Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan dissect Clubhouse’s "struggle session" culture, where ideological moderators silenced evolutionary biologist David Weinstein—his brother—over eugenics claims, mirroring Rogan’s concerns about censorship stifling open dialogue. They link this to broader societal desensitization via "video game mode," where digital immersion dulls real-world empathy, citing tragic cases like the 2021 Uber carjacking and January 6th’s cult-like adherence to narratives. Weinstein’s suppressed geometric unity theory, a visual framework for physics using simple tools, clashes with Harvard’s history of undermining dissenters—including Obama in 1964—and his own battles with peers like Clifford Taubes over wage-suppressing H-1B policies favoring foreign scientists. Rogan’s comedy hub aims to revive creative rebellion, but Weinstein argues modern suppression forces artists into extremism, urging strategic provocation over casual repetition. Their debate reveals how fear of backlash—whether in science or art—distorts progress, while The Portal offers a counterpoint. [Automatically generated summary]
The fact that someone can come in and kick everyone off that disagrees with them, take over the room, and that they did it just because they decided...
What was the reason why they gave her the option to kick everybody out and gave her administrative power or whatever it is?
- Yes, I don't know. - Well, from what I understand, the conversation before she came on was very clumsy.
That's what everybody was saying.
It was like that it left an opening for someone like her to come and go, "Shut the fuck up, get out of here." But the way she treated your brother, and the way she-- - I did not listen to this, by the way.
It's difficult, it's expensive, nobody really is up for it because...
It's probably not as high quality as a point-to-point conversation, but the serendipity of saying, oh, okay, I saw two people I never thought would be in the same room, and then 12 other people.
At first, I think that's exciting, but then the danger of it is that they're going to burn through the novelty effects.
You're going to have seen all these people collide.
True, but I do think that there's a weird way in which you're always in danger of setting up too many different ways into the same basic source that's the value.
And so you can say, okay, I've got a website, I've got a substack, I've got a podcast, I've got a book.
How many ideas do you have?
That's kind of the issue.
One of the things that I think makes you dominant is that you have an insane breath.
And most people are really not that capable of going outside of a few issues.
That if you give the vines perfect soil and climate and all this stuff, they'll produce much fruitier stuff and it won't be perfectly optimized for fermenting into wine.
Well, there's this one particular kind of sauterne, which comes from the Semillon grape in the Bordeaux region, and it's made from this noble rot, so you get the grapes to sort of have this disease that concentrates the sugar, and I believe that Chateau de Chame, It's like weirdly drinkable beyond...
So the thing that I did not understand, I think, about wine is that if you're trying to taste your wine, you can't possibly get at what's this high-end stuff because it's only your nose that can determine these differences.
That nobody's got enough stuff going on in their tongue to tell great wine.
So you've got this thing called the retronasal passage in the back of your mouth.
I mean, it was definitely weird because it's unusual that someone would be...
I don't think it's unusual that guys are in a feat.
I think it's a lot more usual than you think.
But I think what is unusual is that he was so open about expressing the fact that he was in defeat in front of a group of strangers in a one-minute set on Kill Tony.
At that night, I think it was me and Adam Eget that night.
But it's like Donnell Rawlings has been on.
You name Dom Irera as a favorite guest.
Great comics are on it all the time.
So there's a professional...
and talks to the comics.
The comic does a set, and then we'll ask them.
I've done it a bunch of times.
We'll ask them questions, like, how long have you been doing comedy?
Like, where'd you start?
What town did you start out in?
And then they tell, what are you doing now for money?
And they have great stories, and it's fun, because you get a chance to see the beginnings.
And some of those comics have gone on, like Allie McCrofsky, who has opened up for me in fucking arenas.
She started out on Kill Tony.
Yeah, and so it's like you could develop a legitimate professional career from this, but it's like a really good path for these amateurs to get like one minute of stage time.
So they hone this one minute, hoping they're going to get called onto the stage.
And usually like, if you're a halfway decent comic and you've been doing it, you know, six months, a year, you probably have a minute.
You probably have a minute where you could get up there and rock it for a minute.
Some of them are terrible, but some of them are really funny.
So I can't do that stuff, but the point that I'm starting to come to is I realize when different communities behave differently, there are angry, jealous communities and there are open-hearted, we're glad to have you on board communities.
And I could not believe the quality of the people who reached out to me to give me encouragement for whatever stupid...
Well, but in part, when people are, like, fans of...
I mean, you do comedy, you do acting, you do jujitsu, you do so many different things that you know that there's some things that you don't do at the same level as other things.
When people see that you're taking an interest, like if I found out that you were a road racing bicyclist or something like that, people would be like, wow, Joe's one of us.
Yeah, well, I think I do a lot of things from scratch.
I think that's how I got good at jiu-jitsu is listening.
I didn't get good at jiu-jitsu because I figured it out myself.
I get good because my friend Eddie Bravo is a great coach, and my original instructor Jean-Jacques Machado is a great coach, and I just listen to them.
And I tried to get him to do comedy way back in the day.
And he did a few open mics, but it was just too harrowing for him.
But then when he started doing a lot of seminars and got really comfortable teaching, because he became a jiu-jitsu instructor and started teaching for a living, then he got much more comfortable in front of large groups of people, and then he started doing stand-up again within the last five or six years or so, something like that.
He's very funny.
He's just a funny guy.
Me and him hang out.
We fucking laugh so hard.
He's like, other than Joey Diaz, I probably laugh harder with Eddie Bravo than anybody that I know.
But he thinks different than people.
And sometimes it's a problem where he starts entertaining some ideas that are completely preposterous, and he goes deep with them because he's figured out a way with jiu-jitsu to take ideas that a lot of people didn't think were good and figured out a way to tap people out with those ideas.
He took some ideas and he said, no, you just gotta...
For instance, here's a perfect example.
There's certain kicks that if you just showed someone it, they would say, well, that's not practical.
You're not gonna be able to do that.
The problem is you just haven't reached a proficiency like maybe a Stephen Wonderboy Thompson or something like that where it will become practical.
A specific kick is like a spinning wheel kick.
It's a wild, cool-looking kick.
It looks great in a Bruce Lee movie, right?
Wonderboy Thompson, he's a famous mixed martial arts fighter.
He pulls that off in fights because he's a 57-0 kickboxer and one of the best strikers that's ever competed in mixed martial arts.
So his proficiency in striking is so elite that he can do things that if you just taught...
Some people would say...
That's impractical.
That'll never work in a fight.
But it will work in a fight if you reach the highest level of proficiency.
And Eddie had that same mindset with jiu-jitsu techniques, and he figured out a way to make some techniques that a lot of people thought were impractical, not just possible, but really very...
The way that they make this move is that they synonymize the lab leak hypothesis with a synthetic virus engineered from scratch.
