sort of psychedelic to that tank experience, everything gets ramped up. | ||
| It's like you add some drugs, when you mix them with other drugs, they become way more potent. | ||
| That's what happens in the tank. | ||
| The tank, in and of itself, is some kind of a drug, or it produces some kind of profound drug-like effects. | ||
| Can it be banned? | ||
| The tank? | ||
| No, I don't think it can. | ||
| How much experience do you have with the tank? | ||
| Not much. | ||
| How many times have you done it? | ||
| I've been in once, and it was when I was a teenager. | ||
| God, man, you should have one. | ||
| You really should. | ||
| It's just a great way to relax, too. | ||
| It's a great way to... | ||
| And you, as a mathematician, you think of things, and you're spending a lot of time contemplating things, and you have to realize that any other input, whether we think about it or not, is chewing up some bandwidth. | ||
| Yeah, although I actually have a kind of ambient level of distraction, which is most helpful for... | ||
| Look, when I get out there, I get way the hell out there. | ||
| So you like an ambient level of distraction? | ||
| Sometimes, for example, I'll go to an all-night cafe at like 2 in the morning, and there'll be just enough human... | ||
| I mean, I have very ambiguous feelings about humans. | ||
| Don't worry, I don't consider you one. | ||
| What are you? | ||
| What do you consider yourself? | ||
| We'll talk about this one off the air. | ||
| No, I really think in many ways I've left this planet. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that there's a way in which I've checked out. | ||
| How so? | ||
| I think that when you get deep enough into your own mind and you start dealing with abstractions and you find that the real world – I wasn't planning on going here, but we can try it. | ||
| When you find that the real world is often a kind of noisy place to think and that you actually prefer really powerful abstractions and then you check in with the real world to say, does that abstraction actually govern the world that I'm in? | ||
| You start to prefer living in the abstractions. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Do you feel the same way about a crowded nightclub? | ||
| If you go to a bar, do you find that that stimulates thinking? | ||
| Well, it depends. | ||
| If I'm in a stimulating conversation, I'm very present. | ||
| If I'm in an unstimulating conversation, I have to make my own fun. | ||
| And so I will start to sort of... | ||
| Play. | ||
| I mean, you know, at times I'll just make up a story and see how it flies, you know, if I don't think I'm hurting anybody. | ||
| And sometimes I'll sort of experiment with people. | ||
| I think we're all doing it. | ||
| You experiment with people? | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Like you say something to someone to see if they bite? | ||
| Well, you know, it's like – let's imagine, for example, you were going to move to Austin. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Are you going to just be the same old you? | ||
| You're not going to take the opportunity to perhaps reinvent yourself? | ||
| So, for example, you know, if I suddenly change – if I start wearing glasses – And I wear like a really fashion-forward pair of spectacles. | ||
| You should wear aviators with yellow lenses like Hunter S. Thompson. | ||
| I would like that. | ||
| I'd like that with you. | ||
| With your crazy hair? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You with some yellow aviators and don't even address it. | ||
| Wear them in public. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wear them indoors. | ||
| But if I do any sort of alteration, like maybe I've never seen what I look like with a bald head. | ||
| So if I were to move cities, when's the best time to try it? | ||
| Try something new. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And so, you know, at our age, Joe. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| 53. Yeah, that's our age. | ||
| I'm 51. Almost 52. So the great danger is complacency. | ||
| And so I'm terrified about becoming complacent. | ||
| So I always want to experiment, change, like what is it that I can continue to do to grow? | ||
| And if you can't play and experiment, imagine you wanted to go by Joseph just to see whether it worked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whatever it is, we get so locked in and if we change anything, people get angry. | ||
| I've always looked at Madonna and David Bowie as like genius squared. | ||
| Not only did each iteration of them do something that was kind of artistically interesting, but they habituated their audience. | ||
| For change. | ||
| And so the idea is that every time you met a different David Bowie, he would effectively say, do you like this incarnation of me? | ||
| Because it's only here for one year. | ||
| And then I'm going to do something new the next time. | ||
| I just had a conversation with Sean Lennon in which we talked about how his father, John Lennon, always kept changing and yet people want to plug in with the idea that John Lennon was just the guy who wrote Imagine, let's say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trevor Burrus: Right. | |
| Trevor Burrus: And that's a great danger is that if you think about like your output, somebody will say, well, didn't you in 2014 tweet X? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotcha. | |
| It's like, well, yeah, maybe you have 10,000 tweets and maybe you changed. | ||
| Maybe new information came in. | ||
| Yeah, that is a weird thing about pulling up thoughts that you had from a decade or more ago and trying to put them on you today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you say, I don't think that way anymore. | ||
| People don't want to accept that. | ||
| Because it's a disingenuous conversation. | ||
| They're not really trying to find out what you think. | ||
| They're trying to get you. | ||
| It's more interesting. | ||
| For example... | ||
| There's been a ton of pressure – we can get to this in a second – for me to address the question of the IDW. Is it still alive? | ||
| Is it in trouble? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| The international dork web? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| The intentional dirtbag web. | ||
| Let's come back to that. | ||
| When Cher did this remake of I Got You Babe with Beavis and Butthead – She took this, remember, because she had this duet with Sonny Bono, and then she got into a bad thing with Sonny, and so she said, I'm going to re-record the song, and I'm just going to torch it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, the problem is, somebody had that as their wedding song. | ||
| With Beavis and Butthead? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| The other one? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I mean, somebody probably did it with Beavis and Butthead, but they're so punk, they don't care. | ||
| People from Florida that use that one. | ||
| Florida man uses... | ||
| The problem when you change things is that other people wed themselves to where you were. | ||
| So when you pull up and you say, yeah, I don't think that, that's just wrong. | ||
| I was confused. | ||
| Man, I was going through a dark time and I probably was saying stuff I should. | ||
| If you do that, then anybody who sort of invested in that version of you, And integrated that into their lives is now angry. | ||
| They're upset. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| You pulled the rug out from under me. | ||
| And so, you know, in part what Bowie and Madonna did is they said, look, these are stages. | ||
| And if you like that stage, that stage is yours. | ||
| But I'm not staying there. | ||
| And I think that that's sort of the more responsible way of doing it, is that you're allowed your evolution, but you have to let people know, I'm going to do something totally different from time to time. | ||
| And I like the idea of doing things. | ||
| Or just do it. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| Yeah, don't try to explain yourself constantly. | ||
| Well, they didn't explain themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They just – they did it in a clear enough way that people could understand the pattern. | ||
| And so for example – and this is something that I think would be kind of interesting to talk about – everybody is losing their mind at the moment in the space that you and I sort of co-inhabit of ideas and trying to figure out how do we remain sane and plugged in and open-hearted and open to new things but also rigorous and fair. | ||
| Like all of these weird pressures – The ideas behind the intellectual dark web that you coined. | ||
| This concept of having a bunch of people that have different ideologies but yet share this common theme of wanting to have real honest communication and honest conversations and try to figure out, instead of looking at things from an ideological perspective, look at things from an honest, objective point and try to see the way the other people view things. | ||
| Open-hearted, not trying to destroy each other. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| And effectively trying to become the adults in the room as we watch the kids run riot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And not always achieving that. | ||
| Now, because I refused to actually say what it was or who was in it because there was a lot of pressure to codify it. | ||
| I knew that if I codified it, it would die. | ||
| I want a membership card. | ||
| You have one. | ||
| But if I don't get one. | ||
| You have one. | ||
| There's a clubhouse. | ||
| There's a clubhouse. | ||
| We just don't tell the members where it is. | ||
| Every time there's an article about the IDW that doesn't mention me, I'm like, yes, I'm sneaking away. | ||
| I'm slipping away. | ||
| You're like Pacino in 3. They're always going to drag you back. | ||
| There's been some discussion about certain members and certain people that are losing their fucking marbles. | ||
| I think it's pressure. | ||
| And I think one of the things that we're all recognizing, whether it's the internet, Or just celebrity in general, which is, I think, part of the culprit. | ||
| Especially if you're reading comments and articles that are written about you, which I do not recommend. | ||
| I'm doing that. | ||
| Don't do that! | ||
| If you're doing that, you are subject to a massive amount of pressure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a lot of pressure. | ||
| And sometimes people, they apply that. | ||
| That pressure can help you like if it's a good friend or someone who you trust and it's done with It's intellectual honesty and they just really, they think that there's maybe a flaw in your thinking or maybe this could help you or maybe this is an issue and then you realize that and you self-correct. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| But there's a lot of people that are bending to the will of the masses and they also are responding to the pressure of the masses. | ||
| I don't even think it's the masses. | ||
| I think one of the reasons I read my comments is because I want to know what Russia is thinking. | ||
| No, I'm not kidding. | ||
| Listen to me, Joe. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Let's go down the rabbit hole together. | ||
| Well, for sure. | ||
| And we talked about this recently. | ||
| Let me just say this before you get going. | ||
| We knew that something was going on years ago. | ||
| I used to have a message board. | ||
| And on my message board on my website, it became problematic for legal reasons. | ||
| People were putting a bunch of illegal shit up there, and I was kind of responsible for it. | ||
| And a few issues came up where I was like, oh, Jesus. | ||
| I'm going to get in real trouble. | ||
| We had an influx. | ||
| And by an influx, I mean thousands and thousands of Russian emails signing up from my message board. | ||
| I mean thousands with really similar email addresses. | ||
| And they would post and pretend they're from fucking Cleveland or post and be mad that we don't have enough Nazis on or whatever the fuck it would be. | ||
| It would just be... | ||
| It's the same thing that the IRA was doing, the Internet Research Agency was doing with Facebook and Google. | ||
| We were seeing this like four or five years ago, that this stuff was kind of happening, where they were recognizing that there's these large portals of discussion. | ||
| And so they were trying to manipulate that discussion and turn certain discussions toxic and come up with preposterous conspiracy theories and attack people for nonsensical reasons. | ||
| Well, this is the thing. | ||
| I keep seeing the same message modified a hundred different ways from a bunch of accounts that have suspicious similarity. | ||
| Not one of these accounts usually is followed by anyone I care about. | ||
| And then they have a few high-value accounts with blurry photographs of a person that – I think somebody is putting real money into that account to create a fake person who just doggedly follows you and is constantly trying to talk to you in your ear, that account. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But how do you know that that's what that is? | ||
| And how do you know it's not just some person with schizophrenia that really is really interested in Eric Weinstein? | ||
| Well, a couple times I've tried to, like, talk to the person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| And suddenly the thing vanishes. | ||
| It's like, you're so disgusting, I would never talk to you. | ||
| It's like, goodbye. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Click. | |
| Well, maybe they just panicked. | ||
| Could be just a person. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| On the other hand, you remember when we took that photograph at that dinner? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There was this huge number of jokes about Ben Shapiro and a booster seat that were all slightly different versions of the joke and all of the accounts were like strikingly similar. | ||
| I was just thinking like, well, I could imagine a little bit of this. | ||
| But it's way too many. | ||
| And this is part of what I believe. | ||
| I believe that we are in a new world in which a lot of the grassroots stuff is astroturf. | ||
| And if you start to listen to it, you start to get pushed. | ||
| And I start to watch certain tactics. | ||
| And I make models of the tactics. | ||
| You know, like one of the tactics is, gosh, Eric, I once thought that you had a lot of integrity. | ||
| And now I know that X... If you don't address this situation, I'm done following you. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| But I believe that there are sophisticated players who are engaged in trying to Either boost our signal or start to alter the signal. | ||
| Somebody will be up, somebody will be down. | ||
| And then there's like really weird dynamics. | ||
| I think that there's a very strange thing going on, not with Dave Rubin, but with the crowd of people that is just trying to eat Dave Rubin and blind him and confuse him. | ||
| And there's this guy, Sam Seder, who- Do you think he's a Russian? | ||
| I hope he is. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I don't think he's Russian, but I do think that his – I think he has a grassroots following. | ||
| I don't think this is inauthentic. | ||
| That just loves to harass – Well, dunk, drag. | ||
| I hate this language. | ||
| I just can't – I like dunking. | ||
| I like the word dunking. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, it's fun. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm not a fan. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, because it cheapens all conversation. | ||
| Oh, you got dunked on. | ||
| You got dragged. | ||
| It's just like, oh, this is that thing in third grade that I never figured out. | ||
| Well, they found out that he won't engage with them, and so they think it's cute to just constantly shit on him, and they also think it's cute to take anything that he says and interpret it in the worst possible way possible and not think of it as him just being a guy who's trying to talk about things on the fly and maybe isn't even prepared about the subject at hand. | ||
| Like, one of the things that comes up on this show, like, you know, we were talking before we were going to go on there, what were we going to talk about? | ||
| I'm like, come on! | ||
| Let's just talk. | ||
| And so when you do that, come on, let's just talk thing, you never know what the fuck is going to come up, and you might have a piss-poorly formed idea of what a subject is, and you just start rambling. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I've done in my two previous appearances. | ||
| Well, no, you have not, but it seems, you know, it's easy to think that you did that. | ||
| But with Dave... | ||
| You know, there's enough moments where he's misstepped where they just feel like, okay, we got a wounded antelope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| They're trying to pick him off. | ||
| And, you know, I think there was probably a move to do Shapiro and there was a period where you were seemingly in the crosshairs, but you're hard to kill. | ||
| I was in the crosshairs? | ||
| I wasn't even noticing. | ||
| See, that's the benefit of not paying attention. | ||
| And this is something that I've been pretty rigorous about over the last six months, a year or so. | ||
| You, Sam Harris, and Dave Rubin have all given me versions of this advice. | ||
| And I worry about it because I'm not large enough yet that I've been the target of a steady campaign. | ||
| But what happens is You see people's feedback loops interrupted. | ||
| And in part, to course correct, you kind of want to know, was I too harsh with that guy? | ||
| Like when I went on with Jordan Peterson on Dave's show, I was more aggressive because I think I'd seen Jordan and Brett on your show together. | ||
| And I come from an ethnic family. | ||
| We interrupt each other. | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| And Jordan is an interrupter. | ||
| And so what I found is that I probably was intuiting that I had to be more forceful. | ||
| A lot of the comments said, wow, Eric, I haven't really seen you this aggressive. | ||
| Was there three of you on the conversation? | ||
| It started off Dave, Jordan, and myself. | ||
| And then Ben Shapiro came in for an hour. | ||
| And I think Sam Harris might have been scheduled to come in. | ||
| There's an issue always with more than one person. | ||
| There's a reason why I do one-on-ones almost exclusively. | ||
| Even when I had Bob Lazar with Jeremy Corbell, just having a third person that wants to chime in oftentimes interrupts the flow of conversation. | ||
| In that case, it was because I wanted to lock in on Bob Lazar. | ||
| I wanted to get all my feedback. | ||
| I want to find out, is this guy full of shit? | ||
| I want to lock in with him. | ||
| There's another And also, there's another person, even if they have a good thing to say, it's a distraction. | ||
| It becomes a problem. | ||
| Well, you never know when one of these is going to work. | ||
| When it works, it can be magical. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And when it doesn't, you know, it's a little bit like jazz guys... | ||
| If that group is meant to be, then they don't trip over each other's solos and they're trying to come up with something. | ||
| But even with three great friends, I have this issue. | ||
| I've seen great stuff with multiple people on your show. | ||
| And I've seen stuff that doesn't work. | ||
| And the other night we had... | ||
| Brian Callen is fast becoming one of my favorite people in the world. | ||
| And he had us over. | ||
| And it was really fascinating. | ||
| It was all... | ||
| Guys who could rip your head off. | ||
| Not your head off. | ||
| They could certainly rip my head off. | ||
| And very thoughtful ones at that. | ||
| There were people from all different ethnicities. | ||
| My wife was the only female. | ||
| And one of the things I found astounding was that everybody was taking the piss out of each other. | ||
| And it was the most intimate, positive, loving kind of an environment you could imagine where people are joking about each other's ethnicity, their religion. | ||
| And I had to remind myself About how men actually manage intimacy and closeness. | ||
| And it's not the way women do it. | ||
| No, we shit on each other. | ||
| We shit on each other. | ||
| And it's friggin' important to how we do business. | ||
| And increasingly, I have this idea that... | ||
| I need that in my life. | ||
| Well, we have to check each other to see if each other is taking each other seriously. | ||
| You have to make sure you're not taking yourself too seriously. | ||
| I didn't feel like lots of jokes were made at my expense. | ||
| I was probably the only guy there who wasn't, you know, some form of a combat sport veteran. | ||
| And, you know, there were a couple of jokes at my expense on that. | ||
| There were a couple of Jewish jokes. | ||
| I felt terrific leaving that place. | ||
| There was no part of me that felt like... | ||
| Wow, I really got hazed, but I hope I got through it. | ||
| I mean, these guys were just so positive and generous of spirit. | ||
| Well, Brian is one of the best at that. | ||
| He's so silly. | ||
| Like, most of his podcasts that he does, other than with me and him have pretty cool podcasts, we've known each other forever. | ||
