Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan critique the U.S. pandemic response, exposing Nancy Pelosi’s and Bill de Blasio’s prioritization of economics over health, while comparing it to South Korea’s decisive action. Weinstein’s brother Brett predicted flawed lab mice could skew research, yet Jackson Laboratory ignored warnings. Eric’s geometric unity theory—suggesting physics operates in 14 dimensions—could revolutionize quantum gravity but risks suppression like nuclear fission. Their discussion reveals systemic failures: political incompetence, scientific opacity, and humanity’s shortsightedness, underscoring urgent need for transparency and long-term solutions beyond Earth. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, the idea that we have not been tested in so long, it's good to remember also that this stuff is live and real and it has always been live and real.
And, you know, if it was possible to live without this stuff, that would be one thing.
But the 75-year nap that we've been in since 1945 is itself the greatest threat to all of us.
I'm impressed with the people that are recognizing that this is a huge problem.
Not so impressed with the administration of a lot of these hospitals that haven't prepared in terms of like masks and ventilators and a lot of these other things.
Not so impressed with politicians, but also it just seems like everyone, like you said, was in this nap state and hadn't really been tested.
And really, globally, no one had been tested since the pandemic of 1918 like this, right?
No, but you, as a health geek, are up on these sorts of things.
And so you understand the ways in which, you know, for example, you can have a flu where the, I guess the cytokine storm, you know, is your, the threat from your immunity, your immune system is, like, bigger than the virus itself.
There are all of these various weird things that happen.
But I think that let's call it the big nap.
The big nap is itself the greatest threat to us.
And this is bad, but it is also a shot across our bow.
And, you know, this is what was happening in my mind when I was on here talking about the twin nuclei problem of selling Adam.
Yeah, the fear is also that nefarious players will take this opportunity to erode civil rights, to erode civil liberties, and then China to gain power in the U.S. market, to gobble up a lot of stocks while everything is down and try to increase their stake in our economy and try to push, you know.
Because to do all this stuff safely, you would have to have a huge hierarchy of rules.
And my claim is, is that China is they supply so much of our stuff.
We've moved all of our manufacturing base into these crazy supply chains.
And we are completely dependent on a strategic rival.
And China is very careful.
If you remember when they hosted the Olympics to have these amazingly impressive displays that are always friendly.
But what they're really saying is we have our shit together and you don't.
And our system was hackable.
It was open.
For example, if you have a company that has a duty to its shareholders, that the directors of the company must do whatever is in the best interest of the shareholders and everything else doesn't matter, then you can have a situation where a director has to move things to China because that is in the best interest of the shareholders, even if it's absolutely not in the best interest of the United States.
This is what Ralph Gomery, who used to head the Sloan Foundation, once said in an address I was at at the National Academy of Sciences.
He just said, as a director, I am incentivized to do exactly the wrong thing for the United States of America.
So I'm going to put one hat on and tell you, as an American, we must not move all of this over to China.
And then I'm going to put my director's hat on and I'm going to vote to move everything over to China because I have no choice.
And so, you know, in essence, the smart good people, all 11 of them, were always fighting this thing about you cannot become China dependent.
And during the big nap, there was no way to make this argument convincingly.
You couldn't say, look, we have a serious strategic problem by your continuing moves to bring China in as the solution to every equation we can't balance.
And that is really the problem, is that there wasn't any ability to say we are way too dependent on a strategic rival.
You saw this at the beginning of the pandemic.
Everyone was afraid of what?
I don't want to appear xenophobic.
I don't want to appear like Chicken Little.
And so all of our friends, the nutcases, the marginal weirdos, the supposed grifters and gadflies, are the people who most got this one right and early.
And all the respectable people, like Nancy Pelosi, telling people, please go to Chinatown to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Bill de Blasio of New York, saying, despite coronavirus, get out there.
Lead your lives.
Don't let this thing hold you back.
These people need to resign.
Nancy Pelosi should resign.
It's one thing to say we don't have enough information about this.
It's another thing to say take the information that's coming in, disregard it, and get back in there and keep fueling the economy.
This is exactly our leadership class, their problem.
They think about this in short-term economics.
The long-term implications of us all sheltering in place, nobody can compute the consequences of it.
Not one person in the world knows what happens when you run this experiment.
The Made in America argument was always like sort of frivolous, almost xenophobic.
Like, why do you want things made in America?
What do you care?
Do you not like people from other countries?
Do you not want to buy things from other countries?
It was like this Made in America thing was like people disregarded it in a lot of ways.
But when you realize that all of our medical supplies, like so much of our electronics, so much of all the stuff that you need to kind of keep things exactly the way they are, it's cheaper to make it over there because they will, like what we saw with Foxconn, where they put nets around the building to keep people from jumping off.
And the weirdest thing was people trying to argue that the suicide rate at Foxconn was essentially the same as the suicide rate in the general population.
There's nets around where they work because so many people where they work jump off the building to end their life because their life sucks that bad that they kill themselves at work.
Do you know how rare it is to kill yourself at work?
Probably pretty fucking rare.
You know how common it is where you have to put nets around the building?
You're like, look, we're getting really tired of people going to the roof and jumping off because it's the easiest way to kill yourself.
The problem is we are all hooked up to this need for cheap products, profits, when we can't figure out how to innovate enough to actually create the juice in our own system.
Because if you were to build the optimal phone and then people stopped renewing everything, then your system weirdly breaks down.
So it makes sense at the level of the phone that you wouldn't want to do that.
But weirdly in aggregate, if you can't start innovating, if you can't figure out how to restart innovation in a big way, now you're stuck with either having to learn to live in steady state, which none of us, Americans have no program for living in steady state.
We need growth.
That was the whole point of the embedded growth obligation idea, that it's suffused throughout every institution.
And this is really highlighting that for a lot of people.
When people are home and they're with their families and they're not traveling, especially people like me and my peers, like a lot of my comedian friends who travel constantly, we're like, it's kind of nice to be home.
You know, everyone's sort of re-looking at this, like, is this life that we've sort of accepted as this is the way things are, is this really the way things should be?
Or is this just we just got caught in a pattern and we're operating on momentum?
Well, by the way, I should just say, one of the great things about moving back to LA has been your invitations to come hang with the comedians at the store.
What a great scene.
I mean, you made this point to me about a renaissance.
And then I think I sent you David Burns' book about music, The Chapter on CBGB.
And it's almost an exact map of what CBGB did as the Harvard of punk to the comedy stores Oxford of Comedy.
Even when non-comedians like yourself and Melissa and Matt and some of their friends and all these other people come there and they're around these people, they act freer.
They're laughing louder.
They're making more off-color jokes and everyone's just laughing, having fun.
That's one of the reasons I wasn't like gung-ho and Tulsi.
I didn't like some of the stuff about in India there's some issues about Modi, and I don't want to get into that.
But if you ask, like, who would you want to, like, who has that kind of lockdown military, we have to make sense, the bullshit needs to leave the room?
The odd thing is it's a millennial female of color that I would immediately want to subordinate to.
The scale of the screw-up and trying to even understand a government that I cannot trust as far as I can throw it, to feel contempt for the Surgeon General of the United States, to say that the World Health Organization is a danger to world health, to say that the CDC is lying.
I hate being in a position where I believe these things.
This is the weird thing because really before COVID, I was in this Bernie Yang Tulsi mindset, which is just what is the furball that I can shove down the throat of the DNC to make the party fall apart under that Hillary Clinton overhang.
The weird thing is, in an actual pandemic, I am almost positive that she has the stuff.
But how interesting that, like, when the shit hits the fan, the person with the highest number of intersectional points, maybe, is actually the person that you want to lead on merit.
I think that we need to revisit some stuff, which all of this anger and ferocity that we were using to stand up to social engineering invading the mainstream conversation.
I believe that COVID proves that it is deadly.
That if your top concern is not appearing xenophobic, people will die because you are functionally incompetent.
Well, the idea that you can put a negative sign in front of Donald Trump and form an opinion that if he's stupid, then whatever the reverse of what he does is smart is itself moronic.
Well, that's lumping me in with, well, that's what I'm trying to say.
But this is the problem, which I think I get this actually better than you, which is you have a beautiful life, and you recognize that part of it comes with humility of not thinking too much of yourself, being self-deprecating, all these things.