So in other words, the idea of maybe somebody growing horseshoe bat coronavirus in human lung tissue to accelerate natural selection, because we don't know how to engineer it, but if you let natural selection engineer it, You can accelerate that.
Instead of saying, we don't know what to make of accelerated natural selection in a lab leaking, they try to make this move, which is like, there's no sign that this was engineered in a lab.
Okay, well, you changed what the hypothesis is in order to say what you're saying to protect your future credibility.
And the thing that I'm really freaking out about, you've been talking about it, Brett's been talking about it, I've been talking about it, all sorts of people have been talking about this one for a year.
I increasingly think that none of these organizations think that they owe us any kind of truth.
That when they get caught, it's just like, yeah, of course we had to say that.
Like, what?
You know, like this Time Magazine article about, of course we fortified the election.
There was apparently some entire group under one guy with hundreds of activists who told their people, don't riot in the streets, have a dance party instead.
The claim of the article is, we went right up to the door meddling with the election, but all we cared about was free and fair.
And we had a huge conspiracy.
So Donald Trump wasn't wrong.
There was a huge conspiracy.
But we are so committed to democracy that even though we hate Donald Trump with a passion that won't let go 24-7, we still would never do anything against an election.
If you claim that you have to fight all enemies, foreign and domestic, and you claim that he's a Russian asset, You're pretty much saying that you have to do something drastic.
And so the number of things that people claim is what the problem is because they're not all compatible.
And what I'm trying to get at more broadly is over and over I see the same move, which is deny, deny, deny, we get caught.
Yeah, limited hangout.
Yeah, we did that shit.
That's the kind of stuff we do because we have to do it.
I think the concept of a limited hangout where you know that something is too big to hold back, so you push a part of it into the public, not all of it, that's the limited, and you let the public think, okay, well now you know the truth, and it stops there.
And then they stop asking questions because they've got a new toy to play with.
And then now they're calling it – they're not calling it the Biden administration anymore.
They're calling it the Biden-Harris administration, which to me is like letting you know that there's only a matter of time before it's President Harris.
Actually, if you go back to Clint Eastwood in one of the Dirty Harry movies, it's a really interesting scene where he's told that he has to approve new candidates for the force for detective, and there's a female candidate, and he's not happy.
Well, Tim Kennedy had a post about this recently because there was someone who was hired by the Pentagon for some sort of diversity role, and they just let him go because they found out that he had some posts that were very questionable on social media about Hitler and Trump, and so they got rid of him.
Tim Kennedy's point was there's no room for the concept of diversity with trained killers.
Our job is killing people.
There's no room for woke politics or political correctness.
We're there to get shit done.
What are you doing, Jamie?
You got something for us?
Oh, it's like, our job is to get shit done and kill bad people.
In the name of all of the compassionate, the merciful, and Muhammad, peace be upon him.
But they just write PBUH, so they only use up four characters, so they don't have to do the whole thing.
But what I'm trying to say is, we should be able to say something like PBUH about the whole thing that we have to say every time we want to have an opinion, because it's just too expensive.
And that's the thing that, you know, I wrote an entire article about this with Kayfabe, which is that in order to get wrestling to be exciting, you had to move away from actual wrestling.
It's just we're at a weird time where people are pushing narratives and then other people are joining in because that narrative fits along with their ideology, even though they know there's some horseshit to what that narrative is.
A good example is, are you aware of that 65-year-old woman that got beaten up in New York City?
It's a sad story.
Because this guy, it's all caught on security camera.
There's this guy, he's kicking, he kicks this 65-year-old woman down and kicks her when she's down, stomps her, and just, it's horrific.
And there's these three guys, at least two guys, that are watching and they do nothing.
Yeah, but anyway, this guy is kicking this woman while these two guys watch.
And then de Blasio goes on TV and he blames it on Trump.
He blames it on the White House and the current administration because it was an Asian woman.
But what it was...
Was a guy who was released from prison who had stabbed his mother to death.
So the guy was criminally insane.
And because of these liberal ideas about rehabilitation and murder, this guy had only done, I think he'd only done like 10 or 12 years in jail for stabbing his mom to death.
And so they let him go, and what does he do?
He finds some woman and kicks the shit out of her.
Now, here's where it gets weird.
Did he kick the shit out of her because she was Asian, because he was aware of the propaganda against Asian people that de Blasio believes was influenced by Donald Trump's portrayal of the virus as being the Chinese virus?
I don't know.
But the point is, the reason why that guy did that is because he's criminally insane.
It's not because of Donald Trump.
The reason why that guy did that is because he shouldn't have been on the street.
But they're forcing us to talk about it over and over.
The more we have to debunk this stuff, It's just a fire hose of debunkable stuff, and everything takes a half an hour to explain what somebody screwed up in four seconds.
Well, it's hard to do 90 minutes of live shit every week.
But the point is, it seems like a sketch.
It seems like a parody.
Here's what it seems like.
It seems like a scene in a Coen Brothers movie where a mayor is out of his fucking mind.
Go full screen and give me some volume.
Because this is fucking completely crazy.
Watch this.
You're not going to believe this.
So, people just listening.
unidentified
There's people dancing.
Completely out of sync.
And we're gonna do that.
We're gonna really bring back the heart and soul of New York City.
We need our arts and culture back, and we need people to see it and feel it, to participate in it, to know that that essence of New York City has not been defeated by the coronavirus, but will come back strong in 2021. Month after month in 2021, as you see the city come back to life, culture will lead the way.
90% of all the moving trucks are going out of New York City.
And this is his solution to this.
Because these people don't have any respect for business.
They somehow or another think this money falls out of trees.
And that you just need to redistribute this money.
Because the rich people, they have too much of it.
So redistribute this money.
And the way we're going to redistribute it, we're going to open up culture.
We're going to bring back dance.
Like, what the fuck is that?
Like, what is that?
Imagine that you are the mayor of one of the biggest cities on planet Earth, and that's your solution.
Like, this is a big video that you put together, and you have these people dancing and doing all this...
It's so uncoordinated.
The music is so bad.
It seems like a sketch.
This is what you're dealing with.
And this is the same guy that was saying that Donald Trump was responsible for this criminally insane person who kicked the shit out of this poor old lady.
When the nonsense like de Blasio's video or him saying that this guy who got out of jail recently for stabbing his mother to death, that the reason why he kicked the shit out of this Asian lady was because of Donald Trump.
This guy might not have even known Donald Trump was a thing.
It's a really unfortunate situation where you have these young kids that stole this Uber driver's car and he tried to stop that from happening and wound up dying.
It's horrific.
If you've never seen the video, please don't watch it.
And my concern is, is that we don't feel our own life and our own interest anymore.
Like, we don't realize what we're doing.
We imagine that we are characters in a video game.
There's always a restart.
There's always some exploit that you can use to start again.