| We've been best friends since 1994. Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, that guy is smart. | |
| I love him so much that I broke up with this girl, and Brian, she was calling me because she was horny. | ||
| And I was like, look, I have a new girlfriend, but I have a friend who'll fuck you, and he's just like me. | ||
| And so I sicked Brian on my ex-girlfriend, and he fucked her. | ||
| One of the funniest conversations I ever had with an ex-girlfriend, she calls me up, she goes, your friend came inside me. | ||
| And I went, what? | ||
| She goes, yeah, your fucking friend came inside me. | ||
| And I was like, well, did you tell him that you were on the pill? | ||
| She goes, no! | ||
| No, I'm not on the pill! | ||
| And I was like, well, I don't know what to tell you. | ||
| You know, that's Brian. | ||
| You guys should have worked that out. | ||
| My damn ex-girlfriend call you up mad because your friend ejaculated inside of her. | ||
| It was one of the most... | ||
| I hung up the phone. | ||
| I literally fell to the ground laughing. | ||
| I was lying on my back on the floor of my house going, ah! | ||
| Like, it's just so ridiculous. | ||
| That's Brian Callen. | ||
| Brian Callen, everybody. | ||
| So I called him up, and I said, what happened? | ||
| And he's like, whoops! | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was just such a ridiculous conversation. | |
| But I've been friends with that guy forever. | ||
| So all of our conversations are like that. | ||
| I see. | ||
| All of our conversations are like jokes and hazing and shitting on each other, but it's all hugs and love. | ||
| I mean, I love that guy to death. | ||
| Yeah, he's so positive and generous. | ||
| And, you know, one funny thing, I was looking at his Instagram, and he's seated next to, I don't know, I can't remember, was it Cheetah? | ||
| He's sitting next to a wild cheetah in Africa. | ||
| Yeah, and he's talking about how he hunts with it. | ||
| I like to get up in the morning. | ||
| Perhaps we will hunt together. | ||
| I smell antelope nearby. | ||
| Just like he's clowning and there's an actual... | ||
| A real cheetah. | ||
| Yeah, but those cheetahs are interesting, man. | ||
| You can actually pet them. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| I think it was a game reserve. | ||
| I see. | ||
| Like one of those safar reserves where you can... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't ruin the image. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, a lot of that is in Africa. | ||
| Not in terms of like they're... | ||
| They're not pets, but they're so used to people, because people are always going on safari there, and apparently you can get real close to them in some environments. | ||
| But cheetahs, in particular, a lot of people keep them as pets. | ||
| You see a lot of sheiks, rich guys in the Middle East, they'll be driving around in their fucking AMG wagons with a cheetah next to them. | ||
| A cheetah on a leash. | ||
| And the cheetah's just cool with it. | ||
| See, nobody does that with hippos. | ||
| I think if you wanted to go next level... | ||
| Yeah, that wouldn't work out. | ||
| Hippos just decide to fuck you up. | ||
| Yeah, what is with us in the hippos? | ||
| Hippos are like, they're a cousin to pigs. | ||
| Are they right? | ||
| Yeah, they're a ruthless fucking animal. | ||
| Oh, now I see it. | ||
| They don't play any games. | ||
| Yeah, and for vegetarians, it's not even like they were their food. | ||
| They are vegetarians, but they do eat meat. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, so do deer. | ||
| You know, deer and cows, they'll eat birds. | ||
| Okay, we're not going back into that vampire deer thing. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That freaked me out last time. | ||
| But deer oftentimes eat birds. | ||
| They eat ground-nesting birds. | ||
| There's a lot of video of it. | ||
| People don't want to believe it. | ||
| They think they just eat grass. | ||
| Most of the time they do, but they will eat a bird if they get a chance. | ||
| They know it's food. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| And they have an herbivore's digestive tract, but they'll still eat a bird. | ||
| There's a lot of videos of deer and birds. | ||
| I guess I've been really fascinated by the number of species in which some human, like totally deadly species, where some human has decided, I'm going to dedicate my life to hanging out and not getting eaten. | ||
| Hyenas! | ||
| There's some asshole that is hanging out with hyenas on the internet and petting them. | ||
| They seem really playful and friendly. | ||
| Real sweet. | ||
| It's real weird. | ||
| This guy's like nuzzling these hyenas. | ||
| Can you imagine choosing the hyena? | ||
| That's your system? | ||
| That is an animal that bites so fucking hard. | ||
| They have one of the strongest bites ever measured because their whole thing is just smashing bones and trying to get out the nutrition that the lions leave behind. | ||
| So they're all just about crushing bones. | ||
| So their whole face is designed to smash bones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, they're fucking rude. | ||
| See, here's the guy. | ||
| He's hanging out with these hyenas. | ||
| He plays with them. | ||
| Look at this asshole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But they're playing with him. | ||
| They seem to think he's like their buddy. | ||
| Look, they're biting him, but they're gentle. | ||
| I mean, they could rip his arm clean off, but they're biting his leg. | ||
| And, you know, he's nuzzling with them. | ||
| Did he raise them? | ||
| He's letting them bite his face. | ||
| I do not know. | ||
| I do not know. | ||
| Because I think a lot of these have to do with imprinting. | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that was the thing with my friend Phil Demers, who worked at Marine Land. | ||
| One of the reasons why he's so furious at them is because he's got a walrus named Smooshy, and the walrus imprinted with him when it was really young. | ||
| The walrus thinks that's his mom. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That he's rather the walrus's mom. | ||
| So he's just on this fucking furious quest to get this walrus released and to shut down this shithole known as Marine Land. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's been sued forever. | ||
| He's been involved in lawsuits as long as I've known him. | ||
| And he's been coming on this podcast for years. | ||
| For years we've been, you know, trying to boost his signal and trying to get the word out. | ||
| And then when Blackfish came out, that sort of really turned the tide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Where people got a chance to see what orca captivity is really like. | ||
| And they were like, holy shit, this is horrific. | ||
| It is absolutely barbaric. | ||
| But anyway, this walrus came from him. | ||
| He gave me that. | ||
| That is cool. | ||
| Yeah, that sits there for Phil. | ||
| That sits on the desk for Phil. | ||
| Who is the Hall of Fame here on the desk? | ||
| Is there a camera over there? | ||
| Oh, this is... | ||
| These are all little... | ||
| Little statuettes from a company called PlastiCell. | ||
| And PlastiCell is... | ||
| How do you say Fong's name? | ||
| Fong Tran? | ||
| He's an amazing artist who's created all of these little figurines. | ||
| This is Rory McDonald, who's an elite UFC fighter. | ||
| Bruce Lee. | ||
| Notorious B.I.G. That's my dog, Marshall. | ||
| Marshall has one. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| Tupac. | ||
| Conor McGregor. | ||
| Kanye. | ||
| And then that is a different one. | ||
| The bobblehead one... | ||
| That's Rich Rebuilds. | ||
| He's got this really dope website or YouTube channel where he's the only guy that I know of that's ever rebuilt a Tesla. | ||
| He bought a wrecked Tesla and then bought another one and put the parts together and figured out how to make it work. | ||
| And the Tesla people do not like him. | ||
| They don't like that he's doing that. | ||
| Now he's made a place called the Electrified Garage in Massachusetts where He is working on Teslas and electric vehicles outside of their ecosystem. | ||
| So he's doing it on his own, like an independent Tesla. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where? | |
| Massachusetts. | ||
| You think he's going to hybridize with Boston Dynamics? | ||
| No, he's an independent guy. | ||
| That would be cool. | ||
| How do you say his last name? | ||
| Benoit, right? | ||
| It looks like Benoit, but it's Benoit. | ||
| Very cool guy. | ||
| He was on the podcast recently. | ||
| Hey, what happened? | ||
| What do we know about the Kanye situation where he was going to talk about mental health? | ||
| I was kind of excited about that. | ||
| You know, if he wants to, he can do it. | ||
| He's his own thing. | ||
| He is a brilliant artist, but oftentimes a brilliant artist, this is not the best format for them to just talk. | ||
| Sometimes it's better for them to express themselves through their work. | ||
| Maybe, although I found... | ||
| I spent two days with him, and I found that when he's in a relaxed frame, his flow state is just... | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| Well, I enjoyed talking to him. | ||
| I talked to him on the phone. | ||
| I really enjoyed our conversation. | ||
| We had a nice conversation. | ||
| I think he's a very good dude. | ||
| Very sensitive human being. | ||
| Yeah, very cool guy. | ||
| But... | ||
| This is not a relaxed environment. | ||
| You know, this right here, everybody knows how many people are listening. | ||
| It just fucks people's head up. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because the illusion that I have is just you and me talking, and then I come out of here and people are like, what did you say? | ||
| Well, you and I are friends, so that illusion is more maintained. | ||
| When you don't know me and you come in, I mean, I would have to be friends with him. | ||
| That's one of the things he wanted me to come to his church. | ||
| You know, he's running a cult. | ||
| Essentially. | ||
| Everybody's wearing white. | ||
| They're all dancing and doing religious stuff. | ||
| I'd do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm busy, man. | ||
| You're busy. | ||
| Sundays are family time. | ||
| Sundays are family time. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I'm not into... | ||
| I just... | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I think it's beautiful. | ||
| But I'm not... | ||
| He and I were walking down the road and, you know, there was this Crip Alert Yeah, the Crips from Long Beach said, you know, Kanye, you better stay in Calabasas. | ||
| It was a little bit of a tense situation. | ||
| So we're walking along the road and like people were hanging out of the windows of their car. | ||
| You're like, Kanye! | ||
| And I think it was just like positive, you know, like wanting to make contact. | ||
| But it was very disconcerting and this guy was preternaturally calm. | ||
| You know, he was just like, I was nervous. | ||
| How long ago was this? | ||
| This was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You remember when he went on TMZ? Were you talking a year or less? | |
| I think it was probably a year ago. | ||
| It was probably medicated. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He talked openly about the fact that the last six months or so he's been off of his medication. | ||
| And whatever they had him on was fucking with him creatively. | ||
| Well, do you remember Oliver Sacks had this chapter in The Man Who Stook His Wife for a Hat about a drummer with Tourette's Syndrome? | ||
| No. | ||
| And then he took a drug to control the Tourette's Syndrome, and the guy's drumming became kind of monotonous, very regular, but not creative. | ||
| Yeah, look, what that guy's got inside of him, he's so prolific. | ||
| I mean, you listen to his music, it's so interesting and eclectic and prolific, and he's just constantly churning out more great shit. | ||
| He doesn't have any flops. | ||
| I mean, his music is pretty fucking amazing. | ||
| And he's just, that's his shit, man. | ||
| He knows how to just get in there and create, and he's got this whirlwind going on in his mind. | ||
| He's fearless. | ||
| He is exploring – I don't want to get into the details, but one of the things that really impressed me was he would go to places that I'm too scared to go to in my own mind. | ||
| And just thinking about your inadequacies and externalizing them and your vulnerabilities and knowing what is going to emasculate you. | ||
| And his point is like, I'm so comfortable with myself that I'm going to mine that as a source of art because I bet it's in everyone. | ||
| And by exploring these contradictions and these false fronts and – he's got a level of internal access. | ||
| I'm actually quite interested in the mental health aspect of this, which is – There's so much mental unhealth as we term it that I don't think it's all mental unhealth. | ||
| I do think that there's something about the artistic process that seems to be very informed by states that we call unhealth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we require people to stay inside these rigid boundaries. | ||
| And these rigid boundaries, they're great if you want to show up at a job and work nine to five and don't use certain noises with your mouth because it makes people upset. | ||
| But that's not for the creative process. | ||
| If you look at true outliers, if you want to discuss true outliers, like people that are really capable of producing extraordinary art or architecture or works, different interesting things that are part of the creative process, those people are all unwell, every single one of them. | ||
| I mean, in terms of like, if you made him do what a normal person has to do every day, I think normal life is unwell. | ||
| In terms of this... | ||
| This requirement of showing up five minutes early, working all day long, getting off, maybe bringing some of your work home, getting some sleep, getting up in the morning and doing it all over again, all while raising a family and trying to enjoy your time, your limited, finite time on this planet? | ||
| Well, this is why I said I've left. | ||
| Oh, so you left. | ||
| Is that it's not healthy here. | ||
| So where are you? | ||
| Well, maybe this is a good segue. | ||
| I hadn't thought about it this way, but... | ||
| So, can we use this format to announce that I am, in fact, starting the podcast? | ||
| I've recorded a couple episodes already that are in the canon. | ||
| It is called The Portal. | ||
| The Portal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, The Portal refers to this... | ||
| This very interesting thing that I thought everyone was aware of, but very often people wouldn't react to it. | ||
| When I was a kid, I read all of these stories that I thought were known to be the same story, but different versions of it. | ||
| And I called it the portal story. | ||
| And it was always the same. | ||
| Somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence in an ordinary world until some sort of magical portal Accidentally or on purpose enters their life. | ||
| And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, looking glass, platform nine and three quarters. | ||
| Or Dorothy famously was used to introduce Technicolor, where she – the first part of the film, she's in Kansas and it's in sort of grayscale black and white. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| And then she lands in Oz, and they open the door, and it's Technicolor, and there's this transitional scene where you see Technicolor for the first time. | ||
| Was that the first time ever in a movie? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| And so the question is... | ||
| Where's the portal? | ||
| Like, why do we tell the same story over and over and over again with different protagonists, but it's always the same formula? | ||
| It's somebody is trapped in an ordinary world. | ||
| They're sort of, they're around normies. | ||
| They find the portal and the portal becomes the call to adventure and they spend time in the alternate universe. | ||
| And then somehow they're able to live. | ||
| Very often they return. | ||
| If you remember the Phantom Tollbooth, Milo gets this present of a car in a tollbooth and he goes through the tollbooth. | ||
| What is that from? | ||
| Norton Jester was the author and Jules Pfeiffer did the illustrations. | ||
| It was just this brilliant book where there's like the land of letters and the land of numbers. | ||
| So it's arts and sciences. | ||
| And, you know, like there's a... | ||
| There's a person who starts from his head and grows down until his feet reach the ground. | ||
| And there's a numbers mine. | ||
| And he has to rescue the princesses of rhyme and reason in order to restore order between the two kingdoms of, you know, like left and right hemisphere. | ||
| It's some incredibly exciting story. | ||
| And the idea is that after he goes and does all of these, there's an island called Conclusions. | ||
| And when you make an assumption, you leap to conclusions. | ||
| So you suddenly jump. | ||
| I mean, it's all very clever wordplay and stuff. | ||
| At the end of the adventure, it's... | ||
| The toll booth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it, you know? | ||
| And so my question was always, why on earth would we tell the same story over and over and over and over and over again? | ||
| It has the same format and it's always a different context. | ||
| And I came to believe that this story is actually this unkept promise for most people, that in their adult lives, they don't find these portals. | ||
| So, for example... | ||
| Have you ever been to Barcelona, Spain? | ||
| No. | ||
| There is a church in Barcelona, Spain, which is plenty impressive from the outside. | ||
| When you go inside, I've been looking at pictures of it my entire life called La Sagrada Familia. | ||
| It is a psychedelic drug trip and a half like you've never seen. | ||
| It is the most bizarre interior space I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Can you bring up the interior of this thing? | ||
| And on the one hand, it induces like a hallucinogenic state. | ||
| On the other hand, it's an idea of what this architect, Gaudi... | ||
| Now, Gaudi's very famous. | ||
| He did a lot of buildings around Barcelona. | ||
| There is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet. | ||
| And... | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Fuck, that's beautiful. | ||
|
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And if you look up at the roof, wow. | |
| And like, you know, most things you're sort of prepared for them your whole life. | ||
| And then you see it and you think, eh, I guess that's cool. | ||
| I've been seeing this thing my whole life, and I had no concept of what a genius this human being was, because nothing he did – Look at the outside of it. | ||
| The outside of it – I mean, look, this guy – If he never did the inside of this church, he would be a very famous and idiosyncratic architect. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Are they doing work on it there? | ||
| They haven't finished it yet. | ||
| And in fact, he's such a genius that they can't finish it in the style that he started it. | ||
| Because nobody knows. | ||
| It's like an unfinished symphony. | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| Nobody's smart enough to finish this church. | ||
| Wow, look at the roof on that place. | ||
| Okay, now that is a portal. | ||
| That is a portal. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And... | ||
| When I was on this program before, I thought long and hard, what is it that I could push out to the planet to let people know how wonderful and beautiful the world that we live in is? | ||
| And we pushed out the Hopf vibration. | ||
| And suddenly, if you recall, I said to people, this is the most important object in the universe. | ||
| Not the Hopf vibration in particular, but the class called Principal Bundle, which people have no idea it's out there. | ||
| And it is the basis of the construct in which we live. | ||
| So, how is it that a normal human being can make contact with real physics, with real beauty of biology, or just understanding order, symmetry, all of these things that are beyond normal experience? | ||
| And What I hope to do with the podcast is to have amazing guests and interesting conversations. | ||
| Oh, thank you for that, Jamie. | ||
| That guy was on drugs. | ||
| That guy was... | ||
| He was drugs. | ||
| Remember, that's what Dolly said. | ||
| Somebody said, Dolly, do you take drugs? | ||
| He said, I am drugs. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Another Spaniard. | ||
| Spaniards are really something... | ||
| But that is very similar to psychedelic states. | ||
| Well, maybe some people have access to them all the time, right? | ||
| In part. | ||
| Well, there's actually an illustration that sits above our sink out there from a guy who has a tumor in his pituitary gland. | ||
| What is the one that they think produces DMT? | ||
| What the fuck is it called? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Not the pituitary gland. | ||
| No. | ||
| Pineal? | ||
| Pineal. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| He has a tumor in his pineal gland. | ||
| And so he accesses these states all the time. | ||
| So this guy has... | ||
| It's 100% DMT-inspired artwork. | ||