I think that those are all to your credit.
It is also time to lead.
And if you believed that you having to break out of whatever mindset you're in could be the difference between saving physicians' lives and nurses' lives, you'd do it.
Okay, well, this thing is the flagship of pirate radio.
I mean, this is Samizdat for the world.
And the concept of Samizdat, that you would have truth that would circulate underground in the Soviet Union that would not be, like, you are seldom rebroadcast inside of like MSNBC or CNN, except when they're like going after you.
Well, because Fox, there are two sort of dominant narratives.
Fox News is the flagship inside the right of center gated institutional narrative, and then you have all the other organs like MSNBC, CNN, NPR, BuzzFeed, whatever these things are in the left-of-center gated institutional narrative.
Very often Fox will pick up on things that we do if they stick it in the eye of the left.
And so the point is that they selectively amplify us.
And that process of selective amplification is itself dangerous.
Like I get invited more frequently by Fox and people, and I turn them down because the narrative inside of like the New York Times is, well, he's part of that right-wing thing.
Well, I think they realize the limitations of their medium.
I really do.
I think that CNBC and MSNBC and CBS and NBC and ABC, they all realize that they're in this really weird situation where they have to do these seven-minute segments interrupted by commercials.
They have a restriction.
They can only air at whatever time of night the show is supposed to be scheduled.
And they rely on these internet clips to sort of carry the show.
I mean, the YouTube clips are probably far more popular than anything they ever release that's on the air.
Well, he's a guy who's on the left also who thinks that a lot of the stuff, as I do and as you do as well, a lot of the stuff that's perpetrated by the people on the left is not just dangerous, but it empowers the right.
It empowers Trump supporters.
It gets people on the fence to give up and jump right and get welcomed.
I think that it's really important to use, I mean, I don't know him at all, but to the extent that that was a beachhead to connect these two universes, my model of this is that we've got this traditional legacy world and we've got this sort of internet world that hovers above it.
And in general, the insulating layer between them is astounding at this late date.
The number of things that happen on the internet that don't really have any echo inside of the mainstream is astounding in 2020.
And then you get these arcs that happen between the two.
So for example, the famous Sam Harris interaction with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher's show was an arcing between these two universes.
What she was doing, she was trying to get away with this same strategy that she has lazily employed before, this sort of general boxing and categorizing of someone's opinions that don't really represent their actual opinions.
I mean, this is standard behavior for some newspapers and some journalists, right?
The unscrupulous ones, unfortunately.
But this model doesn't work anymore because anyone can go on YouTube and instantly say, my time on the Kathy Newman show, this is what went wrong, and this is why she did this, and this is what they told me in the green room, and this is what, blah, blah, blah, blah.
My take on it is that the great thing about we have an ability to do almost anything we want on YouTube so long as we don't get shut down.
Let's say that.
However, you also have this concern that as long as this world remains gated, if, for example, you have a closed world of people who are pretending to have conversations amongst themselves discussing the issues, and then you have the institutions say,
we're only going to deal with the authoritative sources, then the problem is that if you have a state of pretend, you know, LARPing or K-Fabe, whatever you want to call it, that's taking place inside the gated institutional narrative, the institutions are going to predicate their actions on the official nonsense.
And whatever we do on YouTube, as long as there is an insulating layer, unless we can actually lob something into the wall, you know, over the walls of the Citadel, they will continue to actually act as if we'd never said anything, we never pointed it out.
It's like you're at this kid's magic show, which the magician is completely incompetent and the lights are on, and you can see all the wires and trapdoors.
And the magic show continues to go on.
And so you may make the point, well, everybody can see that it's bullshit.
But as long as the institutions agree to pretend that they believe the bullshit, we have a real problem.
But there's still a function, unfortunately, to the – so I love the point that you're making.
I'm just trying to figure out how to play with it.
Let's assume that there is no mainstream left.
What we're really talking about is legacy institutional media.
And the great danger is that assume that the mainstream completely exits the building and it's only 10,000 people trading bullshit amongst themselves, but they also control all the institutions.
So like you, the world, gets to keep reality.
And we, the institutions, agree to traffic in bullshit.
You can make lots of jokes at our expense, but we are also going to be figuring out whether we're going to stock masks or what our farming policy is or how the U.S. military should be deployed and where we should send troops to protect oil fields and all these kind of things.
And that's what's concerning me, is that a lot of us are settling for being right and having them look like idiots.
And their point is, okay, fine, we'll continue on.
We'll look like idiots, but we also still control the levers.
So with legacy media, your assertion is that legacy media has a much more impactful presence in terms of foreign policy, in terms of dealing with pandemic, the response, things along those lines.
Yeah, I mean, what we have is a situation in which we knew that the mask and personal protective equipment supplies are wildly off, to say nothing of ventilators and ICU beds.
And now, what do we do about it?
So we have rules like, please don't bring masks to work because it scares the patients.
Or please don't wear homemade masks because they might actually be more germ-filled or virus-filled.
So you're back propagating what you wish to be true to get the action that you're looking for.
What we have is a prisoner's dilemma, where if everybody runs and buys up masks, who like the people we need to be protected most are the heroes who are actually dealing with multiple COVID patients and taking huge amounts of viral load.
So there's no question in my mind that those are the people that as a society, if you would level with us.
Like there is a speech to give, which would go like this.
My fellow Americans, as readiness czar, I am forced to tender my resignation effective of Friday this week.
I have failed to heed many of the warnings in our academic literature.
Because our reserves are severely depleted, it is imperative that we not suffer further loss of life.
And therefore, I am forced to make an unusual request.
Having failed you, I'm asking everyone who stockpiled masks for personal use to think about doing something sacrificial for the good of us all.
Our heroes are currently exposed to the coronavirus and taking huge amounts of viral load.
And I'm asking you to donate any unused masks that you have to this population as we are desperately trying to replenish our stocks.
Please continue to shelter in place and recognize that the benefit to you is minor and the benefit to us all is major.
And this will be following your heroic impulse to bring us back together as a nation.
civil disobedience like to put our health care people i mean i have not been off my property for The reason I'm here in part is to do what little I can and it's very little to support the people who are our literal heroes, our life and death, putting themselves in harm's way.
The idea of hospital administrators abusing our physicians and nurses makes me apoplectic with rage.
The fact that these people are told that they can't talk to the press and they write to me and their family and their children write to me.
It is time for these people to resign and it is time for us to remember that we have the ability to turn over our own government.
We are so unprepared as a nation.
And we have been sold out for so long by our self-appointed leadership class who nobody wants that we either remember who we are and how this game is played.
I mean, this is like, this is a pre-war footing.
And this can easily lead to war.
The transmission mechanism is you have everybody stay indoors because you're worried about deaths of accountability, which is, you know, I don't think they're worried about the number of deaths.
I think they're worried about deaths that result from triage and that would result in career-ending action.
Yes, and then if we all have to stay home while they replenish our supplies, then the economy goes into recession.
Recession can become depression.
Depressions lead to armed conflict and armed conflict leads to war.
That would be a transmission mechanism from these stupid masks to something that nobody can handle.
And my it here's the thing.
We are coming up on Passover.
And we Jews have a tradition that I wish everybody had, which is that we read one stupid story every goddamn year just to drill it into your head to make sure it's always fresh.
And this is, when it's time to leave, when it's time to change, don't wait for the bread to rise.
This is what I say to every Jewish person.
Like, you're sitting around waiting for the bread to rise because they all know the story, which is you eat the goddamn matzah because the people who waited for the bread to rise are no longer with us and their descendants are no longer with us.
And it is time to revolt.
This leadership class is unworkable.
The reason that you and I both came to the word Tulsi instantly, I don't think you took much deliberation, is because Tulsi would know what to do.
I think that they use surveillance and tracking and making sure that they visited anybody who was known.
I mean, they had a different system.
And as people like you and me who love our civil liberties, I believe that in part, Singapore's draconian society lives off of things that only we can do due to our freedom.
So you have to realize that freedom is itself an export.
And one of the great dangers is that China has been exporting the benefits of freedom from the United States into an authoritarian system so that they get the benefits of both worlds.
They get the benefits of our middle finger, which I think is the secret of American innovation.