And I'm increasingly feeling like reality...
It's slipping away from us because the phone, it's a little bit like what happened with porn.
We thought that porn was going to habituate us to non-standard sexual practices, and to an extent it did.
But I don't think what we really understood is that it was going to rewire us so that it was very difficult to get aroused about anything because it changes your hedonic thresholds.
I think the same thing is true for real life versus the phone.
The phone is in some sense so much more intense for most people that that environment starts to blot out the feeling of being fully alive.
Very clearly that woman was, you know, dealing with a loaded pistol, right?
And you see the guy who's holding the gun take the finger and bring it inside the trigger guard and then he goes back out because he's like pointing it at her.
He understands what he's doing.
It's like, please don't advance.
And she has an idea that somehow she's protected because she's part of this romantic story in her own mind.
And so there are these twin narrative problems where you've got these two incompatible worldviews and these stories, and they avoid each other, like two guys circling each other.
But both of them know that once we actually engage, it's pretty unpredictable what's about to happen.
That's what I think you could see coming for January 6th.
It had to happen that way in a weird way because the narratives had avoided each other for the maximal length of time because nobody wanted to have this out.
And then it was impossible to stop the two from arcing.
So what you're saying is that you think that there's two worlds that aren't communicating with each other, and both of them believe wholeheartedly in what they're doing without listening to whatever might be reasonable that's coming from the other side, and then they collide.
At some point, there will be a Donald Trump presidency or a Joe Biden presidency.
And once you realize that your story has collapsed, it's like a doomsday cult.
You say it's going to end on such and such a day, and then it doesn't.
And then what happens to the cult?
Because everybody had the same concept.
I think that if you listen to the audio from the Jim Jones, Jonestown Massacre, it's very clear that they got caught up in a story that they couldn't get out of.
And somehow she ran a program that was different than the program, because you have the recordings.
People know that they're going to their death.
They know the software is telling them that this is the right thing.
It's a revolutionary suicide.
And I saw this with people, you know, I was trying to tell people, because I didn't believe the election was necessarily free and fair, but I also didn't believe that it was stolen in the way that Donald Trump was saying it was stolen.
We are very social animals, but the ones that can go the longest in solitude and just think by themselves, there's a great benefit to that.
I was forced into it because when I was a kid, we moved around a lot.
We moved when I was 7 to San Francisco.
When I was 11, we moved to Florida.
When I was 13, we moved to Boston.
I was forced to form my own opinions about things because I didn't have a steady group of friends where we all agreed on a certain narrative.
That's a real problem with people in this country, agreeing on a certain narrative where you know socially That you have a contract you have to uphold.
You're socially...
You're intertwined with this narrative.
And you can't think outside the box.
If you say, hey guys, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Let's look at this logically.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
And then you've got a real problem.
Because people want compliance.
This is what's going on with wokeness.
A lot of what wokeness is, is these...
Socially low-status people who are gaining power by enforcing this narrative and attacking people who don't enforce the narrative.
They're bullying people who don't enforce the narrative.
I reviewed this weird episode of you at the store when you took a break for seven years.
And I looked at the courage that you had to have to do something unfunny in a funny context.
I think it was an incredibly difficult situation.
And I think I've been running from a similar situation my whole life.
I don't want to face certain unpleasant facts That are out of keeping with the joy that I feel, with the love, with the creativity that I feel.
And I don't want to let certain kinds of negativity take over my life.
And then I have this other thing, which is I legitimately believe that if we are not very careful, theoretical physics is coming to an end.
And I believe it is our only hope for getting outside the solar system.
When you have Elon on and he talks about Mars or bust and all this kind of stuff.
I cannot understand how mankind has gotten to the point where we are not spending our efforts trying to figure out how to spread out so that we don't self-extinguish on one, two, or three rocks.
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
And the best hope we have is to go beyond Einstein.
And we're losing the belief That we're capable of it.
We're so worried about the professional norms and humiliation and what's going to happen if we say something and what our colleagues are going to say and all of this stuff that we're self-censoring and we're silencing ourselves because we'd rather be in good standing on the Titanic than risk saying, holy shit, we're in an iceberg field.
Let's think about how we're going to survive this.
I want you to boil this down so that someone who doesn't understand physics at all will understand this in a way that they could maybe even explain to someone else.
There is a team of people Brooke Dallas, Brandon Stone, Boku, a mysterious German who does amazing graphics, Tim, the mirthless swagman from Australia, Aardvark, and Nick, who have been, let's just go up to the top.
So, for example, dramatizing Einstein's, the greatest insight of the 20th century, arguably, click on the one on the left and blow it up.
Einstein took a curvature tensor, which has three components, called vial traceless Ricci and Ricci scalar, snapped the vial off and readjusted the vial scalar to get it to live in a space not called curvature, but metrics.
That is saying that curvature influences how we measure length and angle.
Now, the idea is Einstein took curvature and fed it back into the space of rulers and protractors to say how the rulers and protractors would warp so that we can actually define gravity.
Now, that's...
That is a visual depiction of the Einstein field equations, which if I wrote them down would mean nothing to you.
And the key point is that Einstein figured out you had to get rid of a component called the vial curvature and readjust the Ricci scalar to put it into the space of rulers and protractors, which I bought from Amazon, strangely enough.
And people, you see, I don't think in symbols.
I think in pictures.
Now, the insight of geometric unity, if you'll go zoom out, Is that if you do the smaller neck, like we had a huge bottle to get it into metrics.
But remember the time I showed you the hop vibration and you're like, what the fuck is that?
That was a U1 bundle over the two-dimensional sphere, which was the Earth.
This is a U1 bundle over the one-dimensional sphere, alias the circle.
And as you do that fidget toy, you're spinning that circle over and over again.
So this is an actual model of a gauge theoretic concept that somehow nobody in the history has ever mentioned to me that you can buy U1 principal bundles from Amazon for under $10.
And I could, if we had the opportunity- I don't know what the fuck you just said.
And what I'm going to do over time is to show people visually without symbols.
In other words, if I say Ramanian metric, they're not going to know what I'm talking about.
If I hand them rulers and protractors and a video of it, I don't know about the symbols, but I can follow an actual concrete thing.
That thing, that water wiggle, the idea that that's a U1 principle bundle, that is one of the deepest things we only figured out in the 1970s that the light in this room comes from effectively seeing the world as having a water wiggle structure on top of it.
If we spent an afternoon with a water wiggle, Or those videos, which we can't do because of your audience, I understand that.
You could understand what a gauge theory is because you'd never see a symbol.
There would never be a symbol between you and understanding why there's light in this room.
The light in this room comes from a water wiggle structure about a circle that nobody's ever seen that is at every point in space and time, which is one of the great discoveries that we've made that nobody seems to care about.
We know about that water wiggle structure because we wrote down the equations called Maxwell's equations that unified all sorts of things that have to do with photons.