| I mean, if you look at it, it's like what you see when you do DMT trips. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's a version, you know, in his style of art, but you can see the... | ||
| You can see the signature of DMT? There it is. | ||
| There's his artwork. | ||
| What is his name? | ||
|
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Sean Thornton. | |
| Sean Thornton. | ||
| Thank you, Sean. | ||
| Thanks for the artwork. | ||
| It's fucking awesome, and it sits in our kitchen. | ||
| I'll take a picture of it later and put it online. | ||
| But that's his stuff. | ||
| That's super DMT-like. | ||
| Oh, that's amazing. | ||
| I mean, that's a tryptamine-type experience. | ||
| You could say, like Alex Gray. | ||
| Is probably the most representative, I would say he's the most representative in terms of artists in the DMT space, in terms of like tryptamines and psilocybin and things along those lines. | ||
| And so, if you think about psychoactive chemicals, some of them are stupefying, but some of them are portals. | ||
| And this concept of, if you look at a wall, How do you know that the wall doesn't have a door? | ||
| How do you know that there isn't a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book? | ||
| We learn to stop looking for the portal. | ||
| And I think what I do differently than other people is that I became obsessed with exits. | ||
| That there are other worlds and they're real. | ||
| That this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole and the matrix Is metaphor for very real things. | ||
| And that we just, we live our lives in the most ordinary mesoscale phenomena where we don't see the quantum because we're not playing with polarized lenses in ways that show us what light actually is. | ||
| We're not playing with superfluid helium. | ||
| We're not understanding just how bizarre olfaction is or whether there's some sort of quantum aspect of biology. | ||
| And what you see people doing is that they start grasping for everything. | ||
| I'm not saying that there's nothing to ancient aliens or UFOs or whatever, but a lot of that is just... | ||
| People want something richer and more amazing for their lives. | ||
| And I'm not going to pass too much judgment on that, but I am going to say if we just restricted the rest of our days to the provable stuff that we know is out there, it could be amazing. | ||
| People need more meaning. | ||
| With all of the rationality, with all of the mystery we've taken out of the world, it's time to put a ton of it back in. | ||
| When you say, put a ton of it back in, how are you going to put it back in? | ||
| Well, you know, if I were to start talking about the Octonians, an eight-dimensional number system that no one understands, I can do that totally rigorously. | ||
| I can show you all sorts of bizarre stuff involving the Octonians. | ||
| What is the Octonians? | ||
| Well, that's my point. | ||
| You don't even know that there are four types of numbers whose dance, it's called the real numbers that we know, complex numbers that you were tortured once with in high school. | ||
| Maybe during some kind of a trip, a friend of you mentioned the quaternions to you. | ||
| And then there's this one system of numbers Which is like the crazy relative nobody discusses. | ||
| And that's called the Octonians. | ||
| And the Octonians are so weird that mathematicians don't even really understand why they're there. | ||
| That's an Octonian? | ||
| That thing? | ||
| Well, my guess is that that's probably back to the root lattice of E8, which we discussed last time, which has this kind of Mandela pattern to it. | ||
| But I could show you their multiplication table. | ||
| I could describe their symmetries. | ||
| There's a symmetry group called G2, which involves these strange numbers. | ||
| But it's a mystery. | ||
| Like, if I got to – I probably know more about the Actonians than most mathematicians. | ||
| If I got to the end of all of my knowledge of the Octonians, I still wouldn't know what to tell you about why they're there and what they mean. | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| I promise you that. | ||
| That's a real mystery. | ||
| Now, we could talk about, like, you know, my friend said that that event that happened in Siberia in the early, you know, 20th century was actually an alien visitation. | ||
| Well, maybe, yes, maybe no, I don't know anything about it. | ||
| If I just focused us on what we know is out there that we don't grasp, which is 100% rock solid, it provides so much mystery and meaning and invitation to adventure. | ||
| If you're looking for a hero's journey, I'll show you a ton of these things. | ||
| And it's empowering. | ||
| It's just incredibly empowering to know that you're a hair's breadth away from superpowers. | ||
| So I want to help people explore that. | ||
| So what is that? | ||
| Like when you're explaining this, when you're saying this is bizarre series of numbers, what is it doing? | ||
| How do we interface with it? | ||
| Well, so for example, let's take an easier system that we feel a little bit more confident with. | ||
| There's this thing called the quaternions, which are based on the number one, The complex number i, if you remember that from some distant math class, and then there's something called j and k. | ||
| So i times j equals k, j times k equals i, j times i is equal to the negative of i times j, so negative k. | ||
| There's a multiplication table for these objects. | ||
| And these objects help with computer vision, computer simulation 3D projections. | ||
| They're used all the time in probably video games. | ||
| They may come up in nature. | ||
| I mean, we know that nature uses complex numbers, and most people never found out why they were being told about complex numbers or imaginary numbers, because they never got to the point Where you're actually looking at wave functions that describe photons and electrons and all of that good stuff that you read about in physics. | ||
| So, in essence, the Octonians are a system where IJK keeps going effectively through elemental PQR, you know, until you've got eight different objects. | ||
| And they're not even associative, which is one of these rules that you learn about, you know... | ||
| Well, multiplication is associative. | ||
| And you think, well, what isn't associative? | ||
| So if you talk about commutativity, for example, I can't tell whether you put on your shirt first or your shoes first because it's commutative as to which order you did it. | ||
| But if you put on your underwear in a different order than you put on your pants, it'll become immediately obvious which order you did it in. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Okay, well, there's another thing called associativity. | ||
| And it's almost everything that we deal with in, you know, elementary mathematics is associative. | ||
| So you're like, why do I learn about associativity? | ||
| I've never met anything that isn't associative. | ||
| Well, the Octonians ain't associative. | ||
| They're a number system that is responsible for most of the platypi of mathematics, if you will, things that just occur anomalously. | ||
| So that's an example of an invitation out of this planet, you know? | ||
| If you start to think about the Octonians and care about them and say, are they a message? | ||
| Do they have meaning? | ||
| We can prove that they're there. | ||
| I can construct them for you. | ||
| But they generate so much bizarreness in some sort of abstract space. | ||
| How were they recognized? | ||
| Like, how was it? | ||
| How did it come to be that this was a point of discussion? | ||
| Well, there's a process. | ||
| In fact, there are two processes where you can build these number systems up from each other. | ||
| So you build the complex from the real, you build the quaternions from the complex, you build the octonions from the quaternions, and then you can't build anything beyond that because each time you're giving up a magical power To get to the next stage. | ||
| And by the time you get to the Octonians, you're exhausted. | ||
| When you say giving up a magical power. | ||
| Well, like, for example, it's very hard to think about the square root of negative one. | ||
| So, like, what does it mean for something squared to be negative one? | ||
| So that's like the complex numbers gave up that kind of sensibility. | ||
| And then the complex numbers are at least commutative. | ||
| A times B equals B times A. But the quaternions don't have that property. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So then you have a further property called associativity. | ||
| So to build the next system, you're giving up properties that sort of make sense to us. | ||
| And by the time you've gotten to the Actonians, you've given everything away. | ||
| There's no way you're going to build the next system. | ||
| But yet it's real. | ||
| Yes, yet it's real in a very real mathematical sense. | ||
| So does it just highlight our lack of understanding? | ||
| Yeah, and it is a call to adventure. | ||
| It's like a message from something that isn't human. | ||
| I'm not going to say that it's God. | ||
| I'm not going to say that it's logic or design. | ||
| But it's a more complex system of the universe. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And you have to uncover that these things are there. | ||
| Or, for example, C. elegans. | ||
| I don't know if you've played with... | ||
| Do you know about C. elegans? | ||
| No. | ||
| All right. | ||
| C. elegans. | ||
| You say elegans? | ||
| C. The letter. | ||
| C. Uh-huh. | ||
| Elegans. | ||
| I think it's E. Okay. | ||
| So it's this worm. | ||
| That was chosen by this guy, Sidney Brenner, who just died. | ||
| And it's a shame because he would have been a great podcast guest. | ||
| Just like one of the most brilliant biologists that we didn't focus on. | ||
| And he said, you know what? | ||
| We're missing a species that we can completely describe. | ||
| Soup to nuts. | ||
| Here's the one that's about the simplest thing with a brain. | ||
| It's only got a thousand cells. | ||
| And 300 of those cells make up a very primitive neural system. | ||
| And we're going to track where every goddamn cell, like bring up, Jamie, if I could ask you something, to bring up the cell lineage diagram for C. elegans. | ||
| So this will be the first of two images. | ||
| Well, that is a complete map of how one fertilized egg becomes a tiny microscopic worm for every possible division. | ||
| What in the fuck am I looking at? | ||
| I love when you say that. | ||
| That is so wild. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Right? | ||
| Now, here's the thing. | ||
| Everyone in biology knows how cool this thing is. | ||
| And very few people, not enough people outside of biology, know that we have completely mapped how one cell – like, if you're 30 trillion cells around – It's too big to write a diagram. | ||
| It's only possible because there are only a thousand cells and this thing has locomotion, it has sexual reproduction, you know, it eats. | ||
| So you're looking at the architectural plans for an actual organism. | ||
| And Jamie, when we're done with that, if I could trouble you for the... | ||
| For the folks that are just following, I'm going to pause for a moment, for the folks that are following at home listening, just listening, not watching, what we're looking at, Jamie, explain how someone can see this image if they want to Google it themselves. | ||
| The letter C. It's not C like the Ocean Sea. | ||
|
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Elegance and then the cell lineage. | |
| It looks like a really long basketball bracket. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Kind of pushed out forever. | ||
| That's a good way to describe it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fucking wild. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Talk about March Madness. | ||
| April Madness, June Madness. | ||
| February. | ||
| It just doesn't stop. | ||
| If we could bring up the wiring diagram or adjacency matrix. | ||
| Yeah, let's see how it gets wired. | ||
| Yeah, perfect. | ||
| That is a complete map of the 300 neurons in the C. elegans worm how they are wired to each other like that is a map of the mind of the worm Wow Okay. | ||
| So that's the portal. | ||
| That's another portal. | ||
| Here's an organism which is completely mapped and has complex behaviors. | ||
| It has, I think, about half the number of adult cell types that you and I have. | ||
| So maybe we have like 250, like only 250 different kinds of adult cells, more or less. | ||
| I don't want to get too precise about that. | ||
| And yet we are like 10 trillion or 30 trillion copies of those tiny number of different types of cells. | ||
| Well, I think the C. elegans has about 125 or something like that, different cell types, and it only has 1,000 cells, and it's able to do most of what we're able to do. | ||
| We move around. | ||
| We eat. | ||
| We have sex. | ||
| Pretty simple life. | ||
| Do you think it's ever possible, well, I'm sure it's probably possible, but do you think in our lifetime we'll ever see a map like that of a human organism? | ||
| I don't think so, but the cool thing is we have this map and we still don't understand it. | ||
| Like, we've got this thing dead to rights. | ||
| We've got it boxed in. | ||
| It can't. | ||
| We know every single cell what it does. | ||
| We have all the wirings between the neurons, and we still don't get it. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Right? | ||
| So, like, imagine that you're eight years— What the hell is that? | ||
| Well— What a genius this guy Sidney Brenner was for choosing this organism, right? | ||
| Because this organism is the simplest place to look at complex life. | ||
| This image of the reconstructed biological neural network, it's like, what? | ||
| Like you're looking at... | ||
| Now, we could have a discussion about some weird Peruvian structure and whether we've been visited. | ||
| And I'd be up for that. | ||
| I'm not going to pretend that I'm too good for it. | ||
| But I know that this is real. | ||
| I don't have any doubt. | ||
| I'm not going to sit around asking, well, do you believe that aliens talk to the federal government in the 40s? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That might as well be an alien. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's an invitation to adventure. | ||
| And we are destroying – I mean, just getting back to it – The reason that I'm fighting through culture war issues, which are not very interesting to me, is that we are destroying the thing that has the ability to make sense of the world, right? | ||
| It's really the design... | ||
| Jason Kuznicki Yeah, I mean, like, the ability to say no. | ||
| You know, you come with an experiment that failed. | ||
| And you say, I think it succeeded. | ||
| And I say, no, it didn't. | ||
| It failed. | ||
| And you say, well, I actually am Cambodian, and I think you're discriminating against me because I'm Cambodian. | ||
| Look, your experiment failed. | ||
| It has nothing to do with you being Cambodian. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| And you keep that stuff out of my lab. | ||
| I mean, if you want... | ||
| Culture war stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really what I'm animated by is... | ||
| Get your fucking social engineering out of my laboratory. | ||
| You've got 10 minutes and I'm calling security. | ||
| That's my issue. | ||
| It's not telling people how to behave or that I have all the answers or that we need to be objective in our lives and that we just want to have sensible discussions. | ||
| You're coming after core reality and our ability to make sense of the world. | ||
| And so I'm happy to entertain all sorts of things. | ||
| You take one foot... | ||
| Step one foot in my lab and I'm calling security. | ||
| And if I can't do that, if I can't maintain a scientific journal or a university in which the bullshit departments do not invade the departments that are actually doing the super important work, we're lost. | ||
| And there is a distinction. | ||
| This distinction needs to be made. | ||
| There is a distinction between hard science and gender studies. | ||
| If you could pull up, Jamie, Let's do the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. | ||
| Oh, you can do that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You went all Sean Connery on me. | ||
| Raise the eyebrow? | ||
| Yeah, one eyebrow. | ||
| Isn't that like a genetic thing, like you can curl your tongue? | ||
| Yeah, I could do that. | ||
| Some people can't do that, apparently. | ||
| Can you turn it over? | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| What do you mean, turn upside down? | ||
| Oh, no, I can't do that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You got one thing, I got another. | ||
| This is very mature, Joe. | ||
|
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What is going on here? | |
| I'm looking for a number with like 10 or 11 significant digits. | ||
| We are able to do calculations in quantum electrodynamics, let's say, or quantum field theory. | ||
| In which we can figure out the precision of something, we can predict it to like 10 or 11 decimal places of accuracy. | ||
| And when I look at the achievement that was necessary to have theory agree with experiment to that level, And then I listened to some of the discussions about, well, just take these hoaxes about, you know, somebody who submitted parts of Mein Kampf to, you know, with Jews rewritten as men to a feminine. | ||
| Peter Boghossian, yeah. | ||
| Those two subjects are taking place in the same institution. | ||
| One is incredibly rigorous and demanding and completely unforgiving. | ||
| And the other thing is just like, Frivolous and nonsense. | ||
| Well, maybe there's a core of it that makes sense, but it's not going to get anywhere close to the achievements of the hard sciences. | ||
| But the core of it, whether or not it makes sense, the real problem is the motivation for doing it in the first place. | ||
| Well, the real motivation may be activism, but activism and scholarship aren't – I mean, there's so many things that I want to be true that just aren't. | ||
| I want beautiful – I mean, like, you know, nature. | ||
| You spend time in nature. | ||
| You want to think, you know, like, nature's a community and the forest is a bunch of different organisms all working together. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's red of tooth and claw. | ||
| Everything that you think about the universe that is purely beautiful and aspirational is contradicted by some system in nature. | ||
| And that's why evolutionary theory was the first thing on the chopping block. | ||
| It's just like, well, this contradicts everything we want to claim about organisms. | ||
| Well, tough luck. | ||
| I feel like there's a way to define this clearly that makes people understand it better. | ||
| And I don't know if I'm the guy to do it. | ||
| But I feel like someone... | ||
| This is an incredibly complex issue, right? | ||
| where you're dealing with emotions and feelings and people who feel like there's injustice in the world and inequality and they focus on those things to the point where they're almost participating in social engineering by ignoring reality and focusing on what they want to be true in sort of this way of reimagining the world and they're also demanding compliance this is a big part of this whole thing that's going on here then | ||
| on the other hand you've got this stuff you've got these hard sciences that demand just rigorous rigorous intellectual debate they demand careful study of the facts they demand a deep understanding of complex mathematics in order to achieve these results and to be able to verify them and they're And they're unforgiving. | ||
| Unforgiving. | ||
| They're two totally different things. | ||
| And what you're saying is when one of them that is this sort of Frivolous, airy, kind of utopian version of what they like the future to be, and that interferes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Where they want a certain amount of diverse people on the staff. | ||
| I am not even saying that it's frivolous. | ||
| I'm not even saying it's not scholarship. | ||
| I'm saying that whatever it is, I don't care. | ||
| Maybe it's some beautiful social thing. | ||
| But then they'll hit you with, you don't care because you're a white male and you have white male privilege. | ||
| And what I realize is that as important as inclusion is, exclusion is equally important. | ||
| And the instant you say that, I don't owe you the time of day. | ||
| What does that mean by exclusion is equally important? | ||
| We keep talking about diversity and inclusion, diversity, inclusion, diversity, inclusion. | ||
| And there's an implicit threat in that, which is what makes it really juicy and interesting, which is like, well, let's look at us. | ||
| We've got three white guys in here. | ||
| There's Jamie, you, and me. | ||
| Speak to yourself. | ||
| I'm 1.6% African. | ||
| I'd like you to recognize that. | ||
| I knew he was going to play that card. | ||
| But you, sir, can pass as white, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now... | ||
| In order to have the objection, like, there's some little bit of guilt, which is like, well, why aren't there any people from Cambodia in here? | ||
| Is it that we're really anti-Cambodian? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay. | ||
| It is also important to exclude certain voices from the conversation. | ||
| So the voice that plays the card, which says, well, you're only saying that because X, I don't have to listen to that voice. | ||