And they get the benefits of authoritarianism where they can do things that we can't because they can order people to do the unconscionable.
So my feeling is I'm on team civil liberties and team civil liberties has to be somewhat nationalistic, more militaristic, more command and control.
Like, who would you take orders from?
So in a lot of fields, I'd take orders from you.
You're the big dog in this space, you know?
And to the extent that you wanted to coordinate something, I would use my channel.
I would subordinate to you.
And I would want sometimes people to subordinate to me if I was taking a lead on something important.
When we have this fear of leadership, because we're all so individualistic that we never want to take an order, like whenever I'm training a new assistant or something, one of my always best practices is, can I get you coffee?
You know, it's very important to show that the ability to ask to serve somebody else and the ability to lead are tied.
You have to be a follower to be a leader and a leader to be a follower.
You shouldn't be one or the other.
We need right now a more war, we need more of a war footing.
We need a war president.
We need war senators.
We need people of this mentality because the NAP is coming to an end.
And I do think Nancy Pelosi needs to resign and Bill de Blasio needs to resign.
I think that this administration made some good moves and fumbled the ball.
And I believe that past administrations made some good moves and fumbled the ball.
And the imperative is to stop backpropagating what you want us to do, like defeat a prisoner's dilemma, and come up with the lie that would cause us to act selfishly rationally.
Like if you tell me that a mask is actually more dangerous in my hands because it becomes germ-filled, then the idea is like, oh, okay, so I guess I won't use the mask.
Well, yeah, because you lied to me, and the idea is that that's what you're trying to do.
You're trying to say what would need to be true to get you to do what I want.
And I say, you know, Joe, a seatbelt could trap you.
Should your car go into the water off of a bridge, you could in fact die from the seatbelt because you'd become entangled and would not be able to save yourself.
And now the idea is think about all the lives saved because of masks, both in terms of transmission, which I don't cough on you, I cough into the mask, or in terms of I don't breathe in either aerosolized or droplets, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And now the two are real, but you're focusing on the seatbelt deaths of entanglement because you actually have a covert agenda.
One, we're terrified of triage deaths, deaths that occurred simply because we didn't have enough resources that were mandated to be stockpiled or talked about in the literature.
That's one thing that there's liability, which is, oh, we were following the Surgeon General's recommendation at the time.
Now, if somebody suddenly found, you know, like all the masks in the world, I think that the Surgeon General would suddenly say the science has become conclusive.
As regards the masks, I believe that everybody knows that masks save lives on balance.
They know that the people who need the most have very weird rules.
There's this whole thing about the states versus the federal government.
There's this issue about price gouging and price mechanisms.
There are all sorts of things stopping the mask problem from being sorted out, one of which is the number of masks that are produced in China and the fact that we may have sent masks and personal protective equipment to China.
So there's a huge issue of accountability and responsibility and that we're backpropagating our response.
How much are we quarantined and how much are we locked down?
What are we saying about why the physicians are being told not to wear masks when they're seeing patients?
I mean, I'm talking about deadly nonsense, deadly structural nonsense.
And if people like you and me don't call this out using like these crazy channels that we have, then the narrative just stands.
And so partially what we're doing is a parallel sense-making operation to the standard media, which is Twitter said, we will now be removing tweets if you contradict official authoritative health sources.
So that's just what I did.
Surgeon General's lying, CDC is lying, WHO is lying.
He was asked about the Taiwanese response to the COVID epidemic.
And he didn't want to say Taiwan because China claims that Taiwan is part of China.
And because China exercises so much influence over the WHO, he wanted to say some very general thing, which is like, I think all provinces of China have been doing an excellent job.
I hate to say it this way, but my relationship with authority, and my big critique, is that this is the generic expectation across almost all institutions now.
They are all serving bizarre goals because growth is what gave us our independence.
And when we became less innovative and the innovation dried up and we couldn't grow our way into new things, the number of people who could use their middle finger effectively and say, I'm steering this organization to do the right thing, and this is my bet, and we're going to go forward.
Those people as a class were removed.
If you think about like, what do you do with Churchill when there isn't a World War II to win?
It's very uncomfortable.
Like, would he open a dry cleaner?
We don't know.
You have special people who really only shine when there's an emergency.
There's a guy named Jaiprakash Narayan in India, who's very important.
And he was one of the sort of founding fathers of modern India.
And after Indian independence was achieved, lots of the people who had been founding fathers went to the next phase where they became like, they enriched themselves or they did standard political things to gain power in the system.
He was the one guy who sort of stayed true to the revolutionary spirit.
And bizarrely, when Indira Gandhi created a state of emergency, which was a disaster in India, the people said, well, who can we turn to in a dark time?
And oddly, I guess prakash means light.
So there was this phrase, like in the darkness there is one light, jaiprakash, jaiprakash, jaiprakash.
They turned to the one guy who'd become the patron saint of lost causes because he never broke faith with the revolutionary spirit.
And he gets called up once, but he's incredibly important because everybody knows in a dark time who they can trust.
Right?
That's a very important parallel to where we are now.
Who are the break glass in case of emergency people?
Yeah, when you watch the people that are talking in these presidential addresses, there's none of those.
I don't see any break glass.
I mean, this Fauci guy is obviously an expert in diseases, and he's a doctor, and he's trying to do his best to lay out the ground rules of what we need to do and what this looks like over the next couple of months.
And that's what I'm trying to get at, which is we have a situation where we know if you have two trainers and one of them is doing the don't worry and the other one is saying, I'm not going to lie to you.
The whole thing, look, Joe Biden being the main guy is the only reason why they went after Bernie Sanders and went after me.
I mean, the whole idea was just to reinforce the idea that Bernie Sanders is making poor choices by connecting him to someone who says fucked up things when he's trying to be funny.
But this is the whole thing about the gated institutional narrative.
The key issue, and I learned this when I used to do immigration stuff in Washington during the 90s.
I learned this concept of steady hands.
This is like one of the most terrifying phrases ever.
So I told you, I think at some point, that in New York, whenever people are deciding to do a bad thing to screw people over, they always use the phrase, it's a beautiful thing, meaning that you can extract money from people who have no say in the matter.
So whenever you hear the phrase, it's a beautiful thing, it means somebody is being raped financially.
In Washington, the phrase that I learned to fear is steady hands.
He's a pair of steady hands.
That means you can count on him to do the wrong thing in an emergency to keep everybody on the inside okay.
And there's like a separate system for promoting the people who do the wrong thing and making sure, because everybody inside is super dependent on somebody burning all of their credibility in public.
When Amy Klobuchard dropped out, who was like a baby boomer born in the, I'm going to say 61, something like that, everyone remaining was born in the 1940s.
Elizabeth Warren was the youngest.
Then you had like Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump.
So everyone was like born between 41 and 49.
Now, all of those people would be the oldest president, all of them, the oldest president at inauguration.
Like we've lost our mind.
This is normal to us.
This isn't really commented upon that you would have five for five septogenarians vying for the presidency of the United States.
But we've seen deterioration from Trump, particularly earlier.
In the first year or two of his term, there's some spectacular videos of him falling apart where he couldn't enunciate words.
He couldn't say words correctly while he's speaking to the country.
His tongue was like swollen in his throat.
It was very strange, right?
But people think of that as maybe a substance issue.
Like he goes up and he goes down and sometimes he catches it on the wrong part of the wave and that's when he's in front of the camera and he, you know, he struggles through it, but he literally can't pronounce words.
But then he'll bounce back and he'll be fine.
Joe Biden's not bouncing back.
You know, whether he has an aversion to the same sort of supplements that Donald's using, I don't know.
So when, by the way, if you want to read a great book on professional wrestling, I would highly recommend the book Ringside, which talks about the evolution.
And so what I call K fabrication is the transition of something that usually has twin attributes, is very dangerous and very boring.
So old-style wrestling was incredibly dangerous.
I mean, people would be crippled from about.
So as a result, they would often just circle each other and not really engage.
And war is like this.
Mostly war is extremely boring and then obviously can be quite deadly.
So in order to routinize these things, we create KFABE, which is the system of stratified lies that professional wrestling is undergirded by.
And some of Pride actually was founded by Hicks and Gracie, who was as legit as a man as ever lived, and Takata, who was a famous professional wrestler.