Magnetism, electricity, x-rays, radio waves.
All of that stuff got subsumed into really one equation called Maxwell's equation.
That equation presupposes a circle out of nowhere.
We didn't know that there was a circle, but we wrote down equations and the equations told us, hey, numbnuts, there's a circle that rotates just the way this water wiggle rotates at every point in space-time that you can't see it because that's the only way those equations make sense.
Now you'll hear people, like you'll have Sean Carroll on, who want to talk about the multiverse, right?
Or Neil deGrasse Tyson will want to tell you how big the universe is.
And somehow people don't want to tell you, there's a circle around so we can see each other.
In essence, the photons that we see are the levels from which we measure a derivative, which is rise over run above a level.
The level that we see is the photon, in essence.
And the thing that we're differentiating is the electron.
So electrons are like functions.
And photons are like horizontal levels from which we measure rise over run to take the derivative.
And then the idea that we have partial differential equations is how photons zing off of me and hit your eye and we see each other.
That world of waves colliding, like everything in this place, is waves in collision with each other, waves interacting.
The story of us is the story of interacting waves and the waves obey partial differential equations.
So the fact that you have derivatives, which allow you to define the derivative in partial differential equations, differentials are derivatives, are determined by levels, which is on this page of videos we've made for you guys.
And those things allow you to define the equations for waves which we are.
So when you talk about the theory of everything, what you're actually saying is, tell me about a medium, waves in the medium, and rules for how waves behave moving around in the medium.
It's a theory in which four dimensions births some elaborate crazy setup, which has interacting waves that look like electrons, up quarks, down quarks, protons, neutrons.
Gamma radiation, beta radiation, alpha particles.
That's the story of us.
And how did all that weird shit get into our world to form, like everything in here is made up of upquarks, downquarks, and electrons held together by force particles.
It's like an incredibly economical statement about, look at all the diverse shit here.
That's what this is about.
And what I believe is, is that we'll never have, we'll never take the time.
It's like, let's spend a day talking about this shit and do it at a blackboard and do it with videos.
Like we spent hundreds of hours making these videos to show you what these concepts are.
Now, I understand the constraints of the show and I'm totally fine with that.
But the point is, I believe that with artists and with imagination, we can actually show you What these structures are.
I can draw lines with pens and show you what a derivative is on a water wiggle.
And you can say, okay, you're doing calculus on a water wiggle, and there's a water wiggle-like structure in the world, which I never heard about, and that's what gives me light electromagnetism, all the stuff I know and love, that keeps electrons bound to protons and hydrogen atoms.
That weird world of waves interacting with each other according to derivative equations, where the derivatives are determined from levels called gauge potentials, is visualizable with videos that we've been making.
And the hope is that this is for experts, and they're going to have their day, and they're going to piss all over it, and they're going to be angry and mean, and that's going to happen.
But at the end of that process, hopefully, the ideas herein contained Could change the world.
It's the first time I've ever seen somebody tell a complete story about how did this place fill up with all this crazy stuff, assuming almost nothing to begin with.
It's like a fertilized egg hypothesis.
Show me a minimal amount I can assume and drag out falling in love on a park bench in early May.
That's how crazy the story has to be.
When you have a fertilized egg and it becomes your child, The story of development, of how something births itself, is what this is a story about.
You know that that thing, like if you were going to eat Cabrales cheese, which has maggots infested in it, if you come from Spain, you understand that Cabrales is safe.
So you call it a delicacy because it's some stupid stuff that you happen to have local information to know that it's safe.
But my point to you is that what we are hiding behind the universals It is true that we all have subjective components, but it is not the case that you and I will have a conversation about a whole lot of love.
And we will have an idea, like, that is just the best song.
And you'll know that you have to say, okay, well, I understand that some people don't like it.
But then, when you get drunk, you're going to say, how can you not like Whole Lotta Love?
Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions, objective of a person or their judgment, not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in consideration of expressing and representing facts.
Okay.
So, objective.
It's not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.
So you can say, objectively, someone is a very talented guitarist because you see how complicated their movements are and how they're hitting the strings.
But you could say, subjectively, I don't enjoy that music.
I think what you're now saying is expressing the tension of our moment.
The tension of our moment is that as soon as somebody says that something is objective...
Somebody will say, actually, to me, your definition of that isn't how I define it, and therefore I reclaim the subjectivity of it.
I can turn Andrei Segovia or Eddie Van Halen or Jimmy Page or any of these people into not a good guitarist by redefining what a talented guitarist is.
Is if I redefine the concept of talent on a guitar and I say talent on a guitar is somebody who can convince me of emotions that they're playing with and I didn't feel anything.
Guthrie Govan is arguably the great guitarist of our age, and one of his tricks is you tell him a guitarist and he will play in that person's style in and of what he does on his own.
If anyone is a good guitarist, Guthrie Govan can represent that person's guitar in a way that if you were blindfolded, You would say, boy, B.B. King is having a great day.
You can, like, there's people, like Gary Clark is a perfect example.
Like I said, like Gary Clark, I'm pretty sure I played this for you, when Suzanne Santo and Gary Clark and Ben Jaffe were, they did this show in downtown LA and they played Midnight Rider.
There were two guys in LA, I can't remember the other guy, who, the thing about them was that you were just convinced that their brains were 12,000 times faster than anybody else you'd ever met.
Like that they were just in a weird way smarter.
And Robin Williams' Free Association, it was like being on a Nantucket sleigh ride of the mind, and comedy was how it expressed itself, but it wasn't about comedy.
It was about just like having thoughts interact with each other and you had to justify them by turning every thought into a joke that's influencing every other thought.
It was like almost like excusing madness that was purposeful and pointful and amazing to watch.
And I think that was part of the manic nature of this style was that sometimes he would come across a subject because he was freeballing and he would just use material that he knew of.
Or maybe the ends justified the means, and then what he really was doing was just trying to put on the best performance that he could, and he had this idea that he knew wasn't necessarily his.
He cut checks to a lot of people.
There was a lot of issues.
I know Kinnison and him had a big squabble because of it, and I'm pretty sure he cut a check for Kinnison, and he cut checks for other guys that were at the store.
Do the material on TV. So let me ask you a question about this.
I guess I was reviewing that night in your life, and I was looking at the fact that it wasn't that funny when you went up and you said what had to be said.
Courageous, but that's you know that that was a weird situation where I was called back on stage by Carlos Mencia That wasn't there wasn't like I know I made a statement.
I had already done my set I already didn't stand up and then I went back because he called me out That you know like the me leaving the Comedy Store was not even my idea.
It was like they banned me and In the story, didn't you...
I think what you did is you obligated yourself into a role...
Where you actually had to stand up for something.
