The Portal Wiki - User contributions [en]

28: Eric Lewis - The Singular Genius of Elew

2020-04-12T03:47:31Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[Eric Lewis]] is an open portal, a wonderful friend and one of the most important pianists in the world by our measure. As such, we will not bother with further notes for this episode. If you love the quest of the show as well as authentic soulful music, this is your guy. We simply sat down at a famous Yamaha grand piano at The Village recording studio in Los Angeles and this is the interview that transpired.

<span class="button">[[ep27 | << Previous Episode]]</span> <span class="button">[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/555f45c9-6048-495e-9e9d-2481271d6833 Listen to Episode 28]</span> <span class="button">[https://rss.art19.com/episodes/555f45c9-6048-495e-9e9d-2481271d6833.mp3 Download episode (mp3)]</span> <span class="button">[[A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look | Next Episode >>]]</span>

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== Transcript ==

27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses

2020-04-12T03:47:07Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
In this second episode of the Portal to be released during shelter-in-place restrictions during the Corona Virus Pandemic, we release an older discussion with [[Daniel Shmachtenberger]] on whether there is any plausible long term scenario for human flourishing confined to a single shared planet.

Daniel is seen as a leader of the growing [[Game B]] subculture of the human potential movement. This group bets that there is a second evolutionary stable strategy for cohabiting not based on conflict or rivalry, even for life raised in Game A (i.e. standard evolutionary and economic environments based on scarcity and rivalrous goods. Eric asks Daniel about where the bright spots and progress might be in this movement which refuses to accept the fate that that Eric has elsewhere put forward as the [[Twin Nuclei Problem]] of having unlocked the power of both Cell and Atom in the early 1950s without the wisdom to use it.

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26: James O’Keefe: What is (and isn't) Journalism in the 21st century

2020-04-12T03:46:44Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[James O'Keefe]] is a dangerous man. He records people without their knowledge and publishes the results using the full power of our technological toolkit. He is well versed in the details of the law as to what can and cannot be legally recorded and/or published without the consent or even awareness of his targets. He is willing to risk prison to capture his stories and he has developed a policy of not settling out of court, even when it would be financially advantageous to do so. Clearly, he is willing to risk ruin and hatred for what he is doing, and is therefore not a man to be lightly trifled with.

In this episode, Eric sits down with James to try to understand the mutant future of journalism as it reckons with the power of new technology, while continuing to move away from traditional newspapers and reporting. Eric tries to discover what is truly motivating O'keefe and why he would want to come on a show that has been so openly critical of his organization.

James has many who see him as a crusading hero. He has also been accused of unethical deception, trespassing, entrapment, selective editing, and an entire litany of ethics complaints from traditional media. Oddly, however, more standard reporters working for traditional news desks openly discuss among themselves the professional need to deceive their targets in order to get the truth, or at least the story. Such strategies include using disingenuous flattery, pretending to be the source's friend, threats, the lure of fame, and a host of other edgy techniques to get people to say things that the reporter knows will likely be personally disastrous for the person being quoted.

This raises the question of just what it is that makes James O'Keefe different from a more mainstream reporter. Is it his method, more than his chosen targets? Is it that he really doctors his footage or instead that he has revived older journalistic techniques to hunt new journalists? This interview may not answer all of these questions, but we hope it may prove to be a conversation unlike any you have previously heard on this topic.

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== Transcript ==

* [https://theportal.wiki/images/3/35/James_O%E2%80%99Keefe_What_is_%28and_isn%27t%29_Journalism_in_the_21st_century.vtt Raw VTT File]

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hello, this is Eric, and I wanted to alert you to a small experiment. I think we're going to be running in the portal for awhile now. We've realized that many episodes have needs at the beginning of the show. In the first place. There's a need for some housekeeping and in the second, there's often a need to give some context and a short introduction to the episode so that our listeners can better understand why we're running it.

Well, what we thought about is that maybe we should stop doing that haphazardly. If instead we just decided that there would be two segments. One dedicated to housekeeping, sometimes light, sometimes more extensive, and in the second we had a segment that actually gives the context and an introduction to the guest or whatever the point of a monologue might be.

I don't guarantee that it's going to work and we reserve the right to go back, but we are trying to listen to you and trying to figure out what is doable. The second item of business surrounds the set of rather exotic circumstances under which this week's podcast is being released. As of this recording, I am now self isolating at home, under essentially locked down like measures as a quarantine mentality sweeps across our planet.

One way of viewing this is to see it as a giant overreaction. Now, I don't hold this view and I don't wish to promote it, but the idea is that we have learned to live with influenza and this virus is similar in some ways to the familiar flu. I'm sure you've heard this from others, I know when I go into it and develop the idea here. A second way of seeing this is it as an incredibly rapid societal change in deeply groove behavior patterns unfolding over perhaps the last seven to 14 days in earnest.

From this angle, it is astonishingly agentic as measured, at least by the speed of change, and thus perhaps, it could signal the beginning of the end of the nearly 50 year dream state that we have discussed on this program that set in sometime in the early to mid 1970s and signaled the end of the previous postwar growth machine.

Yet a different way of looking at the reaction to the pandemic is to view it as a slow and inadequate response to a very serious situation. To this way of thinking; the most agentic among us were worried about the situation since at least January, 2020 and they were simply getting no traction in talking through why they were alarmed when attempting to convince the rest of us.

Of course, all three positions have some merit, but the first seems misguided to me, and I think the last has the most substance. Many people have asked me how I am sense-making in the current environment. The answer is rather disappointing. My answer is that I unfortunately appeared to be among the most confused of my colleagues.

Almost everywhere I turn. People around me are nearly certain of things that contradict what various others of my colleagues know to be true. Unsurprisingly, most of these colleagues have settled on various strategies on which they place great emphasis. So then the problem is definitely ventilators, unless it is really reagents and testing instead, or perhaps nothing else matters like behavior modification.

That is, if vaccines and treatments aren't the clear way to go. I want to share with you what I get from listening in on such private conversations with some of the most respected names in health science and technology. I'm sorry to say. What I get is confusion. I am sorry to report that after many phone calls and having read a fair amount, I have not heard a truly coherent, comprehensive narrative emerge around this virus.

No one really trusts China to report in itself, and we don't yet have enough time with the disease outside of China to speak about it sufficiently authoritatively. So what am I doing personally? Well, the first thing that I'm at least trying to do is to stop listening to the very sources that fed me bad information initially telling me not even to worry when I had the maximum amount of time to prepare and to be agentic.

That kind of reporting is what I've elsewhere referred to as pure journal genic harm. Now you can say that democracy dies in darkness with a fancy tagline, but it also dies in civil society. When you are the major news site and you write meaningless fluff pieces on what are ultimately life and death issues inducing people to undertake exactly the wrong course of action.

Unfortunately that means that I've more or less been forced to give up on a lot of mainstream news like the Washington post or the daily beast after they both condescendingly warned us against reacting to the threat of the virus. Similarly, I am trying not to listen to any messaging specifically designed to calm me down or to distress me.

Now, why is that? Well, first of all, what stresses me out most, and I'm just being honest here, is some questionable expert, trotted out with a PhD who's leading response to a deadly virus, is to lecture us on psychology. I mean, if I'm on lockdown, I want to be talking about viruses, about morbidity and mortality.

I want to see grizzly autopsy photos, the ones that the experts have, not because I'm a cob, but because they help explain what we're up against and why the government is reacting so strongly. Information, data risk assessment. That's what calms me down and I suspect it works the same way with a lot of you as well.

I want information and guidance the same way the experts do. How bad is this? I mean, people in the know right now are talking about the potential for multi-month quarantines much longer than the three week ones that are currently being discussed in public as well as about much higher respiratory burdens on the young who recover.

Contrast that with the talk of quote full recovery close boat that I am more commonly hearing in mainstream discussions. I'm sorry, but in terms of morbidity, I don't think recovery from this illness is anywhere near as full or as free as is being discussed. That would make sense to me. In fact, a friend of mine listening to me suggested looking up ground glass opacities and I thanked her for that search string.

I think you might find it interesting as well. But instead of an expectation of full information, we are too often getting the opposite. To put it bluntly, we seem to always be managed rather than informed. To the best of my understanding, we are all in the famous, metaphoric, crowded theater and the powers that be have been cutting costs for decades by making our exits smaller and smaller.

So their current focus isn't getting as few people to panic as possible when the correct thing to do is to ask why our leaders didn't push for larger exits before the crisis. Now in the metaphor, those larger exits would be deeper reserves and larger emergency cushions of ventilators, hospital beds, reagents for testing, all the things that a successful civil society would naturally want, deeply stocked in just such an emergency.

So we have a bit of a conflict, the right thing to do in an ideal world. It would be to level with nations that had been all the while properly prepared for actual society-wide adversity, but to begin that now would mean admitting to universal institutional failure and the previous era to adequately prepare for any event of this kind.

Thus, what I'm planning to do on a going forward basis is two fold. First, I've stopped listening to any exoteric mainstream messaging meant to manage panic just as I've started slogging through esoteric medical and scientific communication. But the second part of this is no less important. I have started to privilege the information implicitly contained in a sensibly self-destructive economic behavior coming from governments far too under the control of elite economic interests to begin with.

That is, I don't think anyone in positions of asymmetric information in power would adopt these measures unless the virus was very severe. Indeed, because the financial risks are themselves catastrophic. Thus, as far as the government is concerned, I am looking at the severity of their actions and turning down the audio of their words.

If the two are conflicting, I am taking more information from what we are putting at risk than I am from descriptions that are being shared with the public. So to sum up, please take this seriously. We don't yet have a way to filter the information, misinformation and disinformation with which we are all being bombarded.

What can you do? Well, the best we may be able to do is to turn off the audio meant to calm the masses and try to start reading the technical literature. If we can. And lastly, watch for the sign that powerful interests are willing to put the very markets which enrich them at risk to fight this. That is a bit counterintuitive, but in the end, the revealed preference and the content of that information may be the best that we have at this point.

Okay, so thanks to your local and federal government as well as the coronavirus. If you're like me, you are sheltering in place while this is being recorded and may be starting to go ever so slightly stir crazy, thanks to a near lockdown, which we can't refer to in real terms. So what are you going to do at the time?

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I would like to say some brief words of introduction to today's episode with James O'Keefe of project Veritas. First of all, I respect James for being willing to come on the portal as our beginning interaction on Twitter was not a specious. As I recall. I wrote, I hate this shitty hidden camera. Gotcha.

Crap. And perhaps not surprisingly, he took immediate exception. I found his response interesting and invited him on the program to explain himself. And to my surprise, he accepted despite my unconcealed hostility, I admired that willingness to face a critic. I've endeavored ever since with James to be a constructive one.

On a preliminary setup call. I promised him that there would be no gotchas, and he actually said that that was unnecessary. I told him that our politics were likely opposite and that I wouldn't pull any punches, nor would I pretend that I was without admiration for some of what he does, such as in the case of his pushing at the famous Amy Rohrbach hot Mike video.

This release revealed that higher ups at ABC news may have been deliberately holding back the Epstein's story for years. In that video of the subject matter was of utmost public interest, and the reporter caught on the hot mic was made to look even more heroic in having gotten the story early. I did tell James, however, that I didn't like his choice of targets and that his methods made me very negatively disposed to the entire project Veritas endeavor.

He simply asked me to keep an open mind as he felt that he had answers to all of my concerns. As it happens. However, I believe that we had a conversation that would have been very difficult to predict by either one of us had we not simply gone ahead and tried to better understand each other. The decision to invite James O'Keefe onto the program was not taken lightly.

Why is this? Well, it's because of an idiotic game. Many in the regular media play, which we might call contamination in this fool's game, if you so much his interview with James O'Keefe, you are marked by extension as damaged goods. Now, this fools absolutely no one is paying attention, claiming that everything project Veritas does is unreliable when often they're merely sharing.

Unedited, continuous footage that they have been sent is not a convincing argument for those in the know. In essence, James O'Keeffe is after all, a creation of our mainstream media, their decision not to aggressively pursue many stories of great importance has created opportunity. And if you believe that James O'Keefe has absolutely nothing to contribute, I do hope you more than anyone will enjoy this interview with him.

Everybody loves it. Great. David and Goliath story. That's why Jagger and Richards took on the Beatles. Watson and Crick took down Linus Pauling, Gilbert and Sullivan took on the monarchy, but when it's the United States postal service that's upping their shipping rates, who's going to defend you. Well, Pitney and Bose.

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Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I get to sit down today with James O'Keefe, the head of project Veritas. James, welcome. Great to be here. I'm really glad to have you. Now, you know, of course, that by just having you in that chair, some percentage of the world is going to go bananas and say, Oh my God, Eric has jumped the shark.

He's beyond the pale. He's gone too far. He's platform. Somebody should never be platform. And this is going through my head even as we speak. And part of the reason I bring that up is that I want to fight that, which is, that's ridiculous. You're an important figure. We need to talk to you. We need to understand you.

And I also want to just begin by commending you because you got to be here in part by your, uh, answering a tweet of mine by just being open about the fact that I, you didn't feel like I was being fair to you. And maybe I would just begin by reminding, uh, our viewers and listeners have this begin. Okay.

Should we do that? Sure. Okay. So you project Veritas had just caught a David Wright of ABC news on undercover camera saying some things that he probably shouldn't have, and he was suspended by ABC as a result of project Veritas, his actions, and you tweeted that out and I responded. Uh, why is this person suspended?

Because he's a socialist question Mark. Because he thinks Trump is a Dick question Mark. Because he discusses the dinosaur broadcast broadcast channels because he is thinking about institutional bias. Dunno. And then I say, I also have to admit, I hate this shitty hidden camera. Gotcha crap. And your response was, you hate the shitty.

Hidden camera. Got your crap right was in a public space speaking freely amongst his peers in newspapers. That's called reporting. You're prejudiced against the method. Doesn't make any sense. You prefer, I report this all caps without the audio. A quotation anonymously sourced close quotes. And I thought that was a really interesting comeback.

So if I just can recall, I said, thank you, James for this question. Let me answer this as honestly as I can. We have a William tell problem, aim too high and you miss the story, aim too low and you kill the impact due to the uncomfortable methods, in my opinion, you are aiming too low and I am aiming too high.

And I think that that really comes down to. The, the, the interesting issue that we have for listeners and viewers today, which is I think you and I are agreed on a lot about the problems in the current system. And we're radically divided by the methods. And I'm very concerned about the damage project Veritas is doing.

And I'm also, uh, interested. In the progress project Veritas is making and most people want to have a one or the other perspective. Right, and I have a superposition of the two issues, so I thought that a good place to start, that'd be a great place to start. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you saw the interaction and any background that you want to bring to the

'''James O’Keefe:''' conversation?

It's a lot to unpack here. There's a million things to directions to go into, but I thought that was a very interesting conversation and credit to you because. After having the conversation, you actually invited me to, to, to talk to you and to call you in that, in kudos to you. Because most of the people I deal with don't even think that I'm human.

They kind of want to dehumanize me. They don't want to engage me in a conversation. So thank you. Um. I really appreciate that. I think that a lot of people, uh, it's a stencil really about the methods of what we do, but in reality, it's about the findings. It's, it's actually not about the methods. It's, it's used as a kind of an excuse.

And in that particular, uh, tweet. A Twitter thread you were referring to. This is a common theme. It's, it's the ethics of recording someone like David Wright was in a bar in New Hampshire and do we want to live in a world where our, our, our likeness can be broadcast and, and transmitted instantly to everybody.

A likable, don't want to live in that world. My argument is going to be and has been my whole life that. Reporters there. There's a routine nature in journalistic methods to both utilize deception and to broadcast things to the world that are not as accurate as a camera would. B, there's a routine nature.

First of all, of using pretense. Journalistic deception is standard in the industry. Uh, reporters make you think that they're your friend and then they betray your confidence. They appeal to your sense of loneliness or vanity, and then they betray you. They pull the rug underneath you. That's, that's what I meant when I said.

That's the Paragon of investigative reporting. And then when it comes to the actual medium itself, which we will talk about here today, um, the camera is a more accurate version of the events in question. So surely, not just from a legal perspective, but from a moral one, we would consider, uh, consider it unreasonable to place ethical restrictions on recording someone when we don't place restrictions on someone.

Writing what they said down with a pencil and paper and shouting it from the rooftops five minutes later because the recording does the individual more justice than second hand hearsay. You know, words are a different mediums. So that was the point I was making to you. And, and I think you had a vert, we had a very honest back and forth there, and I appreciate it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, thanks very much. Um, and it's a great. You know, I think your, uh, your tagline is something like, be brave,

'''James O’Keefe:''' be brave, do something,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' be brave, do something. And I think that it's brave to come into somebody's studio when you know that they've got a problem with you from the get go. So, kudos to you, sir. Um.

I think that you and I are. So let me also just try to be radically different than most of these interviews I've told you that there will be no gotchas. And I'm going to stick to that because I don't, I don't like gotchas, your perspective, which I thought was incredibly honest, was that's, it's an interesting thing to say because gotcha.

Is in some sense what I, James O'Keefe, do we project Veritas? And so what I said in response was, it's an interesting question whether or not. The gotcha problem that I see in the news industry should be doubled, where you got your back to the gotcha. URS or you should try to set an example of cut that shit out.

Right. And that's in part what I try to do, which is I try to go after institutions. I tried to knock, go after individuals, and what I wanted to talk about, um, in part is that because I see you and I. As in agreement that there is a serious problem with the sense making architecture that currently goes under the name of journalism.

And it's not clear what that architecture is actually doing. And I think it's clear it's, it's more and more, uh, Americans and others. Increasingly are asking, is this even really what journalism was supposed to be all about? As we start to see the mechanism fail, because I'm an agreed with you that there's a serious problem.

I don't think that when I say I'm really disturbed by the methods that I'm part of the thing that's trying to protect the institutions, which is I think what you're usually getting from people who think you're the devil. . I think what I'm really concerned about in part is, is that you are actually damaging the enterprise that I'm interested in by pursuing it.

And in some ways, I sort of view you as analogous to Donald Trump. And here's, here would be the argument. Again, it's a loose analogy. It's not a tight one. We have a situation in which, for example, no one is allowed to bring up all of the problems with immigration, uh, within the standard architecture of news.

In general, there's only one role for the restrictionist, and that is the role of xenophobe, which is preposterous. It's idiotic. It's beyond belief. The way in which that weird meme has perpetuated, um, has been perpetuated for at least 30 to 40 years where there's only one reason to oppose immigration.

And that's because of a moral failing of the self. Uh. Can only happen by the news. Choosing not to report all of the reasons one can be a restrictionist. So as an example of, of the, the comparison, I would say Trump found a way to talk about, uh, immigration and restriction ism openly in a way that many Americans could respond to because a lot of Americans actually want immigration restricted.

On the other hand, he tinges it. With stuff he played with the, whether or not he was actually openly racist or not. You can make the argument that you went right up to a line and that he caused people to complete thoughts in their own head that he didn't actually say. But he got very close to some very ugly sentiments at the barest minimum and in part, the method of bringing something dangerous up in public tinge.