He came from, I believe, Carl Gotch and Billy Costello, and I think that's the name of the gentleman.
There was a bunch of people who taught him catch wrestling.
So his style was submission-oriented catch wrestling.
He had like both.
He was involved in professional wrestling as well, but he was a legit fighter.
Anyway, the point was there was a weird blurring of the lines, and there were some fights like Mark Coleman had a fight with Takata where it was really clear that Mark Coleman got paid to take a dive because Mark Coleman should have smashed that dude.
And he gets caught in his heel hook and he doesn't tap.
He's going to tap.
Then he winds up tapping.
And everybody's like, whoa.
But everyone watching that knows fighting was like, get the fuck out of here.
And this is what happened in the transition in the early 20th century between catch wrestling and professional wrestling is that you start doping reality with fakeness.
And the thing I was asking about about the worked shoot, it has to do with the layering of nonsense and reality.
So the idea is that you have something which is ostensibly fake.
Then you have a breaking of K-Fabe, ostensibly, which is the shoot on top of the expected work.
But a worked shoot is tertiary in that the shoot is in self-fake.
It's a fake, real fight that appears to break out of a fake thing that is pretending to.
Maybe it's quaternary.
The brain can't go much beyond four levels of lies, right?
And so you had a famous storyline, I can't remember who it was, where a wrestler was apparently supposedly having an affair with another wrestler's wife, and that was the storyline.
So the people who write these things are called bookers.
So the bookers had come up with this storyline, and then the affair became real because the brain couldn't sort of manage all of the deception.
And so, you know, oddly, I was fascinated by the moment where Vince McMahon declared, I think, to the New Jersey Sporting Commission, he made this unbelievable, it was like one of the great moments in the 20th century, I think.
He realized that he was going to be taxed into oblivion.
And so he had a choice.
Should he pay this tax or do something really bold?
And he went in front of them and he said, you realize that everything we do is fake.
Now, that could have completely toppled the wrestling world.
The admission that there was no reality to this was a potential death blow.
So he said, this is all staged.
All the fights are the winners are known in advance.
You can't tax us because we aren't actually a sport and you don't have any jurisdiction over us.
And then it turned out nobody cared.
Right?
And so the interesting thing is that they used to have this concept of a smark.
A mark is somebody who doesn't know they're being conned.
A smart mark or smark is somebody who knows that they're being conned and still continues to play.
So in some sense, it was the bet that you could take all the marks and turn them into smarks and the business empire would continue and you wouldn't have to pay the tax.
So I was hanging out as one does with Hulk Hogan and I was trying to check whether or not this was true.
And he said to me, Eric, you realize who came up with that strategy?
Me.
So I was like, what?
So he says, yeah, I was the one who said that we should.
You know, he's lost like four inches of height because of all his back surgeries.
Yeah.
I first met him like way, way, way back in the day.
I ran into him.
I didn't meet him, meet him.
I just ran into him on the street in Beverly Hills.
I was like, holy fuck.
And then I interviewed him for Spike TV back in the day when Spike TV was, they were doing professional wrestling on Spike TV and they wanted me to interview him while I was doing the UFC.
So I interviewed him.
We had a fun time together.
But he was considerably smaller.
It was really interesting.
It's like that was just, oh, there's Belzer.
So he put Belzer in what we would call like a power guillotine.
And look, Belzer's out cold right here.
Watch the left arm.
There it is.
Out cold.
So watch it just drops him.
That could have killed him.
That part right there where he falls and he bangs his head off the ground.
Like he just dropped him like he was on a padded mat or something like that.
You really should never do that to someone.
But they don't worry about their self because they put themselves into so much danger.
I mean, these guys are the punishment kings of the world.
Yeah.
And they're extremophiles in that sense.
Now, what my belief is, is that we are, it's real in the sense that the injuries, the death rate, the skill levels, and most of those guys could really fight.
They may not be UFC level fighters, but a lot of them come out of wrestling backgrounds, like legitimate.
So I think, what was it, in 2013 or 11, John Brockman asked the question, what's the scientific theory that nobody knows that would make the biggest impact in people's cognitive toolkit?
And I'd just been allowed to answer this question along with like actual legitimate people.
And so I was kind of like being very protective.
And my wife said, you know, you could give a lot of answers to that question, but that's not the one you want to give.
Do Kayfabe.
Like I had this theory that Kayfabe was the most important psychological theory that nobody really appreciated.
That in some sense, professional wrestling is light years ahead in understanding how the human mind actually works because of the issues of that deception.
And so I wrote up Kayfabe, which is going to determine wars and presidential elections.
And then sure enough, Donald Trump comes directly out of WWE.
Like he really understands.
if you look at that fight with Vince McMahon, Donald Trump intuits professional wrestling, and it is a superpower.
Jamie, can I ask you to bring up Weinstein and kayfabe and see if...
I mean, that is an excellent point of what he does, is that there's a part of his appeal is that he's speaking in, he's like, he's hitting a certain frequency that provides comfort and it narrows the boundaries of what's possible and puts things into some very digestible form that morons love.
You know what I'm talking about?
I'm not saying that all people that are Trump supporters are morons.
There's people that support him economically.
But there's a lot of people that are morons that like him because he's talking in this frequency.
There's a narrow band.
He's not going to say anything crazy that's like self-deprecating or introspective, or he's not going to prepare you for the great beyond or include you in his concerns for the demise of civilization and Western values.
That's not in him.
He's got a bandwidth.
He's got a very narrow band.
And inside that band, he's the king.
Ratings are tremendous, tremendous.
Everyone's doing a great job.
We're doing a great job.
He says these things that they reinforce this sort of pro-wrestling sort of vibration.
I mean, it was a bit of a mismatch, but she is polite and sweet to a fault.
She's trying to be thoughtful.
I really admire her courage.
She doesn't want body augmentation.
So she's got a non-classical porn body.
She chose to do a trans scene because it was erotically interesting to her, even though she was told that it would kill her brand.
She doesn't necessarily, sometimes she shaves her body hair, sometimes she doesn't.
Hey.
So there's a lot of what she does that I think is incredibly admirable.
And I got to know of her because she came to a show that I did with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris in San Francisco, and she was tweeting out that she was a huge Sam Harris fan.
And then I saw something she did where she was talking about it was impossible for her to get banking and regular services as a pornographic actress.
Operation Chokepoint was, I think, an Obama-era Department of Justice initiative to try to make it very difficult to engage in legal occupations like payday lending and things or porn.
Yeah, and so they would, I think they used the FDIC to harass credit card companies and banks into not making it easy for these people to gain access to ordinary services.
So I've been very concerned about the ways in which the authoritarians attempt to regulate who can do what, who can say what, say what, where, get banking behavior, you know.
And then there's like chargeback issues where marginal businesses, you know, people will cancel their credit cards.
But in fact, if you're doing a business where very few people are canceling the credit cards, they'll still claim that they won't work with you because of the risk of cancellation.
So there's this whole thing where we harass and tax PayPal payouts no longer supported.
I believe that once upon a time, the San Fernando Valley was the head of prostitution, head of pornographic acting and movie production because it couldn't be charged as prosecution.
Now, Ashley makes the point that she is comfortable being called a commercial sex worker.
So in some sense, prostitution adjacent, but not prostitution.
And to your question about how did that go, I was quite nervous about having a pornographic actress as a guest.
And I think it's important that if this is going to have a huge effect, like dark matter, you know, you feel its gravitational effect, but nobody can actually see it because you can't talk about it.
I think that it's absolutely imperative that we make more connection to Planet Porn and talk about what's going on, what does it say about us, and the ways in which, you know, they've got great data.
The way OKCupid has great data on what's going on in the world of courtship, porn has great data on what's going on in the world of kink and eroticism.
And, you know, for example, she pointed out that incest porn surges around the holidays when people are spending time with their families.
That's an interesting one because you had a really good point in that people, when they hear that this is a Project Veritas thing, and for people who don't know who he is, James O'Keefe and Project Veritas, they've done a lot of work exposing some biases that are held by some of the people that work in these social media groups, social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook and things like that.
But the way they've done it is all through hidden camera type stuff.
And there's a narrative that people love to use where they go, oh, that guy, he uses selective editing, or that guy, you can't believe anything they say.