And the thing that I'm wrestling with, because I reviewed this whole story a few times, is this question about, like I look at your energy, and you're such a positive person in my life.
And I look at that energy, and you were trying to take care of somebody like Ari.
It was the concept that there was a guy who was more successful than everybody else who would just suck up everybody else's material and profit off of it.
Bill Burr told me a story where he was performing there and he said to the guy that was a manager, the guy that I had the issue with, he said, fuck, I don't want to go on stage.
Fucking Carlos is here.
He goes, oh, don't worry, he doesn't steal from guys like you.
This is from 1964. Obama has passed his general exams which indicates that on academic grounds he is entitled to stay around here and write his thesis.
However, they are going to try to cook something up to ease him out.
All three, that is all three Harvard people, will have to agree on this, however.
They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home, which means he will never get his PhD.
Remember when they said, take a break to you?
This is my alma mater.
This is the thing I've been, you know, there's this whole story about what happened in my early life and why I don't talk about it publicly.
And this is why this is interacting with your story about joke thievery, because it's weird for a comic not to turn that into a joke.
And it wasn't funny to you.
In around, I don't know, 1988, 1989, Harvard University told me, to remain in good standing in this program, you cannot live in Massachusetts.
How can you tell me where I can live and where I can't live?
It wasn't until somebody FOIA'd Barack Obama's father in his file, and I read the story, that I realized that Harvard has a program for how it gets rid of people it wants to get rid of who are in good standing.
Probably because I'm as learning disabled as the day is long.
Probably because I took an unpopular stance that the equations that people were working with called the Donaldson theory self-dual equations were not the right equations to be working with and that we had somehow been assuming that they were highly peculiar to dimension four and that The difficulty of the equations, which was what was giving us all these great results, I had effectively gotten on the wrong side.
I proposed some equations that I was told were insufficiently nonlinear, never mind what that means, that in 1994, effectively the same equations took over the entire field.
Whatever it was, and this is like part of the idea of reclaiming your own story, It was so crazy that a university would tell me what state I could live in.
Or it's like people maintain, for example, one way of...
Getting rid of a tenured professor that's known is that you ask the person to report on their research and you load them up with teaching and you give them a lousy office.
And then eventually they'll just quit because you make their life hell.
So people know that there are these kind of secret, quiet ways to do the undoable.
Without the power, it wouldn't be able to attract the money and it wouldn't be able to constantly position itself.
So through achievement, It gets enough cachet to wield power.
Through the power, it gets the resources to buy achievement.
And this sort of thing is not understood.
And I've been on both sides of this thing.
Like, one of the things that happened was that the Boskin Commission in 1996 tried to figure out how to cut Social Security and raise taxes without getting caught.
Because that's the third rail of politics.
And what they said is, if we change the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, the way we measure inflation, because tax brackets are indexed and because entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare are indexed, if we claim that inflation is overstated by 1.1 percentage points, we will gain a trillion dollars in savings.
And the public won't be able to object to it because we're going to be just adjusting a dial.
We're going to say that this dial was broken and we got some technocrats to fix it.
So they figured out we want to get a trillion dollars over 10 years.
They backed out.
That would require 1.1% overstatement.
They broke into two teams.
One team came up with 0.5.
One team came up with 0.6.
0.5 plus 0.6 equals 1.1.
Totally fictitious.
They got a proposal for a trillion dollars that they were going to steal, effectively, from Social Security.
Robert Gordon, who was one of the five Boskin commissioners, Jamie, could you bring up something called Boskin Wild vs.
Mild?
They brag about these things.
Power wants to explain just how powerful it is.
And you remember the scene in the big short where they're talking to these guys in Florida and saying, why are they confessing?
And somebody says, they're not confessing, they're bragging.
It's a question of what are you proud that you're able to do?
So, until Robert Gordon...
Did this PowerPoint presentation.
We did not understand what happened to the work that I did with my wife in economics, which is that we were trying to show how you could actually compute the Consumer Price Index objectively using gauge theory.
The same year, they were trying to figure out how do we steal a trillion dollars over 10 years by doing funny games with the gauge called inflation.
Okay, Dale said 1.1% implies 1 trillion in Social Security savings over 10 years.
Somehow, our separate efforts came up with the 1.1% bias number.
In other words, They came up with the target, which is, let's save a trillion dollars.
And then they came up with, we have to say it's overstated by 1.1.
We then broke into two groups and somehow, key word, we put the numbers together and we got the target.
This is academic malpractice in the absolute extreme.
When Harvard was doing that, it was acting in its power capacity.
And the way they did it was they buried What I think is probably the best work in 25 to 50 years in mathematical economics that happened in the Harvard Economics Department, which is a second so-called marginal revolution where we changed the calculus underneath all of economic theory.
In another presentation they say, we solved this at the kitchen table of my cousin's house in Florida.
And you're just thinking like, Okay, so it's five guys, Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat and a Republican, got together, picked five economists who were willing to play the dirty game.
The dirty game broke into two teams.
They knew exactly what they had to do.
They found the results to put them together, to put in front of Congress, to put in front of the National Academy.
And what I realized is I don't want to be associated with the shit that happened over something called the Cyberg-Witten equations.
What I just handed you, one of the reasons I've held it back is that it very clearly gives an alternate definition, alternate motivation and derivation of the equations that revolutionized gauge theory, which is what I was thinking about in around 1987, 1988. And I've lived afraid of my own story because it's such an ugly story.
The story of a guy who was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense to any academician.
You hear, like, what do you mean you weren't allowed to?
You present your thesis.
No, no, no.
I was not allowed in the room of my own thesis defense.
I couldn't accept myself in this world of like, you know, if you play classical music, everybody's technically brilliant.
There's no technically weak people in classical music.
I was like a guy, it was like John Lee Hooker in the orchestra of, you know, the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra on one string and a guitar playing with some weird syncopated rhythm.
And the thing is, is that I'm not against the person in the story.
I don't want to be involved with him.
I want him to go and be successful and have a good career.
But my story...
When I put forward those equations, and he said they're insufficiently nonlinear, and he said self-duality doesn't have anything to do with spinners, because if it did, Nigel Hitchens would have told us.
Okay?
Nigel would have told us.
He didn't say Hitchens.
He was wrong.
And then when I gave him the opportunity, he didn't say, you know what, Eric Weinstein brought these equations up, and I told him no.
And that thing is like something I've held open the door.
He's now in his mid-60s.
I was like, you really couldn't just say, maybe I screwed up?
I think with all my flaws and all my failings and being 25 years out of the field, I believe that this story is going to be fixed by people who are trying to shoot it down.
And there's something that I feel like about life, that if you just open, if you don't bullshit yourself, and you're willing to take risks, those things find you, or you find them, and then once you get going, the easiest part is once you've already started, just continuing.
The hardest part is getting going with everything.
The hardest part is showing up for the first class.