That perspective with a kind of meanness or unsavory newness that I didn't think that it needed at all. So the vacuum was created by the media not functioning as it should. Trump filled the vacuum and he also brought this extra little bit, which was an unsavory tinge to the subject. In some sense, I would say I see you as doing real journalism, hard-hitting journalism, and that is to your credit.

And then it is tinted with something which I see is very disturbing, which is kind of, um, methods that make us all uncomfortable. And I think you're quite correct to point out that. Um, journalism. It's is itself openly a deceptive practice as practiced by the institutions. And I want to just say, I also find the journalist practice of trying to be your best friend and then stabbing you in the back.

Disgusting.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Okay, good. Oh man. There's a lot to, a lot to unpack there. Where do I begin? Uh, let me just address the, uh, the characterization that I'm a gotcha person. Um,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' which came from you? It didn't, I didn't say it.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Fair enough. Fair enough. And I, and I may want to correct myself here because maybe there is a universe of gunshots.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I may have said it in the tweet, but I didn't mean to say

'''James O’Keefe:''' no, I understand him. So I think. I think we don't even quote people. We, we, we, we let them be themselves. We assimilate with the people like at the bar and, and when, you know, we're letting people be their natural selves, sometimes people don't have the courage to be themselves in, in public, um, in the way that we record people.

And a lot of these people in the media that we've recorded, like, whether it be Patrick Davis at CNN or this guy, uh, right at ABC. They didn't have the courage to say these things publicly. And I happen to agree with these people what they said, but when it comes to the dis, the methods, you have a choice to make.

You can either, from my perspective, deceive your audience, or you can, for lack of a better word, deceive the person that you're interviewing such that you can tell the truth to the audience and, and one is worse than the other, and you only have these two choices. And, um, that's what, that's what I mean.

The Gunter wall roof was a hero of mine. He was a legendary undercover reporter in Germany, still alive. He's in his seventies. And, and this man said, and I don't like the way he utilizes the word deception, but he says, my task is to deceive in order not to be deceived, to break the rules of, of, of, of, of the game, in order to disclose.

The secret rules of the power structure. And, and a lot of ethicists have basically said the same thing. And when it comes to this sort of journalism, it's, you only have two choices. You can, you can hate the methods, but then you're going to broadcast lies to the public and telling the truth that public is paramount.

The public has a right to know this information. So you can, you know, this sort of the beauty and bane of ethics is that, I guess it's, it's. Always situational. But we've reached a point in the media. I mean, you, you know, look at what's happened this week with this, uh, mass hysteria too. We can, that's another subject, but that, that the, the mass media has become so, so far gone, uh, an industrial system of this production, that manufacturer's consent that.

We're getting to the point now where I believe these methods are universally justifiable because the media is so broken and I have a choice to make. I can repeat what they say to me at a podium or into a microphone, or I can, or I can use disguise, which we believe is morally necessary. And I would even go so far to say it's.

Actually immoral not to use disguise if the only way that you can get to that truth is to use disguise. And other reporters throughout the 20th century agreed with me. Many of these people are not alive anymore, but at this point, it's gotten so bad that we think that these tactics are, are completely necessary because we live in a country.

Where the public's right to know is very important. We cherish the first amendment. We, we, we, you know, hold these truths to be self evident. We, we, we believe in the first amendment so much that you're going to have to deal with that. The methods you're going to have to deal with the possibility that the person sitting next to you has a recording device because we cherish these values.

If you want to live in a different society, which doesn't cherish those values, which. Which leans towards secrecy and the public not knowing things, then you don't have to deal with those methods. And that's, that's an in short order why we believe that, uh, undercover work, uh, pretending to be something that you're not in order to extract truths from people are not just justified.

They're morally necessary in this environment.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Good. Um, so can we both say that, uh. Were it possible to get at the truth without using deception? It would be better to do it if that was possible. In that circumstance.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Society, professional journalists, I think it was in the early seventies, said, cause they always throw this stuff in me.

You know, the society professional journalists, I dunno who the journalism gods are that came up with these rules. Uh, but the society of professional said, you know, you only use it as a last resort. And I would submit to you that were basically there, that, that, that we, that we have, we have a last resort in our society.

Um, uh, right, was not deceived in that bar inside ABC news. He was the undercover reporter, uh, met with him and, and let him be himself. We didn't really have to use that much deception, to be honest with you. We we, this is the tape that we released two weeks ago. If your audience hasn't seen it, it's an ABC news veteran news correspondent.

He's an Oxford educated guy. Very, very, very intelligent man, and I happen to agree with everything he says. He says, so I don't have the quote with me, but he says, my bosses don't see an upside in reporting the news. ABC owns Disney. They sell their Marvel Avengers products.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I understand what joint

'''James O’Keefe:''' covers, everything he said so.

We didn't really use that much deception. We got close to him and allowed him to talk, allow him to be himself. Very minimalist deception artists option pales in comparison

'''Eric Weinstein:''' with, there's a, there's a relative deception question and you're absolutely right. I mean, I want to, I want to seed to you wherever I can seed you and I want to fight you wherever you want to fight you and then I'm happy to change my mind and hope that I can change yours.

We'll find out. I have definitely had the experience when talking to a reporter who screws up a story. Come on. You know the game, Eric, you're a sophisticated guy. You've been around the block. I'm supposed to be your best friend. I'm supposed to lure you into a false sense of security. You're supposed to divulge too much to me.

I'm supposed to tell you that I understand everything from your, and then I have to print the story because journalism is PR printing what other people don't want printed or otherwise. It's public relations. You know the quote Eric. Right? So I think it's absolutely correct that what you're saying is true journalists view,

'''James O’Keefe:''' excuse me.

I wanted to name examples of the people who have said that

'''Eric Weinstein:''' to you. Um, I can tell you that I got into a pretty bad situation with the wall street journal at some point. Okay. Um, I can tell you that. The New York times, uh, put me in an article called, um, they tried to outsmart wall street where they tried to shift the blame for the 2008 crisis off of these CEOs and bank heads, uh, and onto mathematicians and quants, uh, which was completely, uh, deceptive and ridiculous.

And they use their physics reporter, um. Yeah. whose name is Dennis Overby, and I thought that was a complete hatchet job. I can tell you that, uh, you know, Nellie Bowles, uh, who I've become friendly with at the New York times, tried to print an article about me as a men's rights advocate when I didn't even know what MRA stood for.

And I said, I don't even own a gun. Um. Yeah, I mean, I'm not afraid of that. On the other hand, I've talked to Nellie, you know, since, and we've come to a better understanding. I think Michael Phillips was the journalist who covered me at the wall street journal who did a complete hatchet job on me. And, uh, I had to go through a Byron claim.

So yeah, I can name names if that's what you're

'''James O’Keefe:''' looking at. Actually, what I was looking for. And the point being is that. You know, we, we're not beat reporter. We're not, we're not, you know,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' trying to come. Right, right. Sure thing. I do understand what I think you're saying. Which is that the game of reporters is to be these sort of deceptive sociopath's, if you will.

And then you get to say, no, no, no, I'm not a sociopath. I'm a reporter. So if you have sociopathic tendencies, in some sense, you get to work for one of these papers, and then you'd get a halo, a T attached to your head, which allows you to do things, which in other circumstances would be completely deceptive.

And in fact, your point to me, and I think this is great. And this is just like super complicated and we're going to have to take the time to do it, is that the style of reporting that you do has gone out of favor in a certain sense because of the costs, because of the risks and that what you're doing is in some sense, resuscitating an earlier form of journalism

'''James O’Keefe:''' in a different medium,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' in a different medium with a different tinge and a different institutional backing.

And so I think that this is an incredibly complex thing to be pulled apart because. In some sense, what happened in my, into my way of thinking is as the journalists used to hunt institutions when they were heroes in Kings, and then they went from hunting institutions to hunting the, the individuals that disrupt institutions.

Yes.

'''James O’Keefe:''' 100%

'''Eric Weinstein:''' and so my feeling about this is you want to know why the reputation of the presses in the toilet. It's in general because what it does is, as it has changed, it's, uh, the focus of its crosshairs to Nobel individual.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Let's talk about that for one minute. Sure. The, the thing that I've learned doing this is that in the New York times did a front page, um, uh, Pitt P, you know, attempted hit piece on me literally.

One week ago and in this it was about like spies. Some people in the Intel community were helping train some people and there was a paragraph in this front page, New York times. It was chock-full with circumstantial evidence. One of the paragraphs said. You know, it's not clear what the relationship is between Trump and O'Keefe and so forth.

So on that one little paragraph, the way they worded that, it was literally, it's just not clear. They, that was the, the meat of their argument. It's not clear, was the extent of their evidence. And then that justified a circumstantial headline, which was used to create a, I don't know if it was common cause or some.

Left-leaning ethics group filing complaint against me. And what it is is it's what Daniel Barston, the former library of Congress calls a pseudo event. The shadow has become the substance. These, these people create these fake things. And number two, what happens is that people on the government, these beat report, I call them beat reporters.

They have a source in government, which leaks them information. And then, and then reportedly this happened. That leak. That thing, which I don't do that, but I'm not a beat run an investigative reporter, which is a huge world of difference. A B report depends upon these people in the power structure to feed them intelligence.

It's like a counter intelligence operation. Someone in the government, some two star general talks to the New York times, and we don't know who that two star general is. We don't know their name. We don't know what motivates them. We don't know. Why they're doing it. We don't know what they're saying. We don't know the full quote.

And this is the, this is the status quo of journalism. So when you unpack that and

'''Eric Weinstein:''' you take, you think, I don't have a problem with journalism in an exactly this capacity.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm sorry. Do you think I, you don't have a problem with it or you do,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean, you and I just began this by a singing Gershwin together to check our Mike levels.

True. I would imagine that you and I are pretty harmonious on the idea that. Our major institutions have news of news gathering and dissemination are a wildly out of,

'''James O’Keefe:''' but the reason why that matters is because this is, we're trying to diagnose what is wrong and how we got there. And what happened was,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' look, I can do this stuff in my sleep in a, in a rambling interview, internet personality.

Eric Winestein sat down with right-wing activists. James O'Keeffe. Uh, James proceeded, uh, to justify, uh, his methods, which have previously been found unethical by, uh, his peers in the journalistic community through a series of ends, justified the means points that failed to land or something like it can go on and on and on.

'''James O’Keefe:''' What would you like to focus on?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, the point that I'm trying to get at is, okay, I know how they play this game. I know that there's a, to be short paragraph, seven paragraphs in where the actual information is shared. I know the highly placed sources say X, I know that they cut the quotes. They change the context.

Right. Okay. All of this stuff is assumed by, you don't know my audience. I got the best audience and all the podcasts. I may not have the biggest podcast by of people who will dig into anything we talk about and we don't need to handhold for them, and sure they got it. And they also believe. Probably mostly in the need for journalism.

They understand the problems with the major institutions of journalism. That's not really what occupies us. If we spend our time there with looking to stay in the shallow end, we won't get anything done. Right. Okay. Assume that there is a terrible problem in news now and assume that in some sense you are actually a throwback to an earlier, more aggressive style.

Of journalism, but you're also picking up some serious negatives, and I don't think that the trade offs are the way you say they are. And so that's, I want to get to the next level conversation rather than the intro conversation. Let somebody else have that with you. Sure. Okay. I don't think you're on the efficient frontier would be a better way of saying what my problem is with, with you and project Veritas.

In other words, you're saying that you have to deceive the source. It's some level who, which is a negative. You'd prefer to do as little of that as possible. So you have two objectives. One is you want to inform the public and you want to deceive the source as little as possible. I don't think that you're at the point where you have to trade off one to get the other.

I think you could do actually deceive less and get more. Now, I could be wrong about that. Okay. Okay. One thing you could do, for example, just to limit the damage to human beings. We'd be to pixelate people and say, this is a senior reporter. We disguise the voice. We've pixelated the image. Our interest isn't the reporter.

The reporter is only as important as that chair, and our focus is on the chair. And if you did that at some level, you would say, look, I'm not trying to humiliate somebody. I'm not trying to make them unemployable. I'm trying to say you've got a problem in the news media. What is your problem? And it would be seen differently.

Okay. It would be seen as his focus isn't the issue of sticking it to the enemy. His focus is trying to get journalism to function properly.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Okay. Um, let me try to address that. I mean, I think it's,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' does the point make sense about nothing?

'''James O’Keefe:''' As I explained this. Cut me off if I'm going in the wrong direction.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Correct me if I have a wrong impression.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm trying to understand your point, so let me, let me see if I can answer this. I think going back to your point about newspaperman in the 1970s it wasn't that they were a blood. Bloodthirsty or had a lust for, for blood lust. Cause you know, people get fired when, when you expose things.

It was that they had an instinct to go for the juggler but not be bloodthirsty. And I think that investigative reporting, uh, does in fact harm people. I do think it does. And that's. That's the premise. It it, it's a outcome of truth telling. And if your goal is to limit damage to people, it's going to, maybe this is where we disagree.

Come into conflict with investigative reporting. I your point about pixelating faces, I think about this a lot. I think about the ethics of this a lot. And what makes what we do. A Renaissance, to your point about the 20th century and boring, it is a Renaissance newspaper. Men used to do all this stuff and we could talk about this later in the show or right now, whatever your, whatever your preferable it is, the only way.

To, to slip the disc, so to speak. Uh, in my view, the only way is to, is to, is to focus on a shift in the medium. The fact that we don't pixelate the faces, the facts that, that like Alinsky says, pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. The fact that you have an actual source,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Lewinsky affair saw Lynn's benefit.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm not a fan of him. He's stating what I think is a reality about. Forcing a reaction.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm a progressive who can't standalone?

'''James O’Keefe:''' Well,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I don't agree with your conservative who actually thinks it's interest.

'''James O’Keefe:''' No, it's not. It's not binary. I don't like Alinsky. I'm quoting something. He sang a universal truth about human behavior.

If you pick the target, frees it, personalize it, and polarize it, you're more prone to generate a reaction. We can talk about this later. Sure. That I think slips the disc, so when you don't pixelate the face, when you show the intonation, the body language. Uh, the, the, the cadence, the, the way that the man looks in his eyes.

Patrick Davis at CNN, when we covertly filmed him, he was an unwitting whistleblower. He did not, he was not a villain. He was not a villain. And some ethicists might say, well, why would you put that poor managing editor at CNN on blast? And I said, because CNN has played in airports. That's why, because you are, you are a few standard deviations away from the mean Erik.

Most people in airports look at that and goes, that's the truth. And when the managing editor, I can't recall his exact title, managing director of field operations, Patrick Davis sits in that bar. This is filmed last, uh, last year and says, I hate what we've become. Is what Patrick Davis says on the hidden camera.

We could be so much better than we are. That's a direct quote. I don't even listen to the CEO or the president's his calls anymore. I'm disgusted by it, is what he's saying. And I have to make an evaluation. A means ends evaluation on do I blur this man's face? And I say no. Why? Because in my view, in a world where the media.

Is more powerful than all three branches of the government of the United States, which I, we can talk about that if you disagree with me. I have an obligation to tell the people about what this man who basically controls all of the stuff happening on CNN.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I understand what you are. Leaves. Okay. Okay. And I'm not even, look,

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm just passionate.

That's why I'm, I'm not arguing with you. I'm just passionate. And I firmly believe that,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' brother, you ain't seen nothing yet. Go ahead. No, I'm, I'll match you passion for passengers. Okay. Yeah, my, my concern is, is that you're actually, so the way I view it is you're an alternate David throwing stones at the same Goliath, and you're pissing me off at some level.

And the reason you're pissing me off is probably complicated, which is why these interchanges, they never happen. And it's great thing to do it. If I look at what happened, for example, with the . The Amy Robach, um, tape. Do you want to say a little bit about how you see that? And then I'll come back to it and say how I see it as being significant?

'''James O’Keefe:''' How I see it in, in, in, in,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' in general? What is that you, you broadcast it to the world. And I think it's an incredible, incredibly important and interesting piece of, uh, footage and, but our listeners may not be aware

'''James O’Keefe:''' of me. Robock was this a, this is back in November of last year. Um, we had an insider within ABC news.

Uh, a record, this a hot Mike moment where Amy Roebuck is the anchor on good morning America and she comes across very credible in this tape. She's a, she's a very attractive blonde female anchor and she's bemoaning how ABC squashed spike the Jeffrey Epstein story. They had victims, they had all this evidence and she's really upset that she didn't get the scoop and she says that they, she, she testifies this is a hot Mike moment between like during the commercial break.

That, uh, it was to protect the Clintons and the British Royal family. So this was, I've been doing this for 11 years in a really major way. This is by far the most viral piece of this is like a 92nd piece of film. And it was like the most viral thing I'd ever seen. It was, it was, it was an indictment to so many of, of what we're talking about here today.

I'm

'''Eric Weinstein:''' like holding back emotion. It was so powerful, right? It's like, okay. Now I, it took me six months to get it. The courage to say, I wonder why it is almost no news outfit will ask the question, is Jeffrey Epstein known to the intelligence communities of the world and is his pedophilia known? And did we sit idly by while 12 year old girls and upward or or down?

I don't even know were being trafficked. Uh, in the most powerful circles in the world. I mean, is somebody going to ask the questions where his fortune came from and where the trading records were that I'm trying to map the silences of the news media. I'm much more interested in what they don't say, don't report, don't do.

And this thing that I'm calling the disc distributed idea suppression complex is perfectly illustrated by Amy Robach and you, so far as I know, simply broadcast. The video in an unedited form that was leaked to you,

'''James O’Keefe:''' something to that effect. We have an end. We have this insider program. These, it's actually quite extraordinary thing.

If I could mention it for a minute. We have these people on the inside of these institutions who, who, you know, they do have, um, you know, confidentiality agreements with their employers, et cetera, et cetera. But what's remarkable is they might strap a camera to their chest or simply record and, and give that to us.

And in some cases, Eric, these insiders. Go public and, and go on the record, sit down and write, become a hero. Or a martyr in this case is a rare exception where this person is still working there. And Disney corporation, you know, quarantined every employee and grilled them for hours and they still have not been able to identify this person.

So this was recorded and it was a remarkable moment. It was. It was on the same type of standard. She w Amy Romark did not know, or she knew, and so far she was wearing a lav. Mike,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' you know, it's an incredible. It's incredible piece of footage and then if I recall correctly, yeah, she comes back and sort of almost a little bottom fashion apologizing for what she said.

Yeah.

'''James O’Keefe:''' This is what happened was, again, I'm speculating here, but I pretty safely speculating, ABC news

'''Eric Weinstein:''' actually don't spec, you don't need to,

'''James O’Keefe:''' ABC news issues a statement and the statement is. You know that, that the, at the time, not all of our standards met our reporting for air. It was very robotic, you know, corporate statement justifying why they didn't.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I regret that some of the intemperate things that I may have said in a moment of frustration were picked up

'''James O’Keefe:''' kind of frustration with words.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I don't know that she used that.

'''James O’Keefe:''' She did. It was actually, it was actually quite literally quote, moment of

'''Eric Weinstein:''' frustration. I didn't, I didn't know that

'''James O’Keefe:''' there was Amy's statement and there was ABC news estate,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' whatever it is, it's, yeah.