| And I think this is really important. | ||
| That is not a voice that needs to be answered. | ||
| It's not a voice that needs to be taken seriously or paid attention to unless there's some serious allegation that there has been some kind of discrimination or inclusion. | ||
| The burden of proof is on you for saying why that's interesting in a particular conversation. | ||
| The burden is on you to explain why that's interesting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, for them, they're trying to engineer a more fair and balanced society. | ||
| If I was going to take their perspective, they would say that the reason why there aren't more women in science or trans people in science or, you know... | ||
| But I'm also trying to engineer a world where there are more women in science. | ||
| How are you doing that? | ||
| By trying to figure out what is it that's selecting against women. | ||
| For example, that we need to get women more money, as I said on this program, earlier in their lives so they can hire help to help raise their children so they can spend more time on their careers and balance... | ||
| Yeah, but a lot of women don't find that attractive. | ||
| They don't want to do that. | ||
| Maybe, but my point is that there are lots of reasons that men and women are different, right? | ||
| So, for example, I saw a beautiful video of a guy who jumps down an enormous flight of stairs on a skateboard, and he just nails the landing, and it's just a thing of art. | ||
| And then it shows you 150 attempts where this guy just abused his body. | ||
| And failed and failed, maybe broke a tooth, blood everywhere, and you're thinking, oh, you showed me the success, and you didn't show me that this guy was willing to put his brain, his life on the line in order to nail that trick, and he's actually one of the world's falling champions, right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, when you start saying, well, why are you putting this video of this person who's doing this thing on the internet because that person belongs to a privileged class, I'm saying, well... | ||
| I don't know, that guy abused himself and put himself at risk and devoted his life in a singular way that no sensible – I mean, I would be appalled if my son did that. | ||
| I'd be furious with him. | ||
| There are things that are happening that result in imbalances that aren't about some kind of unfairness. | ||
| And I think it's very important to say that unfairness is real and structural problems are real and non-structural problems and things that really aren't unfair are also real. | ||
| I think we both agree that it's important for people to have the opportunity to pursue what they enjoy pursuing. | ||
| I think there's also an issue where we want people to be more represented. | ||
| We want more of that kind of person that's interested in something. | ||
| when they might not necessarily naturally gravitate towards it. | ||
| And it might not be that there's some impediments and that there's some boundaries and some sort of boys club that keeps them out. | ||
| And it might be more that they're just not that interested in that. | ||
| Which is biologically that's been proven in studies. | ||
| But I'm trying to make it a different point. | ||
| To me, what I'm trying to say is I made a mistake years ago, I think, of engaging and answering this point, which is, you know, let's take piano competitions. | ||
| Why are piano competitions historically disproportionately, you know, let's say entered in one by Russians or chess or who knows what? | ||
| Well, Russians are beasts in the way that they destroy children on their way to the concert stage. | ||
| They will do things that most American families will not do to produce a concert pianist. | ||
| That's not an unfairness for the rest of us. | ||
| I mean, I play the piano. | ||
| I can't get on stage with these guys because they're just amazing. | ||
| It's not an unfairness that I'm not represented on that stage. | ||
| You know, if I told you that my intention is to become the world's greatest jujitsu expert at age 53, being overweight and not having any history in combat sports, you know and I know that it's not going to happen. | ||
| With the right amount of drugs... | ||
| Come on, Joe. | ||
| And engineering. | ||
| We can do miraculous things. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| We can make him better than he was. | ||
| Yeah, we need daily stem cells. | ||
| We're going to have to do some real—we're going to take a chance on cancer and all sorts of other diseases. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| We can achieve some things. | ||
| Okay, but the previous conversation that we were trying... | ||
| No, you need to develop. | ||
| You need to develop. | ||
| It needs to be a part of your... | ||
| Well, here's the thing that I always say about striking sports. | ||
| Striking sports are probably one of the more interesting ones in that when you start out at an early age, your body develops learning how to strike. | ||
| And it's a gigantic advantage over someone who learns once they're past puberty. | ||
| When you get someone who's learning how to strike and they're in their 20s, it takes a real outlier to become super successful. | ||
| It's very, very rare. | ||
| But I remember being in a fist fight and throwing a punch and not connecting and hurting my arm. | ||
| Yeah, it happens all the time. | ||
| I didn't understand. | ||
| It's not free. | ||
| Now all you've got is your left arm and you've got a really pissed off person across from you. | ||
| What I was getting back to is I wanted to talk about, in part, the portal and how it relates to the whole sort of weird social justice thing. | ||
| The key point is I'm not that interested in In the culture wars. | ||
| I'm interested in the pipeline of amazing stuff that is unforgiving. | ||
| Right, but don't you think that along the way you have to kind of address that the culture wars are a thing, try to figure out why they're a thing, try to figure out what are the main points and main factors that are responsible for it being a thing, and is there a way to mitigate its impact on progress? | ||
| Well, I'm concerned that the culture wars are going to keep girls, black people, whoever, short people, I don't know what, Out of the things that they want to do. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we're not being honest about what it actually, what is involved in selecting against people. | ||
| So you brought up the issue of interests. | ||
| So like the Google memo, the James Damore issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which is a great example publicly. | ||
| Okay, but my wife went on Dave Rubin's show. | ||
| Look, this is a woman who brought techniques of gauge field theory into economics. | ||
| So she's no slouch when it comes to analytic thinking. | ||
| Is gauge field theory similar to gauge symmetry? | ||
| Yeah, gauge theory. | ||
| Okay, same thing. | ||
| Just call it gauge theory. | ||
| She wasn't doing quantum theory, but she was taking – her thesis – Brought techniques of bundle theory, like the Hopf vibration that we had, and showed that economics, without any alteration, was a mature geometric system in a gauge-theoretic idiom. | ||
| So we collaborated on showing that you can't accommodate changing preferences in economics without gauge theory. | ||
| So that was kind of pretty amazing. | ||
| It was really great fun. | ||
| Her point was, I didn't enjoy the unpleasantness of focusing on these things because they were so abstract. | ||
| I was interested in people. | ||
| I was interested in making sure that our models could capture human dynamics better. | ||
| And, you know, I was just really excited by the collaboration we were doing, which was, you know, she and I came from two different worlds and we found this bridge between them. | ||
| So she went on to Dave Rubin and said, look, it's not about abilities. | ||
| Women are as smart as men. | ||
| It's interests. | ||
| We're not interested in the same things necessarily. | ||
| And that should be okay. | ||
| But when she said it on Dave Rubin's show, it didn't register anywhere. | ||
| Then James Damore said it. | ||
| And like, the world freaks out. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| But that's also because he said it within the environment of Google. | ||
| He just wasn't on a podcast. | ||
| But if he had said that same exact thing and he was an employee of Google and he was on a podcast, even if it was a popular podcast... | ||
| I don't think it would have created nearly as much of an issue. | ||
| Well, he was also somewhat spectrumy, and it was the fact that it's Google and the fact that you can get paid for these weird sort of spectrumy skills, which, you know, guilty. | ||
| That's what I care about. | ||
| I really enjoy doing isolated things in the absence of other people that have a very technical nature to them. | ||
| And, you know, my experience in general is that I've had female collaborators in very technical subjects. | ||
| Fewer women are interested in things that involve isolation and technical things removed from human interaction. | ||
| And so that statement will undoubtedly cause a flurry of activity. | ||
| And if a person says it who's not suspected of trying to keep women out of something – my point is I want – A much more equal world. | ||
| But we have a very different diagnosis as to why the world is as unequal as it is. | ||
| And your diagnosis is that it's unequal because people have varied interests. | ||
| But also like something as dumb as kin work. | ||
| Ken work. | ||
| Women take care of sick relatives, children, and the elderly at a level that most men can't be bothered with. | ||
| It's just like, eh, I don't care. | ||
| So you've got all of these guys hyper-focused on their career who are doing the equivalent of jumping down a flight of stairs on a skateboard. | ||
| Maybe it's not healthy. | ||
| And then you've got another group of people who are saying, I want to have children. | ||
| I want to stay home with the kids for a couple of years because it's really important in terms of their development and bonding and all these things. | ||
| And I say, absolutely. | ||
| How do we create a financial product that gets you money early in your life when you need it? | ||
| And then maybe you pay something out. | ||
| It's just a different diagnosis as to what the problem is. | ||
| It's not all oppression. | ||
| Part of it is resources and financial products. | ||
| Part of it is interests. | ||
| Part of it is the fields being set up in a way that is biased. | ||
| I do believe in structural oppression. | ||
| I just don't believe in the level of structural oppression or the remedies for structural oppression. | ||
| We are losing many of the best minds that are on female shoulders. | ||
| We just are. | ||
| There's no question about it in my mind. | ||
| And rather than saying- What do you mean by we're losing them? | ||
| Well, they exit the system. | ||
| They get through the, let's say, BAs and STEM subjects. | ||
| A lot of them enter PhD programs. | ||
| Let me give a very simple example from the Harvard Math Department from years ago. | ||
| I think Harvard had this weird thing where it would very often allow one woman in a year to the PhD program in mathematics. | ||
| And that person usually felt isolated and would often kind of leave the program. | ||
| And then one year, a female who was admitted deferred. | ||
| So that meant that there were two women starting the next year and they formed a support network and they both got through and then other women came in after them. | ||
| So it's like, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| We just learned something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you let women in in pairs, maybe they're going to do better. | ||
| And then maybe three will do better or four will do better. | ||
| Okay, I'm totally up for that kind of a remediation up until we can build up enough female experience so that women have role models. | ||
| It's really helpful to be able to look at a senior female researcher and go to her and say, how did you do it? | ||
| You got married, you had kids, you had a very successful career. | ||
| How did you come back? | ||
| One of the things I found, I used to be interested in this problem and I found that a lot of the Women in the 1950s were very successful in STEM subjects, had a lot of money, or their husbands had stable jobs that allowed them to use nannies and housekeeping in order to free themselves from drudgery. | ||
| Well, that was an unadvertised feature of the system because that's not available to everyone. | ||
| It's a feature where financial privilege actually enabled somebody to stay in science. | ||
| So, you know, the issue isn't a question of inclusion or exclusion of groups. | ||
| It's a question of, how are you so sure that everything is structural oppression? | ||
| That's a really weird thing. | ||
| And if you can launch that objection cheaply, if you can just say, I can take any group and say, why does this group have no one in a wheelchair? | ||
| Now I've got to spend 30 minutes explaining that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't want to do it. | ||
| It's not a good enough objection. | ||
| Like, if we're going to make progress, let's actually make progress that matters rather than making ourselves feel good. | ||
| How social justice movement has reached such hysterical levels over the last decade? | ||
| Well, a couple things. | ||
| One, I think that certain positions became – like the failing business of traditional media meant that you couldn't actually employ people at the same level that you could employ them before. | ||
| So a lot of people who – Didn't have huge opportunity costs entered journalism. | ||
| What does that mean by huge opportunity costs? | ||
| Well, let's imagine for example that you're very ideological and somebody offers you a $50,000 a year job which allows you to be ideological or you could take $150,000 a year job and ideology isn't a large part of the offer. | ||
| Only the ideological people are going to give up $100,000 a year for the privilege of activism. | ||
| So in part, when you have a failing business model, you start – as a system of selective pressures, it's going to start selecting for very different people. | ||
| So that's one of the things that's going on is that you have very economically frustrated people because the silent generation started a problem. | ||
| The baby boomers amplified the hell out of it. | ||
| And Gen X is still waiting to take its place in society, and the millennials just don't even see a path through standard careers. | ||
| Nobody's putting a glass of scotch in their hand and a cigar in their mouth and saying, come with me, kid. | ||
| Let me show you how it's done. | ||
| Well, isn't it also... | ||
| Partly because the discussion is out there and the discussion is a very attractive one. | ||
| The discussion of one of the reasons why you haven't gotten by in this world is because of inequality and because of some sort of systemic racism or systemic sexism or systemic homophobia or transphobia. | ||
| And it becomes, when you give people an option to find an excuse, they gravitate towards that excuse. | ||
| You create safe spaces and you coddle and you make, I mean, all these pieces are in place. | ||
| There's many, many moving parts, right? | ||
| And I think all these little pieces are in place where we also have these massive echo chambers because of social media. | ||
| We have these people that, you know, they find ideologically similar human beings and they bounce off of each other. | ||
| But these are all real problems. | ||
| Like, I have an intersex friend who I haven't seen. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Somebody who's indeterminate between male and female physiologically. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| Let's imagine that they have some karyotype XY profile and that the developmental process did not produce unambiguous genitalia. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Is that a hermaphrodite? | ||
| I don't want to just intersect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| This is a person I think is pretty terrific. | ||
| And I look at all the forms that say male, female. | ||
| And I just, you know, my heart sinks. | ||
| Like we're not even in trans here. | ||
| We're talking about somebody whose biological card that they were dealt. | ||
| Could have been you, could have been me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And through no choices at all, this person is being shoehorned into a paradigm that Which puts them in an increased risk of suicide. | ||
| And it breaks my heart, and we should change it. | ||
| We should break the male-female dichotomy. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Now, I have a different feeling about trans, but if we solve the issue of intersex, which is not pressuring, just accepting that some tiny percentage of the population, which is not vanishingly small, just not large, is neither unambiguously male and female in terms of genotype-phenotype concordance. | ||
| We will do most of the work necessary to take care of our trans folks who are suffering, too. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, trans is a much more rich world because there are a million different issues taking place in trans. | ||
| And they're all conflated. | ||
| You know, part of it because of developmental biology, part of it because gender really, in some sense, is socially constructed in a way that like when people say mathematics is socially constructed, I have to reject it. | ||
| You know, and I give this example of like kilts and lunges from Scotland and India are skirts. | ||
| But they're not female in those places. | ||
| So you have to learn about male and female relative to the codification in your society. | ||
| And the issues of what are our obligations to recognize, hey, this is really a female mind in a male body versus this is a regular mind in a regular body but needs instruction. | ||
| All of these things are conflated. | ||
| And I was really hoping that if we used intersex as the test case, To break the binary because the binary is an oppression. | ||
| There's no question in my mind about it. | ||
| Well, how is it an oppression? | ||
| Because let's imagine that I – let's say I have persistent Mullerian duct syndrome. | ||
| So I'm phenotypically on the outside male and I go to my doctor and he says, hey, you've got a uterus. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You have a uterus. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's an exotic situation. | ||
| Maybe I want to identify male, you know, because the outside equipment looks male. | ||
| It's a weird situation. | ||
| Maybe the idea is that… We're talking about extremely rare circumstances. | ||
| So does that really define it as being oppressive? | ||
| Like what is… For a friend of mine who is in neither situation, yeah, it's oppressive. | ||
| Some people are born paralyzed, right? | ||
| Some people are born with serious neurological diseases that don't allow them to be motile. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Is it oppressive if people are just recognized, like most people, recognized as being able to walk and move around? | ||
| What if there was no category called disabled, right? | ||
| Or in a wheelchair. | ||
| Okay, no category. | ||
| All right, yeah. | ||
| So you've got somebody who's got a spinal cord injury, and you have people saying, all right, everybody, walk this way. | ||
| What do you mean you can't walk? | ||
| Get up! | ||
| Why are you lazy? | ||
| That's what it sounds like to me. | ||
| It's one thing to recognize that not everybody is in the standard category, but it's another thing to hard code. | ||
| Hard code where? | ||
| You're talking about job applications? | ||
| Forms, yeah. | ||
| The federal government gives me a form. | ||
| There's a binary. | ||
| It says male or female. | ||
| Let's imagine it doesn't say other or prefer not to say. | ||
| Okay, so we're just talking about filling out forms, which is how often does that take place in your life? | ||
| Often enough that it represents oppression? | ||
| Where you have to be defined as male or female? | ||
| Emotionally? | ||
| Emotionally. | ||
| I think this is oppression. | ||
| Oppression? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But isn't it done under the interests of defining people simply? | ||
| Because for the most part, you're dealing with males and females. | ||
| And for the most part, they're just trying to figure out what's what for their statistics. | ||
| Yeah, but you know, again, this is fun. | ||
| I'm glad you're asking me these questions because usually I have to be on the other side of this issue. | ||
| And this is really where my heart is, which is I care about these people. | ||
| And I know that in every single conservative society in the world, there are accommodations made for the failure of simple binaries to accommodate the population. | ||
| There's no society that's so conservative that they've sorted the world into male and female. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| You know, the famous example in Iran of the Ayatollah making a fatwa that said it's fine to have gender reassignment. | ||
| We have to recognize that every single population produces gender sexual ambiguity. | ||
| But isn't that also to get around the idea of homosexuality being a grievous crime? | ||
| Because I believe in Iran it's illegal to have homosexual activity, but you can have gender reassignment. | ||