There's a great benefit for me personally to do this podcast and to talk to interesting people and to have these conversations and I've most certainly been educated beyond my wildest dreams in the 11 years that I've done it.
I've learned so much about just the broadest spectrum of ideas.
I think there's multiple variables that are at play.
And I think performing is a big one.
And lately, I haven't been doing that much of that because of the pandemic and trying to be responsible and not do that many shows, you know, and certainly not do shows without people being COVID tested, right?
And I'm hoping that as we come out of this, and it seems like we're coming out of this, it'll be easier.
And I'm also buying a club in town.
So once that happens, I'll be doing the same thing there with COVID testing everybody and trying to get the ball.
So there's that, right?
But then there's also you have to think a lot.
You can't just perform.
Because if you do, like one of the things that comics fell trapped to in the early days, not the early, you know, last 10, 20 years, was they would do a lot of jokes about being a comic on the road.
And I think you have to experience life and you have to think.
And you have to experience different mindsets.
You have to experience different subject matters that you're contemplating and puzzling, you're puzzled about.
You have to perform a lot.
You have to write.
I think you have to write too.
I don't think you can just perform a lot.
Some people can.
Some people just write in their head and they go on stage and they continue to craft these ideas and some of the best comics alive.
But I think they would have more to choose from if they just sat in front of the computer and forced themselves to write.
And some guys will say...
I don't like it because then my material seems like I wrote it.
It comes out like a script.
And I understand that.
But I think the workaround for that is what I've done.
And I've talked to a few other comics that do the same thing.
Felicia Michaels, she said she does it this way too.
I write essays.
I just write on a subject.
If I'm going to write on getting drunk, the perils of getting drunk, the pros and the cons and what feels good and what feels bad and what's good about it, what's bad about it, what do I hate about it, what do I love about it.
And then out of this, I might write 3,000, 4,000 words.
But out of it, I might have one paragraph that comes across, that becomes...
So one of the things that I learned from sort of studying, when you do a bit and I see it multiple times, I learn about when you find the rhetorical formulation, That allows you to get closer to the truth without paying the outsized price.
Somehow that unleashes comedy magic.
I remember you had something about getting high and having kids.
And it was a very difficult issue because obviously people do get high and they do have kids.
And then we have this idea, you know, it's like being sexy leads to kids, but sex and kids have to be kept apart.
All of these are weird ways in which normal adult behavior and children are incompatible.
And so there was like a William Tell Act, in some sense, that had to be How am I going to talk about two things that are not supposed to coalesce, but obviously they coalesce in people?
How do I find the skill?
And that's sort of what I wonder about when you hone a bit, is that you can get closer and closer to the truth because you find the formulation that actually works without blowing up in your face.
It's like, I can throw this grenade and wait to the point where it's maximally effective without losing a hand.
As opposed to every other person who opens up a comedy club.
Every other person who opens up a comedy club opens up a comedy club to make money.
They say, I'm going to have these comedians, you know, I'm going to make X percentage of the door, and they're going to make this, and I'm going to make a good living.
I'm not saying that at all.
My idea is to break even.
If I can break even, I'm happy.
I just want to make it the most comfortable place for comedians.
This guy is one of the greatest human beings, and the privilege of coming to this show, he is one half of the Attia-Singer Index Theorem, a courageous guy, brilliant beyond words, who changed the entire face of mathematical physics.
And a human being who I had a falling out with over the National Academy of Sciences a I hate mushrooms more than anything in this world.
And I discovered that the National Academy of Sciences had faked a shortage of scientists and engineers They did a secret study where they looked at supply and demand and decided that the price of American scientists and engineers was going to hit six figures.
And they subtracted the demand curves and they said let's fake a demographic supply crisis where we wouldn't have enough scientists.
They got us to pass the 1990 Immigration Act, which came with H-1B. And I told Iz this.
And it put him in a position where the thing that he loved, which was the system, because he was the guy who made the system work, He was like Harriet Tubman.
He would do things.
He saved me.
He saved me.
He loved the system.
And then I had to show him that the system had gotten so corrupted that we were going to give it all away to China.
We were going to allow the Chinese to populate our labs and put a proctoscope in the entire university system, which is where we do our research, so they would get the benefits of totalitarianism and the benefits of our freedom.
They'd learn all the stuff we were doing with our freedom, and then they'd go implement and execute with totalitarianism.
And Iz was so angry at me that I had found the study in 1986 done with the National Science Foundation and the National Academy to fake a fake shortage of scientists and engineers to pass the 1990 Immigration Act that led to H-1B. That he and I got to a point where we couldn't talk to each other.
I'd go up to his office and we'd talk about jazz and love and children and heartbreak and all sorts of stuff.
And he believed in this that I showed you, okay?
He had so much confidence that when I came to Cambridge, shit out of luck, when Harvard was trying to asphyxiate me, he stood up for me and gathered the entire creme de la creme of the MIT math physics world To hear what I had to say because he believed.
And then he made sure that I got an NSF postdoc and that I got a postdoc at MIT and he repaired my story, right?
And I love this guy.
I love this guy so much.
And he was at my wedding and I never got a chance to say goodbye to him.
And the New York Times did an obituary And the New York Times hasn't talked to me for like eight years almost, something like that.
And I looked at the obituary to hear about his singer and like I'm the major quote because they were still talking to me and they do the obituary so many years in front.
I've met a tiny number of people who will be remembered a thousand years from now.
This is one of like three people I can say for sure, if people are still talking a thousand years from now, they're going to remember him because he did this wonderful thing, the Atiyah Singer Index Theorem.
It's just so foundational.
You can't even imagine how beautiful this thing is.
It was shocking to remember that I had been enough part of the system that I could be respectable, that I could be trusted to say something about this great man who just passed at, like, I don't know, 96. And I never got a chance to, like, say goodbye or repair the relationship.
And, you know, I was in touch with his daughter who writes for the New York Times.
Iz had a cabinet.
And if you said something really brilliant, like really fucking brilliant, he'd often go to the cabinet and say, you know, it's funny.
I haven't thought about that for N years.
And he'd pull out a piece of paper, and there was your brilliant idea, which he didn't even think to publish, because it wasn't ready yet.
And on the one hand, you were just devastated, like, holy shit, you had that thought?
And on the other hand, you were like, I had a thought that is singer-hit, you know?
It's like, there's this level, like if Carlin might maybe, you know, for some comics, or Lenny Bruce, or Richard Pryor, or Dave Chappelle, or somebody like that.
There are these relationships where people are just at such an incredible level that you can't even believe that some human being has ascended.
And the period of time that I spent with him taught me more about what the human mind is capable of than just about anything.
He's the smartest, most brilliant man I've ever had the pleasure to know really, really well.