It's fricking scary. Yeah. Right. Cause the idea is that you're seeing, it's like somebody recanting their testimony, uh, in North Korea and you know that there's like a gun held to the person's head or you're watching a hostage video or something like that. Okay. Now here's my problem and I really want you to take the time to play this through with me.

I watched what happened when that debuted with project Veritas stamped on it. And in my circles what w what got said, and this is a trap, and again, it's not, you're not responsible for it, but we both have to agree with the game is the game is, is that anything that comes through James O'Keeffe and anything that comes through project Veritas cannot be trusted.

Right. That's what they've done. They fit, they fitted you with a shit suit. And your shit suit is you are so psychopathic, so non reliable that even what appears to be continuous, unedited footage can be completely discounted if it appears as project fair to us.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And that has not stopped us.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, not only has it not stopped you, it creates a really interesting dilemma.

First of all, that tactic that is being used against you is manifestly stupid and unethical.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And I have nothing I can do about

'''Eric Weinstein:''' it. No, no, no, no. You're jumping ahead. I don't agree with this, James. I think that the problem is that this is at such a level of complexity, whatever the ABC news function is that stop that, stop that story from running that might've saved people from having terrible incidents in their lives.

They don't know. Whatever that thing was is my enemy. That's the disc. And we have to slip the disk in order to save our society. That's basically my take. I also agree that you've been fitted with this thing so that if you're handed a piece of footage and you run it and it is appropriate for you to run it, that that footage immediately becomes.

Inadmissible in what I've called the gated institutional narrative, which is the Washington post discussing the New York times about whatever the democratic party said in their engagement at Princeton university, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes. That thing is trying to seal itself off from the internet.

So the idea is that are authoritative sources and then there's the garbage that happens online, which is ridiculous. I don't think you're helping. Break this thing open because what you're doing isn't, in essence, there's this weak point in the crust and there's this magma of truth underneath it. and they've decided, okay, anything that breaks through at project Veritas.

Is immediately an admissible. And it's very important that I be able to defend something that occurs at your outlet. Okay. And you're not helping me because of the level of which you're playing the game. And so maybe that's partially my frustration. I don't believe that you that that's a deep fake interview.

I believe that that's a real hot mic. I believe that it's leaked. I believe that you probably have lawyers who went all over it and said it was legal for you to use it. I bet that you probably even do something that regular journalists don't do, which is check the journalist code of ethics. Right. Um, and so all of this positive stuff that you're doing is then sacrificed.

In part in, in my opinion, because of certain kinds of super aggressive self-justifying tactics, which is what's really pissing me off.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'd like to,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' and it's your show too. If

'''James O’Keefe:''' I go into the wrong direction, just steer me

'''Eric Weinstein:''' back. No, and if I, if I'm overboard and not getting something, you let me know.

'''James O’Keefe:''' This is a very important, astute point.

And we have some disagreements about this because the, and let me start with the conclusion. It hasn't stopped us. And there's no other way to slip the disc. There's no other way than to anyone who of anyone. If if I didn't invent or create project Veritas and some other person did, they do the same thing.

That person, no matter who it would be, they would slime and slander and defame. However, what's interesting about the Amy Robach tape and the David Wright tape, both of which came with an ABC news. Is that the president of ABC news did in fact return my phone call the day before I called them for comment.

I did the ethical thing and they did in fact issue a response, and that response did in fact make it into the Washington post. In fact, the Washington post ran three articles on the same day. We were in fact, one on the front page. Of the style section. This was a couple weeks ago where they said reporter suspended over and they had to put the quotes from David, right?

Bemoaning the fact that his corporate bosses, this and that, the stuff that your audience all agrees that's in the print edition on the front page of the style section. Thanks to project Barrett. Now. Now here's the rub. As Shakespeare would say. That insider. When I met that person, I'm not going to tell you their gender.

I'm not going to tell you anything about them except this. When I met that person in a hotel room, it was like a scene out of all the president's men, like literally out of a thriller novel and this when we're having this unbelievable conversation, which if there was any justice in the world, there'd be a movie made out of this one day.

This person says. I had nowhere to go. I, I couldn't go to the Washington post. I couldn't go to the New York times. He, she, they were like, I can't go anywhere because, and I'm going to quote them here. They'd hunt me down like a trophy buck. Not only would they not tell this story, my story, they would systematically, this is what you were saying, hunt me down.

And he, and, and this person said, I had to go someplace. Just let me finish what he said. He had to go someplace that. I knew no matter what, this person wouldn't give me up, wouldn't quit, wouldn't stop, wouldn't settle lawsuits, which is this thing we should talk about in this episode. And there was only one institution in the world I could think that would do that.

Project Veritas. Now where we we're, where I think you're mistaken, I feel as though we're at, you're mistaken, is. They attack us, slime us, and call us liars. But they have to put on the front page of the style section in the Washington post.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yes. So this is, I mean, this is exactly where I want to be. This is the conversation you're never going to get anywhere else.

Okay? So what we, we know what this is, we call it FID, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Right? And the idea is that we have to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt around you. But because . There was no way of just pretending that video didn't exist. It had to enter the gin gated institutional narrative. I accept your point now.

I want you to just to listen to something which is very tough for me to say. Consider that heroism and sociopathy are adjacent, right? A friend of ours, uh, named, um. Named Andrea, I'm just blanking on her Polish. Last name for the moment, has a theory called extreme altruism. And her point is, is that an altruist and a hero and associate path or one toggle switch off of each other?

And the key question is, when you have this kind of need to shake things up, is it done for the self or is it done for the greater good? And I detect that you actually have a commitment to this that is at a level that. Is somewhere between heroism and sociopathy. To be blunt, now I get it. There are no super tough.

People who don't crack, don't fall, have their own organization, are willing to fight in the courts. And this is in part what you're doing. And you know what? Let's talk about another story you covered, which I was brought in before. I believe you were brought in, which was a Google insider. now, can we use that person's name?

Yes, let's do it. Zach Vorhees. Okay, so Zach Vorhees, uh, was talking to me about all the stuff that was going on at Google, and he showed me things like screenshots and programs about ML fairness, machine learning, fairness, and how Google was going to buy us a search by unbiased thing. It, you know, that he didn't say those words, but that was my encapsulation up and.

I did not know how to help him directly. And what you're saying is true in a world in which no one will cover the goddamn story, you're looking for the outlet that will, and that's what happens repeatedly. And it's not just with you. Fox news, Breitbart, you will cover stories that go counter narrative.

To this mainstream left of center tradition or narrative. Right. And so for example, as you know, when my brother. Was driven, uh, out of his, uh, college where he was a professor by racist students calling his anti-racism racism. That was so completely bizarre for something like the mainstream media that you had, um, effectively a black led Maoist uprising with a white, uh.

Sort of ultra woke pre president against an antiracist behaving in an anti-racist fashion being called a racist. That story was so destructive to woke ideology that the New York times couldn't cover it. And so my brother ended up where at Fox news with Tucker Carlson. So once you understand that there's sort of this weird rule, which is if all of us pretend that that thing isn't happening.

Then the idea is no one has to cover it. No one has to discuss what it is and the only places that it appears are right of center. And then each of these right of center weakenings in the crust. Think of the crust is as the disc, right? Um, you, you have a narrative, which is everything on Fox news is bullshit.

Everything that Breitbart prints is crap. Everything that comes out of a project, Veritas is a, is unfairly edited and is an unethical piece. Absolutely. That. Okay. You're not helping when you go into yourself. Justification mode about. Well, we have to do this. I mean, you may have to do this, but you, what you first have to do is to exhaust all the things that both serve the ends of informing the public where they need to be informed and minimizing the damage to humans.

Unless those humans really deserve the damage. So let me just try to get it then. My contention is anytime you move. Private life into the public sector. It appears bizarre and is incredibly damaging. We are supposed to appear here as if we always put on sport jackets and button down shirts, uh, let's say, and conduct ourselves, you know, in this kind of weird mannered interaction.

Which is in some sense force now. For example, I love fart jokes. Just love them. Do you like fart jokes

'''James O’Keefe:''' and not too familiar with the fart jokes?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, for example, there's a fantastic, really long Limerick called the fodder from Sparta. May I say the first? Yeah. There once was a fellow from Sparta, a truly magnificent Fardah on the strength of one being he'd blow God save the queen and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and it goes on and on.

I like that. Right? It's really quite good. Now, the problem is, is that when I talk about fart jokes in public, it's like, wow, Eric, you're doing potty humor. Nice. Classy. Stay classy. Anytime I move private life into the public sector, it's destructive. And that's why it's not just about the written rules.

It's also, you know, we talk about in Judaism, the written Torah, and we talk about the oral tour. and I believe that your lawyers know what the rules are for recording conversations in public places. Semipublic places, whether the door is open, closed, one sided or two sided consent, blah, blah, blah. And the idea is it varies from state to state.

And the average person, their idea of these rules is zero. They're tunc completely ignorant of the law. So the key question is don't we as Americans have an oral Torah and idea of what one shouldn't be doing. That goes along with the written rule, and you tend to get alerted to this when somebody says something is perfectly legal.

That's the phrase that alerts you to the fact that they're usually violating the oral Torah rather than the written Torah is that they say perfectly legal rather than merely legal. And I'm concerned that what you're doing is perfectly legal and overkill with respect to the individuals. And it's killing your ability to actually stick it to the institutions who need to be policed and that you're set up to police.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Okay. Oh boy. Um, first of all,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' um, got you here, but it's,

'''James O’Keefe:''' no, it's a lie. It's a

'''Eric Weinstein:''' lie. It would be tough.

'''James O’Keefe:''' What, as you were speaking, there were about seven points I wanted to address there, but let me try to take it from the top. Okay. Um. You know, I was reading a book, I think it was a, about images. And the Marshall help, I pronounce his last name, Marshall McLuhan.

Uh, the medium is the message. You know, that book. And you know, the way the medium changes, how we perceive the world around us, it actually changes how we think it does. And I. I, I, maybe this is self-justification, but I truly believe that this medium, you know, like in the McLuhan's sense of what we do, which is transmitting these little hidden shaky videos on a tweet, and it gets 10 million views in an hour, that changes the way we perceive the world around us.

And it affects our understanding of each other. And. To quote a Scott McNealy, like we've lost our privacy already, that this is a new world, maybe a brave new world. And when they invented the Telegraph, I think there was a criticism, this is an 18 emitted mid 19th century, that there was a criticism that, well, what does Maine and Texas have to talk to each other about anyway?

And when they admitted that, when Alexander Graham bell invented the telephone, it was like, well, that's kind of an invasion of privacy, you know? Transparent, heaps of jelly to one another was a characterization that was made about the telephone at the time. You couldn't cut a man off by gesture or look when you're talking to him on the telephone.

So now we have this new paradigm where you or I could be recorded in the bar saying C, U, N, T to a friend in a very, in a, in a context that we think is private and that can be broadcasted instantly. And then we have this cancer cancel culture phenomenon and who wants to live in that world? There's a difference between recording something and broadcasting it.

And I would say this, this oral Torah metaphor that you, there's oral tour that you use. We draw the line at the choice to broadcast the information. I can't tell you on my server how raw tape I have, where someone sent something that was very private. I'm not going to tell you where or who, but there was an example where someone at a bar said, um, come up to my hotel room and engage in some, uh, nausea trois.

I didn't publish that. That's pig's blood. It's my duty as a citizen. It's my obligation not to

'''Eric Weinstein:''' publish because it wasn't newsworthy.

'''James O’Keefe:''' It wasn't, it wasn't newsworthy. It's a, it's a private, sort of the private sexual nature of people. There was probably some infidelity, but that's not what we do. We try to focus on areas of profound public importance.

Now, I'll also tell you that when Upton Sinclair wrote the jungle, there were no. You know, hidden cameras. Um, Upton Sinclair was, it was an extreme idealogue as far as I'm concerned. He was a socialist and he cared about worker participation. He, I don't think he set out to, to expose the meat conditions he wanted to.

Social, you know, is this is an advocate for socialism. When he. Infiltrated, went undercover posing with a lunch pail, uh, and taking off his tie to fit in with the workers. He, he, he didn't even have a, I don't even believe he had a writing utensil. I think he sprinted back to his hotel room to write down from memory what he saw.

So we would make the argument that the recording. The recording itself is distinguished from the broadcasting of the recording, and that recording someone is a fundamental human right. Just like writing down what they say is the fundamental human right, and to restrict someone from saying what they hear.

It goes back to my argument that the first amendment that we live in a world that, um, that, uh, we, we live in a world where we capture people audio visually. This is a new paradigm. Now, I was listening to George Carlin on a comedy show recently, and he was given a sketch and he said, we live in a new world earth plus plastic.

We live in a new paradigm earth plus people at bars being recorded, and that being put on Twitter instantaneously and just like the atom, you know, invention of the telephone, of the adventure of the telegram or the invention of the automobile, it'll, it'll remake how we view our world. But there are safeguards against privacy.

Privacy issues existed before the advent of technology. You can, you can choose where you go and what you say to people. False friends existed before the advent of technology. Betraying people existed before the, you know, and in most cases, it's not in your self interest to betray a close friend or confidant.

So I don't think, and I, I really strongly believe that what we do is moral for getting the legal, that we can talk about the law, but

'''Eric Weinstein:''' forget the law. You realize that, I understand the argument that sometimes what's your on earth thing is of such consequence that it would be immoral to hold it back wholesale.

But it is also the question. I mean, I'll be honest about it. I feel like you get a kind of pleasure. You and I are both feeling Gaslight is my.

'''James O’Keefe:''' You, you feel like I get a pleasure out of, out of, out of, out of what?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm worried that you get a pleasure out of sticking it to the sanctimonious, uh, elitist progressive thing that suffuses.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm just trying to make it easy for you to understand where, where I'm coming from, which is I can't stand. What the left has become. It's unrecognizable. To me. It's not, it's not a, a force that seems to want to fight for working families. It doesn't really seem to care about the environment like this.

You know, the Sierra club used to be against immigration. Uh.

It's sanctimonious. It's pure, constant, sanctimonious sanctimony in the service of institutions. So the idea is that I see this kind of, we are the world. I'm not as this beautiful song and sentiment, but as the cover story for breaking your bonds to your fellow countrymen so that you can go seek cheap labor or overseas or something like that.

The Davos crowd, if you will, um, betrayed the left. And the the right who's always found the left to be irritating. Uh, this is a part of the left on this show that can't stand the part of the left that you, that you may be targeting. That said, I have to stay my hand because I don't want to engage in the kind of crap that they do.

And I feel like you're in some sense doubling down on their methods.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I disagree. I think that investigative reporting, you know, going back to the 1960s and seventies and I'm not an expert on this by no, some, these people did some things that were maybe, maybe we are, you disagree with their tactics, but I mean, you had, let me give you a few examples.

Um, you had, um, you know, Gunter Waldorf was an extremist. He, he, he literally used disguises in an infiltrated newspapers to show how the news colored things. You had the Chicago sun times ran this, a undercover operation where they purchased a

'''Eric Weinstein:''' bar in Chicago. Let's frame this cause I think this is really important.

Yes. You and I both have the sense. That journalism used to be very different and much closer to the methods that you're using. Is that true?

'''James O’Keefe:''' I would say even further so than the methods I use. But yes,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' but, but your methods were, are closer to an older style of journalism. So I also have this impression,

'''James O’Keefe:''' and you've said this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. Well, what I had to ask you on the phone when we spoke is, can you frame for us a timeline of what change that relationship between journalists in this kind of aggressive style of investigative reporting, which you at least partially exhibited. In project.

'''James O’Keefe:''' That's an economics question as well, which we can reach, well, I'll try to get to, but, um, investigative reporters back in the day, there were newspapers and they were typewriter gorillas as they recall.

I called myself a gorilla journalist. I use video as my medium, but these guys did things like w there was a guy named, uh, William Gaines who dressed up like a janitor in 19, mid, early seventies, 1972, 1973 and got a job at a hospital. He literally employed himself as a janitor. And that surgeons would say, Hey, come, can you come assist me with surgery?

And without even washing his hands, he was asked to participate in doing surgery on somebody. Oh. And also he won the Pulitzer prize. So. The, I would, I would never do that. I would never, can you imagine James O'Keefe gets a job as a janitor assists in, in, in fixing someone with the coronavirus? I would be, I would be dead bacteria on my hands would get inside.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Wasn't Gloria Steinem of Playboy bunny?

'''James O’Keefe:''' Gloria Steinem was a Playboy bunny. Um, but you had these reporters, Clark, uh, Clark Molen off at the Iowa newspaper. You had, you know, Bob Woodward lied to deep throat, uh, Jack Anderson in the 1970s. And all of these people were hated. I mean, hated by the system. While they were doing this, they were, they were despised.

They were attacked by the establishment media, and then something changed. And what we were talking on the phone was, what I think changed.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There was this old line about. Uh, what are the 10 most feared words in corporate America? Like Wallace from 60 minutes is here to see you.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Yes. So Mike Wallace used to ambush people and board rooms and, and, and, and then something happened in the late seventies.

I trace it to this incident. I wrote this book called American provid, and I researched the 1970s journalism. And what happened when I saw was that in 1977 the Chicago sun times, which was the center of all this muck, raking newspaper reporting, ran this bar for like seven months. They bought a bar. Under a under disguise, and it was bartended by newspaper people, and they put cameras in the, in the, in the rafters of this bar, Apple, he named the Mirage.

They actually called the thing. The Mirage was kind of ironic and they filmed all of the city inspectors taking bribes, bribing each other, you know, payoffs. And asked Pam Zekman was working at the, at the Chicago sun time, Pulitzer prize winner w they were asked, why did you have to resort to all this so-called deception?

They said, because nobody, everyone was afraid of Chicago city hall. None of these people would talk, not even on background, not even off the record. So they ran this bar, and I mean, this was like the most consequential, in my opinion, investigation of the 20th century, like 50 people went to jail. The mayor lost reelection.

It was just such a consequential, impactful thing. So it gets nominated for the Pulitzer prize. 1978 and Ben Bradley, who is the legendary editor of the Washington post says, no, we're not going to give you a Pulitzer prize because your deception was too elaborate. Your deception was too much. I don't, and I think the quote was.

You know, when, when, when cops pose as journalists, we don't like that. So we shouldn't pose as something that we're not. And that was the, one of the, a few influction points in American history because there was no, there was no, um, there was no currency in doing this. It was exp. It's expensive. First of all, which I can talk about in the how expensive this stuff is.

And then you had Mike Wallace in the mid eighties. Mike Wallace, 60 minutes said it became about drama. Not illumination. I think that both Ben Bradley and Mike Wallace were, were, were disingenuous. I don't think that was the real reason they stopped doing it. I think that argument, which is one we can have today, relates more to economics of mass media.

Um, and, and Ben Bradley probably was a little close to people in the Chicago machine. And, uh, and you know, Bradley reportedly. These are not. My sources had contracts with people in government and so forth and so on. And it became this mass media became, had a symbiotic relationship. With, with those in power and using these tactics.