| So if you're a gay man, you can choose to become a female. | ||
| It's true, but there's also a thriving gay scene in Tehran. | ||
| Do they have to recognize this female? | ||
| There was a situation in India where I have more experience where you would say, oh, those two people are confirmed bachelors. | ||
| You know, that they're so dedicated to their professions that there's no room for family and they live together. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, like, traditional societies have – everybody accommodates homosexuality and failures of simple gender binaries. | ||
| And, you know, I always bring up the example of Turkish, where Turkish doesn't hard-code the third-person singular pronoun as male or female. | ||
| It just has one pronoun for both. | ||
| So, Thank you for giving me the opportunity to show where my heart actually has been this entire time, which is... | ||
| I believe this is oppressive. | ||
| And I don't think that it oppresses that many people. | ||
| But I believe that it's an important oppression that we have to realize that we hard-coded. | ||
| And that's what generated a lot of the feelings. | ||
| Before we get to trans, you can simply say from the position of intersex that the world is a richer place than male and female. | ||
| And people say, oh, it's XX versus XY. It's like, no, it isn't. | ||
| It just isn't. | ||
| It for the most part is. | ||
| For the most part it is. | ||
| So in terms of – it has been an edge case to deal with. | ||
| But that edge case is important to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because the edge case are – they are human beings that are – Not only that. | ||
| I actually – look, I like people who are outside of the norms. | ||
| I think that probably a larger percentage of those people are going to be more interesting people because they're forged in the fire. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's not just a case that, you know, do you want to chase a couple of edge cases? | ||
| Everybody with a really different experience is more important to me than everyone with a standard experience. | ||
| I think we have to take care of the standard case, but I'm absolutely interested in outliers and edge cases. | ||
| To get back to the line of thought. | ||
| Well, that's an important distinction. | ||
| And what you're saying is very important because you are, in one way, someone could pigeonhole you from your earlier statement that you're not interested in a lot of these different studies, grievance studies, a lot of these gender studies. | ||
| Because they're sending it... | ||
| If they interfere with hard science, which you are getting, particularly with evolutionary biology, you're getting a lot of interference. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And you're not interested in that. | ||
| But that does not mean that you're an insensitive person that's uninterested in human beings. | ||
| You're just not interested in the disruption of the acquiring of data and the analysis of said data. | ||
| I don't think that activism Makes for good advancement. | ||
| Well, I think there's also a problem with who's the activist, and what age you're talking about, and how idealistic these people are, and going back to biology, where's their mind at? | ||
| How formed is their mind? | ||
| How narrow is their view of what the world is or should be, and their impact, what's significant about their impact? | ||
| But my disagreement, to give you an idea of where my energy comes from, Let's imagine that you actually believe that males and females are equally intelligent, okay? | ||
| Just a Fisherian equivalence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can I say LOL? Then what would you be? | |
| You'd be fascinated as to why you don't have males and females in an intellectually – in equal numbers in a demanding occupation. | ||
| So you'd start saying, huh, if I already assume that males and females are equally intelligent, I care about different categories. | ||
| How much of this is about fertility? | ||
| How much of this is about kin work? | ||
| How much of this is about structural oppression? | ||
| How much of this is about path dependence? | ||
| You do some very careful thing in order to understand your problem. | ||
| And only when you finally understood your problem Would you say, okay, now I have an idea of how to remediate it. | ||
| We need a financial product that transfers money from late life to early life because the huge burden that knocks women out of the STEM pipeline might be that they have to take care of elderly parents or young kids. | ||
| Bingo! | ||
| Now you're working in a totally different idiom because you've actually come up with a different idea. | ||
| Or for example, if you hard code, like Sean Carroll, I think, just had a podcast in which he said something to the effect of, well, the IDW is kind of too interested in race and IQ. | ||
| I have never been interested in race and IQ. | ||
| The only time I became interested in race and IQ was when I started hearing there is absolutely no variation between groups in any kind of cognitive endowment. | ||
| Well, certainly there is in terms of height, the ability to radiate heat, melanin content of the skin, the ability to absorb sunlight. | ||
| It doesn't pass the smell test that you could be able to say that a priori. | ||
| It's not a scientific type statement. | ||
| It's something you'd have to investigate. | ||
| So, in that situation, Am I interested in some finding that says that one group is smarter and other groups are not as smart? | ||
| Do I believe that IQ equals smartness? | ||
| No, I don't believe IQ equals smartness. | ||
| Do I believe that there's no cultural bias? | ||
| I think there is cultural bias. | ||
| I'm definitely on record of saying there are ways in which groups that are said to fare less well in terms of IQ demonstrate actual intellectual dominance. | ||
| This is some rich, weird area I've never cared about before. | ||
| And the only reason that it becomes interesting to me is that suddenly we're making these incredible proclamations with certainty. | ||
| Like, you know, you can't say this word, or this is absolutely true. | ||
| And, like, life doesn't work like that. | ||
| There's no word in the English language. | ||
| George Carlin made this point all the time. | ||
| There are no bad words. | ||
| There's bad intent. | ||
| There are bad people. | ||
| Well, isn't it also the issue being a part of a group? | ||
| Say more. | ||
| The IDW is too interested in race and IQ. I'm not. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| Who is? | ||
| I mean, I'm really not. | ||
| I don't discuss that at all. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But who is interested? | ||
| Sam Harris has discussed it before, but he discussed it with someone who was studying it. | ||
| I don't think Sam cared. | ||
| I think that Sam felt that Charles Murray had been railroaded by him, by he, Sam Harris. | ||
| And then as Sam came to understand what it is like to have a mob turn on you, Sam said, maybe I'm wrong about Charles Murray. | ||
| And then Ezra Klein made this really interesting point in a really unfair way against Sam, which was basically like, hey, you don't know what Charles Murray is. | ||
| He's a hybrid. | ||
| He's not just a social scientist. | ||
| He's also got an agenda. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that accurate? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I've never read Murray's work. | ||
| I don't know enough to say either. | ||
| Deeply polarizing. | ||
| The bell curve, the whole idea about being able to recognize the differences in race and IQ. It's a very contentious subject. | ||
| First of all, I mean, look, I have to admit that I don't score that well on certain tests. | ||
| So I have a built-in total skepticism. | ||
| Of IQ tests, SAT tests, ACT tests, any kind of test. | ||
| Because it's an unnatural examination. | ||
| It's not intelligence. | ||
| It just isn't. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's a proxy. | ||
| Like, there are people who think, oh, it's a really good proxy. | ||
| I've never met someone who has a really high IQ, though, that I deem to be intellectually inferior. | ||
| Yeah, but I've met people who don't have very high IQs who just blow me away. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Absolutely, there's a type of intelligence that certain people possess, particularly creative intelligence. | ||
| There's certain people that might not score well on SAT tests, but they're capable of producing amazing stuff, whether it's literature, comedy, whatever it is, movies. | ||
| They can make things. | ||
| They can do things. | ||
| They have a genius in their ability. | ||
| And that requires some intelligence. | ||
| It requires some immeasurable – something that you can't put on a scale. | ||
| Well, this is what I said to Jordan Peterson. | ||
| I said, I don't think I have an IQ. Because the conceit – we have to remember that a priori we would always have guessed that intelligence was many different things. | ||
| It was a composite of like lots of different types of intelligence. | ||
| The conceit around IQ is you'd think that was true, but guess again. | ||
| There's essentially one kind of intelligence. | ||
| There's one scale. | ||
| It's a surprise. | ||
| Oh, that's really surprising. | ||
| Tell me something. | ||
| Of the various forms of intelligence, is one of the things that you call intelligence processing? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, processing is very important. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't score well on processing. | ||
| In fact, I don't think anyone in my family has ever scored well on processing. | ||
| What do you mean by processing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| some kind of mechanical process of how quickly and flawlessly you can encode information, play with it, and get it out. | ||
| You know, like if you're a dyslexic, let's take spelling. | ||
| Lots of people on Twitter say, ha-ha, you misspelled here. | ||
| In fact, it's H-E-A-R in the case that you meant. | ||
| It really just shows me something about your intelligence that you can't keep track of spelling. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's your level of thought. | ||
| Do you know how many brilliant people can't spell, can't write? | ||
| Well, also, you're not even thinking. | ||
| You're just trying to get the word out, and you misstep. | ||
| Yeah, but like my mind, you know, at some point I got sent home, I think, because I was asked to draw a chicken in school, and I put two wings and four feet on it. | ||
| I'm so non-observant. | ||
| My handwriting... | ||
| You got sent home? | ||
| Yeah, something like this. | ||
| They sent you home? | ||
| I was like aberrant or, you know, I was making fun of the teacher. | ||
| Because it was four-legged chicken? | ||
| Well, you know, famously, Mrs. Bacchiero in first grade sent me out of the class because I said that a spider wasn't an insect because it had eight legs. | ||
| She sent you out of the class? | ||
| Yeah, because I was... | ||
| Well, you're correct. | ||
| In that case, I was. | ||
| In the case of a chicken, I wasn't. | ||
| Well, maybe you saw some weird fucking Chernobyl chicken somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Chernobyl chicken Kiev. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That's comedy gold. | ||
| My point being that if you don't have a high confidence in net normal metrics, the race and IQ discussion doesn't land. | ||
| So, to get back to Charles Murray. | ||
| So, Charles Murray, it is... | ||
| It's hard to say. | ||
| He wrote The Bell Curve, was either dismissed as being racist or applauded by people who you would call white nationalists, who trot out his ideas as proof, as measurable proof that certain races are superior. | ||
| And, you know, we could discuss many online people who trot those out all the time, and they use it to form these weird groups of people that love to hear that. | ||
| And that smacks of racism. | ||
| Well, this is the issue, which is you have a situation in which... | ||
| He appeared to have a political orientation, which is that he didn't want money spent in certain ways and he wanted it spent in others. | ||
| There was a political interpretation of why he wanted that, which was maybe he's a closet racist. | ||
| Then there was facts that will tend to empower people who are actually racist. | ||
| Alright, but let me pause you there. | ||
| But then there's the actual data. | ||
| Now, in examining the actual data, if you just look at the actual data, Is it racist to look at the real numbers? | ||
| Like if you say Nigerians in particular, who are incredibly industrious and some of the more successful immigrant groups that come over to America, also happen to be black. | ||
| If you wanted to look at Nigerians in terms of like, if you wanted to, if all... | ||
| If you wanted to look at them particularly as a group, it would be very difficult to be racist. | ||
| You'd have to say, well, these are superior. | ||
| A lot of superior intellects come from Nigeria. | ||
| They also trot out the Asian one. | ||
| This is one of the weird things that people like to show that they're not racist. | ||
| Like, look, it shows Asians are of a superior IQ. I puzzle on that one. | ||
| That one's puzzling to me. | ||
| Say more. | ||
| Because I think with certain people, With certain males. | ||
| Let's just go with males. | ||
| They look at African Americans and they see superiority in certain ways. | ||
| They see superiority athletically, artistically, musically. | ||
| If you look at the contributions of African Americans culturally across the board in terms of the Jimi Hendrix, the Miles Davis... | ||
| Speed of thought and creativity. | ||
| Like analytic... | ||
| Well, not just that. | ||
| Also, athletically. | ||
| Like, the fucking outliers are just so many. | ||
| There's so many Michael Jordans, Mike Tysons, Sugar Ray Leonards. | ||
| There's so many African American outliers who are just extraordinary in terms of their accomplishments. | ||
| But not that many Asian Americans in that regard. | ||
| So, it's almost like they'll concede. | ||
| Like, they're not doing the things that make me jealous. | ||
| Do you see what I'm saying? | ||
| They're not creating this insane music, although there are a few, right? | ||
| But overall, they're not creating these insane athletic accomplishments that these white Americans can't keep up with. | ||
| So we'll say, but look, they're superior intellectually, so I can't be racist. | ||
| I'm pointing out these Asians who I'm not jealous of because they don't do the things that I wish that I could do. | ||
| But then when it comes to the African Americans, They're pointing out all the things that the African Americans can do that they can't do, but they're saying, oh, but they're intellectually inferior. | ||
| Well, this is proven. | ||
| I'm not racist. | ||
| I don't want this to be true, but it seems to be true. | ||
| I see. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| It's like a way of – it's a way of suppressing accomplishment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| While, like, almost mitigating the impact of the jealousy that they feel. | ||
| So if you think about, for example – Does that make sense? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Right. | ||
| First of all, I just, I hate this topic. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| It's a weird topic. | ||
| It's a weird topic. | ||
| It feels greasy, even touching it. | ||
| Well, but now we have to, right? | ||
| Like this, I feel like... | ||
| My wrong view of it is if you'd never brought this thing up, we would never have had to deal with it. | ||
| I no longer believe that's true because we have so much inadvertent data. | ||
| I don't want the data on chess. | ||
| We have an idea of how many grandmasters there are and which groups like male, female, Asian, black, various portions of Europe. | ||
| I don't know what that data means. | ||
| But I can't stop the data because it's going to be generated even if nobody comes up with a standardized test because it's a game and it's scored and it has something to do with intellectual abilities. | ||
| On the other hand, I mean, I'm a competitive guy. | ||
| You do comedy. | ||
| I do some amount of music. | ||
| I can guarantee you that both of us have had our ass kicked at some point by African Americans who excel in both of these areas. | ||
| And I don't mean... | ||
| You know, all God's children got rhythm. | ||
| I mean, getting out thunk in a competitive situation. | ||
| You know, looking over somebody's shoulder on the keyboard and they're thinking so quickly in so many dimensions, I can't even imagine what the hell is going on. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, therefore, I never had a lot of fear about it because, you know, I'm in close proximity with somebody who's just kicking my ass. | ||
| And... | ||
| Therefore, I thought I could leave these topics alone. | ||
| I would never have to deal with it. | ||
| The way in which that they come up in a way that is really unpleasant is this new thing, which is that all imbalances are all structural oppression, right? | ||
| And which doesn't allow for trade-offs between groups like Finns. | ||
| Finns are good at some things. | ||
| They're not good at others. | ||
| Nobody believes in like anti-Finish prejudice. | ||
| So we don't think about it, right? | ||
| It's just not a big issue for us. | ||
| Finnish humor. | ||
| How many Finnish comedians are there? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| How many do you run into at the comedy store? | ||
| That's a bad example because you're dealing with America in American comedy and you're also dealing with the highest level of the game. | ||
| The comedy store is essentially like the It's like the Harvard research labs of stand-up comedy. | ||
| Yeah, but nobody's worried about anti-Finnish behavior. | ||
| We're worried that we're prejudiced against certain groups. | ||
| We're worried that we're prejudiced against Jews. | ||
| We're worried that we're prejudiced against Mexicans, against blacks. | ||
| We have a pretty clean idea of what bigotry we really still need to worry about. | ||
| And we feel guilty about it. | ||
| And that's why you say it has this kind of lubricious quality. | ||
| What are you really up to over there? | ||
| Why are you looking at that data set? | ||
| And what my comment is, is I don't know how to stop this thing. | ||
| I'm not excited about it. | ||
| I'm not interested in it. | ||
| I definitely think that we have to actually think about the social implications of all these things. | ||
| But if your idea is that we're going to stop this at the level of data and analysis, I can't afford that. | ||
| I just can't afford that. | ||
| We need to have somebody who's able, like for example, microcephaly. | ||
| You've got people with smaller heads than the rest of us, maybe because of the Zika virus. | ||
| Well, is it unethical to study what the cognitive impairment due to microcephaly is? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what to do, but I know that I want to have a very thoughtful conversation. | ||
| Well, how can it be? | ||
| How can it be unethical to study the cognitive impairment of someone who's affected by a disease and that could possibly help fund research, help fund preventative measures? | ||
| What if there's a correlation with smaller heads and cognitive impairment? | ||
| Let's take Mosaic Down Syndrome. | ||
| Mosaic Down Syndrome doesn't have the same profile as regular Down Syndrome. | ||
| You get much higher functioning people. | ||
| I mean, ultimately, we're all souls, and we have to figure out dignity, and we have to figure out some system by which we can live with this increased level of knowledge. | ||
| But does examining impairment, does that really mean that it's a prejudice? | ||
| Like, what about examining impairment from people who've been injured? | ||
| Should we avoid doing that because we don't want to be ableist? | ||
| Do you see what I'm saying? | ||
| Not quite. | ||
| Because we're talking about reality, right? | ||
| We're talking about issues. | ||
| If you're examining someone who contracted the Zika virus and it led to them developing a smaller head, which is one of the horrible side effects of that, is examining that in some way some sort of prejudice? | ||
| Should we avoid examining their cognitive impairment? | ||
| Well, if we avoid examining it, we might do some damage. | ||
| If we examine it and publish the findings, we might do damage. | ||
| So you might say you might do damage to the people that are infected or afflicted? | ||
| Look, if we don't begin with an idea that ultimately the issue is compassion for ourselves and others and that a lot of our genetics and our history predisposes us to bad behavior now that we're living with each other. | ||
| Like, we have to start, I mean, as hippy-dippy as this sounds, we have to start from a place of love and decency. | ||
| I certainly agree, but I don't think that we should avoid reality. | ||
| Well, this is the thing, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So now I have this other thing, which is reality is compassionate in and of itself. | ||
| Remember when HIV was an equal opportunity disease and it just started in the gay community and it's going to jump the fire road and it's going to be as much a heterosexual problem as it was a homosexual problem? | ||
