Eric Weinstein joins Joe Rogan to debate the mispronunciation of his name, Mel Brooks’ legacy, and texting’s distractions, linking discipline to freedom via Jocko Willink. They explore orcas’ rare predatory behavior, Hearst Castle’s invasive wildlife, and Rogan’s psychedelic edible experiences in isolation tanks. Weinstein critiques culture wars for stifling scientific rigor, citing intersex risks and gender fluidity in non-Western societies while rejecting IQ as a sole intelligence measure. He warns of humanity’s unchecked godlike tech power—nuclear fusion, synthetic biology—paired with existential threats like weaponized gene drives, urging urgent action to avoid another WWII-scale conflict, now framed as "information warfare." Despite academic skepticism, Weinstein defends his geometric physics theory, thanking Rogan for a platform amid potential suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
The texting thing, the problem is, if I, 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.
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 would be impossible to manage.
Calls would constantly be coming in.
You'd never really be able to say anything.
So we were 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.
But, you know, in terms of this weird thing about islands of time, one of the things that we do is we have a 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 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.
mean in 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 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 like 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?
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 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.
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, you know, the drama of, there it was.
Temptation.
I held out for 45 minutes, but eventually I became weak.
I mean, I think we all 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, you know, there's like this weird thing when you hit 40, you start to be able to have analytic thoughts that are uninterrupted by sex.
So did you, what is he, 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.
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.
And I'm just thinking, do you even know what you're doing or where you are?
He's thinking, 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, you know, Bob Beeman arguably is one of the great moments in all of sporting history, and it happens in the long junk 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.
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.
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.
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 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 Marineland shut down, Canada has banned all orca and all dolphin captives.
Because, well, I thought menopause was just a shift in the hormonal balance of the- Well, what is the purpose evolutionarily of continuing life beyond the ability to reproduce?
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 past that point.
You know, this is the old point about, 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, discretized reproductive strategy.
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 in the estris 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.
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.
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, 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, they just sort of, it like helps them along, almost like reverse drafting, like because they're kind of in front of it.
So as you're pushing the water, let me find it here.
I think that they're actually, you know, the orcas figured out how to use our fishers, our fishing boats, and just wait for us to get stuff on the line.
And they're trying to figure out a way 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 didn't.
They did it 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.
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 came up with the chemical composition for nylon.
And when it was a combination of several factors, and the decorticator was invented.
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.
It's hemp, 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've seen these like 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?
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, see if you could find the cover of this in like the 19, 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, does it say there's a cover of it, though, that says hemp, hemp the new billion-dollar crop.
That's just the inside part of it.
See if you can find it.
Anyway, so William Randolph Hearst would have had to have shift over because hemp paper, I don't know if you ever played with it?
Nope.
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 going to 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.
And 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.
He was like the YouTube and the Google of, you know, the 1930s.
He did belong to those.
He had access.
He was the one who could just decide what gets distributed.
And so he, 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 coolie labor.
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.
And you have to ask yourself who in the modern era – like I found it astounding that when Elon came on this program and had a blunt that like it was an issue.
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.
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, et cetera.
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.
Well, I thought it would be sort of commonplace, you know?
I wouldn't have guessed, you know, somebody would say 5-MeODMT, somebody else would say ketamine, somebody else would say, you know, LSD or DMT or ayahuasca.
But the common thread throughout all of these people, who were many of them were researchers, was that they felt that cannabis was a miraculous substance.
My favorite is a good stiff dose of an edible and then wait about 45 minutes and then get in the tank.
So because 45 minutes, it's like the way I describe it is like 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.
And 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.
Like you start seeing these strange dancing cartoons and like weird, weird shit.
You can get similar situations on other psychedelics, especially in the tank.
The tank is a really unique way to experience anything.
Even normal psych, like the normal state, the 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?
Well, when you add any sort of psychedelic to that tank experience, everything gets ramped up.
It's like, you know, 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.
Well, 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 –
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?
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.
Now, the problem is somebody had that as their wedding song.
The problem when you change things is that other people wed themselves to where you were.
And 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 that I've done.