Because you're listening to these people talking, and they're talking about how they marginalize right-wing viewpoints.
They look for people who have like MAG in their headline, and they put them in certain categories where it makes it very difficult for people to get their stuff that the algorithm supports, you know, that they know how to marginalize these perspectives and these points of view.
And it's really weird that no one, they've found this strange way of describing it, where even though you see it on video, you hear people say things that should be outrageous to anyone who believes in objective reality.
And yet people love to say that's just a Project Veritas thing.
Amanda Fielding, Countess Amanda Fielding, is the head of the Beckley Foundation for the scientific study of psychedelic and related substances in the UK, who I think works with Imperial College.
The belief that she had was that your brain expands to fill your brain case, and that when it runs into a hard stop, that the blood circulation has changed, and that when the blood circulation changes, you lose that sparkling clarity that comes from your sort of childhood.
And so if you remember how clear the world was when you were a kid, her belief was by relieving the pressure from the brain case, that you actually get a kind of permanent upgrade in your cognition and the level at which you're experiencing all of reality.
And so people were just putting huge amounts of LSD in things and having terrible experiences.
And I thought, well, okay, this is completely.
She's crazy because I know it's acid.
And so I just had this image that you pour acid on a brain and it turns it into menthol or cheese with lots of the holes.
And sure enough, like we don't even know what the lethal dosage of LSD is.
Right.
At a physiological rather than at a software level, it seems to be incredibly well tolerated because it's the only thing that has this effect in such tiny trace amounts.
She had a pet bird called Birdie, and she built a mausoleum to her pet bird in the form of some sort of a conical earth outcropping that in order to reach it, I think you have to walk over Doric columns that cross over these old columns from Greek temples.
And so the tops of them form steps across a moat, and it's guarded by attack swans.
So you can take nothing at all psychoactive, and then you're visiting this woman, visiting her bird's mausoleum, being attacked by swans, walking over Greek columns to cross a moat.
Drilling holes in your head is really where I draw the line.
cheers to that that just seems I mean I don't think there's any real science to relieving pressure by drilling a fucking hole in I think you're just relieved by the fact that you've taken this really radical step outside of the norm and decided you're going to be the person who drills a fucking hole in your head.
I mean, I don't think she's sorry, I just, I generally, I think she's as eccentric as the day is long, but I'm such an admirer of people who are willing to try to cross the adaptive valley and do it and fund their own expedition.
Yeah, but like, I want you to think about, and there are much better videos than this where these giant waves and things go through.
The people who are bringing transcendence and grace and beauty to our lives when they're hounded because of like what language they've used, things that like self-experimentation, advocacy for psychedelics.
I'm very, it's very important that we have rule breakers, mavericks, people that you might call crazier lunatics, and that we be very gentle and celebratory.
I don't know the specifics of his plea, and I don't want to say anything that could screw him up, but I imagine that, you know, the issue was something to do with a large cannabis business.
I mean, I'm not opining that he didn't break the law, but I also think at some level, when you go back, I mean, you know, when you see cannabis being advertised everywhere and you grew up in a world in which only bad people did that.
Yeah, Indica definitely gives you some pretty wild thoughts.
It's really, it perturbs normal consciousness, right?
And in that perturbation, if that's a word, is that a word?
That's a word, right?
In that adjusting of your normal perceptions, that's where these new ideas come in.
That's where these new, it's almost like you get a little chance to pop your head off the top of the clouds and look around and go, oh, this is not what I think it is.
This is some weird thing.
You know, and I got really high the other day and I made a post on Instagram about Joe Exotic and Donald Trump and then this thing.
And I was like saying, like, here's what's weird.
Like, the thing that keeps coming to me when I get high is not, it's that, this idea that one day things are going to get back to normal.
And the idea is that there never really was a normal, that it was just an attractive illusion.
And that it's a comforting and attractive illusion.
And I used a photo of Joe Exotic in one of Donald Trump's most ridiculous tweets where he was talking about the coronavirus and how he's a huge hit and how John Trump's ragings.
Joe Exotic from the new Netflix documentary series called Tiger King, which must be a part of your life.
This is Donald Trump, the president of the United States, makes a self-congratulatory tweet that his talking about a pandemic virus that could potentially kill as many as 200,000 Americans.
But me, as a high person in the valley, sitting on my back porch while my kids are asleep, looking at this tweet, I'm like, well, I don't even think there is a normal.
I don't think normal's real.
I don't think normal's real.
I think we've been hoodwinked.
Normal's not real.
I don't think it is.
I don't think it's real.
I think it's...
That's one of the things that I love about nature.
You know, we were watching a video yesterday of an owl eating the head off of a hawk because I was explaining there was a sort of a hawk war that went on in my backyard at one point in time.
These owls killed these hawks and I would find these headless hawks.
The only way that a female can bear young is if a male attacks her thorax and breaks it open in an act which is definitely called traumatic insemination.
Jesus.
So, you know, you have a situation in which violent rape is the only method by which females can leave young.
There's a different system which I think is fascinating, which is there's a conserved quantity in dung beetles where they have weaponry on their heads in the form of antlers for fighting the males.
And it turns out that there's an inverse relationship.
So there's some resource that's allocated between the copulatory equipment and the weaponry that the dung beetle has.
If they have a lot of weaponry – oh, there goes the Sean Connery.
If you don't have it going on, you've got to go get yourself a monster truck.
Looks like that tiny little gun embedded black.
Anyway, so what happens is that the size of the copulatory apparatus may be the engine of speciation.
That when a male's equipment no longer fits the female, that may be the cue that some dung beetles will speciate because they can't reproduce effectively.
And we don't know why the conserved quantity would be spread between fighting equipment, which is used only to displace rivals, and the size of the package.
When I went on a tour of the Vatican, I had a really great guide.
It was really cool.
He took my family through this thing, and he was a professor, and he was really happy that I was so curious about things.
And I was on an edible.
Don't tell my family.
And so we were wandering around billions of dollars of stolen art.
And one of the things I kept saying, I go, why are their penises so small?
Like, what's going on with that?
And he was like, that's a really important question.
And he's like, back then, the thought was that bigger penises were brutish and that they were, that these, you know, you've got to realize these are people that were fending off barbarians.
The idea was that their gods would be beautifully proportioned, but they would have these small, sort of less dangerous penises.
That's the reason why women find that build attractive, probably, other than the fact that it's going to be the person who'd be more successful at protecting you from said barbarians.
This is one of the Michael Jackson stories that I was promoting before it actually was confirmed by his doctor, the doctor that winded up killing him and went to jail.
I was like, the way that guy sings, because I was aware of castratis.
I'm like, he sounds like one of them.
Like, he sounds like he has this permanent female voice.
Well, the doctor that went to jail for sedating him and when he wound up dying, Dr. Jackson, whatever the guy's name was, that guy confirmed that Michael Jackson was chemically castrated by his father to preserve his voice.
They would have inspired a taste for Gamora in people whose taste is the least depraved.
What?
And when Casanova fell in love with a castrato who conveniently turned out to be a woman in drag, he asked her to dress as a castrato in bed.
Okay, I'm done.
Check, please.
For those women, for those women who choose, as Dryden put it, to, in quotes, in soft eunuchs place their bliss and shun the scrubbing of a bearded kiss.
Yeah, they wanted someone who eats a lot of pussy.
Affairs were idolized and safe, but bed hopping could be risky for the castrati.
One was assassinated by his lover's furious family, and another who wrote to the Pope requesting permission to marry on the basis of that his castration had been ineffective, received a reply: Let him be castrated better.
The Pope said, No, you can't get married.
We're going to cut your nuts off better.
We're going to do a better job.
All mouth and no trousers, castrati had more fun than you could think.
Hello, Guardian.
That's a great fucking Samantha Ellis meets a singer who wishes he'd had the chop.
And if you want to think about partnerships between men and women and the way in power is passed back and forth between people of equal abilities, just astounding.
That's one of the more amazing things about computer technology.
the footage that they did with World War I, where they took some of that footage and colorized it and smoothed it out and used computers to sort of fill in the choppiness of it.
The Brett one is a story about his prediction that all the laboratory mice that we use from the major supplier, which is the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, may have been compromised by their breeding protocols, which allowed the telomeres to radically elongate.