He's just too close for comfort. You're, you're, you're burning these institutions, agencies, and things that you need access to, to get your information from. So it got cut off in the 70s and eighties and finally, ABC news in 1992 got sued by a grocery store, food lion, but they buy a chain is called food lion grocery.

Again, they got , they got jobs working in the butcher shop, and they recorded, they put hidden cameras in their wig. Like you might be able to fit a camera in that, in that hairdo of yours. And they had

'''Eric Weinstein:''' wigs,

'''James O’Keefe:''' tiny little thing, and, and they filmed, the meat was rotting and they repackage the meat. So this was

'''Eric Weinstein:''' a, this was like bleach or some bleach.

'''James O’Keefe:''' The meat. Was rotting. It was a devastating expos. A food lion stock tanked. They got sued. ABC did. They lost at trial. They won on appeal. It cost, God knows over $1 million, and ABC's a bass brass basically said to hell with this, we're not going to spend $1 million. There's nothing in it for us. So investigative reporting.

Was not profitable. It was not profitable. It wouldn't get you the Pulitzer prizes. It wouldn't get you the

'''Eric Weinstein:''' truck. I want it. I want to do your point even more than you're doing your point. People are gonna hear that as like, Oh, is that where you're doing reporting to get appealed? Surprise. That's not the point at all.

They let me do it. Let me do it. Okay. My belief is that the pilots are pro the Pulitzer prize to say nothing of worth appeals or fortunate came from, um. Was intended to say, this is heroic behavior. This is admirable behavior. And when you took away the prize, it was the community saying, we no longer want to see this as heroic.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And

'''Eric Weinstein:''' that that message rather than the prize is the chill.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And it's one of the reasons,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' well, to your point about the growing, um. Links between the journalistic community and, and, uh, the institutions they cover. Those links were not absent earlier. In fact, there were some, you know, I asked you to look at the story of Jean Seaberg, a woman destroyed by the FBI using the Los Angeles times and Newsweek, uh, as their conduits for a, uh, a, uh.

A smear campaign against one of the leading actresses of Hollywood because they didn't like her politics. Um, so there've been very chilling threads between our media and the institutions of power, and in fact, the cryptic institutions of power. What I don't understand is given that those things existed before, something had to change environmentally.

For this type of reporting to all but disappear over a period of a perhaps 20 years.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And that's economics. A lot of it, in my opinion. Um, investigative reporting was a loss leader on a company's balance sheet. So in those eight days, there was kind of a, uh. Well, newspapers were certainly more profitable than they are now, and David, right on the ABC tape, put it.

Thus, he said it changed in the digital era when it became even more commercially. He says, the commercial commercial imperative is incompatible with the news, and I get branded as some right wing guy. And it's like, well, I actually, that's a Chomsky argument from manufacturer to,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' let's be honest, a lot of my friends on the right.

Spend a lot of time quoting Marx Chomsky. I mean, there's a lot of commonalities there is.

'''James O’Keefe:''' There is that, and I agree with that statement. So the commercial imperative is incompatible. The news said, David, right? He was suspended by ABC news for saying it, and investigative reporters. Like, Oh, I'm going to give you my economics of what I do.

I'm a, I'm a charitable organization. I'm a five Oh one C three organization and

'''Eric Weinstein:''' let you PR project. We, uh, were a huge part

'''James O’Keefe:''' of prime, the chairman and CEO of the company. And I had to be the chairman to have the authority to make decisions like not to settle lawsuits. You know, 60 minutes got sued over 150 times in the 1980s.

Hunting, maybe even more than that. All of the reporters I mentioned earlier, the 1970s were, were, I mean, some of them went to jail, um, to protect their sources. They were sued for libel. Investigative reporters had to deal with all that stuff. And to your point in this age, I'm vilified for having to deal with all that stuff.

Back in the day was considered to be a thing. So

'''Eric Weinstein:''' you'd go to jail for your source?

'''James O’Keefe:''' 100% and again, I've been to jail, we've talked about that, but not only would, not only does the reporter have to be willing to go to jail, the reporter has to be willing to. Appeal it all the way up to the Supreme court, and if the Supreme court determines that you have to disclose your source, the reporter has to be civil disobedient.

Yeah. That's what you have to believe in in your heart to do this. Most of the people in the news business, these are you kidding me? They're just trying to get to retirement. They're just trying to to get across the finish line, get their pension, and be

'''Eric Weinstein:''' done with this. What makes you such a difficult character is, is that you have so many of the most admirable features of journalism.

And I don't think you get to have the conversation where somebody who really is troubled by what you do also acknowledges the positive in what you do. Like you. You to me, are a super position okay. Of what is noble about journalism. And why I can't stand journalism.

'''James O’Keefe:''' That may be so, I think in light of the recent exquisite though, Eric, there have been a couple of reporters, Paul Farhi, the Washington post, a guy named Grove at the daily beast, have actually talked to me.

I've never actually, and you're frankly just this manifest destiny. I'm sitting with you here. You wouldn't be sitting with me. But not for the events of the last six months,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' but I've been aware of you for a long time.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Well, I think because I think because of the. The, that I'm, I'm continuing to do this, that, that I'm getting and tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm getting reactions from these institutions that they're forced.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You've been an interesting person to me for a long

'''James O’Keefe:''' time. I did not know that. Yeah. Um, so

'''Eric Weinstein:''' by the way, I should just say, people will assume that you and I are connected somehow through Peter teal and completely untroubled. I know of. Or just had my first conversation with Peter about you ever

'''James O’Keefe:''' the New York times on a front page story association between Peter teal and the, and the substance will be, it's unclear exactly what relationship and then they'll run that and do that whole thing.

Um, but so the economics of mass me, this is a very important point. You know, one of the reporters I researched in prov that when I wrote this book prompted was that bosses have to have, they said bosses with balls, right? You have to have an editor. Where someone that works for you that has that has principle

'''Eric Weinstein:''' and facts is a unisex because it works for both.

What does it, what does it

'''James O’Keefe:''' you have to have huevos and in back in the day there were bosses with balls and, and these days what David Wright says is. This is so ironic. Dave Wright actually says at the bar, my bosses don't care about this stuff. So that's, is that integrity? Is that a lack of morality? And then you have the economics of mass media?

It costs my, uh, my organization or our organization because it's a nonprofit project. Veritas over $1 million to do a story. And sometimes it'll cost us as much as three quarters of a million dollars to fight a lawsuit. I do not settle lawsuits, Eric. In fact, I've, we've won eight straight lawsuits

'''Eric Weinstein:''' have settled those.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I have not ever. Lost a defamation. Lost it. I've never settled defamation lawsuit. 11 years ago, I was sued for invasion of privacy in California and I settled one and I made a mistake and I'll never make that mistake

'''Eric Weinstein:''' again. So I appreciate the distinction, but you have settled,

'''James O’Keefe:''' important distinction.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Every time you say something that isn't,

'''James O’Keefe:''' they're going to do, they're going to

'''Eric Weinstein:''' do, they're going to play the game. And I'm not, again, I am not trying. To destroy you. I'm not trying to build you up. I'm trying to get you a fair hearing.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Yep. Let me be clear. We've never lost a defamation lawsuit. We've never settled a defamation lawsuit, and 11 years ago, I was sued for invasion of privacy for recording a guy in a room with the door open in California.

This guy was coaching me on how to get girls across the Tijuana border. He claimed later he would claim he was playing along, but I did not defame him by quoting him. And I was sued for invasion of privacy. I fought it and I didn't have any money, so I settled. So we don't settle lawsuits anymore. We've won every lawsuit.

We've led

'''Eric Weinstein:''' it. I also, I just want to be very clear that. There are all sorts of situations where people settle when they're in the right because of the economics of, of the legal

'''James O’Keefe:''' profession. They're held to a different standard than me. So totally understand, settled the, and your audience knows this. CNN settled the Covington lawsuit for, they were sued for two 50 million people set a loss.

It's all the time. But my point is this, that

'''Eric Weinstein:''' you have to say, I don't think you should be held to the standard of never settling as the, if you can meet it,

'''James O’Keefe:''' you want to know something very interesting, please. A lot of the insiders, one of the reasons they came to us other than the fact that they'd the Washington post in New York times, he said that these, one of them said to me, the fact that you didn't settle that lawsuit, the fact that you stood by your reporting, the fact that you would stand on principle at great economic cost, my staff has to scuttle around the country on airplanes to meet with these people and ask them for money and, and, and it, it, it pains me to have to spend.

Three quarters of a million dollars. Little old lady in North Carolina, you know, sues me for defamation. I did not defame her. I quoted her accurately. I know the law and the facts are on my side, and the arbitrator or the, uh, the person in the middle goes, why don't you just give lady $25,000? Call it a day?

And I have to spend three quarters of a million dollars.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Jay, it's like, I understand your problem. You know? I understand. You break my fucking heart. You really do. Because you do stuff that is unnecessary, that causes harm to the effort to illuminate what it is that you're trying to. I don't have your politic

'''James O’Keefe:''' argument.

You're making a very interesting argument. I do think that earring. Let me see if I can restate what you're saying. I do things that hurt my argument, but you like, you like the, the, the, uh, the effects of it, or you like the truths

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I perceive, and I could be wrong about this, you're a very unusual person.

You were driven by something, which is not money. There are easier ways to turn a buck than what you're doing, right. You were driven by, I think it could be wrong in part an ideological need to get at certain things that are going unreported, anywhere. In essence, there are a tiny number of places that can break a story, like the stories that you're breaking, and I want.

To be able to wholeheartedly say, did you see that thing that occurred? And when I see project Veritas and I say, okay, beyond that, I already know that the big boys are playing unfairly with you. Right? So it's not like I'm saying that everything that they're doing is fair to you, but you do things. That are unnecessary, that tarnish what it is that you can bring to the world.

You're not on the efficient frontier. And this is my irritation and my anger with you is that you got cheap stuff in there when you, you're supposed to be iStat re-establishing investigative journalism. Like what?

'''James O’Keefe:''' What, what's the, give me some examples.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I think that is. I think that you could do a tremendous amount to let people know we've got the fucking goods on you.

'''James O’Keefe:''' When you say cheap stuff, just give me an example. Recently, or even in the last decade

'''Eric Weinstein:''' when you've. Uh, Cameron, a purse or whatever, and something feels to me like you're on the verge of entrapment, or you're making one of those technical arguments. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. We, you know, we looked it up and we were perfectly within our, when that kind of stuff occurs and you're in costume and I'm thinking like, okay, was the poor, the poor sob who happens to be employed in this.

Wayne is, you know, speaking with bravado. Maybe the idea is like the standard reporter techniques of buttering people up. I hate those when that comes from the New York times. I've been through that mill. Yeah. Okay. Yup. I don't like the behavior pattern and my feeling about it is, is that ethics clearer ethics are a peacock's tail.

In other words, if you have, if you have the ability and the skill, you get to have the ethics. If you're this close to the line, it's because you haven't gotten your skill together. Now I'm trying to do some of what you're trained to do. I released an episode recently, uh, talking about whether or not, uh, laboratory mice are broken for the purposes of all sorts of science, which may include drug testing.

and I'm, I, I did not go for the juggler. It was very pointed. But I, I invited the person, uh, who is most associated with the story onto the story after the fact. I've tried not to speak much in public, giving them a very long time to figure out how they wanted to respond. Right. And I, I intend to close the story out, but I am struggling with the ethics.

And my concern is, is that I want to watch you. Rive in pain as you struggle with the ethics of what you do. I understand the argument that you're unearthing things that really matter.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Well, I could, I mean, I've, what's that line from the Shawshank redemption? Whatever sins I've committed, I had paid for them and then some had been, I mean, God, my story is in other deal.

I've been on probation for three years, federal probation, supervised. I've been charged with crimes I haven't committed. I've been sued depose dozens of times. I've, I've laid my soul bare under oath in depositions where they have all my emails. And like Chesterton says, you know, but the thing about bathing and hot water is that it keeps you clean.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' These are twin problems and you're not getting away with that. Listen to me just very carefully. Those things may make you heroic. They may be incredibly,

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm listening, I'm listening.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They may make you heroic. They may be incredibly painful, but all of that stuff speaks potentially to courage and nobility, to being the righteous man in an unjust world.

That's not what I'm talking. James,

'''James O’Keefe:''' let me see if I can address your, the fundamental issue here of the, the purse cam or the button cam or the lapel

'''Eric Weinstein:''' cam

'''James O’Keefe:''' or the, and what it represents,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' what it represented represents,

'''James O’Keefe:''' what, whether I arrive in, in, in, in consternation. Um. I guess the easiest way I can explain it in, in a very personal way is that when I was in college, um, I went to Rutgers.

I'm 20, 35 years old. So when I was 20 years old on st Patrick's day, which I believe is this, is it either today or tomorrow, we're around st Patrick's day filming here. I was surrounded by professors telling me how great Stalin was. And I'm like, well, I'm not really a history buff, but that seems odd, you know, shouldn't we also talk about the gulags?

And again, I'm not, I wasn't

'''Eric Weinstein:''' a very short trials. I

'''James O’Keefe:''' wasn't, I wasn't learned about style. And I just said, well that's odd. And I'd read the New York times every day cause I just liked the read the New York times. And I said, well that's odd. They seem to be using obfuscation and there. And I felt compelled to wear a hidden camera and go into my dining hall.

To try to prove a point, and I tried to get lucky charms banned on the grounds. They were racist to my Irish heritage. It was a little stunt like it was a little bull rat, like it remains people's favorite video. I'm getting to a point here and that what I'm going to show you, what I realized in doing this was that I had to hold these people to their own expressed values.

Because they don't, it's really hard to shame these people and we can be shamed because you believe in morality. You believe in probably some sense of. Law and there should be equality before the law. You believe in all these principles and the people that I'm dealing with are just irrational. They're just like, Stalin's great.

You should love him. And I'm like, well, I'm paying money to come to school here to learn about philosophy. And you're telling me how great the Soviet union is that that's just unjust. So. When the premise is that these people in and at Rutgers university, the student handbook said, you're not allowed to offend anybody for any reason.

I said, well, that's, that's, that's that. That's irrational. I know. So to confront the irrationality, to hold them accountable to their own expressed values, or as Alinsky would say, make them live up to their own principles. I went in there. I was very scared. I was shaking, I was worried. I know it doesn't come natural to to do these sorts of things.

And I dawned a little Kodak camera, this is before the iPhone 2005 and I put it on the table and put a little cloth over the red lens because in 2005 cameras would blink red when you recorded video. And I began to do to, to, to pretend to be something I wasn't. I said. And I, I am Irish, but I'm not offended by lucky charms.

And I said, as an Irishman, this serial offends me. The mascot offends my heritage owned by the way, it's a violation of your own campus rule book about offending people. And the Dean of dining services took me seriously, and the Dean of dining services said there, there'll be no problem removing lucky traumas from the cafeteria.

What we did. Is a microcosm,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' even though they're magically delicious,

'''James O’Keefe:''' even though they're magically delicious. I even said the marshmallows were teeth rotting. I said that I'm six foot one Irishman, which I am. O'Keefe is my last name, and I said, I, this offends my heritage and I tried to keep a straight face.

It was very difficult and even though I was shaking because I was afraid of what I was doing, and what we did is offer the community Rutgers university, which is far left. An opportunity to go, that's ridiculous. We, we slipped the disc. We, we show it. We sh and, and, and what you're saying is I'm doing the thing that you don't, that they did the Jordan Peterson.

What you're saying is what you're saying is what, what the argument is, is that I should feel more, um, unclean. I should, no,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' no, no, no, no.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Help me understand

'''Eric Weinstein:''' the argument. Is that what you're doing? Is your, you're balancing harm that you have to inflict with good that you have to do. And I don't think you're efficient on either one.

And in some sense you're screwing up stories for everybody else because they don't have, and this is very like, it's a complicated point and

'''James O’Keefe:''' I don't think I want to understand it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm trying to, my belief is, is that like the Zach Vorhees story about the Google insider and what was actually going on at Google isn't a really important story.

And any, if I took. A terrible, terrible, important story, and I put project Veritas on it right now. I know that won't have the impact that it would have if we could somehow force it into the world in a different degree. I completely disagree with you.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I strongly, we strongly disagree strongly

'''Eric Weinstein:''' on, but let's make sure that we actually do disagree in that we're not having a miscommunication.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm not sure, but that statements you're making Zach for, he says documents. Um, Zach, you know, I'd come to me, you know, come to us some years ago, we had to send a reporter to talk to Jen Janai, who was an innovation person for Google. She was a of Irish heritage. And we, we, we, we filmed her in a, in a, in a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco, uh, saying that she wanted to prevent the quote Trump situation.

And there was some ambiguity about what exactly she meant by that. Did she mean stop Trump from winning reelection? Did she mean stop rushing interference? But Jenji and I also said on this hidden camera recording, which Zach did not provide to us, that was filmed by our undercover reporters. She also said that, um, that Google needs to stay big, two to two

'''Eric Weinstein:''' fairly fragmented.

Then you wouldn't be able

'''James O’Keefe:''' to, you wouldn't be able to, to stop Trump. Essentially, so this is what this person said, and that amplified is Zach's messages, his documents, we interviewed him and I, I feel very strongly that I

'''Eric Weinstein:''' do understand. I'm worried that we're not communicating again. I agree. That there's this really strange problem that you can't go to CNN, the Washington post, NPR, New York times with a certain class of stories that run counter to their unstated narratives.

They won't run them.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Yes, I'm right here.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yes. So let's, let's, we can be in agreement on,

'''James O’Keefe:''' we can agree on that. The New York times is the paper of record. They call themselves. They used

'''Eric Weinstein:''' to be, they call themselves, who knows what, but certainly

'''James O’Keefe:''' not all of you are. You are a very intelligent man. You pay attention to this stuff.

Your audience is, is I'm certain, extremely intelligent. Most people on in Los Angeles looking out at the streets have no idea what we're talking about. And in fact, when you go into the airports in O'Hare or JFK,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' no, no, no. I'm also the guy who goes into the airport and temporarily, when I look at that screen and has CNN,

'''James O’Keefe:''' the Chirons

'''Eric Weinstein:''' yet, whatever, my brain goes into the same stupid trans, right as, as probably even does yours.

Right? It's the lower brain probably, probably. Right.

'''James O’Keefe:''' So when the New York times, Jim Rutenberg, I believe was his name, said in 2016 something to the effect of we have to cover Trump unfavorably or unfairly. He basically said this on the front page, the executive editor, Dean Beck, Hey, who's definitely no fan of mine executive ever DEMA Kay said.

Good, good for Jim Rittenberg to say that the paper record has established on the front page of the New York times, basically by Jim Ruttenberg. We must cover the president unfairly. And when we live in a world hell, I'm trying to address your fundamental argument when the premise is that our S that our institutions that inform our citizenry, by the way, I believe government is downstream from media.

I agree with salts and eats in that the press has more power than all three branches of the government, and I think you probably agree with that too. If you don't, we should talk about that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I wish I saw it as distinct from the. The governance of government. Yeah.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Okay. But unlike the government, no, we don't elect our media officials, and there aren't any committees and there's no, there's no way of holding them accountable.