| That turned out not to be true. | ||
| It was an ideological statement that didn't look at the differences between different kinds of epithelium and different sexual practices between gays and straights. | ||
| It was an activist position that started to compete With a epidemiological position or a biological position. | ||
| And so historically what we did is we had private expert communication. | ||
| And it's not always clear that you can trust your experts. | ||
| It's not always clear that you should start with the data. | ||
| What if the data says terrible things? | ||
| Like maybe the data on people with microcephaly says something and you have got a person who's going to be judged by the size of their head which is visibly off from the rest of their body. | ||
| We haven't taken up the challenge of our time, which is, okay, we've got a lot more information than we wanted, and we have a lot more ability to analyze it, and we know something about ourselves. | ||
| We know that we have got bigotry as part of our makeup, and we know that we're not really good at certain ways of integrating information and not becoming triumphalist and jerkish about it and taking victory lapses if it's a competition. | ||
| Like, my group's better than your group. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, that's where we're stuck. | ||
| Now, I want to be struggling with other people who are saying, look, I don't know what the answers are. | ||
| I don't think, as I brought up before, I don't think East Africans are cheating on the Boston Marathon because they've come to dominate it. | ||
| Just because suddenly you had a diverse group of people replaced by a very tiny group from Ethiopia and Kenya. | ||
| We are behaving as you would expect when compassionate people who recognize that they have been bigoted and structurally oppressive encounter data that they can't handle, which the science is giving us more data than we ever wanted on these things. | ||
| And we're not answering the challenge of our time. | ||
| And that's what my issue with social justice is. | ||
| It's not about I don't want a better planet or a more inclusive planet. | ||
| It's like, stop crowding out the really difficult, interesting, open-hearted, and hard-headed conversation with this dime-store nonsense about simple answers and simple truths, because those aren't true. | ||
| And it's not going to work in the long term. | ||
| I mean, I guess maybe the idea is we're competing with social justice for the rights to try to come up with a better, more equitable future. | ||
| And the complaint about it isn't you guys are trying to come up with a better, more equitable future. | ||
| It's what if you're going to make the same mistake when we said, well, the heterosexuals are as much at risk as the homosexuals. | ||
| Well, that wasn't true. | ||
| We needed to devote resources to our homosexual community. | ||
| And we did need to get the heterosexual community interested and we had a problem and we needed to think about, you know, very thoughtfully, we've got an epidemic that's killing people. | ||
| I think when we're talking about this, I think everything you're saying resonates and everything you're saying makes sense. | ||
| And I think when we're talking about compassionate human beings looking out for each other and that this should be something that we all This is like one of our primary concerns whenever we address any issue. | ||
| I think our problem in this country, there's many problems, but one of our problems is the loudest voices on the fringes. | ||
| And this is one of the things that I want to discuss with you is what's going on in Portland. | ||
| And I think what's going on in Portland is the loudest voices on the fringes that... | ||
| The people on the right and on the far right are recognizing as emblematic of the left. | ||
| They think it defines the left. | ||
| And I don't think it does. | ||
| And I think it's a symptom of... | ||
| It's a symptom of, first of all, terrible government, of someone who's allowing this to flourish inside the mayor of Portland, who seems to be supporting this in some sort of a weird way. | ||
| Weird way. | ||
| And ideologically believes that Antifa, just because of a name, stands for anti-fascist. | ||
| If you had no name, what you would have is a bunch of hood-wearing, mask-wearing, violent thugs who are beating people who disagree with them. | ||
| Because that's what we saw with that. | ||
| How do you say his name? | ||
| Go? | ||
| I think it's Andy No. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's N-G-O, right? | ||
| I treat the G as silent until somebody corrects me. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| What you saw from that video, that anyone could support that. | ||
| With a person who's just talking. | ||
| What I've seen of him, what they've tried to describe, that he supports neo-Nazis, that he supports the Proud Boys, I've seen none of this. | ||
| I've seen no evidence of this, but I've seen the narrative trotted out over and over again as a justification for violence against him. | ||
| When the left supports bullying in the worst possible form, ganging up on someone, punching them, hitting them with sticks, crowbars, all this crazy shit, thinking that it's okay to throw milkshakes at people, thinking that this is fine, this is nothing. | ||
| I think this is a horrible precedent to set, and it's a terrible move. | ||
| If you're playing a game, it's a terrible first move. | ||
| Because things only escalate. | ||
| They don't de-escalate. | ||
| No one says, wow, you beat the shit out of Andy, no. | ||
| So this is a mystery. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, what the hell is going on right now? | ||
| Well, you're allowing people to wear masks and carry backpacks with weapons. | ||
| And there's a natural human inclination when someone gets hit to jump in and hit them, too. | ||
| You see it all the time. | ||
| Watch WorldStar. | ||
| Go to worldstarhiphop.com and watch someone gets hit, a bunch of people just jump in and hit them. | ||
| It happens at truck stops and fucking high schools. | ||
| It happens... | ||
| Brain damage, people die. | ||
| People punch each other all the time. | ||
| Yeah, permanent injury. | ||
| When you're seeing in Portland, there was one of them where an old guy got hit in the head with a fucking crowbar by some masked kid because the old guy apparently disagreed or they all disagree on things. | ||
| My guess is that the old guy is not exactly as portrayed. | ||
| I believe that the old guy may have been there with a telescoping baton. | ||
| Oh, so he was hitting people. | ||
| I think this is so worthwhile, but let's do it right, because I think this is so mysterious. | ||
| What the hell are people doing supporting Andy Ngo being beaten up on video? | ||
| So let's stay with him, because that's the best, clearest example of someone who's a tiny little gay man. | ||
| He's tiny. | ||
| I mean, he represents so many different maligned populations, right? | ||
| He's pretty intersectional. | ||
| Yes, he's Asian. | ||
| He's an immigrant. | ||
| He's an immigrant. | ||
| He's gay. | ||
| Is he a Republican? | ||
| I thought he was left of center, but I was told that he was a conservative journalist. | ||
| Well, I've been told I'm a fucking alt-right guy, so it's very confusing. | ||
| He's also diminutive in physical form. | ||
| He's not threatening physically, right? | ||
| And they've chosen this guy as an example, and One of the more disturbing things were how many people saw the video and were justifying it. | ||
| Saying things like, get another hobby. | ||
| The anti-fascists will not stand for your bigotry and your hate. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| You think it's okay to punch this guy? | ||
| The fact that you guys all piled on and punched him and threw milkshakes at him? | ||
| This is so subtle. | ||
| I've been thinking a lot about it. | ||
| I have a model. | ||
| I'm happy to hear yours because there is a mystery. | ||
| Can we both agree at the beginning? | ||
| That you would imagine that that video would have shocked people and to find so many people sort of excusing it is really shocking. | ||
| And given that he's also clearly intersectional, you wouldn't predict this from first principles. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, you wouldn't. | ||
| If you looked at it on paper, you definitely wouldn't, especially if you allowed him to self-identify as left to center. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So here's how I think the model goes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Unless you want to give yours first. | ||
| No, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| The first thing that we have to understand is that there's a division. | ||
| I want to lay this out super carefully. | ||
| The first division is between the, what you're calling the loudest voices, and I'm going to call the most courageous, well, I don't want to call it courageous, the most willing to accept loss. | ||
| The voices most willing to accept loss. | ||
| Most of the left Does not want to be dragged to the extreme left. | ||
| So you hear this thing about why are you focusing on a fringe? | ||
| And the answer is because the fringe is running the show, in my opinion. | ||
| What do you mean by willing to accept loss? | ||
| If you go into an Antifa versus Proud Boys melee, You're willing... | ||
| You accept that you may get clocked with a bike lock. | ||
| I don't think that's correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or a baton. | |
| I don't think that's correct. | ||
| I think you're dealing with people that have no concept of real violence, no experience of real violence. | ||
| They're LARPing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's fucking cosplay. | ||
| It's cosplay LARPing. | ||
| Have you seen the image of the guy who's the suspect? | ||
| Looks like he's never worked out a day in his fucking life. | ||
| Looks like he's never been outside. | ||
| And I think these people are playing a fucking game. | ||
| We've agreed on this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But you are willing. | ||
| So you think you're going to get into a Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner kind of a thing where both of them always survive to the next cartoon. | ||
| They have no idea what they're doing. | ||
| Have you ever seen a fight between people that have no idea how to fight? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| I've been one of those. | ||
| Okay, that stuns me. | ||
| As a martial arts expert, it stuns me that people are willing to participate in that. | ||
| It's like me not knowing how to get in a motorcycle and getting in a race. | ||
| I don't know how anyone's willing to do that. | ||
| But they're willing to do that. | ||
| And they're willing to do that because they're delusional. | ||
| They're delusional. | ||
| And they're supported in their delusional perspective by the giant numbers of them. | ||
| They all get together. | ||
| And then they wear masks, which further emphasizes this illusion that they're a part of the game. | ||
| But Joe, look. | ||
| Assume that you are not even in a physical situation. | ||
| You're willing to be very loud on social media about very simplistic perspectives. | ||
| And you're willing to become a pariah at some level. | ||
| Are you, though? | ||
| I think mostly you're supported. | ||
| There's far more support. | ||
| I'm not necessarily – you are going to trigger so many times on this explanation that I probably just need a little place in the table to start building this up, and then you can tear it the hell down. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The first belief that I have is that the fringes are much more running the show than the people who claim that this is a small number of people believe. | ||
| That the fringes are scary. | ||
| Fringes are willing to go places the rest of us aren't. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| On both sides. | ||
| Left and right. | ||
| Left and right. | ||
| So I spend a lot of time focused on the fringes because the fringes have become terrifying and the middle has become cowardly. | ||
| And the whole principle about the whole IDW thing was about creating a non-cowardly That's part of my | ||
| irritation when people come after it. | ||
| So, there is a cowardly center and a very terrifying fringe, and the fringe is going around the whole thing, right, left and right. | ||
| The next thing is that people are secretly weirdly sympathetic with the violent fringe to their extreme, rather than making common cause across the center. | ||
| So, for example, You imagine that you run a laundromat and you're being visited by a member of organized crime every week. | ||
| And he comes into your laundromat and he kind of plays with your stuff. | ||
| And he says, oh, it'd be a shame if anything happened to your business. | ||
| And he shakes you down. | ||
| Starts saying, oh, you know, I noticed that you have a daughter. | ||
| I would love to date her. | ||
| Perhaps we'll go out sometime. | ||
| You hate this guy. | ||
| Then some sort of violent vigilante element that's operating extrajudicially after you've gone to the police over and over again breaks this guy's kneecaps. | ||
| You're weirdly sympathetic with the vigilante because you're being terrified by a group that is not being taken care of. | ||
| I think that this is in part why some elements of the left that should be more responsible, that have institutional positions, that have platforms that they can broadcast, are weirdly sympathetic to Antifa. | ||
| And why country club Republicans are weirdly sympathetic to some of these far-right groups is that they view them as this is the dangerous group that's kind of taking care of the problem that I can't stand up to. | ||
| So you've got this bizarre, cowardly sympathy from the center who won't actually stand up and say, I have more in common with a country club Republican. | ||
| Like in my case, I view myself as a progressive or at least a liberal. | ||
| I have more in common with a country club Republican than somebody who's got a bike lock who's looking for trouble in a street demonstration trying to smash up a Starbucks, right? | ||
| I don't want the help from my left. | ||
| Now, the group that wants to play this out using these sort of proxy groups to handle the problems is saying, look, we're going to sound an air horn before one of these things so that all reasonable people can get the hell out of the way. | ||
| And if you don't respond, then you're collateral damage and that's on you. | ||
| That's how they see this. | ||
| I think that's very accurate. | ||
| So in other words, I think Andy Ngo is the guy who doesn't listen to the air horn. | ||
| Brett Weinstein doesn't listen to the air horn. | ||
| Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris don't listen to the air horn. | ||
| I think that's very accurate in your description of these fringe people doing the work of the people that are more reasonable but are happy to have these bad people do their work to fight this battle for them because they think that ultimately it's for good. | ||
| Yeah, I need my organized crime group to get rid of your organized crime group. | ||
| And so the idea is that the law and order people are like, I really don't want anybody's organized crime group, and I'm going to actually stand up to the mob, and I'm actually not going to pay you your goddamn protection money, because I'm going to own a laundromat, and this is the United States of America, and fuck off. | ||
| That's the view that I represent. | ||
| Thank you, Antifa, I don't need your help. | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| I actually am much more afraid of the far right. | ||
| And the reason I concentrate my negative energy on the far left is what are you trying to do? | ||
| You're trying to get the genie out of the bottle on the far right? | ||
| That is the danger. | ||
| Yeah, you want to see more tiki torches? | ||
| It's not tiki torches that you need to worry about. | ||
| It's armed people who come and they're not bringing bike locks. | ||
| We're pushing ordinary human beings to the extremes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And the thing that I get is that I believe that the Republican Party – I never get a chance to say this stuff. | ||
| I have never gotten along with the Republican Party. | ||
| I just don't like it. | ||
| I view it as the thing that wants to exclude me from their country clubs. | ||
| I have an older model. | ||
| They're the group that wanted to put in condo developments in Yosemite Valley because they couldn't figure out why we would want to preserve the national parks. | ||
| They were the ones that laughed about clubbing the baby seals. | ||
| Ha ha ha. | ||
| I just always had this attitude, fuck these people. | ||
| This is my emotional cadence. | ||
| And we always had this thing where the Democrats, we had most of the smart people. | ||
| And so in a tiny fraction of time, we have seen this giant evaporation of intelligence, if not Actually, through a lack of courage. | ||
| The people who represent responsible left-wing thinking, who believe in structural oppression but don't believe in the extent claimed, you know, who want to keep making progress, who want to make sure that traditionally marginalized groups are taken care of, that we take our responsibilities but not our guilt as the reason for trying to make a better world. | ||
| I'm not paying reparations for slavery. | ||
| I mean, my family came over here in like, what, the 19-teens or 20s? | ||
| We came from pogroms. | ||
| Is anybody going to be paying Jews for the pogroms? | ||
| Am I going to be getting Ukrainian reparations? | ||
| Let's not be ridiculous. | ||
| Do we want civil war? | ||
| Do we just want to open up, tear off every Band-Aid for the purpose of trying to make everybody as uncomfortable in their skin as possible? | ||
| What we have is a situation in which we don't have courageous people willing to fight for what works. | ||
| We have a tiny number of people who are animated by this. | ||
| The reason I'm animated by this is that I'm trying to keep the pipeline open for science. | ||
| It's really what happened to my brother. | ||
| Before it ever happened to him. | ||
| My brother and I were in this discussion about what are we going to do to make sure that there's always a place to do biology, to do mathematics, to be able to weigh competing claims. | ||
| And when you start politicizing everything and you choose activism over thought and reason and civility and comity, you consign yourself to becoming a less great nation and a You're no longer able to lead. | ||
| You can't build a world on angry activism that's trying to go back to a lily white nation. | ||
| It will never happen. | ||
| And you can't enforce equality of outcome. | ||
| We don't even want that. | ||
| People who work their ass off deserve some of the pleasures of working your ass off. | ||
| And I don't always want to work my ass off. | ||
| And Jackie Chan is the one I always look at. | ||
| That blooper reel at the end of every Jackie Chan film tells me he deserves his money. | ||
| I'm never going to do that to my body. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| I don't want an equality of outcome with Jackie Chan if I make some little film and this guy risks his life for every scene. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| We need to create a world in which people are excited and animated about keeping the pipeline of decent thought, compassionate thought, open-hearted thought, and rigorous and unforgiving thought Both on the table at all times and not adulterating one to serve the other. | ||
| I don't want to see science abused to oppress anybody. | ||
| And I don't want to see somebody's dime-storn concept of utopia infecting our ability to make sense of the world. | ||
| Those are twin directives. | ||
| And this is what I'm excited about. | ||
| We need to get the world excited We need to get the world excited about cross-pollinations of ideas between different groups. | ||
| We need to get the world excited about every group that is sort of marginalized contains neurons that we are not accessing, right? | ||
| And so, you know, for example, Asian females make up about a quarter of the world's population and very few of the world's Nobel Prizes. | ||
| We should be getting greedy about how do we get those Asian female brains into our STEM labs so that we can have the fruits of their discoveries. | ||
| People can't hear this because they've settled on very cheap versions of progress. | ||
| It's time to get back to real progress, not fake progress. | ||
| How do we do that? | ||
| I agree with everything you just said, but how do we do that? | ||
| Honestly, this is my third time on perhaps the biggest podcast in the world. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe that's giving you a little bit too much credit. | ||
| It's not very far off. | ||
| We're doing that. | ||
| We're trying to stand up. | ||
| And if people respond, and you've given me courage to start a podcast. | ||
| I've got to tell you, I did not want to do this. | ||
| I brought my producer Jesse Michaels here. | ||
| I was a pain in the ass to this guy. | ||
| I did not return his phone calls. | ||
| He tried to get me to sign contracts. | ||
| I wouldn't look at them. | ||
| I've started with this turnkey podcast company called Cast Media. | ||
| They put up with me for like eight or nine months where I dragged my heels. | ||
| I don't want to be famous. | ||
| I don't want to be well known. | ||