And that we thought that these mice were representative of all mice and that they had radically elongated telomeres at the end of their chromosomes, which appear to mediate the level of mitosis that can happen during histological repair.
So if you imagine that your cells can divide a certain number of times, if there isn't a counter that stops the number of divisions, everything can become tumorous.
And since you have like 30 trillion or 100 trillion cells in your body, it means every cell almost can kill you.
So it appears that the reason we may die from senescence, that is aging, is that that's our anti-cancer mechanism.
So if you eliminate like infectious disease like viruses and insult from being hit by a car, the two things that you have in the end is either you die from immortality, which is cancer, which where cells can divide an infinite number of times, or you die from the recursion limit, which is how many times the cell can divide, called in biology, the Hayflick limit.
And Brett predicted from First Principles that what we thought about mice, which is that they have radically elongated telomeres, was only true for laboratory animals because all the laboratory animals in which we test things like drugs have been broken.
Yep, because the breeding rotations privileged much younger mice and removed all sort of threats from the environment.
And so because telomeres are not protein coding, they're sequences of nucleotides that repeat as a counter rather than coding for a translation in the ribosome into amino acid sequences.
What you have is that the body can mutate, if you will, to use the Jackson Laboratory's concept of this, very rapidly because it's not building something structural.
It's just a question of do we have 17 on the end or 170 on the end?
Because it's acting nucleic acid has multiple ways in which it can participate in regulating the body's responses.
So in fact, the breeding protocols constituted a novel system of selective pressures that destroyed the efficacy of all of our laboratory animals, potentially.
And so he predicted from First Principles, he said, I bet if you test wild-type mice rather than laboratory mice, you'll find that their telomeres are not long as you believe.
And this was actually carried out by Carol Grider, who did not acknowledge the prediction.
I mean, this episode, which is almost impossible to listen to, because at the beginning of the episode, I'm absolutely insufferable to Brett because he won't tell the story.
Because in academics, the idea of some punk kid alleging that they predicted in a telephone call to a Nobel laureate that if they would test wild-type mice, the telomeres would be radically shorter than the elongated telomeres of the laboratory test.
And then the person refuses to acknowledge that such a prediction was made, even though we have emails from the lab.
I cannot find a single, I've been over the literature, there is no mention anywhere of, and I live this with Brett in real time, so I know the events were happening.
We have communications with that lab since.
I cannot find any acknowledgement from the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory that this interaction ever took place.
And that because he called and wrote and did not write an email, he did not have a paper trail of that prediction.
Now, there's consequential emails that show the interaction between the labs.
But how many times have you ever heard anyone predict a molecular result from first principles in evolutionary theory?
This is what Brett was supposed to be famous for.
And then, you know, he became like this obscure professor at some ridiculous college, and then this thing happened to him.
But that's not his origin story.
His origin story is that he is the badass of biology who was able to make this prediction from first principles and may have advanced the theory of why we have to die balanced between deaths from immortality, that is tumors, and deaths from recursion limits, that is telomere-mediated hayflick limits.
But it puts the question out, how much research is compromised by the laboratory breeding protocols and breeding rotations from a single point of failure at the Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor, Maine.
There's a point after which I'm not Mr. Nice Guy, and I'm just like adamant.
Brett is simply wrong.
It's a result and a story that needs to be told.
If there is another side to the story, we need to hear the other side of the story.
And my goal is to have Carol Grider say, you know what, this interaction did happen, and I probably could have handled this better because she has work that she's done, which is beyond question some of the most important work that has nothing to do with anything Brett has done.
But it does not give that laboratory the scientific right to deny the existence of this interaction, the importance of the interaction.
And because there are potential downstream consequences in pharmaceuticals, we need to have an answer, and every answer is interesting.
Like, if the laboratory mice having radically elongated telomeres is not a problem in some way, that's fascinating.
How could you have an animal that has this huge adaptation to the laboratory not affect things?
Well, no, but if it doesn't have to do, like, for example, let's say you have a really toxic substance, right?
And it causes a lot of cell death that requires histological repair.
Well, if you have huge, long telomeres, you're going to have an ability to metabolize that toxicity much better.
Right.
You'll be able to take the insult that comes from this.
And so these mice are probably preternaturally disposed towards radical histological repair.
That's why they remain youthful and young.
And if you test something that might be, you know, if you're doing toxicology studies, it could be that the telomeres, even though you're not testing the telomeres, what you're actually doing is picking up that these broken mice are like the world champs of repair, but they suck at cancer.
Essentially, all the mice with radically elongated telomeres let go long enough all die of cancer because they're tricked out for one special thing, which is we are the best at repair.
Right, so think about it as the theory of death and clear away all of the noise.
There are two ways that nature can't figure out an escape from.
Either you die of immortality, which is that all your cells want to live forever, you know, and that's a huge death, a huge danger, or we call it a resource leak in computers, or they die because the only thing nature can figure out to do is to say you only get a finite number of cell divisions up front.
Now, there's some adjustments to the theory, but if you only get it, like if you if you look at the moles on my face, which your people love to comment on in the comment section, they probably started as a runaway replicative process that arrested at the border of the mole in order to keep it from killing me.
Right, so we have cells that go rogue all the time, but then what happens is that there's some means of making sure that the process doesn't take down the entire organism.
But think about 30 trillion assassins as the cells in your body, all of which might kill you at any moment.
So the best hope that I can come up with, and it's a slim one, is that if we could figure out what goes beyond Einstein's theory, the Einsteinian speed limit might be bendable or breakable because we would be in a framework that was larger than Einstein's.
People often interpret this as what they call FTL or faster than light travel.
But that's not what I mean necessarily.
What I mean is that the underlying source code gives us opportunities that we don't normally have.
So seven years ago, I tried to release, I tried giving these lectures at Oxford, which is probably the university that is spiritually closest to what I care about because they care about geometry and physics and the interrelationship.
They've kept the faith with that tradition through people like Roger Penrose and Michael Atia.
And I released this theory of geometric unity, or rather I released the video of the lecture that introduces this theory.
So this was the first time since 1983, 84 that I talked in public when I started this program when I was 18, 19, something like that.
And I just released the video today on our YouTube channel.
So it's introduced by Professor Marcus de Sotoy, who has Richard Dawkins' old job as the Simoni Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.
And he met me in a bar, and he got me a little drunk, and he said, okay, what are you really working on?
And I told him, and at first it sounded crazy, and then he started thinking about it.
And he asked me more questions, and he brought me over to Oxford.
He got me an appointment, had me talk to their experts.
And then he decided that he wanted me to give these, what he called, special Simoni lectures.
And they are an attempt to go beyond Einstein to look for a unified theory of physics between the two major branches that have resisted unification.
Now, that's usually, in the modern era, confused with the idea of quantizing gravity.
But the quantum gravity imperative is a political program that comes out of what would have been the quantum field theory community before it became the string theory community.
The idea is we have to take Einstein and make him submit to the will of Bohr.
And I don't think it's exactly like that there.
I think they got it wildly wrong, and they synchronized themselves and sort of took the field off the cliff, and they weren't able to ship a product and they couldn't deliver on any of this promise.
And so when I saw that they were about to go off a cliff, I switched fields as an undergraduate into mathematics and used mathematics as a stalking horse to study the same sort of underlying structures, but not to get swept up in the politics of physics.
And I had this theory, which I can now talk about for the first time in like 37 years or whatever it is.
And like today is the first day that I'm sort of free because I've kept this to myself.
So if you want to ask me any question about geometric unity.
Do you know that let's start off with Escher's drawing hands?
So do you, Jamie, do you have a picture for that?
The key problem that we have in a fundamental theory that people don't think about is not why is there something rather than nothing.
I don't think we can answer that.
It's why is there so much that is rich out of almost nothing?
And so this issue shows that if you had a piece of paper, could you will into being the hands holding pens using ink to draw each other, right?
That problem is akin to the problem that we face in a fundamental theory.
If you had the canvas, how would the canvas bring all of the richness that you see around you into being?
And what I did was I said, okay, we have to go below Einstein.
So we have four degrees of freedom, but they're not yet space and time.
It's proto-space-time, but before.
And then I said, okay, those four degrees of freedom are like the stands in a stadium.
And the stands somehow need to build the pitch.