They just, they did it in a clear enough way that people could understand the pattern.
And so, you know, 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.
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 other people feel.
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.
And I think one of the things that we're all recognizing from whether it's the internet or just celebrity in general, which is, I think, part of the culprit, is especially if you're reading comments and articles that are written about you, which I do not recommend.
Sometimes that pressure can help you, like if it's a good friend or someone who you trust and it's done with intellectual honesty and they just really 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.
And on my message board or 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 the same thing that the IRA was doing, the Internet Research Agency was doing with Facebook and Google and Twitter.
We were seeing this like four or five years ago, that this stuff was kind of happening where they were recognizing that there are these large portals of discussion.
And so they're trying to manipulate that discussion and turn certain discussions toxic and come up with preposterous conspiracy theories and attack people for nonsensical reasons.
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 like I think somebody's like 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.
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 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. You know, if you don't address this situation, I'm done following you.
It's like, oh, really?
Goodbye.
Click.
But I believe that 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 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.
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 are 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.
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've seen great stuff with multiple people on your show.
And I've seen stuff that doesn't work.
And, you know, the other night we had Brian Callan is fast becoming one of my favorite people in the world, and he had us over and 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.
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.
They have like 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.
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, well, just, you know, 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, you know, 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.
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.
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 them do what a normal person has to do every day, I think normal life is unwell in terms of 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.
So the Portal refers to 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, a looking glass platform nine and three-quarters.
Or, you know, 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.
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 left and right hemisphere.
It's some incredibly exciting story and the idea is that after he goes and does all of these like 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 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?
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 hop vibration.
And suddenly, if you recall, I said to people, this is the most important object in the universe.
Not the hop vibration in particular, but the class called the principle 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.
Well, there's actually an illustration that sits above our sink out there from a guy who has a tumor in his pituitary gland, or his, not his pituitary gland, his one that they think produces DMT.
Aaron Powell, Jr.: 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 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.
Like 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.
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.
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 Octonians 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 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 like 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.
Like 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.
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, like, you know, multiplication is associative.
And you think, well, what is an 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.
Okay, well, there's another thing called associativity.
And almost everything that we deal with in 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.
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.
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 illustration.
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.
unidentified
The letter C. It's not C, like the ocean C, elegans, and then the cell lineage.
It looks like a really long basketball bracket kind of pushed out forever.
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.
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.
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, 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 listen to some of the discussions about, well, just take these hoaxes about, you know, somebody submitted parts of Mein Kampf with Jews rewritten as men.
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 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.
Where you're dealing with emotions and feelings and people who feel like there's unjustice 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 and 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 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 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 where they want a certain amount of diverse people and staff.
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.
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, filming.
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.
But my point is, 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.
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 and won 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.
Okay?
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 jiu-jitsu 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.
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, trying 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.
She wasn't doing quantum theory, but she was taking – her thesis brought techniques of bundle theory, like the hop 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 and so I wanted, you know, 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 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.
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 an issue.
They get through the, like, let's say, BAs in STEM subjects.
A lot of them enter PhD programs.
Like, 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.
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?
You know, 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 who 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 is this group have no one in a wheelchair?
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.
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 a $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 select as a system of selective pressures that'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.
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.
Well, when you create safe spaces and you coddle and you make, I mean, all these pieces are in place.
There's many, 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.
And through no choices at all, this person is being shoehorned into a paradigm which puts them at 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.
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.
And I give this example of like kilts and lungies 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 and a male body versus this is a regular mind and 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.
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.
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.
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 if they interfere with hard science, which you are getting, particularly with evolutionary biology, you're getting a lot of interference.
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.
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.
You'd be fascinated as to why you don't have males and females 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 kinwork?
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'd 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 continent 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 the 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.
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.
Like 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.
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.
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 humanity 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.
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 an 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.
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 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.
So we'll say, but look, they're superior intellectually, so I can't be racist.
I'm pointing out that 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 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.
And I no longer believe that's true because we have so much inadvertent data, right?
Like 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, you know, 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 and 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 funk 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's going on.