But for him to actually take what I was saying, that the National Academy was acting against the American interest by narrowly saying we need to make American scientists and engineers cheaper, that we need to flood the market, we need to interfere in the wage mechanism, we need to allow China first look at everything we do, The concept that the problem was the National Academy when he was the National Academy.
In the Reagan administration, for the first time, they appointed somebody to come in from industry rather than academics to head the National Science Foundation, a guy named Eric Block.
And I think he came from IBM? Not sure.
Eric Bloch took a sort of green eyeshade view of the world, like, holy shit, we're going to have to overpay for American scientists and engineers.
How do we avoid having to pay six figures for new PhDs?
How do we avoid letting the genius of the market solve the problem of supply and demand?
Because there's no such thing as a labor shortage in a market economy long term, right?
The wage mechanism will rise and you'll get as many people as you want.
And when Eric Bloch did this, he went through a guy named Peter House, and they picked an economist named Miles Boylan, whose name I've never said, who in 1986 wrote a study that said, here's how expensive it's going to be to pay for scientists and engineers who are American in the future.
And I had deduced from first principles that they had done a competent economic study and that they had faked economics.
An incompetent demographic study by subtracting a demand curve.
So they hid the competence and pretended that they were incompetent to pass the Immigration Act of 1990, which brought us the H-1B, which brought us huge numbers of Chinese graduate students who currently staff our labs and who we're addicted to.
And this gives China the benefit, a first look at the benefits of freedom and the benefits of the ability to execute with an iron fist.
The idea that I was telling Isidore, you don't understand.
Your organization is doing the wrong thing.
You have to stand up against your own organization.
The National Academy of Sciences, something called the Government University Industry Research Roundtable, and something called the Policy Research and Analysis Division of NSF, the two main science groups, National Academy and National Science Foundation, teamed up against American science for the benefit of employers to make sure that they would never have to pay market prices.
And fuck these people.
They gave away our advantage, our geopolitical strategic advantage, And they spun an entire story about we need the best and the brightest, but it was all about money.
And this guy, Miles Boylan, who's an economist, who's I believe sort of semi-retired from NSF, is the name I've held back.
Like I'm saying names that I don't normally say in public.
I lost somebody I cared so much about over this issue.
Right?
Because I told is the National Academy of Sciences has gone bad.
They've had me there four times to tell them that I've caught them.
There's no record.
At some point they had a reporter from Science Magazine and I spoke and there's no record that I said anything.
I got a standing ovation at a conference for talking about the fact that I had caught them in this In this conspiracy against American scientists.
And I learned about what happens when, like, you're going and you say, can you please report this?
It's like suddenly your voice vanishes.
And I said, you know, Iz, they've had me there four times.
They've asked me four times to tell them how I've caught them.
And it was too much for him.
He couldn't come to grips.
And like, I don't want to be talking about that.
I want to be talking about the Atiyah Singer Index theorem or Ray Singer torsion or any of the beautiful things, the BPST instanton, all the wonder that Is Singer brought into the world.
I want to talk about him saving my career if I'd wanted one.
This was the thing that didn't go that way.
It was me saying, you know the thing that you loved?
Because we all believe in the best and the brightest and we're heads down in our work.
Wait, wait a second.
I got up and I said, Sherwin, very interesting that you think scientists are like cattle.
Let me tell you a different story about economists And then I went through what I'd unearthed, okay?
And I brought a room that was in an academic conference to a standing ovation.
That never happens for an academic conference.
Because people wanted to hear the truth.
And Sherwin Rosen You know, went off to the airport and said that was the most impudent young man I've ever talked to.
And then I got invited to the COSAPUP committee.
And the COSAPUP committee said, you know, Eric, the problem with your model is scientists are not in any way motivated by money.
They only care about the truth, and that's why all of your models don't work.
And I said, great news, because I have a friend who's got a wife who's eight months pregnant being paid $14,000 a year.
So I'm going to open my briefcase, and we're going to use the tool called Revealed Preference, and we're going to go around, given that you're all doing very, very well in your lives, and we're going to open up the briefcase, and we're going to allow you to put in an IOU for how much money you don't care about to help the struggling young topologist and his wife.
And I looked at each member of the COSPOP committee, and I got to one of them.
He said, okay, Eric, you've made your point.
And one of them said, well, who did this dastardly thing?
And I said, the Government University Industry Research Roundtable.
And all eyes turned to this woman.
I think her name was Mary Ellen Fox.
She said, well, Mary Ellen's the head of that.
So then Mary Ellen invited me.
So then I gave this talk again and again and again and again, right?
And they wanted to know, how much do you know?
How much do you know?
And then there's no record that any of this happened.
And one of the reasons I don't talk about this is not that I don't have the goods.
It's that I don't want to ruin the beauty of who we are and what we do.
I keep waiting for these people to retire and stop ruining our universities and stop ruining the next generation of kids and stop charging people so much that they have to effectively go into gray area prostitution in order to pay off their student loans.
I keep saying, when are we going to get rid of this class of people that ran everything into the ground?
I've now given up.
And that was one of the things that I did by reviewing what you did with joke thievery, as I realized that you said, joke thievery isn't actually funny.
There are things that aren't funny.
And these things that I'm talking about, about burying careers, about destroying people, about interfering with the wage mechanism, about giving away our advantage to our geopolitical rivals, are not funny.
And they're not cute.
And I've realized that this is the thing that I'm unwilling to talk about.
I don't want to get into the ugliness of going up against the National Academy of Sciences and saying, what the hell is wrong with you people?
But now I've decided I'm going whole hog and I'm going to be who I am.
One of the things that I'm worried with when it comes to woke culture is not that people think the way they think, because I think a lot of young people think that way.
A lot of young people have socialist, Marxist ideas, because it seems like it's a good thing to think of, you know?
And then, you know, woke ideology, at least...
On the surface, it seems to be spreading what you would call social justice, which seems to be a positive thing, right?
What my concern really is, and I think what's highlighted what you were just expressing about these Chinese scientists...
My real concern is, and I think this is probably actually happening right now, is the way that people are expressing things online is not entirely organic.
I think it's partially organic.
But I think it's influenced by foreign entities.
I think it's influenced pretty considerably.
I think there's a lot of elevating and escalating a lot of the rhetoric.
Accelerating the rhetoric and pushing the narrative.
The thing about this woke ideology that we were talking about before with this forced compliance is that people feel compelled to agree with everything.
They feel compelled to go along with whatever the ideology is proposing.
I think a bad actor can insert almost like bad code into an operating system.
Like a virus into an operating system and accentuate or advance things past the point that just a few years ago would be considered preposterous.
And I think that this woke ideology, the way it permeates through academia and the way it doesn't allow for reasonable debate, it doesn't allow for uncomfortable ideas, and it enforces things like safe spaces and And trigger warnings and all this shit that's just not supposed to have anything to do with learning and growing and exploring ideas.