And the pitch is a 14-dimensional space.
So if, let's imagine that you had, okay, we've got four objects here, right?
So the four degrees of freedom correspond to the four objects.
Then we need a ruler to measure how much of each of these four objects we have.
So that would be four additional variables.
And then you have angles, because length and angle is what Einstein gave us in space-time.
So the angles between any two objects are the same as the reverse of the angle.
So then you can count it up, and there's six angles to be had.
So there's four degrees of freedom plus four rulers plus six protractors, which is 14.
So there's a 14-dimensional auxiliary space.
And in my estimation, you and I are in some ways potentially having this conversation in a 14-dimensional world that we perceive back in the stands rather than on the pitch as a four-dimensional conversation.
That is, we are in a three-dimensional room going forward in time.
So, I've called this the observerse.
And the observerse is two spaces rather than Einstein's one space.
Because I'm saying that the fields, that is the stuff, is dancing not mostly on the four dimensions that we think we perceive, but it's also dancing on the rulers and the protractors.
So, in other words, if I have x, y, and z, I need rulers in the x direction, the y direction, the z to measure things.
And I need a watch, which would be like a ruler in the time direct.
So, those four rulers are, in fact, in play as well.
And the protractors, because space-time is four degrees of freedom plus rulers and protractors, I'm saying work over the space of all rulers and all protractors as part of where these particles and fields can dance.
So, the rulers and the protractors are part of the system, not just a choice of particular rulers and particular protractors.
So, by choosing particular rulers and particular protractors, Einstein is grabbing a tiny filament of the space of all possible rulers and protractors.
So, in effect, space-time is recovered as the act of the observerse contemplating itself.
That's a little bit poetic, but I mean that the choice of a space-time metric inside of the space of all metrics is a section of a 14-dimensional bundle over a four-dimensional space.
Now, that's the first sort of mind-bending weird thing, is that this is not happening in one place, it's happening in two places, in X and in Y, the stands and the pitch.
There are things that are happening in the stands, and there are things that are happening in the pitch.
So, you know what when a guy's like trying to make a free throw and everybody's waving their giant noodles trying to get him to miss, there's an interaction between what's happening in the stands and what's happening on the floor.
And the observerse is the bundling of two spaces and saying, hey, you're confused as to what's going on here.
Some fields are happening in the stands, some fields are happening on the floor, and everything feels as if it's happening in the stands because that's where you're sitting in some weird way.
Then you've got this really crazy stuff, which I think one aspect of it is everybody in theoretical physics is looking to figure out whether there are three or more generations that is copies of matter.
Everything in this room is generation one.
It's all made up of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons.
So, that up quarks and down quarks give you protons and neutrons, and electrons give you the sort of interesting personality of the various chemical elements.
There are also neutrinos, but they're streaming through us, so I'm not going to count them.
And that's all generation one of matter.
So, everything in that, think of that as like plastic Lego.
Then there's another Lego set made out of wood, and then there's another Lego set made out of like lead, you know, and we don't see those other two Lego sets except if we're doing very energetic experiments.
So, there were three copies of matter, and everybody was trying to figure out three or more, and I thought maybe it's two or fewer.
And so, one of the aspects of this theory is that the third generation of matter is an imposter.
It looks like this generation of matter in terms of its particle personalities.
But if you were actually to heat up the system, it would unify with a bunch of particles nobody's ever seen before.
And so, there are predictions for what those new particle properties would be.
There's also a fourth pseudo-generation of what would be called spin three-halves matter, which is not prohibited, but has never been seen as a fundamental.
So, it makes predictions for the particle properties of new spin-half and new spin-three-halves particles.
It attempts to say that there are sectors of matter that I think decoupled, that the universe is not, in fact, left-right asymmetric, which would be called chirality.
And if you think about the weak force, so if you have a neutron on a table, it'll decay in I think something like 17 minutes on average half-life.
When it decays, there's an asymmetry in that decay called beta decay.
And that was found by a woman, bring up Madame Wu from Columbia and the Cobalt-60 experiment.
So, in the 50s, this gal, Madame Wu, who should have won a Nobel Prize, discovered that when cobalt-60 decays through beta decay, the electrons come spin out one side and not the other, meaning that the universe is like Marilyn Monroe or Cindy Crawford having a birthmark that lets you tell the left from the right.
So, this is like the ultimate experimental badass who never got recognized fully.
And she did an experiment based on work of Yang and Li that for the first time showed that the universe had a preference of one of its left over its right, if you will.
I don't believe that preference is fundamental.
I believe that there's another copy of matter that so the analogy I give is that if you think, if you look at your three fingers in the center of your hand, your middle finger, which is my favorite, is obviously symmetrical about itself.
Your digit ratio two and four is pretty close, but is determined by the amount of testosterone you're exposed to in utero.
And then your thumb and your pinky are wildly off.
But you could try to make it symmetric and say, well, a pinky is like a lame thumb, which it isn't.
If you're just looking at your hand, you're trying to figure out why is my hand asymmetrical.
But you don't realize that you've got another hand.
And it's thumb to thumb, not thumb to pinky, that is the symmetry.
So when you place your fingertips together, you see that if you didn't know, if you were like Oliver Saxed out and you could only see part of your body, you would think about, oh, the world is asymmetric.
Well, my belief is that in weak gravitational situations, this other matter decouples.
So you only see one hand or the other, and we're all in one-handedness.
So what I'm starting to do is that I'm terrified of talking about this stuff.
I don't have the right credentials, not a physicist.
I've been out of this game for forever, so I often say the wrong things and break rules and who knows what.
And I haven't really talked about it.
This is like really a very lone, I mean, I've been completely alone on this project all my life.
I was somewhat holding this back because I'm afraid of what it unlocks.
And now that I know that we're willing to elect Donald Trump, not store masks, play footsie with China, be Putin's bitch, all of this stuff.
To hell with this.
We're going to mismanage this planet into Armageddon if we don't get some grown-ups into the room.
And so I don't know that I'm a grown-up, but I'm willing to vie for leadership by putting something up, having it investigated and seeing where it goes.
Well, the last time we gained some serious insight into the way nuclei worked, that with a little bit of geometry from Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller gave us the namesake of the bikini.
Do you think that when we're looking at the failure of leadership on the scale that we're seeing play out because of this pandemic, that this is indicative of how it would go no matter what went wrong?
Look at the history, Jamie, of Vesuvius eruptions by year since the 1800s.
My guess is that Wikipedia will probably have a list.
And the last one was in 1944, 45 during World War II, grounded a bunch of planes.
And then Vesuvius stops erupting.
Like, we're wildly overdue for a Vesuvius eruption.
And then when Ikefelekul erupted in Iceland, like we hadn't realized that the era of jet travel in the developed world had happened during an incredibly quiet period of volcanic activity.
So did we build any kind of volcanic sensitivity into these planes?
No, we just grounded the fleet.
Right?
And there's a volcano not so far from Ikefellikul called Ketla.
Makes Ikefelekul look like child's play.
So you have to look at the big nap as the greatest danger to all of us.
And this point about being Jewish is that to be really Jewish, Ben Shapiro makes a point which is not very popular, which is a lot of people who call themselves Jews aren't actually Jews.
They're really Jews on the way out.
People who can't figure out why they're keeping these traditions up, they sort of like to go three days a year, mumble a few words.
There's something intrinsically Jewish about wanting gold bars someplace where you can grab them, knowing where the exits are on a building.
You have to be prepared because the problem of anti-Semitism to leave at a moment's notice.
And Jews have always lived like this.
And many of us have forgotten because we've gotten soft in a world with, you know, knockwood anti-Semitism, while prevalent, has been under control in the U.S. for a long time.
And I think we've weirdly become denatured because we haven't been living with open anti-Semitism.
You see it crop up in the comments section of every video, but it's incredibly important to stay in a state of readiness.
And I've tried to keep that story about Passover and the exodus into Israel from what Jews call Mitraim, which means the narrow places or Egypt.
So my contention is the Jews had a great run in Egypt.
But if we're running a million different experiments, it's different than if we're running one correlated experiment with Donald Trump at the helm of the most dangerous machine ever created in the world.
So the simplest way of saying it is no one younger than Frank Wilcheck, who was born in 1951, has gone to Stockholm for a discovery in theoretical fundamental physics made since like 1973.