| Too late. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, I'm sort of well known. | ||
| Well, it's time. | ||
| Look, so this is the crazy thing. | ||
| You want to get really nuts? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's time to leave. | ||
| Time to leave what? | ||
| This planet. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Listen, we can leave this planet. | ||
| I got something right here. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Take you to another planet right now. | ||
| He's joking, federal agents. | ||
| Let me give you my argument. | ||
| Where are we going? | ||
| Well, we don't know that we can leave this planet. | ||
| I love this planet. | ||
| I love this planet. | ||
| I have a good time here. | ||
| This is my favorite planet. | ||
| Mine, too. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But here's the real reasoning. | ||
| We started a clock. | ||
| Around 1953, which is when we had the explosion at Bikini, the first hydrogen bomb, and when we figured out the double helix. | ||
| And I call this the twin nuclei problem, and it began in 1953. In 1953, we started a clock. | ||
| It was also the height of the McCarthy era. | ||
| We do not have the wisdom to be able to fuse nuclei. | ||
| We don't have the wisdom to be able to investigate the cell. | ||
| It's too much power. | ||
| So our wisdom may have increased slightly. | ||
| Maybe it didn't. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But our power is now godlike. | ||
| So our biological intelligence, what our minds are capable of, has not – it's been surpassed by our intellectual achievements in terms of our technological innovation. | ||
| These things, which while complicated – Succumb to our intellects, right? | ||
| They're much simpler than we ever imagined. | ||
| To be able to create something that normally happens in the sun on an island in the Pacific, or to be able to rewrite a cell the way Craig Venter did, you know, synthetic biology. | ||
| We are now gods but for the wisdom. | ||
| That's a great quote. | ||
| We are now gods but for the wisdom. | ||
| Should be a meme. | ||
| Picture you. | ||
| Picture you. | ||
| We are now gods before the wisdom. | ||
| That's going to be up there. | ||
| Someone's doing that right now. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Focus. | ||
| Focus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So that started this clock. | ||
| And the world's most serious human beings should be working on the twin nuclei problem. | ||
| What do we do with new godlike powers given our history of conflict, our history of envy, our history of madness? | ||
| Because we succumb regularly. | ||
| I was born 20 years after the end of World War II and we all know what really happened there. | ||
| I mean, we're nuts. | ||
| We're absolutely not capable of this level of responsibility. | ||
| And so the question that we have is, do we believe that we have a long-term solution in terms of increasing our wisdom? | ||
| We should definitely try it. | ||
| Everybody believes that should work on that problem. | ||
| But if we don't think that we have the wisdom to live like this, we don't know how much time we have left, but it's probably maybe a few hundred years tops, because sooner or later you're going to have Putin-like or Trump-like people. | ||
| I mean, I'm sorry, I would have a very deep antipathy towards Donald Trump. | ||
| He's not temperamentally fit to have the secrets of theoretical physics at his fingertips. | ||
| He just isn't. | ||
| And it's imperative to me that he not be elected in 2020 and that the Democratic Party wake up and get rid of its crazy fringe so that we can buy some time. | ||
| And it's nice if Elon thinks we can go to Mars. | ||
| Maybe that will allow a small number of us to diversify in case we do something really dumb to the planet. | ||
| But if human beings are to continue, and we are to continue evolving, we need to spread out. | ||
| And there are three rocks that are inhabitable. | ||
| There's the Earth, there's the Moon, and there's Mars. | ||
| And the Moon has nothing there. | ||
| Mars is pretty uninteresting, to be blunt. | ||
| I know that it's beautiful that we send back these pictures. | ||
| And we've got this one gorgeous planet that we are clearly not smart enough to steward. | ||
| We're still having idiotic climate change debates. | ||
| Even if climate science is somewhat junkified, we should still be taking climate super seriously because we don't know what we're doing. | ||
| It's such a complicated nonlinear system and we're not even capable of focusing. | ||
| Two seconds later, I'll be watching the Kardashians for sure. | ||
| So what is the answer? | ||
| Well, in my opinion, we've got to increase the number of possible places we can go beyond three. | ||
| To say nothing of space stations, because that's not realistic. | ||
| None of these things make sense. | ||
| So the first place that you have to get to is, we're really deeply screwed, and not because of apocalyptic cult-like reasons. | ||
| Just because of science. | ||
| Just because of 1953. So the only opportunity is if we can break the Einsteinian speed limit, so far as I know. | ||
| Or we can upload into silicon, or we can reboot from tardigrades. | ||
| Like, none of these answers are good. | ||
| So, what I've been toying with since I was 19 was, what is the theory beyond Einstein? | ||
| And that's the thing that I've been most uncomfortable talking about, although I've been talking about it more. | ||
| I gave these lectures in May of 2013 in Oxford, and I was appalled by the way in which the world's physics community responded. | ||
| I mean, I was very scared. | ||
| I'm not a physicist. | ||
| I don't claim to be. | ||
| But I felt like I tried to present what I hoped was a path forward, given that the field was completely stalled out. | ||
| And this is it. | ||
| Physics and biology led us into the valley of death. | ||
| And it's now time to try to get out. | ||
| And people... | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| No, please. | ||
| So what is my responsibility in terms of the portal? | ||
| Um... | ||
| What I'm going to try to do with this podcast is gain the courage to share whatever ideas I've had about breaking the speed limit. | ||
| In the form of, I don't think I have the wisdom to figure out what it means, but at least I have a hope of trying to write the fundamental rules to figure out our source code. | ||
| And that was the plan, which is, what is this place? | ||
| What is the source code for reality? | ||
| Now, what was the response from the physicist that you found appalling? | ||
| There were two articles that appeared in the Guardian newspaper or website that talked breathlessly about what I had done or what I might have done to call attention to the lectures that I was giving. | ||
| So these were the special Simone lectures by Richard Dawkins' successor, Marcus de Sotoy, who is a colleague of mine from way back, who found me in New York City, I think in 2011, 2012, or something like that, I was working on this theory I called geometric unity. | ||
| And I was very uncomfortable. | ||
| I hadn't really told anybody that I was working on this theory for all those years because it's a crazy – there's certain stories that you find in theoretical physics, which is kind of the precursor to madness, where somebody thinks that they've solved – Some big problem and they're working in secret. | ||
| This is sort of what happened with Andrew Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorem, which was a really interesting story because his first proof of Fermat's Last Theorem I think was unfixable. | ||
| So he announced a proof that he had solved this most famous problem in mathematics and he didn't have a proof. | ||
| And then bizarrely he was under such pressure that he found another proof. | ||
| And actually pulled it off. | ||
| So it's like, you know, hats off to him. | ||
| It's one of the craziest stories. | ||
| But he was working in secret for seven years and nobody knew what he was doing. | ||
| So sometimes these stories work out. | ||
| But he was a professor at Princeton and very highly regarded. | ||
| And he had sort of husbanded seven years worth of work to pretend that he was releasing papers when he was actually secretly doing this thing that would have made him a madman in some sense. | ||
| And so this is what I was trying to do. | ||
| I was not able to work on these issues in the string theory community because the string theory community was possessed of this belief that they had found the answer back in the 80s. | ||
| In 1984, they had what they thought was a revolution. | ||
| And the math community doesn't think in these terms. | ||
| Like, both of these are very conservative communities historically and very focused on following the leadership of the top people unless there's a revolution. | ||
| And so I started working on a different idea to unify the two branches of physics that appear to be incompatible, that was different than the string theory idea and different than the loop quantum gravity idea or any of the others. | ||
| And your main motivation was to do this, to try to figure out a more advanced version of space travel? | ||
| Well, it wasn't space travel. | ||
| It was, we need the source code. | ||
| Like, it might be safer to go further once you've unlocked nuclear fusion. | ||
| You're pretty much as screwed as you need to be. | ||
| So then the issue is, okay, I'm pretty sure that Einstein's theory is not final. | ||
| Because you get these singularities which I don't associate with ultimate equations. | ||
| So the black hole singularity called the Schwarzschild singularity or the initial singularity that we associate with the Big Bang in like the Friedman Roberts and Walker space times. | ||
| Are signs to me that these equations are incomplete. | ||
| But the big problem with Einstein is that Einstein's work was so fundamental that it's like you can't get in under the ground floor of Einstein. | ||
| You begin a physics seminar and you're already immediately in his world. | ||
| You say, let X be a space-time manifold. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| You're already in relativity. | ||
| So it's almost impossible to figure out a way to get in at a deeper level of physics than Einstein's theory. | ||
| And we know that we have to recover Einstein's theory because that's been proven to work in all sorts of situations. | ||
| And the same thing with quantum field theory, which is why I talked about the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. | ||
| So my idea was that only since the 1970s have we known that particle theory was based on geometry. | ||
| We knew that Einstein's theory, Einstein used geometry to develop his theory. | ||
| It was the language of relativity called Riemannian geometry. | ||
| But many years later, we found out that Bohr's sort of quantum and Planck's quantum and Einstein's quantum as well was based on a different geometry of this guy Charles Erisman. | ||
| He was an Alsatian geometer who worked with Cartan. | ||
| And that geometry was figured out At Stony Brook in New York by Jim Simons, who became the world's greatest hedge fund manager, and C.N. Yang, who's arguably number one or number two greatest living theoretical physicist. | ||
| He's now in his 90s. | ||
| And they figured out that the secret language of particle theory was also geometry, but a different geometry. | ||
| And so geometric unity is simply the idea that it's not a fight between Einstein and Bohr. | ||
| It's the two parents, Riemann on whose work, Einstein-based relativity, and Charles Erismann with this gauge-theoretic stuff that we did in the time before this, which in fact empowers particle theory. | ||
| And so when do those two geometries unify? | ||
| It's two different geometric theories. | ||
| And I've found that in general they don't unify in a way that you want. | ||
| You don't have the ability to do Einsteinian tensor analysis where you compress something called the Riemann curvature tensor and the gauge stuff where you do this gauge symmetry that we were talking about. | ||
| Because gauge symmetry ruins the ability to compress the Einstein tensor. | ||
| Never mind what that means. | ||
| But in one or two rare circumstances, you can actually combine the two geometries. | ||
| And that's where I think we are. | ||
| And so partially what the purpose of the Portal podcast is, is to use... | ||
| I'll just sort of tear the mask off a little bit. | ||
| We've been talking about lots of interesting things, about social justice, about mathematics, about wonder, about psychedelics, and trying to be decent human beings to each other and to set an example. | ||
| And I think it's been partially a success and partially a failure. | ||
| But what I'm trying to do is to gain the courage to talk about what these ideas are. | ||
| And the worst comes to worst. | ||
| Is that I wasted a lot of my life on a crazy theory that turned out not to be true. | ||
| What was the response, though? | ||
| Like, how did the physicist react? | ||
| And what was disappointing about it? | ||
| So, the articles engendered an immune reaction. | ||
| Immune. | ||
| Yeah, it's an immune response. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, so somebody's giving a lecture, and now, how many times have we heard before the next Einstein, yada, yada, yada, yada? | ||
| And I totally understand this. | ||
| It's a reasonable reaction. | ||
| Like, Sean Carroll had this reaction. | ||
| He referred to me as a backyard Einstein. | ||
| And his wife- You referenced him twice today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's on my mind. | ||
| And his wife wrote this amazing article in Scientific American called, Dear Guardian, You've Been Played. | ||
| Now, she's not a physicist, but she has access to Sean's brain and she writes on physics. | ||
| And then there was this whole thing where the new scientist said, okay, this guy claimed to give this lecture in the physics department, but he hasn't written a paper and he didn't tell the physicist. | ||
| It was a sneak attack. | ||
| Well, of course, that wasn't true. | ||
| There was announcement of the talk. | ||
| I stayed in England, and I gave the talk once more, and then a final time a week later. | ||
| And by that point, all sorts of people from Cambridge and Oxford came to the talk because it was a worldwide topic of discussion, what the hell's going on. | ||
| And I gave a two-hour talk. | ||
| Consider that nobody outside of theoretical physics gives talks on physics. | ||
| It's like North Korea. | ||
| They don't get many visitors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| To the extent that they get visitors, they do get visitors from mathematics, but in general, mathematicians don't take an interest in the real physical world. | ||
| And to be blunt about it, I don't think that the string theorists are very focused on the real physical world either. | ||
| They've been playing with toy models for nearly 40 years. | ||
| So a lot of it was playing out in the press, and the new scientists had to retract. | ||
| They said, no, what we wrote wasn't true. | ||
| They did publicize the talk, and then there was an article. | ||
| They sent a reporter to the final talk that I gave, and the reporter did not know any physics. | ||
| So I spent the morning with this person, teaching him what the Dirac equation was, like a very fundamental thing. | ||
| A question came up in the talk about, is your model anomaly-free? | ||
| And my model has a property called nonchirality. | ||
| Chirality, which is the difference between left-right asymmetric models are called chiral and left-right symmetric models are called nonchiral. | ||
| So my model is nonchiral, but the chiral nature of the universe is supposed to emerge from it. | ||
| And I was asked questions that didn't seem to make sense, which is you can't have a chiral anomaly in a nonchiral model. | ||
| And the person, the reporter picked up on this and didn't really get it. | ||
| So there was like a flurry of activity with a big WTF. And if you ask me, by the time I gave the second lecture, people weren't laughing. | ||
| It was a serious lecture. | ||
| People heard that it wasn't like somebody come up with their own language and their own... | ||
| You know, written in crayon in some indecipherable thing. | ||
| It was written in the normal language, but I hadn't written a paper. | ||
| And papers are very much the stock and trade of that community. | ||
| So I would say that the community settled on a rubric, which is paper or it didn't happen. | ||
| In other words, put up or shut up. | ||
| Give us a paper. | ||
| I had written something. | ||
| But because my trajectory through math and physics was very unusual, I have a very low trust of the academic community. | ||
| I support them, as you can tell. | ||
| I'm extolling the virtues of science. | ||
| But I was subjected to a situation in graduate school where I had – I'm probably the only person you've ever met with a PhD who was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why is that? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| What was your thesis? | ||
| It was on self-dual equations not being as peculiar to Dimension 4 as was claimed. | ||
| But – I had a situation in which the thesis when I had entered grad school was something that you would present to the world. | ||
| And by the time I was trying to leave, it was a closed-door affair where the department would appoint the person for you. | ||
| And I was in the unusual position of not having a thesis advisor. | ||
| So there's some very fraught story. | ||
| One thing you'll find is that graduate school for some subclass of people becomes an extremely fraught experience where the power of a department not to grant you a degree or not to To help you get a job or to expel you becomes very contentious, right? | ||
| And that was the situation. | ||
| So I got into a very contentious situation. | ||
| But there was no explanation of why it was so contentious? | ||
| We can talk about it on another podcast. | ||
| But I was in a very low trust situation with Harvard and with the standard community. | ||
| And so when work that I had done that was rejected for my thesis was discovered by others in 1994 and revolutionized topological gauge theory, I became very sort of sullen and angry and withdrawn because my department knew that I had put forward the same equations that became revolutionary in mathematical gauge theory. | ||
| Did you revisit it with them? | ||
| Where a guy named David Kajdan, who I very much admire, the person who had been my advisor, I don't want to name names, had given a seminar saying, all of gauge theory has been revolutionized. | ||
| Old gauge theory is dead. | ||
| There's a new gauge theory. | ||
| And David Kajdan, who I will name, said – I was in the back center row. | ||
| I think I was picking my nose, actually. | ||
| And he said, didn't we have a student who told us to look at these equations? | ||
| And suddenly the whole room turned around and looked at me. | ||
| I think this is in room 507 of the Harvard Science Center. | ||
| And it's just like, you know, try to imagine you're an anonymous person in a lecture and suddenly everyone is staring at you. | ||
| And your fingers and your nose. | ||
| And... | ||
| That was the moment. | ||
| And I think I mumbled something just to get out of it. | ||
| But I was angry. | ||
| I was angry that they'd taken away my agency. | ||
| Better not to give me a PhD. | ||
| Better just to say, look, we're going to go short you. | ||
| Screw off. | ||
| You don't get a PhD. | ||
| And then if I end up doing something, screw you. | ||
| That would have been a better outcome. | ||
| So instead, I got a PhD through a very tortuous situation, and I came to give up on academics. | ||
| I don't think that they're a fair system. | ||
| I don't think that it's open-minded. | ||
| I don't think that they welcome all sorts of different belief structures which are capable of producing innovations. | ||
| So for my money, I've been very vocal about this. | ||
| I've written articles on edge.org, and I've said theoretical physics is stalled. | ||
| And you've been claiming that you're going to ship string theory since 1984. Well, where is it? | ||
| And it's always, you know, N years away. | ||
| Now, what was the premise of Sean Carroll's wife's article that they got played? | ||
| Well, Jamie, can you bring it up? | ||
| I had broken the rules. | ||
| The rules? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're supposed to submit a paper. | ||
| The paper is supposed to be reviewed. | ||
| It's supposed to appear in a journal. | ||
| You're not supposed to be doing this from mathematics. | ||
| You don't have training as a physicist. | ||
| This is a hoax. | ||
| But it's not a hoax. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, if it is a hoax, it's on me. | ||
| It's clearly not a hoax. | ||
| You're not hoaxing anyone. | ||
| I'm not trying to. | ||
| So why the attack? | ||
| I don't understand the motivation for the attack. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Imagine that you're the Princeton physics department. | ||
| You probably have a cork board on the wall called the crank board. | ||
| And every week somebody writes to you and says, I figured out perpetual motion. | ||
| I have a laser transport device. | ||
| And so everybody is concerned and frightened that their time is going to be wasted by lunatics. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, I both fit the lunatic profile and don't fit the lunatic profile. | ||