That we are empowering what are essentially our economic enemies and our political enemies.
We're empowering other countries.
I think these things are all connected.
And I think the economic motivation that allowed those people to essentially...
You know, they essentially cut the Achilles heel of science by making it so that these scientists could only earn a certain amount of money and disincentivizing people who are economically...
I interviewed investigators for the American Society of Cell Biology, and principal investigators who were at the top of the bio pile say, we're supposed to not have children because we have to show that we're serious.
One claim was, we make people wait to get tenure into their late 30s and early 40s because some percentage of females discover that motherhood is as interesting as science.
You would talk to somebody and say, look, you know, you can say what you want about best and the brightest, but really what I enjoy is having a slave labor force.
That the PIs, the heads of labs, need an army of people to do exactly what they say in order to be competitive to win grants and get prizes and publish papers.
Yes, but very often what they're really doing, the foreign ones, are very often trying to immigrate.
And so the idea is that the way into the country is that I'm going to contribute N years of labor at a very high level, at a very low price, pretending that I'm not a worker, that I'm a graduate student, China, for example, will get the ability to look at what we're doing because their people are in our labs.
The PI gets low-cost labor to carry out the research.
And the system is based on the idea that pliant labor is in an abundant supply.
So I forget, like a quarter of PhDs went to China, something like that.
And we talk about them as students.
So the whole thing is like people want to unionize.
How can you have a union of students?
They're students.
Well, really, they're a cryptic labor force.
The work that's getting done is being done by the students who are really not students.
You're a student probably for the first year or two of graduate school.
Then you're a worker.
So the whole thing is completely corrupt.
It's cryptic.
There's like a system called fringe rates.
There's a system called overhead.
It's funny money through and through.
And this whole thing is organized so that senior principal investigators, PIs, can run their careers with these labor forces.
And then they take pictures and they say, look at our lab and how wonderfully international it is.
So this is why the National Academy and I... This is fucking heavy.
No kidding.
But the point is that we just gave away our technical advantage Because we couldn't get the money to pay for our own labor because we actually have the best and brightest people right here in the States.
Or they stay here and they have a very strong tie because very often our professors, in order to remain competitive, have to take on this kind of science knows no boundaries.
Well, if science knows no boundaries, why are our tax dollars supporting it?
And I want to say, look, I don't want to fear you.
I want you to be more open to your people with their middle fingers up telling you to go fuck yourselves.
And in order to get that freedom, remember Tiananmen Square and the Statue of Liberty and all that kind of stuff?
In order to get that, we can't give them the benefits of both systems.
What we've done is we've given them the benefits of freedom by taking all the stuff that they can see that we're doing, and then they have all the benefits of command and control.
So they execute like crazy and they listen through their people here.
And then they build, you know, programs where people go back and forth.
And so what we're doing is we have a group of people who are so idealistic.
Well, one thing is, is that if I have a friend who has a ridiculously large podcast, I can go on about once a year, and I can say crazy shit, and then maybe, maybe, somebody will write about this.
Because he, look, this is a guy who made the system run.
If you're proud of our universities, if you're proud of our government, if you're proud of journalism in a previous era, this was the kind of a guy who would break the sons of bitches who would do bad things.
He cleared stuff out of people's way.
He knew who was naughty and who was nice, and he made sure that his people survived.
So it's, you know, I can be at this moment in my life, this stage of my life, I can be a reasonable spokesperson in that I really am just doing this for the art form.
And then I really do love the art form still.
And I think that we, for somehow, because of economics, we've been embedded in Hollywood in terms of like acting, like actors and, you know, and television shows.
But we are as far from actors as a creative endeavor can be.
Freddie King is super important, but I think that the issue of bending notes that B.B. and Albert did, and their particular boxes next to each other on the guitar neck...
One of them we associate with Albert, which has got meaner and more minor.
And the BB box, weirdly, is all about this major minor alteration through bending.
You don't hit a note by playing the note.
You hit a note underneath and you move up into it.
And so it's this vocal articulation and particular kinds of vibrato.
And the weird thing about super technical players, like the most, like a John Petrucci or something, is you say, well, who do you revere?
And they'll say, B.B. King.
And you're like, huh?
He played super slow.
Well, yeah, but with five or six notes, it'll just break your heart infinitely.
You won't care.
You'll just stay there.
And it's sort of this idea of really deep musicianship that...
It took me a lot longer to appreciate Albert because Albert was gritty.
It was much more idiosyncratic.
He played flying V upside down and backwards, the gauge of the string.
Everything was like really weird.
And he knew that he was doing everything quote wrong.
But I think Stevie Ray Vaughan really just said, okay, this guy has said so much and I'm going to prove it.
And I'm going to prove it by building my legacy on top.
I think so much of what I believe was important about the 50s is that jazz and comedy and a few of these things, like maybe beat poetry, were so dependent on the oppression of the normies...
Well, that's the thing, is that I listen for what these guys were doing, and I think about there were these...
Math and physics seminars in the Soviet Union that we did not understand were entirely dependent upon the fact that everything in the Soviet Union sucked.
And so that you could go to these places and say, here's an island of transcendence in a sea of shit, right?
And so in a weird way, I think the U.S. had this, and I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, at some point they held San Francisco Home Movie Night at the Castro Theater and I went.
And they asked everyone to send their old home movies of San Francisco.
And people were filing out of Candlestick Park or something in 1962. And I noticed that half the people looked like modern human beings and half of them had that glazed look that you'd have with a formal hat on your head and like a suit jacket that you associate with photographs from like an earlier time.
And so it was like you were looking at cardboard cutouts and modern human beings simultaneously.
And you're thinking like, wait, you were in a sweatshirt when everyone else was doing something else.
Yeah.
There is sort of almost no trace of this.
And George Thorogood was the guy who said, when I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, He said, it was the first time I saw young people having fun in public on TV. Like, just not performatively.
They were just having a blast.
And I didn't realize the extent to which this was the oppression that animated the Lenny Bruce milieu.
And, you know, if you were going to see Lenny Tristano or, you know, Dizzy Gillespie or Bud Powell, you know, like, if you just think about the beginning of Howl, you know, this thing about I've seen the best minds of my generation, blah, blah, blah.
People are seeking something authentic and real, and the hippies aren't yet.
You know, we just lost Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the great last beat poet of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.
I don't know how he lasted this long, over 100, I think.
I think we forget about the beats as important to that time.
I think what's going on right now is a good thing for comedy because comedy has become radioactive and certain words are forbidden but that just makes it so that you have to figure out a more clever way to describe things in a way that resonates with people better in a way where While also being funny, you're figuring out a way to let these people know you're a good person.
My reaction is you're screwing up the repression angle.
If you want to say something like wet-ass pussy, you want to do it in a way that you're frustrating it and making it difficult, so you have to work for it.