So when you live in a world where that is the case, and the paper of record says, we are going to cover this person unfairly, and everyone's okay with that. I mean, I don't know if it's just war theory or whatever the ethical implications

'''Eric Weinstein:''' is. Again, the, there's an efficacy issue,

'''James O’Keefe:''' which is Cassie.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' For example, when you were given a tape that needs to air and imagine that you had two ways of airing, you had a way of airing it with.

Uh, project Veritas stamped on it or without project Veritas stamped,

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'd have to use project Veritas. I feel strongly about that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Because you believe in your own project. No,

'''James O’Keefe:''' because in order to have the authority to make the decisions tend to let me do them. Please let me finish this point because I, this is my Martin Luther moment.

Here I stand. I can do no other in order to have the authority to not settle the lawsuits such that I can draw another insider out to come to me with more.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I know where you're going.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I have to, I have to. I have to be able to draw, uh, they call it, um, um, uh, the, the, the network effects, if you will, a whip sign effects of drawing out other people.

They, they, they have to know

'''Eric Weinstein:''' where to go to. You. Project Veritas,

'''James O’Keefe:''' because no one else, everyone else will settle the lawsuits. Everyone else will quit. There are the barriers to entry.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I don't even know if this is correct Spanish, but like huevos Del Toro, you know, like you're establishing at some level that your organization will stand behind the people who.

Contribute to you, you will protect them that you have the competency. That is how you see project Veritas. Let me see for the purposes of this argument that that is true.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Okay.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hypothetically, imagine a second white label that had established the same track record that

'''James O’Keefe:''' didn't have cut white label that established the same track.

Right.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' In other words. People had come to them, they'd never cracked. They'd never broken. They'd never settled on a defamation or whatever. Right.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I would submit to you that the barriers to entry are too high for that because

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I, what I'm saying when I'm trying to get at is do you acknowledge that you have not evaded the shit suit very effectively?

Maybe you think you've done as good a job as you could do, but I can guarantee you, like I had a choice when I sat for this, when I decided to have you sit for this interview, which is how much did I want to spend on James O'Keefe? And I thought, you important, really important

'''James O’Keefe:''' me, me and my history, the history of what I've done?

Or do you mean

'''Eric Weinstein:''' by virtue of the fact in the crazy left of center mainstream game, they play an association game right. So association. Yes. So you sit in this chair and I don't, and I say anything that's positive about you, you're normalize.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And that's what they're going to say.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Whatever the hell they're going to say.

They're idiots. Yeah. Right. If we, if we think about the idiots who sit in the golden Thrones, uh, inside of the commentary, it, we will never get anything done. You are worth spending in terms of their idiotic calculus of adjacency on graphs. okay, so I've decided to lose credibility. I've decided to lose some viewers.

I've decided to make a very easy target on myself just by sitting with you because they're evil and that's wrong. You deserve a hearing. You've done a lot of stuff. Much of it good. And I'm still pissed off and angry and I don't know that we've exactly connected. We haven't even gotten to whether or not there's selective editing on some videos, all the usual things.

I tend not to spend time where other people do spend time. I figure you can have that conversation with somebody else. It's a waste of my effing time. So I want to, I want you to have the conversation here that you're not going to be able to have anywhere else. Thank you. Okay, well thank you. So what I'm trying to get at is I want to see you more disturbed.

If you think about this as a fraction, it's important truths per unit, deception or just unit sub ethical deception. Okay? And your point is my fraction is positive. And I want you one to search your soul. Could you have made the denominator smaller without making it zero? I'm not. I don't think, I don't want to hold you to the stents, to the standards of Jesus.

If Jesus was an investigative report. Okay.

'''James O’Keefe:''' The asymptote towards that dinner. It's like over time I think it'll get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That may be, but the point is, is that you had to spend a lot early on learning your game. I think that, and I also, I want it, I want an effing come to Jesus moment.

If you're going to continue to be the only place people can, let's take your insider from before, and that person who says, look, I couldn't go anywhere else. I believe that in some sense. That's true. And I believe that you have to take on a new responsibility.

'''James O’Keefe:''' You're right, you're right. I actually, one of my, I have 14 ethical principles, which I actually don't have memorized, but I generally know them.

And the 14th is with great power comes great responsibility, very cliche, but I tell my team every day, I got, two of my folks are out there in the green room in there, and they're winking at me. Like I tell my folks every day that we have a profound responsibility where I disagree a little bit is that.

And I'm, I'm, I am trying to in good faith, get to the fundamentals, your

'''Eric Weinstein:''' argument, a good faith conversation so far.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Oh, absolutely. I'm just trying to address your fundamental pleas argument and it's an interesting point that you're narrowing that you're pinning your down on. It's interesting, Eric, because nobody else.

Even in, even the people I are, my hero heroes of the 20th century, all of them were co could took this sort of like, Aw shucks, like are you kidding me? Give me a, give me an effing break about ethics. The guy's not going to tell me the stuff unless I go in there. That's how they say it. They say the only way to get the information is to use this, and they do go for the juggler, but they're not bloodthirsty.

It's not bloodsport. They, they, they believe so much that a government agency is not stepping up in all the rationalizations that I've gone over with you here about why we do it. They, and for me, in college, the lucky charms, it was literally a justice complex. And when you're wired the way that we

'''Eric Weinstein:''' recruit, what's that?

Are you a hypocrite? I am. How so? I dunno. I say lots of things that aren't true. I lie, sometimes I have a rosy opinion of myself that probably won't.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Oh, I see. I see what you're saying. In other words, what you're saying, um,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm a sinner to use the religious

'''James O’Keefe:''' yes. And I think so.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' To be destroyed for my sins constantly.

I don't always want to be reminded of the farter from Sparta, although it's a pretty damn good Limerick.

'''James O’Keefe:''' That is a very astute point. A lot of people have said or are wary because if they're in front of the magnifying glass, you're going to find, if you're in a bar saying things, and I think it goes

'''Eric Weinstein:''' back to that while you're losing people just in part.

In part, the idea is, I can't see the difference. Between if you had a more clearly stated ethics, if you went to greater lengths to first try, can we get the reform without causing somebody to lose their job?

'''James O’Keefe:''' But can I, can I make one modification about our vision statement please? Our vision statement has evolved from 10 years ago, and now we have these brave insiders.

Uh, that, uh, that where the cameras and, and in some cases violate their own confidentiality agreements. And they're, to your point, they're heroes for what they do and they're willing to lose their jobs. And why? Because they have some sick fetish with being martyrs. Of course not, because they are so motivated by this justice complex.

Oh, and by the way. When we talk about being hypocrites every, of course I'm a hypocrite. I, everyone does things. They make mistakes in their private life. If you put my life on

'''Eric Weinstein:''' things to heart, I do. Of course

'''James O’Keefe:''' we have secrets. Yeah. And there are boundaries on where

'''Eric Weinstein:''' we are. And I appreciated what you said before, that you had things that could destroy somebody, that you wouldn't air because you didn't.

'''James O’Keefe:''' 100% and we, and I tell another ethics rule of my 14 rules, is I tell my staff, behave as though there are 12 jurors always watching you, Eric. This is a very important distinction between me and us. And I would think other newsrooms and in the intelligence community, I'm a huge distinction ethically that we, that I believe in is that you have to behave like there are 12 jurors always watching you whenever you work.

in your bedroom. I don't want to know what goes on in your bedroom. I don't care. I think that's a boundary I would never cross. Um,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I brag when drunk in bars you,

'''James O’Keefe:''' I don't, I do not do that. Do you drink? Very rarely.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Okay. I drink.

'''James O’Keefe:''' There's nothing wrong with drinking.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Okay. When I drink, I become dis-inhibited.

When I become dis-inhibited, I say things that's self aggrandized that I think make me look big in the moment. And when there's a contact, wait a second, I'm sorry. Now, my point to you is not to tell you that I'm the world's worst person in a bar. My point is, is that a lot of us go drinking in bars. A lot of us say stupid stuff.

A lot of us say contradictory stuff. A lot of us puff ourselves up. A lot of us come forth with lies, with truths, all sorts of things. And effectively what you're doing is you're losing those of us who wish to remain sinners and part of this world. Now I see this in terms of a right of center counterculture, for example.

You are particularly animated by the story of leftist professors extolling the virtues of stall and when he was an incredible mass murder. I'm with you. I come from the left. I hear you. It makes me effing crazy. Likewise. I can tell you that I am very, very pissed off and angry about all sorts of stuff that goes on on the right now in general.

I spend my time targeting the left for very different reasons that you do. My feeling is you guys are throwing the game. You make us look terrible. What are you like? From my perspective, you're supporting mass murderers now. You know, you, you want to talk about the starvation in the Ukraine. You want to talk about the show trials.

You want to talk about article 58 who the hell are you to extol the virtues of, of Joseph Stalin? Okay? Your perspective may be that's that lefty crap, but I come from a part of the left that you probably would get along with much better, you know, question, but people who stood up for the working poor people who are very focused.

Uh, on the abuses of power, uh, wherever they are. And I look at you and I say your politics, your own crusade. Like, I see the issue with justice. I have a justice issue as well. And it, it both brings out the best in me and the worst. . And when I asked you about like, you know, searching your soul and you start talking about all of the things that make you more heroic.

I'm not hearing the part that I'm looking for, which is what opens you up to people like my family, my friends, my colleagues, which is, you're doing great stuff sometimes. Sometimes you're doing terrible stuff. I don't want to get into what I think is great and what I think is terrible, but it's enough to say that some of it is great.

All right. I want to be able to bring my people what you do when you're doing great stuff. And I don't want to spend three hours talking about the ethics of James O'Keeffe.

'''James O’Keefe:''' It's going to be hard, Eric, because no matter what we do, I think it's. You're a rare individual because all of the time it's extensively about the, about the , but in reality it's, but that's your case.

It is not what you were saying.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And you're saying that the methods make an you an easy target.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I, it's, it's a, it's a conundrum because you can't get the effects. You can't get

'''Eric Weinstein:''' the, the, no, no, no. In Martin interior point, you're not on the efficient frontier. Jerry's just not.

'''James O’Keefe:''' There is no other means of a co

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I disagree with you.

If you were targeting Twitter, let's say, okay. And you went through and you said, look, we're here. We have a new program at project Veritas. We are going to try to get this information, but what we're gonna try to do is we are going to try to limit the collateral damage to individuals because we don't really want to destroy people.

What we want to do is to make sure that it is understood that the world has an accurate idea of the platform on which it communicates. Okay. Right. And then you went through great. Pains and you said, look, here's our first line. Our first line is we're going to try to spare people and then we're going to provide greater and greater resolution as you come to ignore our work, because the content layer is different than the, than the really sexy humiliation layer.

The voyeurism. You're, you're, you're, you're talking, I can't stand the voyeurism.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Maybe it's been, it's been characterized in the 20th century is voyeurism. Like the

'''Eric Weinstein:''' television. This is something that I really appreciate. You came up with that word. I w I wanted to use it and I thought, that's not going to be fair to him.

And so it feels to me like that's in good faith and I'm

'''James O’Keefe:''' praying to viewers have a right to know the public has a right to know what David Wright said in that bar with his face on may.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I don't know the answer to that question

'''James O’Keefe:''' cause I think the answer is yes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Okay. And I struggle with it and I understand your argument and I worry.

Okay? Okay. And I also worry that for all of us hypocrites in the audience, I don't want to see your face in a bar. I don't want you in a mustache. I don't want you in address. I don't want you with a camera in your purse. I don't think privacy is completely dead. I don't know all the business in your life.

You may have gotten to that point, and I know that all of the people who own tech companies want to tell me the privacy is dead because they want to monetize my privacy. That's true. To be honest, I don't know what they're doing in their bedrooms, and so it's the asymmetry that I don't wish to live under, and I don't wish to put a camera on you to keep you from putting a camera on me.

Now, you may have accepted those terms. But I am rejecting the game and I'm rejecting the game when the New York times plays it with

'''James O’Keefe:''' the New York times, published my wedding website, uh, last Sunday. And, and I can tell you in a personal moment of, of vulnerability here. That that was hard for me. Yeah. And a lot of people, a lot of people, in fact, I would say the majority reaction was they doxed O'Keeffe's wedding.

And I remember I was in a grocery store cause I think this cuts to your point, I was in a grocery store thinking, man that sucks, that hurts. But I kind of simultaneous was like, Nope, that's my cross to bear.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's, that's cause you've accepted the gap. I've accepted that. I have not.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I, I hear you.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And most of us.

You see, your appeal is limited by virtue of the fact that most of us are sinners who don't know where James O'Keeffe's editing. Don't know where James O'Keeffe's disguises, don't know where James O'Keeffe's practices begin and end, whether the in general covenant between two people that is assumed, which is often violated.

Often.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Yeah. Not, not actually, but that existed before the advent of technology lead

'''Eric Weinstein:''' me. I understand that, and I understand your point, that it's better to actually have an accurate representation of stuff, but the thing is, is that I also think that in part, do you remember like this program to catch a predator?

Of course. I,

'''James O’Keefe:''' I remember it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Okay, so that was really, really interesting. Was that the right way to go about that problem?

'''James O’Keefe:''' It was a, it was a little different than what we do. It was a, it was a little, it was a little,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' it was mainstream.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Yes. Put that out. Uh, Chris Hansen, uh, an NBC, NBC, NBC, Dateline, Chris Hanson would set up these people with and an intro and, and trap them.

I not legally speaking, cause they're not the government, but, um, in, in the case of Wright and Robock, particularly as this asymptote gets a little. Less, uh, problematic. I would say to ethicist. We're just literally letting people, and I, and I mean, it's a strong with, right, we didn't even quote him like, even though w

'''Eric Weinstein:''' even, but I'm trying to, where I'm trying to do is to say what Dateline did, if it is in fact Dateline,

'''James O’Keefe:''' Dateline NBC, Dateline NBC did,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' was to set up something much more extreme in some sense than what you do and to use the entertainment value.

Of catching and destroying someone who would pray on Sheryl. You have, you have something, an activity which is completely evil.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Yes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' In my book, and I don't, I'm not going to back away from the word evil. Um. Probably committed by people who are mentally and psychologically damaged. In fact, our friend David Eagleman even gives the case of a guy who had no pedophilia, no pedophilic desires, until you developed a brain tumor and then suddenly had them.

Then the brain tumor was excised. They went away. Then the pedophilia came back and they scan the brain again. There was a tumor, so it's possible. To destroy a life based on a weird physiology thing. It's possible that these people are just sick, evil, horrible people. I don't know what it is. I'll tell you what I do now, okay?

I know that the activity that these people were engaged in was evil. And I know that the techniques were entertaining because they were so destructive and vindictive.

'''James O’Keefe:''' So a lot of ethicists in the 1990s and tooth and the 2000 said that it was akin to using a bazooka to kill a fly. It was voyeuristic at project Veritas.

We didn't.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I may have been sorry. I don't even know that I, maybe it was the case that that was so terrifying. That it actually stops some stuff.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I don't know. I, I have very complex view on this, but I, I strongly believe that there are some, like we're talking about Google now, we're talking about it's this situational ethics and listen, the, the, the beauty and bane of the ethical thing is that it's inherently situational.

You can't evaluate the means used to obtain the info used to obtain the information in the abstract. You have to evaluate on a case by case basis. This is what. All of the reporters have said in the 20th century when it comes to this, and when it comes to what, what, what we're talking about now, we're talking about Disney corporations, children's company.

We're talking about Google, you know, with a, whatever, a trillion dollar market cap. We're talking about Facebook, we're talking about, um, uh, these, these, these, these leviathans the, and we feel. I don't know. I don't know how else to say it, and I know I'm being redundant, but we feel the public has such a right to know

'''Eric Weinstein:''' this, but I also don't think you can aim your, your rock with enough force and I don't think your stone will be true.

I think that you're, you're not understanding the point, which is you're paying for things that you could do better. By a limit in the effectiveness of the project. If you could get your politics the hell out of what you're doing.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I did. On this point, I'm going to vehemently disagree with you. Please. We focus.

We don't moralize we don't, we don't, we don't editorialize the content. The, the, the, the medium is so pure. It's the purest type of reporting. We don't add to it. We don't edit it out of context. Uh, contrary to reports, we don't do any of that stuff. And what other journalists do is, is try to contextualize and add moralism to it, investigate our, our stuff.

Is is hard fact. It's, it's hard fact and, and people will say, well, your right-wing, well, here's the deal. If the New York times wants to say on the front page, Jim Rutenberg wants to make the argument that we need to cover this guy unfairly, and they use the paper of record and the bully pulpit to do that, then if I just take my camera and aim it in any direction, I want to vote, I'm going to record things that are contrary to what the media says.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yes. And the media has a. I don't even want to call it a left of center, but like a democratic party bias. I believe that it does. You may not. I can say that it does. All right. Now it's not up to you. I'm not, I'm not asking you to say,

'''James O’Keefe:''' I just believe strongly that I don't let my politics tone.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Where'd you go after acorn?

'''James O’Keefe:''' Because I logged onto YouTube and I saw a video tape. Of of, of, well three reasons. Number one, a girl messaged me on Facebook and said, I'd love to do something on acorn. So I logged on D a YouTube 2009 I typed into the search bar acorn cause I didn't know a lot about them. And I saw a video where they were squatting foreclosed homes.

And I looked that up. I said, well that's against the law. So while that might be morally justified in some circumstance, I think that someone needs to expose or test these acorn worker's propensity or willingness to break the law. And then Hannah Giles, the young woman said, why don't you pose it? Why don't I post as a prostitute?

And I said, well, that's interesting. If there's a prostitute, probably should be some pimps. So I was, I was testing and affirming. Why is it that this organization, which may get billions of dollars in federal money, is allowed to break laws and do people have a right to know that information? And what was different about what we did is we just walked in off the street and had a conversation.

It wasn't some elaborate deception. We go after the sacred cows, Eric. We go after the organizations that the media. Is unwilling or unable to invest

in.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I believe that there's a huge problem that you have at an a sensibly. And I, I don't, I hate the term left of center media, uh, sort of a center, left oriented media that refuses to go after Senator left counter narrative stories.

And that would be a counter narrative story. So in other words, I think I can tell the tale, which is each, there is no news outfit. That is so good that it can run counter narrative stories and there's no news outfit that's so inept that it can't run a story fairly. That comes right down the center of its narrative.

And then the key question is, what about the stories that are, you know, 30% oblique to the, to the narrative or who knows what? Right? So this is like the main problem. So given that the major organs. You know, tend to be aligned with this sort of center left perspective. Those stories don't get cut that they, they live in the blind spot.

And so I understand why you do it. And in part, this is why I target the same group of people because my feeling is, is that they are destroying the confidence. Now what really divides us is, is that you and I have radically different ideas about what to do about this problem. And I'm concerned that I'm coming across and I'm saying, here are my biases, right?

You even saying you're right-wing, if I say you're right wing versus right of center versus conservative versus alt-right. Like there are all sorts of ways to conjugate.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Upton Sinclair was a socialist, a Seymour Hersh, and the guy who broke the my Lai massacre was an antiwar activist. Right. All of the people that have ever done anything worth doing as far as

'''Eric Weinstein:''' IMC about manufacturing.