| On the lunatic side, I'm outside of the system. | ||
| I haven't kept up. | ||
| I'm not particularly mathematically minded. | ||
| I mean, in fact, I'm sort of a B math student from high school, so I'm the only person I know with my profile with a PhD in math. | ||
| And on the non-lunatic side, I mean, look, you've been listening to my crazy ideas for a while, and they're all over the world. | ||
| I have lots of heterodox ideas. | ||
| I don't think that they're taken as being insane. | ||
| And I don't think this is insane. | ||
| It's been looked at by enough people to say, until you actually write it down very cleanly, and clearly we can't fully evaluate it. | ||
| But it's a gamble. | ||
| And the worst thing that can happen Is that I have something that looks like a final theory that turns out not to be. | ||
| Are you going to write it out? | ||
| It's already mostly written up. | ||
| I'm in a different phase. | ||
| I felt that I got rolled in an alley. | ||
| So here's the big reveal. | ||
| It's going to be a lot harder to roll me. | ||
| I can roll myself. | ||
| I can screw this thing up just fine by myself. | ||
| But the opportunity to take me into a quiet corner and make something disappear or to hand the credit to somebody else is going to be a lot harder to do. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| Dear Guardian, you've been played. | ||
| I love when they use contemporary slang. | ||
| It's so bitchy. | ||
| Are you allowed to say bitchy when it's a girl? | ||
| What? | ||
| When a girl writes it? | ||
| I don't care, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, look, it's only like the future of... | |
| A number of people have been privately asking me about the recent Guardian article and accompanying an op-ed by Oxford mathematician Marcos de Sotoy. | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sotoy? | |
| Marcos de Sotoy. | ||
| De Sotoy. | ||
| Gushing over supposedly revolutionary new unified theory of physics by a man who officially left academia 20 years ago. | ||
| Or... | ||
| As I've taken to calling it the Eric Weinstein's amazing new theory that solves everything puzzling conundrum in theoretical physics, only he hasn't written an actual... | ||
| All these are capital letters, that's why I'm saying it this way. | ||
| Capital letters. | ||
| An actual paper yet, so physicists can't check all those hard mathematical details, but trust us, it's gonna be awesome. | ||
| Wow, that's super bitchy. | ||
| Ahem. | ||
| Are you allowed to say that? | ||
| Yeah, I can say it. | ||
| I can say whatever the fuck I want. | ||
| Ahem with a period. | ||
| First, a couple of caveats. | ||
| I've met Weinstein. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| He's wicked smart. | ||
| This is a stupid article. | ||
| Because you know better. | ||
| Well, it's just the way it's written. | ||
| It's just, it's... | ||
| It's catty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's for clear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Clearly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, we could go deep into this. | ||
| But she's playing enforcer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You broke the rules. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We know why you broke the rules. | ||
| There's fame and fortune for you in this. | ||
| You think that's what it is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, or you're delusional. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, what's her motivation for writing this article, though? | ||
| That's what's weird. | ||
| Well, she's a physics – look, she comes from – I think she's a protege of Casey Cole, the great physics writer who's not a physicist. | ||
| In her defense, do you feel that she felt this honestly and that this was problematic in her eyes, that you were entering into this field that you had not written a paper in, you had left academia 20 years ago? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And that she was like, well, this is all nonsense. | ||
| Okay, I'm going to put a stop to this nonsense. | ||
| And I'm going to do it with sort of contemporary language and slang. | ||
| I don't like the bitchiness, but I understand the motivation. | ||
| Look, I think the bitchiness is to make the article more entertaining and more absorbable. | ||
| It was part of her style as a writer. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, I actually met her, as she says, And I had a very high and positive impression of her. | ||
| So why do you think she wrote this without discussing it? | ||
| You know, look, Sean is also one of these people who's trying to enforce the rules. | ||
| He didn't have the easiest time. | ||
| I think he didn't get tenure at Caltech. | ||
| He's kind of a stickler for reality. | ||
| He's on the one hand talking total nonsense about Boltzmann brains and thought experiments, which is what I associate with desperation physics. | ||
| On the other hand, he's kind of this rigorous... | ||
| Rationalist thinker who's a prominent atheist. | ||
| So he's a complicated guy. | ||
| He's a great explainer. | ||
| He's got his own sort of economic incentives that he's one of the very few people who's sort of a voice of physics to the world. | ||
| And they operate in some sense as a couple. | ||
| And there's a richness to this. | ||
| My point isn't to run them down or to boost them up. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| People are playing out their roles. | ||
| Whenever anyone has a sentence that consists of one word and that word is ahem, Yeah, I did not enjoy that article. | ||
| But look, yeah, but she's trying to throw me a bone. | ||
| He's wicked smart. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| But he's delusional. | ||
| He's delusional. | ||
| And to the extent that I've been delusional before. | ||
| I'm about the only person in the U.S. who's against high-skilled immigration because people think, why should we keep out the best and the brightest? | ||
| That's a complicated story. | ||
| Before the financial crisis, I was saying mortgage-backed securities may blow up the world. | ||
| People are like, are you kidding? | ||
| It's the great moderation. | ||
| We've banished volatility. | ||
| People have a chance to know me now. | ||
| They know that I can get way out there. | ||
| I said this at the beginning. | ||
| I get way out there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think Elon Musk is totally wrong about going to Mars. | ||
| Mars is not going to save us. | ||
| And maybe going to the stars isn't going to save us. | ||
| Maybe the AI will follow us there, yada, yada, yada. | ||
| But I'm not going to take this lying down. | ||
| We're in a desperate situation. | ||
| And if you're not trying, here's the clear thing. | ||
| We know what nuclear weapons look like in the fusion era. | ||
| If we aren't trying to get off this planet before people are unleashing gene drives and, you know, weaponized anthrax and who knows what the hell people are going to get up to as the power of biology and the power of physics keeps going, the power of information, at least I'm trying. | ||
| I think I'm doing a damn sight better than trying, but assume that I fail completely. | ||
| How crazy is it that we're not trying to take arms against our new sea of troubles? | ||
| It's time to rush the cockpit. | ||
| We've got to get Trump out of office. | ||
| We've got to restore sanity to our sense-making. | ||
| We need newspapers. | ||
| We need fact-checkers. | ||
| What is particularly problematic about Trump being in office? | ||
| That man has nuclear capabilities and I have zero confidence in his decision making. | ||
| And people imagine that I'm a Trump supporter after I've called him an existential risk. | ||
| And my boss and good friend Peter Thiel was a supporter of Trump in the last election. | ||
| I'm taking a huge risk in how much I love this guy Peter Thiel and how much he loves me. | ||
| Because I'm putting the employer-employee relationship at risk. | ||
| And people say, okay, you're just a Peter Thiel tool. | ||
| Well, nobody's going to take that kind of risk unless they have real faith in their friend. | ||
| And I work for a friend. | ||
| I mean a real friend. | ||
| A person who doesn't cut and run when trouble starts. | ||
| And I totally disagree with Peter. | ||
| I have come to understand that Trump – I thought people would understand the Trump danger and that the Democratic Party would reevaluate their situation, but they didn't. | ||
| They tripled and quadrupled down, and that is alarming. | ||
| And so that's something I very much got wrong about Trump, is that even Trump wasn't enough of a message. | ||
| To let people know. | ||
| But Trump cannot have the nuclear codes because he's not a skilled and regular enough player. | ||
| He's going to accomplish a lot. | ||
| One of the things I said before the election is he might be the best and worst of presidents. | ||
| He might get us a North Korea deal because they're going to look at him and say, this guy is nuts. | ||
| Who knows what he would do? | ||
| But we, the technical community, created this problem. | ||
| And we're abdicating our responsibility by worrying about our egos, by worrying about our reputations. | ||
| I am abdicating. | ||
| I should have turned this theory over to the theoretical physics community years ago, even if they screwed me over. | ||
| And I'm too petty and egotistical to want to give up on it. | ||
| I watch them take credit for things that weren't, you know, an assigned credit. | ||
| I don't like the way they work. | ||
| The theoretical physics community is our most important community in the world, and it is also a very unpleasant community. | ||
| And we need to fund them, and we need to let them play. | ||
| They're dangerous boys, for the most part. | ||
| They are women, but in general, they're very unpleasant men. | ||
| They've been somewhat cowed. | ||
| They're not the same cowboys they used to be because they've been failing for 40 years. | ||
| I should be sharing stuff. | ||
| I should be writing things down. | ||
| I have not had the courage to do it. | ||
| And if I really have the courage of my convictions, I should share this and see what happens. | ||
| But one thing is I don't know if it could be weaponized. | ||
| Assume it's right. | ||
| I have this decision tree. | ||
| Assume it's wrong. | ||
| I've got egg on my face. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I'll be okay. | ||
| I worry much more about if it's right. | ||
| The two things that can go wrong if it's right is, one, that it could be weaponized before it becomes useful, and two, is that there's no solution in it. | ||
| Maybe we actually are stuck in this place. | ||
| We never get to go to the stars. | ||
| We can look at exoplanets and dream, but we're stuck here. | ||
| Until we change human behavior, isn't a trip to the stars just a relocation of our own problems? | ||
| Yeah, we're kicking the... | ||
| But we need time, man. | ||
| We need time. | ||
| We have not gotten to the point where we don't even feel... | ||
| The danger we're in. | ||
| We are in so much danger and we haven't had almost anything happen since 1945 at the scale of World War II. And so we've got magical thinking between our ears where we think it can't happen here. | ||
| You know, this is the thing that makes me so fucking furious about screwing around with Europeans and sovereignty, which is Europe is a dangerous place. | ||
| Europe is historically a dangerous place. | ||
| It's been a place for years where college students can go and take in the sights. | ||
| But it's a dangerous ethnic cauldron. | ||
| And Jews know this better than anyone. | ||
| And the one thing that the far left and the far right agree on is Jews, and it's not in a good way. | ||
| So it is very important. | ||
| We are the canaries in the coal mine. | ||
| We feel the stuff early. | ||
| And things are coming apart. | ||
| The physical world, the world of commerce, the world of structural engineering and building permits is still okay so far. | ||
| But the intellectual world that sort of wraps that and keeps it in check is coming unglued. | ||
| And quite frankly, I don't want to go through that again. | ||
| We cannot afford another World War II because World War II won't look like World War II. World War III. Yeah, and I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it'll look like information warfare. | ||
| Maybe it won't look like anything like a war that we've seen before. | ||
| But, you know, the problem is, Joe, is that I've got some sort of wildly tattooed martial artist across from me. | ||
| I'm some sort of guy who dropped out of academics years ago and doesn't have a published paper in this area. | ||
| And I really literally think... | ||
| Maybe it comes down to you and me. | ||
| Maybe we use this podcast and some crazy-ass differential geometry to at least make a go of it, to at least, at the minimum, excite somebody to think maybe it's possible to make progress. | ||
| Well, what's interesting about that is what you've said is reaching an astonishing number of ears and eyes. | ||
| This is why I pushed out. | ||
| Look, I've been responsible about this up until now. | ||
| This is my first really irresponsible podcast. | ||
| Why is it irresponsible? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it's egotistical. | ||
| Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this. | ||
| I guarantee you there are going to be a lot of people in physics departments who are going to be pissed off when this hits. | ||
| Yeah, but it's your thoughts. | ||
| There's nothing irresponsible about your thoughts. | ||
| Well, you have to appreciate that when you're working as hard as these guys have, and these guys have been slogging in the salt mines for forever with no progress of the type I mean since the early 70s, it's pretty galling. | ||
| It's pretty galling to hear somebody talking like this who has the luxury of an invite to this podcast with no vetting, with nothing behind him other than the hope that maybe he's done something that's interesting. | ||
| And I've never spoken about this. | ||
| I have a recording, for example, of the lecture that I did at Oxford. | ||
| Which I chose not to release. | ||
| It was so unpleasant. | ||
| The cattiness, the bitchiness, the nastiness, the undercutting. | ||
| The idea that this came down to ego or fame. | ||
| I guarantee you the thing that I really like least about what I'm about to do with this podcast is fame. | ||
| I think fame is a bad deal. | ||
| You have to deal with this. | ||
| You don't want to say what your location is, where you're going to be. | ||
| All day long, people say, can you get me into Joe Rogan? | ||
| Can you connect me with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan? | ||
| It's constant. | ||
| I get two to three requests a week. | ||
| I don't want it. | ||
| I've had a wonderful 53 years without being very well-known. | ||
| And if this doesn't work out, I'll go back to being not very well-known. | ||
| My greater fear is that maybe it will work. | ||
| And then the thing that I really care about is, does it help? | ||
| Does it buy us time? | ||
| Can we get off the planet? | ||
| Is there anything we can do if we actually know the source code? | ||
| John Brockman runs this thing called edge.org. | ||
| And every year he asked a question to like 200 scientists. | ||
| And finally, he got tired of asking the annual question. | ||
| So he said, okay, 20 years is enough. | ||
| The last question is, what is the final question? | ||
| And Jamie, could I ask you to bring up edge.org and my name and my answer on – it must have been 2018. | ||
| And it's interesting because I kept putting stuff out in Edge. | ||
| Like, for example, I was very worried about professional wrestling presaging an election. | ||
| So I did an article on kayfabe, which is the system of lies that undergirds wrestling. | ||
| And I did one on Bitcoin called Go Virtual, Young Man. | ||
| So nobody ever paid attention to my series of answers to the edge question. | ||
| So this is... | ||
| The last question. | ||
| The last question. | ||
| Did something unprecedented happen when we finally learn our own source code? | ||
| Nobody cared. | ||
| This is the question that obsesses me. | ||
| This is when I say I've left this planet. | ||
| This is what I'm focused on. | ||
| What happens if we actually figure out where we are, where this place is? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Who are we? | ||
| What built this? | ||
| And who acts on that information once we do figure it out? | ||
| What steps are taken? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Whether or not the consequences of those steps are ever really fully thought out. | ||
| I always tried to talk to somebody like government or the intelligence services. | ||
| I don't know whether I have something. | ||
| Maybe I do, maybe I don't. | ||
| But wouldn't you guys want to know ahead of schedule? | ||
| I never was able to get anybody interested. | ||
| I went through graduate school on the Office of Naval Research's top grant for graduate study. | ||
| And I always thought they would check in with me, but they never have. | ||
| So, like, the federal government paid for my postdoc, and the military paid for my graduate education, and Harvard doesn't care, and they don't – nobody cares. | ||
| Nobody believes that anything is possible, which is the really interesting part. | ||
| What do you mean by that, nobody believes that anything is possible? | ||
| You mean really astronomical breakthroughs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, we all know – we're waiting to see what Tim Cook is going to do for the next iPhone. | ||
| Will Elon get to Mars? | ||
| Does anyone actually care about Mars? | ||
| I was there for the moon landings. | ||
| And let me tell you, we were bored of the moon by the time we left. | ||
| It's a very weird thing to say, but that's something. | ||
| I was born in 1965. We were bored. | ||
| Well, my perception of the whole Mars thing is that it's the shittiest location that we can get to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a bad neighborhood. | ||
| It's the best location that we can get to that isn't this one. | ||
| Well, yeah, but it's also like we have spots on Earth that suck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We don't even go there. | ||
| We don't even go there. | ||
| But, like, at least, you know, hats off to Elon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That he at least inspires people by – he followed up the scent when we gave up on progress. | ||
| So my point is, we're not – nobody thinks this is going to work. | ||
| I can say it on the show. | ||
| It can generate a little bit of flurry of activity. | ||
| It'll die down within a week. | ||
| We're going to go back to, you know, who got milkshaked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we're going to want to know, is Tulsi gaining on Andrew? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| What about Biden? | ||
| Can the center hold? | ||
| Will the fringe come in? | ||
| We're just constantly distracted and at least this is going to be entertaining. | ||
| We are at three and a half hours. | ||
| See, last time we almost got to four hours. | ||
| I'm happy to end it. | ||
| If people will go to The Portal with Eric Weinstein on Apple, Spotify, and popular clients for podcasts. | ||
| I'm sure they will. | ||
| This is gonna be an interesting one. | ||
| I'm really curious to see what kind of blowback this one's gonna have. | ||
| Well, two things, Joe. | ||
| One, you, along with Sam and my brother, really encouraged me to do this. | ||
| So I'm holding you personally responsible for whatever goes wrong. | ||
| The second thing is, I really just, I have such a positive feeling about what you've done in terms of empowering people. | ||
| Like, it really touched me that when my brother was shit out of luck, you did a bunch of shows with him and helped him get to a safe place. | ||
| And I just want to say that there is like an aspect, we keep talking about, is there any use for men whatsoever? | ||
| And standing up in a situation in which you can take a fair amount of guff, you can take a lot of heat, You said this thing to me that was really amazing, which is that this is a golden age of comedy. | ||
| And my interpretation was that there was a period of time where nobody could figure out how to tell a joke on a college campus. | ||
| And our best comedians have figured out how to be compassionate enough and kind enough and touch the things that are animating us and making us uncomfortable. | ||
| And that that's what you're a part of. | ||
| And so I view you as like a very delicate neurosurgeon. | ||
| I watched the evolution, for example, of your jokes about professional wrestling being gay. | ||
| Right? | ||
| No, seriously. | ||
| Stay with me, Joe. | ||
| I watched that. | ||
| It was always funny, but it got better and better and better. | ||
| And the idea that that could be told in a way that you'd be totally comfortable with your gay friend or lover right next to you laughing your ass off taught me a lot about the power of just radiating decency. | ||
| Together with analytic thought. | ||
| And it's a bit of a template. | ||
| I don't know that I have the skill to pull this off. | ||
| But you've been an inspiration. | ||
| I just want to say thank you for having me back on the program. | ||
| My pleasure, my friend. | ||
| It's always a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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