Physics effectively, the prestige part of physics came to an end in the early 70s when everything changed across the board.
We had a broad economic change in our world.
Jamie, do you want to bring up GDP versus median male income?
Something bizarre happened in the early 1970s that we should all be talking about that almost nobody knows about.
And one of the things that happened was that physics effectively came to an end.
They're not fair and decent because there's not enough resources.
And so when resources get scarce, people become psychopathic.
And like string theory is just an utter failure that we can't discuss because the baby boomers use that as, well, we're making huge progress while they're actually doing nothing.
I mean, I don't say they're doing nothing.
They weren't making contact with physics.
They became mathematicians, like a bunch of soldiers and generals who are playing war games during peacetime.
It's related to what they're supposed to be doing, but there was nothing for them to do.
So they sort of went to the gym and ran on a treadmill rather than actually running marathons.
So we have a terrible situation in that the community that powered our economy and gave us this incredible power in the world through like nuclear weapons and the Rad Lab at MIT and whatnot has gone into decline.
And it's very dangerous to restart theoretical physics.
So it's been safe because there's been nothing new that we can use coming out of it.
My belief now is that we have to talk about a thousand-year solution to human life with weaponized viruses, with weaponized nuclei.
I mean, the amount of damage we can do is astounding.
And that's going to restart at some point since the NAP is now coming to an end.
Like we're living, this is the end of the NAP.
Three months ago, we were all just leading la la beautiful lives doing whatever.
We were struggling, we were frustrated, but we weren't in danger.
Okay, so this theory, geometric unity, replaces space-time.
So think about a fundamental theory as a newspaper story.
It's who, what, sorry, it's where, when, which is space and time, who, what, who would be fermions, that is matter, electrons, quarks, and what, which would be the force that pushes them around, how and why, how would be the equations, and why would be something called a Lagrangian.
And what this does is to say that there used to be two origins for physics.
There was space-time, which Einstein gave us, and then there's this thing called SU3 cross-u-SU2 cross U1, which comes from nowhere that anyone knows.
Well, you and I are seeing each other through photons.
Photons are scattering off us and being perceived by our eyes.
Photons are associated with electromagnetism.
And there is actually a circle at every point in space-time.
So here we are in space.
My fingers are up here between us, and I'm going to snap at a particular instant.
At that point of the snap, there was a circle, as there is a circle in every other point in space and time that we do not perceive, that generates all of electromagnetism.
So call this the mysterious U1.
We don't know where this U1 comes from.
Why is there a hidden circle that generates the electromagnetism that you and I use to make visual contact that we use to send electronic signals like our Wi-Fi?
Not only is there a circle, there's also a three-dimensional object called SU2 and an eight-dimensional object called SU3.
And effectively, SU2 generates the weak force.
That's not quite right.
It's called actually a weak isospin.
And SU3 generates the strong force, which is sort of on the nose, which is why the protons in your body don't all push apart given that they're positively charged and like charges repel.
So why don't you explode?
That's the strong force and it comes out of something called SU3.
We have two origin stories.
One origin story is the story of space and time.
The other origin story is the story of SU3 cross SU2 cross U1.
And what I did was to get rid of the freedom to choose the symmetries that generate the personalities of the particles that make up this place.
And then the question is: okay, I called it the magic beans trade, because if you think about Jack and the beanstalk, Jack gives away the family cow to get beans, which seems like the worst trade of all time.
But the beans actually had much more in them than was understood.
And so Jack gets the better of the trade because the beans allow him to do something crazy.
So that's what I did.
I gave away the freedom to choose the symmetries to generate the particle properties.
I tied my hands the way Einstein would tie his hands.
And then I tried to show that you could recover these particle properties by trusting that the theory would self-assemble.
And that's the hands drawing hands.
So the idea is that I generated the fermions on top of the space of all rulers and protractors on top of the four dimensions.
And the natural object, which would be called spinners or chimeric spinners, when perceived on the four-dimensional object, that is, when you pull back the information from the second world that got created into the first, from the pitch into the stands, the particle properties appear to be more or less the right particle properties of the particles that we see.
Now, when I started this in the early 80s, we didn't know that neutrinos had mass.
And so we thought that there might be only 15 particles in a generation.
And my stuff would only work if the number of particles in a generation was 2 to the n.
So the joke when I was in college was, I sure hope that 2 to the 4th equals 15.
Now it can't be, because 2 to the 4th is 16.
But then, luckily for me, neutrinos were found to have mass, and that sort of changed the probability that there are 16 particles.
So this is some weird thing to deal with the fundamental incompatibility of the two theories, general relativity of Einstein and quantum theory of Bohr and Dirac.
In the 70s, we found out that there was a geometry that governed the Bohr-Dirac part of the world called Arismannian geometry from Charles Erisman and Alzation.
And Einstein had used Bernard Riemann, a German mathematician, his geometry.
So my gambit and why it's called geometric unity is that the two branches of physics are derived from two geometries.
So rather than saying it's about quantizing geometry, which is the quantum field theory imperialist perspective, Einstein must submit to Bohr, the real issue is that there's a fight between the parents, that is, Bernard Riemann and Charles Erisman.
Now, we don't know those names nearly as well.
And so my goal was to say, is there any world in which these two geometries and the advantages of these two geometries could be made to play together?
And in general, there isn't.
But there is one case in which it works, which is this issue of natural spinners.
And so the whole gambit was to say, what if the world is not a generic world, but a very natural and peculiar world where certain games work that would not work in a generic situation?
So what I tried to do is to recover Einstein the way Einstein tried to recover Newton from a more fundamental theory.
And the incompatibility is that Einstein had to compress something called the full Riemann curvature tensor, which is the sort of measure of how warped something is.
So he broke that beast that tells you the warping of something into pieces.
He threw one of them out called the Weyl curvature.
And then he adjusted the properties of the other two that were left to create general relativity.
So my thing does that, but it also has another property called gauge invariance.
And gauge invariance is the sort of sinequanon of the particle theory.
And this is only possible in very limited circumstances.
And the gambit was, what if the world is in that tiny class where this game can work?
So it's sort of a career suicide theory because if it doesn't work this way, you don't really get anything in the end.
So, you know, think about that exhaust vent in the Death Star.
By releasing this with this discussion, this video that you're putting out, are you hoping that more people examine it and try to actually implement it?
And then ultimately, this would be something that allows people to do what?
But what I'm saying is that when it comes to people following the story, artists and computer people are going to help us push out aids to like, can you pull up EricWeinstein.org?
There's a visualization that's sketched in the door.
Like there's a guy named, if you had Grant Sanderson, he does a show called Three Blue, One Brown, which is some of the best math videos you've ever seen.
Gorgeous stuff.
Just sucks people in.
And you're learning relatively hard math that somebody has made visually beautiful.
This guy is a national treasure.
And I'm hoping to get Grant on the program.
You know, we've been experimenting when we had Roger Penrose in the program.
I said, I'm not going to talk to you about quantum consciousness.
I'm going to talk to you about twisters and about your contributions to the field.
And what my community did is they built something called the portal.wiki.
So if you bring up the portal.wiki, there's an entire ecosystem that's digesting what happens in our episodes for the lay public.
So, for example, we have this graph wall tome project where we start off with this paragraph from Ed Witten.
If you go down, you'll see that they're figuring out how the paragraph from Ed Witten fails over into this wall that was chiseled in Indiana limestone in Stony Brook, New York, which has all of these below that.
So that's the paragraph that tries to sum up the universe as we understood it in the modern era in prose.
And I recommend everyone read that.
And then if you go down from that, there's this plan, right?
Yeah, there's a clickable thing under that neath that graphic.
So for example, this is the plan for this sculpture that Jim Simons, the world's greatest hedge fund manager, paid for.
And if you click on any one of these things, these ruins, so it's like the uncertainty, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, my people are digesting everything that we say, everything that we point to, and helping each other understand what goes on on my program so that I don't have to spend all the time in the shallow end.
No, I really think that what you're showing, that is a branch of what humanity is trying to do with creativity, with curiosity, with the thirst for innovation.
Hey, and Joe, at some point, let's just hang out, and I'd love to just show you exactly what it is, tailor-made to whatever questions without any worry about.