'''James O’Keefe:''' No, no, no, no, no. That's not my point. My point is, is that anybody who's ever found facts that were the fiercest of indignation fused with the hardest of facts were total. Ideologues and more power to them as far as I'm concerned, as long as what they were reporting was actually factual.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I understand that it is not your job to investigate all facts and that you're, you have a right to choose what you want to focus on.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And right now, that's probably the fourth estate is the, is the beat.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I understand it, but

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm missing the point.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Or I'm, or I'm, or, I mean, I've seen most of the discussions really good, but there is a point at which we,

'''James O’Keefe:''' the ethics of what we do and, and, and I don't know if I can, I don't know if I'm qualified academically to go deeper,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' strike me as very self righteous and insufficiently reflect.

Div with respect to some of the most persistent critiques. And it is not the case. Like, I don't think you've ever been given your due for the good that you do like Trump, when he does good. tell him that he's a jerk. Right. Okay. In general as a society. So the idea is that he just, if you wanted a model, when you decide that somebody is themselves bad.

There's a belief that you should never say anything positive about that person, right? Because to do that, clutters the issue and the issue is we know we have a bad person. So for example. Hitler, uh, gave, uh, uh, there was a protest in the Rosen Stross, uh, of women who wanted their half Jewish men back from the death camps.

And somehow these women were so bad ass that they actually caused a problem for the Nazis and the Nazis relented and released these men, okay, do I want to say good for the Nazis for doing this whore, this, this thing in a middle of a horrible, uh, you know. Psychotic situation. I don't want to say a damn thing and that's positive.

I want it to be so simple, so clean. That is just Nazi equals bad. Right. Right. So this is kind of the problem that we have is that we don't want to acknowledge anything good about somebody we deemed to be bad,

'''James O’Keefe:''' but that, but the way our videos work is that they slip the disc in so far as they force a reaction and that end justifies that particular

'''Eric Weinstein:''' mean.

Maybe the idea is I want you to be a little bit less certain. About the numerator and denominator of what you're doing because it adds up to effectiveness. And I know that in the next two years, somebody is going to send you a piece of video that I am going to say, Oh my God, that is incredible. I needed to know that that is the most important thing, and it's going to have project Veritas stamped on it, and I am going to show that to people and you know what they're going to say?

I'll just tell you, because I move it. I move in academic left-of-center circles. You can't trust anything from project Veritas, and I'm going to say, wait a minute, are you claiming that there's a cut in this? Are you claiming,

'''James O’Keefe:''' just let me let, I'm listening,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm listening. Are you claiming that this never happened?

Are you claiming this? And they are not going to listen to a word. All they're going to say is, I've got my fingers in my ears, my eyes are closed. I'm going so I don't have to hear a single thing James O'Keefe ever says that's their strategy. To keep you from having the impact that some of your, the best of your work deserves.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And it will work for a while, but then one day we'll catch some things and we'll catch some more things and force some more reactions. And little by little over time, people will go, you know, but that T there's a guy in New Jersey, David Perry, that guy was caught on tape. Telling a person he thought was a child abuser, teacher just lie and put it back on the child, the democratic state Senate of New Jersey, where I'm from, this is two years ago, held hearings about it.

They, they, they, the governor of New Jersey, who's, who's Phil Murphy, the big, big friend of the teacher's union was forced to condemn it. So what, by getting the reactions from institutions by forcing other insiders to come forward, it's just after a while. That I just, we just keep going. We just keep doing it and I don't, I,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' you were partially effective and I can't get the

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm not trying to focus on my self righteousness or my heroism. What I'm trying to do is, is tell, tell you that in order to do this job, the reporter has to have a sense of. Singular, narrow tunnel vision. Nothing can get in our way. If I let anything stop me from that vision, which is a very, by the way I, it's going to happen.

We're going to recruit more insiders. They're going to record more things inside these institutions, and. And that there's going to be double the output every year. And after a while, we did one of these stories in Delaware where a teacher, a teacher's union official, was caught on tape and the union said, dude, you can't trust project Veritas.

They're right wing extreme criminals. And the membership, most of whom were probably Democrats, but not as political as is as us. We're like, but he was on tape protecting a child abuser. Why are we trying to cover that up? There was a slip in the disc and I've got the documents. I could show you the source material where the members were taught chattering on the internal message boards, and Eric, the president of the Delaware union said, do not click on this YouTube.

Do not give O'Keefe. One more, one more view and all of the numbers, but. But what's, well, I hate, Oh, keep. But what's wrong with what he did here? So my point is, content

'''Eric Weinstein:''' is King James. You're not getting

'''James O’Keefe:''' it. I am.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I feel like what you're doing is you're telling me that you are effective. And I'm not disputing that.

Why? Why bother telling me. Because you're having an

'''James O’Keefe:''' impact. Because if you want to evaluate the ethics in the abstract, it's impossible for me to justify. I cannot, it's impossible. I'm not

'''Eric Weinstein:''' telling you to be an angel. I'm really not.

'''James O’Keefe:''' It's I cannot. I will not. It is ethically impossible for me to justify.

Using a disguise in the, in the ways we do, because it's like

'''Eric Weinstein:''' trying to, I haven't even said anything about whether you're entitled to do some of that stuff. I, I'm maybe, maybe, maybe I need to make myself clear.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Maybe. Maybe so, but I believe what I . It's going to be very difficult for me to make an argument, a logical argument defending methods that taken in the abstract are indefensible on their own.

It's like trying to, one, Ephesus says, I tried to invent fireproof wa fireproof coal or dry water. I can't,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm not asking you to be a perfect angel. I'm telling you something different, which just doesn't land. Okay? I don't think you're on the efficient frontier. I think that there are things you could do that could minimize the individual harm and maximize the anti institutional effectiveness of your operation,

'''James O’Keefe:''' moorings and individual harm.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. In other words, the problem that you have is, is that most of the people that you're broadcast into are like me, poor schmucks who don't have their stuff completely sorted out. They partially sympathize and partially cannot stand the people you're catching on video. . And by doing more to up the ethics of your game, you would have more effectiveness.

And I'm not saying you have no effectiveness. I'm not saying you've done no good. I'm not saying you don't have windows of steel. I'm not saying that I haven't thrilled to things that you've released. I'm not backing one second away. From my decision to invite you here, and I think I made absolutely the right decision.

I have things I could try to got you you with. I think you'd be fine with it because I think you're a pugilist and you accept the game in a way that I do not. And the key issue is I'm standing by what I'm doing. We want your heroic behavior and we want you to get some of the flies in your ointment out.

Maybe not all of

'''James O’Keefe:''' them. Okay. All right. I think, I think I understand. And going

'''Eric Weinstein:''' back to see you struggling with the fact that somebody is not going to have a job. When you're done with them or somebody who's going to be humiliate or somebody maybe will take their own life at some point. So when you could've picked with, sorry, when you could have pixelated their face and gone after the employer,

'''James O’Keefe:''' like with slate, the face, if I use these

'''Eric Weinstein:''' strategies, you can figure out what.

Look, as I said, I'm not making a case that I would not make against Dateline NBC. You don't

'''James O’Keefe:''' know what you don't know. The unknowns, which is that we do in fact redact, omit, and otherwise not publish

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Zach's vortices face. When you had him on your program.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Yes, yes. Until yes, and he made the decision

'''Eric Weinstein:''' to go PI.

I understand that, but my point was that there was a period of time where you were protecting your source. Yes. And not protecting the target. Uh,

'''James O’Keefe:''' Jen denied Google,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' for example. And what I'm trying to say is, I want to see you wrestle with the ethics more than justify the ethics, because to be honest, I had a phone call with you and you were wrestling with the ethics and it was inspiring.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I think you, I think I wrestle with them more than you see.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's what I'm saying.

'''James O’Keefe:''' And at night. Getting a little naked at the, at the booth here. I, I, I torture myself

'''Eric Weinstein:''' and what I'm trying to fucking say,

'''James O’Keefe:''' and most people don't see that in the single single minded driven. You know,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' you don't wrestle with the idea whether you're going to protect your sources, but you wrestle with the ethic.

This is the

'''James O’Keefe:''' thing that I do. You have to take my word for it. But at night when I don't believe that you, and I'm in my bed, I'm you willing to die. The intern, I have an internal dialogue with myself. For example, in the upcoming story, which I'm not going to say on the air, but the upcoming story, we have this person that was, we had to protect for reasons I can't even say.

And our team had two days of conversations about, do we blur the person's face? Do we elect their name? We did all that. Um, and it, and it comes down to a cliche, uh, which the, Pam's Ekman said in the 1970s, which you have to balance the harm to the person would do with the weightiness of what is being exposed.

And

'''Eric Weinstein:''' you only have to do that on the efficient frontier. Do you understand the point? If you're in an interior point, you are not at the point where you have to balance those two things yet. Your first goal is to get to the efficient frontier, and that's an issue of skill. Okay.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Help me understand more.

Help me understand Bridget, this concept for me, efficient frontier. Imagine balancing harm versus public important,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' right? Imagine for example. That you hadn't pixilated somebody's face, but you could pixelate it and you could have the same effect. Now, just for the moment, I see the point is you don't yet have to balance the harm to the individual.

In fact, you can even get a boost in both. It could be that people say, Oh my God, he's trying not to destroy the person. He's really concerned about the platforms that have a bias that can't be discussed in public, which I'm really disturbed about. And I also, you know, I hate, I really hate the Donald Trump is president.

I really do. But this is a democracy and we have the wait, wait, wait.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Okay.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' My show. Go ahead. We have a right to elect Donald Trump if that's what we're, what we're going to do. We don't have a group of people that gets the right to stop Donald Trump. You either signed up for democracy project or you're not.

I'm signed up for the democracy project, so if the electorate, ALEKS, Donald Trump, I have to accept that Donald Trump is the president. I don't have to like it. Right? But that's part of what being an American is. And God damn it. If my guy at some point wins, you're going to have to suffer through him too.

It's a tough shit, right? That's, that's the bargain that we sign up for as Americans. Okay. You don't have an unelected group of techies who get to keep their finger on the scale and say, well, for the good of the world, we have the right to control the election because all the information passes through our servers.

Okay. I get that. What if you're at a situation where you can protect the individual and by protecting the individual display a kind of humanity that causes more people rather than fewer to sign on because the content. Rather than the destruction of the person is what really animates us. Are you telling me that I'm being de boosted in, down ranked, and they claimed that they don't shadow banned because they've got different words for it?

Are you telling me that Google has an internal thing called the good sensor and they won't talk to us about it? Is there an esoteric exit Terek game? Are you telling me that a bunch of. People whose politics I don't know, is determining exactly what the contents of my mind are and that we can't even discuss this.

I'm animated by your content and what's you're instead showing me is the pornography of personal destruction. Interesting.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Interesting. The pornography.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I've heard say it with me, the pornography of

'''James O’Keefe:''' personal phonography of I think

'''Eric Weinstein:''' professionally,

'''James O’Keefe:''' I think I've, I've, I've heard this some, I've heard this argument before, somewhere, someplace by someone.

So I've actually thought about this and I think we're, we're where we disagree on the premises that I'm quote destroying unquote someone by letting them talk and what I'm, what I'm, what I'm trying to reconcile here is that I. We believe so strongly that that journalism is corrupt because you don't see the intonation, the movement of their eyes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They've already seeded

'''James O’Keefe:''' this. You already see this to me, but to me, this is directly connected to the premise that we're destroying people. I don't think we're destroying David. Right. And I had, maybe we're, maybe we're freeing.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I had the walls a little bit. It'll come after me. Okay. Okay. They like personal destruction.

Don't get them wrong. They're into

'''James O’Keefe:''' it. I think you and I agree on those, on that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So then

'''James O’Keefe:''' I don't mean to grapple with that, but what I'm struggling with is I don't view it as a destruction and I'm, and I'm ready and willing to live in a world. In this sense, I'm not a hypocrite where if someone wants to record me to bar bragging, bragging openly,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' because this is your, you're also getting paid from this.

I mean, I don't mean to say that that's

'''James O’Keefe:''' why you will actually, I'd like to make a profound comment about this. I started in my, and I'm passionate. I'm not angry. I'm just passionate because I

'''Eric Weinstein:''' literally appreciate that

'''James O’Keefe:''' I'm not this, I'm just passionate. I started this on my parents' bedroom floor with a laptop.

People thought it was fricking nuts. And, and, and, and, and

'''Eric Weinstein:''' the, I don't want you making this argument cause I can make it better for you. Well, the fact that I said that you were getting paid for it doesn't mean that this is your road to riches. You could get more money doing something else. Let me make the point very clearly.

Okay. Am I right that you're basically willing to die for what you do

'''James O’Keefe:''' that might come across as, you know, I don't.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Are you willing to risk death for what you do? It's a very calm, are you willing to risk personal destruction for what you do? You're willing to risk jail for what you do.

'''James O’Keefe:''' You probably,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' yeah. I think you're willing to risk ruin.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My all my favorite guy, Albert Einstein said that the public intellectual has to be willing to risk ruined financial ruin, but he generally jail talking during the McCarthy year. Okay. Okay. I think it's very admirable. I don't see enough of this in my world and I struggle with this. How much am I willing to risk to run the show?

How much am I willing to risk to do an episode on Jeffrey Epstein when I don't know what the hell is on the other end of that story, right? There's no amount of money that you can pay me to do. It's not why I do it. All right. I sat on that. I sat on that episode for a long time, but I just found it was leaking out at me.

I couldn't stop talking about it because I'm worried that I'm part of a country that looks the other way. When somebody who has intelligence, uh, maybe a freelancer who knows, uh, you know, is a, is, is trafficking 12 year old girls and my co my country and my reporters won't stand up and ask the goddamn questions.

Right? And so I, I don't even know if I made a sane choice. I just know that I couldn't sit on it any longer.

That said, this is your game. It's not my game. and therefore I don't have the same need to be able to say, well, I'm willing to go into a bar. Okay, you've accepted the game, so you've accepted. That's the price of what you do, but what you're known understand is the rest of us are not like that. And because we haven't made that bargain, we both think you're protecting us and hunting us.

At the same time, if you were trying to hunt power, you could have less collateral damage to the individual, and I won't say it again because I think I've said it enough, right. My feeling is you displayed enough depth of character on the phone. When we were talking. As you struggle with these issues and you evidence a higher level of inner conflict, of dialectic, of concern, your stories would benefit so much more from showing that person rather than the person who knows exactly what the laws of a one sided recording are in Montana versus Iowa.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I hear it, and I wrestle with that every time we release a story. I probably should have started by talking about the process by which we wrestle with it, both from a company like my, my colleagues and me personally at, in my bed every night. Uh, these are, these are inherently situational tests, but going back to our rules for radicals book, which, you know, um.

We can talk about or not, but, Oh, with Beck, Saul Alinsky, I know people think it's controversial. I keep citing Alinsky, but the, he says the ne Deere of immorality is to do nothing. And he, this is what he says, than Indian idea of morality is to do nothing. And I could never justify. Inaction and I tried Eric deliver normal life.

My personal story is, is pretty crazy. I, I tried going to law school, I tried going to business school and I'd sneak out to get into the video lab. Like, you're right, I have a unique role in society in which maybe makes me. More willing to subject myself to the, the tactics that I, I do. But that's somebody has to do it.

Uh, the insiders, it's 1e-05% of people are probably willing to strap a camera to themselves, violate a nondisclosure agreement for the public's, right to know in the country, 400 million. That's a lot of people. There are roles that we have and we, I don't know if maybe we just want to move on to the next point

'''Eric Weinstein:''' and told

'''James O’Keefe:''' uh, remind me.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' He was a Polish, I guess, a nobility. And he, uh, had the idea during world war II that he should visit Auschwitz. So he dressed up as if you were Jewish, so that they would take him into Auschwitz. And he did reconnaissance and he organized resistance, and then he got himself stuck out so he could tell the world.

Now it was deceptive. Uh, was it justified? 12,000 million percent. it's not about deception, right? It's not about not wanting to bring these institutions when they are doing wrong to their knees. And it is not about the issue that I do not see. I completely agree with you that journalists have taken this privilege for themselves as an indulgence of working for the times.

That they have the right to behave in this fashion and those outside of the club do not . The issue has to do with whether or not you are actually being effective in not wrestling in a more productive way in front of your critics. Given that you are going to continue just if I take . Things where people are simply going to feed you information because they can't trust anyone else.

And my claim is, is that that is what places this moral burden on you.

'''James O’Keefe:''' D are you familiar with Stanley McChrystal and uh, uh, Michael Hastings in 2010, you know, he burned McChrystal and with the rolling stone magazine, it's customary for reporters to go to, you know. Speaking of going to bars and the military brass or saying things could have off the cuff.

Yup. And E, are you familiar with this story? Yes. McCrystal resigned or was fired by Obama or whatever the case may be. Do you believe in that circumstance that Michael Hastings, um. Is this a, is this consistent with what we do or different? Because it did involve the case of video. No offense,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' it's not just about video.

It's about the fact that you are one of the only people standing outside of this structure who's got the organization and the stones to go up against this. And honestly, in some sense, I'm doing a different version of this. I'm not as powerful. I'm not as prominent yet. But the portal is in part in another place for things to come to the surface that need to come to the surface where there is no other break and I guarantee you they're going to try to fit me with the same shit suit that they fit you with.

Oh, you can't trust that that appeared on the portal. Did you see this one tweet from Eric.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Uh,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' in 2011, blah, blah, blah. This taken out of context that wrestle conjugated, et cetera, et cetera. My point is you're not filing a flight plan, and I don't want to meet you in the skies doing your barnstorming tricks.

Too many costumes, too little pixelation, too much hidden cameras, shit. Too many people being felt. Being made to feel that they are vulnerable. When you're targeting an institution like a tech platform, right? And your collateral damage is an individual who went may be misguided, may be sanctimonious, may be hypocritical.

This is the William tell problem from the original tweet that I tried to mention, you keep aiming too low. Now you can come back at me and say, Eric, what the hell have you done? And I could say, you know what? I'm so worried about hitting the kid. Did I knock? I'm not coming close to the Apple. So I'm willing to be the other failed part of this enterprise, but my point is maybe you want to take your aim a little bit up and maybe I need to be a little bit more pointed and bringing my arrow a little bit closer to the fruit.

'''James O’Keefe:''' I appreciate your point. I think I understand it now. Thank you for,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' well, thank you for putting up with me. This is a hard, hard conversation.

'''James O’Keefe:''' This is a unique conversation because I'm so used to dealing with disingenuous and bad faith. Criticisms, but I don't think at

'''Eric Weinstein:''' all, I promise, do what

'''James O’Keefe:''' you're doing. I just, I'm just, you're just going deeper into an issue that most people.

At least on the surface don't have an issue with, and I will say that on an on about, I'm being very vulnerable here, but I'm, I consider myself a pretty transparent person. I can say that in my staff speaking on behalf of our reporters for a minute who operate anonymously really wrestle with this. And.

In some cases, we even have full curriculum workshop. I can't get into all the things that we do when we train our people, but we actually have an entire half a day where we let you know, man is, do you, do you empathize with the person that you're, you're, and it's almost like we accept it. We take our medicine.