So therefore, I never had a lot of fear about it because 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 they come up in a way that is really unpleasant is this new thing, which is that all imbalances are all structural oppression, which doesn't allow for trade-offs between groups like Finns.
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, you know?
And like, what if somebody, like, 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, right?
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.
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?
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 and care.
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 straits.
It was an activist position that started to compete with an 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.
You know, 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 laps as if it's a competition like my group's better than your group.
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 that's 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.
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, 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 recognizes recognizing as emblematic of the left.
They think it defines the left.
And I don't think it does.
And I think it is 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.
What you saw from that video, that anyone could support that with a person who's just talking.
I mean, what I've seen of him, what they've tried to describe, that he supports neo-Nazis, that he supports the proud boy.
I have 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, 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.
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.
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.
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 What you're calling the loudest voices, and I'm going to call the most courageous, well, I don't know what I'll 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.
And 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.
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.
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 core that could actually potentially hold the center because people are actually fairly courageous.
Like you would have to say, my brother is fairly courageous.
Ben Shapiro, Andy No, Sam Harris, these are people who've stood up to death threats.
You know, I have a guy who's threatening me every day of my life coming through the internet and my family.
You have to have some courage in order to be part of this thing.
And 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 their violent, 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.
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.
I don't want, 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?
And the thing that I get is that I believe that the Republican Party, you know, 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 were the, 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?
I mean, you know, we came from pogroms.
Is anybody going to be paying Jews for the pogroms that, you know, 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 comedy, you consign yourself to becoming a less great nation.
And 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 that 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, you know, twin directives.
And this is what I'm excited about.
We need to get the world excited about curing disease.
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.
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 innovations.
These things, which while complicated, succumb to our intellects, right?
Like 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, with synthetic biology.
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 who 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 not hundreds.
I mean, 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.
I mean, 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.
You know, it's like 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 2013, 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.
So what is my responsibility in terms of the portal?
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?
Well, 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 Simoni 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, 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 are kind of the precursor to madness, where somebody thinks that they've solved some big problem and they're working in secrets.
You know, 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, is 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 other things.
Once you've unlocked, once you've unlocked nuclear fusion, you're pretty much as screwed as you need to be.
So then the issue is, okay, we know that 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 Robertson 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 then 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, who was an Alsatian geometer who worked with Carten.
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 is arguably number one or number two, greatest living theoretical physicists.
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 Erisman 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 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, you know, 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.
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 scientists 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 physicists it was a sneak attack.
Well, of course, that wasn't true.
There was an 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 is going on.
And I gave a two-hour talk.
Consider that nobody, nobody outside of theoretical physics gives talks on physics.
It's like North Korea.
They don't get many visitors.
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, you know, nearly 40 years.
So a lot of it was playing out in the press.
And the new scientist 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.
The question came up in the talk about is your model anomaly free?
And my model has a property called non-chirality.
Chirality, which is the difference between left-right asymmetric models are called chiral, and left-right symmetric models are called non-chiral.
So my model is non-chiral, 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 non-chiral 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 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.
But because my trajectory through this, 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.
It was on self-dual equations not being as peculiar to dimension four 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 help you get a job or to expel you becomes very contentious, right?
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.
There was a seminar where a guy named David Khajdan, 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 is a new gauge theory.
And David Khazdan, 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 was 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.
You know, 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, you know, 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.
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.
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 op-ed by Oxford mathematician Marcos du Satoy.
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 going to be awesome.
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, 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.
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?
And it's a complicated story.
Before the financial crisis, I was saying mortgage-backed securities may blow up the world.
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 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 our arms against our new sea of troubles?
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, oh, 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 or 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 new North Korea deal because they're going to look at him and say, this guy's 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 watched them take credit for things that weren't, you know, and 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.
There are women, but in general, they're very unpleasant men.
They have been somewhat cowed.
They are 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.
You know, 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.
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.
All right?
So it is very important.
We are the canaries in the coal mine.
We feel this 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.
Maybe it won't look anything like a war that we've seen before.
But 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, 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, it's 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.
People react 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 very well, not very well known.
My greater fears 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?
You know, 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 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.
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?
And 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 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.
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 know, 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 that 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.