I'm talking on behalf of the reporters and we go, well, you got to balance the public's right to know and its circumstances will determine what they're saying. And, and we do. We do struggle with it. And the way that I'm wired in my brain is I have internal dialogues with myself.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yes. That's what I'm trying to

'''James O’Keefe:''' get at.

People don't know that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I know about me.

'''James O’Keefe:''' No kidding. In fact, I would say even my staff doesn't even know.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's what I gambled on. Given what it is that you do, because you do things that I know

'''James O’Keefe:''' you don't have to believe me, but I hope

'''Eric Weinstein:''' that you'll take your word for it. It leaks out in what you do, James,

'''James O’Keefe:''' but I mean it might, but I mean to say this is a very important point.

I, James O'Keefe had internal dialogues in my brain, like an angel on one holder devil, and I do this. I'm wired to do this. I think I have this internal. Governor that like, uh, like on an old car that, that, that, uh, that, uh, stops the, uh, uh, how fast you're going. I have that governor and I surround myself with people.

Joe Holdermans, our, our, one of our producers, he's never voted for a Republican his life. He's never voted for a Republican ever. He's a, he's an old news man and I tried to create a management team that we really do grapple with these things, but what it comes down to is. The people believe so much and I'm, and I mean, I'm coming here from a very, I'm trying to be as genuine as I possibly can.

They believe so much in. The value of the information and the public's right to know it, that they kind of have to take that medicine and deal with the harm done to the individual in that specific circumstance. And it's something that we, we do despite the harm, not because of it. Um, we don't, we don't want harm.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Uh, we farther you get away. From things that look like entrapment, selective editing, invasion of privacy, needless destruction of personal reputation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All the stuff you can imagine, the greater you make the intake of your messages because more of us understand that we are not in your cross hairs.

You see, in part, I don't really, I don't want to be your worst nightmare. I want to be your best nightmare. I want to be the person who has the conversation with you that gives you the criticism that you never get because most of the criticism is at this very simplistic level. All right, I have to grant 12 things before we even get to the conversation that we're supposed to be having.

Okay, well, we got a chance to do that and I promised you that that's what you were going to get. Am I right that there was no misrepresentation as to what this interaction

'''James O’Keefe:''' was going to be? Very fair

'''Eric Weinstein:''' and I think you've been very fair and very forthcoming and I really appreciate that. What I want to say is I would look forward to being able to have this conversation with you again when.

And you have my number, feel free to call me up. The key thing that I'm trying to focus on is to the extent that what you do is a good thing that must be done, and to the extent that there is almost no one else willing to do this, consider that you are not on the efficient frontier and that upping the ethics may up the effectiveness.

I understand what you said about you cannot afford. It denominator of negativity that is zero hours, you know, badness or whatever you want to call . Right. My claim is, is that partially what is harming the efficacy of your, of your project is that people feel that they are in your cross hairs. It's a very technical argument and that you're getting too much pleasure out of the voyeuristic spectacle, and I don't think that's actually what's motivating you.

I really. I'm going to gamble and say maybe that makes it memetic and people want to want to watch somebody be destroyed, but the information is so much more important that ABC might be holding back information on Jeff Epstein that. The major tech platforms have their finger on the scale and maybe trying to tilt elections.

I don't even remember the names of these people. I don't care. And you know, to be honest, it's like in a corrupt world, if I go to Nigeria, I guarantee you I can find everybody taking and giving bribes. Right? Right. And so in this moment of universal corruption. You really want to point to individuals being sanctimonious or sub ethical or, you know, disguising speech.

We all do it. So w my, my claim is, is you have an unique opportunity, which is stop talking about the trade off. And start working on getting to the point where the tradeoff kicks in.

'''James O’Keefe:''' Point taken point. Al, I'll consider that

'''Eric Weinstein:''' James would be a pleasure to have you come back and further the conversation. We look forward to what you guys do next.

Let me know if I can be a constructive force in your future and I'm really glad, whatever the cost that uh, we chose to sit down. I think this was a conversation that I was dying to have with you and you have behaved terrifically in that chair. And thank you sir,

'''James O’Keefe:''' and thank you. And we welcome. I, and let me just say, we welcome skepticism of, of even ourselves.

We want, we, I try to be as transparent as possible, uh, even into our methods more so than others. So I welcome this. I appreciate this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Appreciate you all. We'd say

'''James O’Keefe:''' you've given me something to think about and something to research further. I, I've never had anyone drill so far into this argument and I'm happy that you did so.

And I will think about it and I hope to see you again.

I look forward to that. So you've been through the portal with James O'Keeffe of project Veritas. Please find us on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe. Also navigate on over to YouTube. And not only subscribe, but.

Click the bell icon, so you'll be notified when our next video episode drops be. Well, everybody in stay safe during this bizarre Corona epidemic.

25: The Construct: Jeffrey Epstein

2020-04-12T03:46:18Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
Over half a year ago, immediately following the reported death of [[Jeffrey Epstein]], Eric recorded a solo episode that he never released in hopes that its subject matter would be overtaken by investigative journalism. As this has not happened, it is being released with some trepidation in March of 2020 due to the issue of state involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.

Eric discusses his memories of his single bizarre meeting (circa 2004?) with Jeffrey Epstein in Epstein's 71st St townhouse in Manhattan. While at that meeting, Eric was surprised by Epstein's strange behaviors and came to the conclusion that it was highly unlikely that Epstein was likely to be the money manager he claimed. Instead, Eric came to the conclusion that the person with whom he was sitting was more probably a construction of one or more intelligence agencies, interested alternatively in powerful actors and scientists.

This 15 year hypothesis and Epstein's mysterious death lead to Eric's four questions:

A) Where are the newspaper stories tracking the financial records from the Villard House offices on Madison Avenue of Jeffrey Epstein's hedge fund and financial management firm J. Epstein & Co.? Who holds these records? What trades do they show? Who were the prime brokers? Where are any former employees who executed trades? Was there never a hedge fund at all? If not, is the inexplicable Epstein fortune and the missing Robert Maxwell fortune actually one and the same fortune?

B) Where are the newspaper stories detailing the known border crossings where Ghislaine Maxwell's passports were last presented to the immigration agents of any government? Where was her last known social engagement? Is she continuing to file and pay taxes? Why is she not being sought by law enforcement and where is the government request for any information as to her last whereabouts? How did this person simply vanish in a world where Tech tracks everyone at all times? Where did her digital trail run cold?

C) Where are the newspaper stories asking whether Jeffrey Epstein was known to be connected to any US or foreign intelligence agencies? Where are the on-the-record stories asking if the US and its allies categorically deny refusing to work with any known child sex traffickers? Why has have such questions not terminated in at least a categorical denial or "no comment" response or even a refusal to discuss "sources and methods"?

D) Why is there no routine call from Journalists, Senators, Congressmen and women, Academics, Clergy or Business leaders for hearings into the intelligence communities in the wake of Epstein and related affairs, as there was during the 1970s when the Church and Pike committees uncovered dirty tricks campaigns against lawful citizens? Why are these agencies now protected and immune in a way that they were not previously?

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== Episode Notes ==

* Notes are currently being taken in Google Docs. Once they are in a more finalized form, we can move them into the wiki: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lf0atNcbU6HxwW-JEf-kA9YwzFRzogmDI0SJKLRQr-g/edit?pli=1

== Transcript ==

* [[Episode 25 VTT File]] ([https://theportal.wiki/images/8/8e/EW_-_Epstein_V2_FINAL_AUDIO.vtt raw file]) - We can use this raw file as a starting point to build a more human-friendly transcript. Please don't alter this machine-friendly file. We want to preserve all the time codes. If you're going to make a transcript from this, you can copy it to the Google Doc linked above and start making changes there.

24: Kai Lenny - To Play and Flirt with Giants

2020-04-12T03:45:00Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[File:ThePortal-Ep24 KaiLenny-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|right|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Kai Lenny (left) on episode 24 of The Portal podcast]]
In a world which is often slow-moving and even stagnant, there are always sectors and individuals who buck the trends. In this episode of The Portal, [[Eric Weinstein|Eric]] sits down with his favorite surfing hero [[Kai Lenny]] who is pioneering a new approach to big wave surfing. By availing himself of the latest technology and dedicating his life to innovation and discipline, all-around waterman Kai Lenny is redefining what is possible with boards and waves. Whether it is kite surfing, hydrofoils, paddle boards or towing into monster waves, Kai is not only riding, but playing in the biggest surfable waves as if they were up to an order of magnitude smaller. Eric attempts to understand Kai's approach to innovation and how he can be so carefree and seemingly casual when he is always flirting with death within some of the most powerful structures and forces nature can through at a single individual from Jaws in Maui to Nazaré in Portugal.

Please Subscribe to the Podcast wherever you listen to The Portal and make sure to check out our YouTube channel and click the bell icon to be notified when our next episodes appear! Hope you enjoy this.

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== Transcription (In Progress) ==

Eric Weinstein 0:00
Hello, this is Eric, I wanted to give a small note to say that today's episode fits into the general arc of the portal. As many of you know, I'm a critic about what is going on in academics and in science and in the economy. With respect to innovation, I feel that we're experiencing some kind of a very broad malaise and slowdown. On the other hand, whenever you allege that something is going generally environmentally wrong, is incumbent upon you to check that you aren't in fact, in the middle of a depressive or negative episode, one of the things that I like to do is to check and see where the bright spots what are the things that inspire me? Where do I see people actually pushing the envelope, making breakthroughs? If I can spot those, then I can realize that it's not me who's dead, but in fact, a memory of what is possible that is actually causing the frustration. And in these circumstances, I sometimes look very far afield to see where people are actually innovating. And one of the places that I see a tremendous amount of innovation right now is surfing. At some point out of the corner of my eye, one particular surfer caught my attention. His name was Kyle any and it wasn't as clear as it is now that he was onto something really special. As his skill has increased, he's been taking on larger and larger waves. And I don't know how to say this exactly, but playing with them. So before you watch today's episode, put in the name Chi, Lenny, k, l, e, and why, and maybe words like Jaws, or Nazeri and watch what he's doing. Because it's unlike anything I've ever seen. Every time I look at it, it looks more like art than surfing. He's effectively playing with some of the most frightening and dangerous waves in the world. And in some sense, it seems like a metaphor for where we are that with many forces that are potentially incredibly threatening. A small number of us have the courage and strength and discipline to instead of fretting and becoming enervated. We start playing with what the possibilities might be. Chi is experimenting in every technological dimension, every athletic dimension and I daresay every artistic dimension That you can imagine, his famous phrase is, I feel like we're just getting started. It's hard for me to believe that there's that much headroom given how close to the edge, it seems that he's always playing. But even though I know that he's taking his life making these videos for us and experiencing these waves, in the kind of perfect solitude that must accompany being inside a gigantic barrel, or falling down the face of what can only be called a liquid cliff, I know that Chi is actually serving something greater in the human spirit. And even though we can't necessarily be in the wave with him, through the magic of helicopters or GoPro videos, or any of the incredible technologies that we're now able to use to bring the experience closer to home. Kai is reacquainting ourselves with the sense of the possible what might lie within us, both as individuals and as a society. So I hope you'll see this in this light. I hope you'll take an interest in surfing whether you live in a landlocked country, or whether you're old and maybe even disabled. what he's doing is in fact to me, hugely inspiring and One of the places that I turn to when I start to feel extremely frustrated, so I feel hugely honored to be able to bring you Kyle any please take a look at his videos beforehand. And then once you understood what it is that we're all capable of through his efforts and antics, I think you'll find that this interview is much more enjoyable. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks.

Hello. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. And I'm thrilled today because my guest is none other than Kai Lenny, who I've been stalking on the internet. And recently in Maui actually Chi Welcome to the portal.

Kai Lenny 3:41
Thanks for having me. On the portal.

Eric Weinstein 3:43
Okay. Well, look, the aim of this program is to talk about breaking through two worlds that people can't even imagine exist. And there is no one who better exemplifies this at the moment than you because what I see us doing before even people love people wanting to know who you are, is that you are right now in the process of expanding the vocabulary in a very unusual area. So that I'm seeing things I've never seen before. Even though I'm not expert in your area, we talk about big wave surfing and what you're doing to it.

Kai Lenny 4:18
Oh, my favorite thing in the world to talk about big wave surfing because it's like the passion. I mean, just a quick background for everyone. You came and visited on Maui and you saw my board room and you saw all this equipment and stuff. where I grew up is just down the road from what would I would call the Mount Everest of big waves. jaws payout here in Hawaiian peyote, he means the beacon or to be called, which is a perfect name, because when it starts to break, it almost sends this signal out to the rest of the world. And people come from all corners of life to either surf or watch or film photography. Take photos of these giant waves and so
When you're born and raised with Mount Everest in your backyard, it's inevitable you're gonna have to go try to climb it right and big wave surfing, you're in it. It's inevitable. You want to go surfing as a little kid because before you know comic books and comic book movies, right? Mainly comic book movies were really big in the mainstream media. They're my superheroes were the guys that were riding these monster waves. You know, there was was there a comic book hero called the Silver Surfer? The Silver Surfer? Yeah, sure, I guess. But it was like, I guess like, in Hawaii, we do live in a bubble. I'm not arguing against that at all. Because we're, we're not a part of the continental United States. We're middle of the ocean 2000 miles away the most isolated landmass on the planet. And you
everything that's going on around you in Hawaii is what's going around you you know, it's there's not A lot of there's influence from other places thanks to the internet and stuff, but it's such a scene over there. And Hawaii is a powerful place as well like an energy you can really feel that and it's almost unexplainable. There's a frequency that if you can match it will give you some of the most incredible moments of your life. And we'll get into that more when when when I start talking about like the art of actually riding big waves. Yeah, and being in tune with the ocean and the frequency and I mean, why not just stop start talking about it now? Is that the
Eric Weinstein 6:30

Lopez I'm gonna start off by just contradicting you you say that you are out there. Of course you have to write it. You're too modest because I talked to people who are living out there who are surfers who love it. And when I when I asked them, Do you go and surf this particular wave? The usual answer is now did not crazy. I mean, this wave when it when it breaks is really it's a beast.
Kai Lenny 6:53
It's a beast, but Okay, so just throw it back to when I was. Gosh, right. I think one of my earliest memories as a child, you know, all of a sudden it's like you don't remember anything and then maybe when you're four years old or even younger, like three years old all sudden, there's like a distinct memory. One of the most distinct memories I have as a kid is standing on the cliff watching jaws break. So there was already a seed plants from an early age. Highly, you know, curious kid.
Super my superheroes the guys like equivalent of the Justice League and the Avengers were called the strapped crew. And they were the ones that pioneered payout aka jaws and jaws doing a name check them, huh? Yeah, no, absolutely. So who who made up this strap crew were guys that invented tow in surfing, which was the first. The first are still probably the best way to ride big waves on a high performance level.
Laird Hamilton people have probably heard of him. Dave Coloma was another rush Randall, Derek Dorner, Pika brina, Robbie Nash, Mike Waltz, Brett likkle those guys kind of comprise this strap crew. And they're all different characters. A lot of them windsurfing champions, a lot of them from different parts of the island. islands, you know, from Oahu, as well as now of course, but they kind of were on Maui, Gerry Lopez, who's like, I would say, the equivalent of Yoda in surfing, you know, like he's the all wise basically all knowing, like, Master, the guru. He showed Laird this wave back in the day like this is in the he'd been watching it since the early 80s. And very early 90s. They Jerry's like okay, like he noticed Laird was really taking interest in big wave surfing on Allaha, which at the time was considered the best big waves on the planet. It means like I got something you might want to see and they walk through the pineapple fields, they get to the edge of the cliff. And all of a sudden layered is shown. The the golden goose the the, the, the best big wave on the planet, it's so perfect that if you're not someone on it for scale, it looks like a small wave. It's rare to find big waves that look six feet, but are really 60 feet. And so Jerry told me when I was a kid, and I always try to get them to repeat it is a story of like in the 80s when a giant swell came in, they were surfing this other break, which is also known as one of the best waves in the planet, not best big wave but best wave. And it's very similar to how jaws breaks just on a smaller scale. It's called Honolulu Bay. Beautiful epic sunsets there. And he said one day after surfing they went up to jaws to go check it and it was so big that where we surfing now would have been whitewater and where the boats are would have been where the barrel So where the way was breaking and creating a giant tube, he he would he would approximate the ways were probably in the hundred foot range.
Eric Weinstein 10:09

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Kai Lenny 12:22
There was other nicknames or other names they call it before it was coined jaws jaws sort of came when layered landed on the cover of National Geographic with a giant wave and he was just in boardshorts. And it was like, unbelievable shot, which I think he's still the only surfer to ever be on the cover of National Geographic.
Eric Weinstein 12:39
There's so many ways that I want to get in underneath the story before I even get to like you and what I'm sure so, but I don't even know where to begin. So first of all, one, the only thing that connects us really is that we're both fascinated by waves. I'm fascinated in physics. You're fascinated by ocean waves. Yeah. And one of the things that I find fascinating Is that these these waves are sort of like intercontinental intercontinental exploration that has only happened recently, like, we mapped all the landmasses, but somehow they're still relatively recently. Only relatively recently has there been certain discoveries of these really important surfable waves

like Mavericks in Half Moon Bay not been explored for that long. And then yeah, and then you know, you're saying with with jazz, jazz and bi The thing that I find fascinating about this is that there was also this taboo around tow in surfing the because of the, the purity of surfing culture, and the ethos of it like you're talking about it both as a sport and the beauty of the wave and the sunsets. Like it is the sort of kind of complete picture in world and there was something transgressive about Tony and Is that right?
Kai Lenny 13:57
I think before anybody started kind of pinning tone surfing as being unnatural or not soulful, or whatever other kind of term they use. People were just blown away by the fact that you could ride away that big. And so it didn't even matter at that point. Now, fast forward to present day people are paddling in and tow in Surfing is widely regarded, within course, surfers as cheating. But I think they forget that
Eric Weinstein 14:29
it's the it would be the equivalent of going and climbing the mountain and skiing down versus taking the helicopter up and doing it 50 times. Why isn't there an issue about how fast the wave is moving? And if it's moving too quickly? It's almost impossible to pedal in or is that changed?
Kai Lenny 14:44
I think it's changed a lot. I mean, I think what people thought was impossible to paddle into is possible is just the best way I can describe it is when you're trying to paddle into a really big wave. Just imagine there's a platform or like a launching pad right that you can go from but the big You're the wave gets, the smaller that launching pad gets, where you can take off and make it Yeah, because it's all about positioning, it's triangulating yourself with the land around you. So looking at shore and finding two trees or two points that you line up with, okay, this is where I am on part of the reef, and then looking to your left and finding another point in lining up with the point. And so you kind of triangulate yourself in and that's where by by checking where the waves are breaking, that's how you figure out that you're going to be in the right spot to get on that launching pad. Because if you're too much on the shoulder, which is kind of away from the critical part of the way, you're not going to catch it. If you're too deep, you're going to become part of the wave and go over the falls. So it's that's
Eric Weinstein 15:44
patterns given that this is a non surfing programs, can we say that over the falls means getting swept up over the crest and being just shoved into the
Kai Lenny 15:52
I guess over the falls would be the equivalent of jumping into the water and going over Niagara. Right like that's the same thing like So you become the lip. The wave picks you up in what we call it is the ride after the ride.
Eric Weinstein 16:07

Okay? So what I don't really want to object in any way to toe in I don't have these issues. So the main issue for me is innovation, right? Like the reason I find this so fascinating is that I wasn't around unconscious like in 68. I was three years old when dick Fosbury came up with the Fosbury flop and changed high jumping. And if you think back to like table tennis, this guy from Japan I think his name is like Hiroshi such put rubber on a hard bat paddle and change the game of table tennis forever. What I see you is doing and I could be wrong about this. I've been looking at you for several years not knowing because I'm not a surfing guy. Why am I carrying about this one guy? It was quite so evident early Than it as it is now that suddenly I'm seeing things that I just came believe I'm watching. And essentially what I think I'm seeing is that you're taking some of the world's largest waves. And instead of just like showing that they can be written, like actually just playing, and doing tricks and pushing every available corner of performance, to eke out things that nobody knew was were possible. So you really inventing your own vocabulary of surfing to me. And then the thing that you said that just, you know, tore it my soul. I was watching you on some kind of unbelievable wave doing some trick. And you said, you know, the thing that blows my mind is I feel like we're just getting started. And I thought I thought we were already at the limits of what is doable. And your point of view was, I can see how much headroom I have. And its enormous. It's Yeah,
Kai Lenny 17:56
I mean, it's crazy. The there's I think there's more room for growth and high performance big wave riding, then there isn't any part of surfing, maybe even any part of action sports because, you know, I'm just starting now to do three sixes on big waves and do it confidently. But there's really no reason why I shouldn't be doing a triple cork something that Shaun White can do you know and a half by, you know, something like that. So
Eric Weinstein 18:24
your feet are tethered to your board are they
Kai Lenny 18:26
on toe and surfing It is really the only way to do it in big waves turn surfing, because of the speeds you're reaching the amount of wins even on a glassy day when there's no wins on the face of the wave. Waves are moving fast if they're producing their own local wins at the top. So you know, probably 20 knot winds 25 mile an hour winds on the top of these breaking waves. And so you and the boards are heavy to go through all that chop because I'm probably hitting 55 miles an hour at times and even faster potentially in certain waves. riding my toe and surfboard.
Eric Weinstein 19:03
Got it. So what I want to sort of just induce people to do is to Google and search for some of the epic rides that you've taken, that also alerted the world to the fact that something crazy was going on. So, you know, with Laird Hamilton, a very famous alert that went out to the planet was this photograph of him in Tahiti, which must have
Unknown Speaker 19:28

been lynnium wave to you want us to talk
Eric Weinstein 19:31 about how that affected
Kai Lenny 19:32
you. I mean, Laird was mice was a superhero to me, even up to that point, and this is 2000. And Laird was known is known as riding and kind of like pushing the limits of big wave riding where people didn't think it could go. Part. I think that's why I'm kind of inspired to follow in those footsteps like, and it might be a little different approach but for Laird when he rode that wave in 2000 And he just kind of like, blew the door open on what was possible to what wave was it talked is this is Tahiti. Yeah. So this is in Tahiti, French Polynesia. Most Beautiful day ever. There's this way of called Tahoe. People call it Shoku. People call it shopes. And it's this wave that breaks and six feet of water on a shallow reef comes from the depths of the ocean. It's really deep on the other side. And what makes this wave so unique is it can displace the entire ocean and instead of being instead of standing up vertically, it just folds over so it's almost like it's the closest thing to a rideable tsunami there is. Because there's no back to the wave. It's just the whole ocean.
Eric Weinstein 20:42
It is the most beautifully perfect wave I've ever seen. And I'm there two waves that have captivated me just visually, and they're the exact opposite of each other. So this in that, how should I say should I say choco?
Kai Lenny 20:57
Well, you could say it however you want. What does it mean? Can you
Eric Weinstein 20:59 translate it's got a good
Kai Lenny 21:00
Oh yeah, this is this is great. So Tahoe yeah Shoku is translates to broken skulls. Yeah. And it's not because of the wave, but that area is like culturally significant. They call it the end of the road. It's where the road ends. And that's where that wave is right at the end. But back in the day, there used to be really big battles in Tahiti. And people's skulls were put on steaks and they would be stuck in the sand there and it just kind of fit perfect that one of the gnarliest waves that could stick you on a steak is just maybe 200 300 yards offshore, fairly shallow reef so shallow so sharp razors, just imagine razor blades on the bottom you touch it barely. It's just your you get ripped apart and a classic Tahitian tradition is you line them after to kill any bacteria because the research so alive there that it's really easy to get staph infection. And so instead of using anything That's like by modern medicine standards or less painful, they live you and it is hard It's like putting acid in your wounds It hurts so bad because you know the acidic the nature of limes are pretty acidic and so it just feels it's killing everything in there but it's also stinging

horribly bad and there's nothing worse when you get cut you try to hide it from like all your friends and the local TV shoes because they seem like lime and people it's it's hilarious find so much pleasure and seeing you just like SCORM as they like lime your back. And it's good because it kills. Yeah, any staff that could possibly take you but at the very same time it's miserable. You already go through a horrible experience and then you have to do it again.
Eric Weinstein 22:45
This this way is not the tallest but it's one of the heaviest waves in the world, just in terms of the mass of water.
Kai Lenny 22:51
Yeah, I mean, it kind of defies like belief when people first see it, especially in person. It's not that the wave nationally it's not only Like the wave gets displaced as it comes in and hits the reef. And typically what happens is water is shot vertically and Rachel creates a tall wave, there's a back to the wave, it's usually half the size of the front of the wave. But because there's all that mass pushing behind it, but at Shoku, the way it hits the reef, it just shoots the lip forward and the whole oceans behind it, and it draws all the water off the reef back into the ocean. And so you're surfing at below sea level. If you're riding a 30 foot wave there, you're 30 feet below sea level, you're in like a pit. And you can see the water going back up the reef in front of
Eric Weinstein 23:37
it almost doesn't make sense.
Kai Lenny 23:38
Yeah, no, it's just, it's a freak of nature. And certain waves do that. But this one's the king of it. It's the best. It's I like to call it the most perfect clothes out on the planet because and all the photos you see of it, it looks like this perfect wave. And it is for a little bit. But as you're writing, there's a right hander that's coming at you. So there's a wave that's equal in size that's going to close out Is
Eric Weinstein 24:00
that all that missed that right at the end so
Kai Lenny 24:02
that's called spit. You know when you see a breaking wave as it barrels, it'll shoot like a cannon and all that water. It's the compression of water. These big waves waves in general are like cannons or like guns. So when you're riding in the tube, you can feel air. It's a vortex. Right? It's a vortex. And so it's sucking air in like a jet engine like and then the wave there's so much water moving, the air can't escape. So it goes the least resistance which is back out the tube, and it explodes and it shoots chunks of water that can knock you off your board. Probably hundreds of pounds of like water that are like shooting you and it hurts really bad. Like it feels certain waves. It feels so good like getting just it's only time it feels good to be spat on.

Eric Weinstein 24:50
Well, you said this thing to me about barrels that I never thought of and maybe it's a common place and surfing but I'd never heard it which is that a barrel is a unique experience because of you said something about the only time that
Kai Lenny 25:06
Yeah, well, riding inside a tube, a barrel, a wave, basically the hollow part of the wave as it pitches over. It's unique because it's the only way we can breathe underwater without any other breathing apparatus. That was amazing. And you feel like a fish for a second, you know, and there's something about waves that break and the negative ions they produce that, you know, make you feel so good. So you can imagine being in this kind of capsule or this vortex, you're so focused on making it it's all that's on the front of your mind that there's a moment when nothing else exists, and time slows down. It's like you really are almost, I don't know if accessing more parts of your brain or what it is, but what feels like tense, what is four seconds, feels like a minute. That's amazing, and you're just in there and I'm watching water droplets move by me at like matrix speed, everything looks like the matrix. And if you're really calm, and and you're really comfortable, you can look you have time to like, look around and absorb all this information. And then all of a sudden, as it spits, and you come out of the tube, it's like life just starts going back to normal speed, and you realize how life fast life moves. Because in there, it's like, you have all the time in the world It feels like and it's, it's what it's probably the pinnacle of what you could do surfing. Better than any maneuver any aerial, acrobatic tricks being in the tube.
Eric Weinstein 26:38
The portal is proud to welcome back returning sponsor wanting access but I think we're going to throw away the script because they recently invited me for a wine tasting event built around a bottle of wine. That is incredibly important in my family and wine access knows nothing about it. So let's just give it a shot. Right before my brother Brett and sister in law Heather hi and got married Heather's parents, Douglas and Jesse hiding took us out for a wonderful dinner right before For the wedding, they pulled out a bottle of wine and poured it for everybody. I wasn't thinking much about it. And as I tasted the wine suddenly everything stopped. What was this wine I had no idea. It was one of the most distinctive glasses I've ever tried. And it was the first time I think I was feeling that I could tell that this was a great wine. It turned out to be silver oak Cabernet Sauvignon, a legendary and sometimes controversial wine in California, but an incredibly important and sort of landmark bottle. When I went to the event in West LA, it brought back the memory of Heather's father, who is now passed. And I think I'll tell more about that story the next time. But a great bottle of wine is more than just a beverage. It's an ability to stop time to create some kind of a marking to let you know that something significant is happening in your life. And it also gives you the ability to conjure people who've left us so Thanks, Doug with wine access.com slash a portal, you're going to get yourself one hell of a bottle with wine access.com slash portal, so why not order them by Tonight, you get $100 off and support the show by going to wine access comm slash portal, you'll be glad you did. It's always interesting

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Kai Lenny 29:58
Oh, absolutely. Well, you know, what's a Interesting, there's not that many crazy big waves in the world. They're big waves. But then there's waves that are in the league of their own. You could say chocos in a league of its own jaws nazzer A Mavericks which is here in California. And chip Stern's is one of them as well. And they all have different personalities and the art of riding these big waves is finding the personality and kind of matching your the best of you with them. But what makes ships turns exciting, and the reason why they call it ships turns is because the way the cliff is situated, it looks like the front of a massive ship, maybe the Titanic or something? No, but I know all about that way. You know, because I've been studying it kind of getting ready to go and I've had opportunities ago and it hasn't worked out. I mean, big wave surfing, you could be halfway across the world on your way and the forecast can switch in a flash and you turn around and go home because sockin even breaking or the winds are going to be bad and Tasmania is very susceptible to bad weather just because it's really as close to Antarctica as yet and all those massive storms are pretty is big waves oftentimes slam that island and but what makes that waves so raw and so heavy as well it is really cold water but it's the the symmetry the bottom the what we would call the reef which is really just rocks there has a bunch of it's an uneven surface and so adamant mapped No, but I just know from experience and I mean if you you can look into videos about they, they basically talk a lot about all these other big because like I
Eric Weinstein 31:29

think a choco I've saw underwater photography of the wave breaking from below and it's one of the most confusing and gorgeous things I've ever seen.
Kai Lenny 31:39
It's pretty I mean, there's always like hidden features to Reeves or to the bottom contours that you don't necessarily realize. But for the most part, if you've been surfing a long time and especially in big waves, certain things equal other things so
Eric Weinstein 31:55
so you can infer what the bottom must look like from the gnarly aspect of that.
Kai Lenny 31:59
Yeah, just By seeing those ledges in, in the legends within the face so this way, the way it breaks is it's like a right hander choco but maybe not quite as displacing of the ocean. But it has all these like, steps they call them yeah, basically. So miniature waves within the way you could have like four miniature waves in the face. And that is like if you go to a river, and you look at a river in and you see a little standing wave right before you'll see some turbulence right before, that's because there's lightly uneven rocks right before it and so underwater, there's these rocks that come up that kind of ever so slightly displaced the wave in such a way that it makes these mini waves in between. But everyone the way people typically ride it is a kind of those are speed bumps and they try to get through that as quick as they can to get into the barrel and I'd say my vision for it and it's a scary one. Anything you try new and big waves is horrifying because it's like the consequences are severe beat downs and you know Possibly drowning, but is hitting these small little waves and doing aerial maneuvers off of them. And then as soon as you land have the whole wave break over you and you're in the tube, and then come out, it's really like being a drug addict and you just need a harder drug or something because you can ride big waves all the time. You can surf in general all the time, but for me, I feel like I need to constantly be upping it because it's not as satisfying as the last time I did it. And also I'm all about progression as well. Like I love getting the the feeling of getting better and maybe that go coincides with it. Right? Never done drugs in my life, but I can imagine what it might
Eric Weinstein 33:36 DSPs you have
Kai Lenny 33:38
Yeah, it is a drug but a natural wine. Right?
Eric Weinstein 33:41
Well, this is the this is the thing when I look at I mean, and again, I don't view you within surfing, I view you as like Rodney Mullen or Eddie Van Halen, or Alex Honnold like they're just these people who are meant to change what we know about Each of these sports now they're all within a context, you have a lot of colleagues or you're learning from a new teaching. But I do see you as what do you see as differentiating your approach? That, you know, if everybody's

got kind of a secret signature, and you were talking about your own expression relative to the wave? What would you say is defining the difference? What am I picking up? But I don't know anything about surfing at all?
Kai Lenny 34:24
Well, I think, from my own personal perspective, I'm just kind of, and I think a lot of other people that do really cool things. Like I think I've heard Alex Honnold talk about this as well. It's like, you don't really know any better. It's just kind of who you are. And it kind of sort of happens and it's, and in my perspective, it is sort of the environment that you spent the most time in or that experience that led to this point. And so when I go out in the water, it's not like I'm going out there with the intention to change things or tried to recreate the landscape. It's more like, Oh son, I got this idea. And that sounds really fun and think I could do it. You know, it's like, it starts with a little whisper in your head, like, maybe this is possible, then you do it and then all sudden you look around and people appreciate it and without people appreciating it, I don't think I would know if it was significant or
Eric Weinstein 35:18
not. I need the feedback loop. Like I think Riley molar was basically having a conversation with himself.
Kai Lenny 35:23
Yeah, like, Well, I know what I want to do. But sometimes, like, when you're surfing a big wave, you don't know how big the wave is behind you. For example, if I never saw a photo or no one told me if it was an early I might get so used to it. Yeah. So comfortable. I was talking to my brother about this the other day about being starting to get desensitized by certain size waves now, I mean, I spent out of the last two weeks terrifying. Yeah, it is. But you get comfortable you know, you spend so much time in it. spent the last eight days surfing big waves. I'm out of two weeks, and I was in nazzer and I went to jaws and
Eric Weinstein 35:58
to nezzer is this port Jeez, with that comes out of an underwater Canyon where all of like the energy's being focused. And maybe it's all just close to the tallest surfable wave in the world.
Kai Lenny 36:10
Yeah, that is that's probably the most consistent big wave. And I think we should that's an in depth conversation that plays. But real quick, I'm just to kind of finish off this. Sorry. No, no, but to finish off sort of this kind of thought on becoming desensitized a little bit and talking about like, how you kind of need feedback, there was this one particular wave, I'm not meaning to toot my horn at all. But there's this one particular wave where I got interesting feedback from my brother afterwards where the way I was approaching it, and I you might have seen it on my social media, my Instagram is that really big barrels wearing an orange vest, and I wrote it for a long time and I end up getting spit out was probably one of my best big wave barrels ever. But the interesting about that is I was I was so focused on reading the curve of the wave and when

you're taking off on a wave of Jaws, the whole thing is a horseshoe, it bends around you, and taking in certain aspects of it, I could read what it's going to do. It's like predicting the future. Like if it hits the reef just in this way, the way it's going to barrel really hard, I'm gonna be standing in a cave, or standing in like a huge tunnel. And without thinking twice are how big it was. I just bought them turned, I did what we call a check, turn. So it's a turn mid phase to burn my speed off the toe board. And then I just stood there and I lived inside this tube for a couple seconds. But afterwards, I was talking to my brother and he was like, like, how was that barrel earlier? You know, he jumped off the cliff and I picked him up on the jet ski and I was getting him some waves. And he was like, he's like, how do you stall for that? And, and, and like, do that and I'm like, honestly, like, big like, it didn't feel that big. He's like, that was the biggest wave of the day so far. And and I was like, that's really kind of weird. I think I'm like getting a little desensitized by what I'm seeing because it's becoming such an often occurrence that It's becoming my normal all of a sudden. And yeah, it's still terrifying surfing big waves at all is terrifying.
Eric Weinstein 38:05
Like a huge drop on. I think it was on jaws that like the world was buzzing about.
Kai Lenny 38:11
Yeah, yeah, that was like last year.
Eric Weinstein 38:13
And can you talk about that? And is that an example of something where you didn't realize just how gnarly it wasn't till you looked at the footage?
Kai Lenny 38:19
Yeah, absolutely. So I had been riding there, we had a big wave competition, and it got too big for paddling surfing. So the waves were in the 60 to 7080 foot range. And I decided to go toe and surfing because
Eric Weinstein 38:33 they called this off.
Kai Lenny 38:35
Yeah, so we're in the middle of this contest. And the way it's just got too big. And problem with it getting too big was also the wind factor. It got really windy. And the wind was blowing up the face making it really difficult to catch the wave because it was just trying to blow you out the back. And if your surfboard turns into an airfoil it becomes a wing. Yeah. And you start flying through the air and to do that in competition. I mean, it's just really dangerous. I mean, that morning, the heat Before they canceled it guys were passing out underwater hitting the water so hard having concussions, they were blacking out. People were coming up spitting blood out of their lungs. Maybe one person in the final heat made a wave and that's when the decision came. Okay? It's like too gnarly like we're all for big wave surfing and big wave competition but in a contest is never worth losing someone's life over anything you know, it's all like big wave

surfers get paid that much either to compete right. And so they ended up canceling it it was a group decision from most of the surfers that they didn't want to continue because for fear of someone not coming home to their family, and
Eric Weinstein 39:40
but on the other hand, a total moron might think cool, there's no one in the water. I'm going to go for it.
Kai Lenny 39:45
I guess I'm That moron. That's what I'm talking about.
Eric Weinstein 39:48 But what happens next?
Unknown Speaker 39:49 Well, so I just saw the
Eric Weinstein 39:51
stuff and I flipped out Yeah, just insane.
Kai Lenny 39:54
Well, so I couldn't paddle anymore. And with toe and surfing which is When and to explain to people who don't know a ton Surfing is it's a jet ski with a wakeboard rope on the back of it, and you use it to get towed into these massive waves. So you eliminate paddling all together, and it's just a slingshot into these giant waves. And you're riding a board that's much smaller versus a 10 foot board, right? You're on a six foot board. And, and so I just ended up having the best session of my life up to that point, because there was no one around everyone didn't want to serve because they didn't want to get injured. Because the contest was going to run the next day, right always would be smaller. But for me, big wave surfing was never about competing. It was always a spiritual aspect. That's where I found my kind of it was almost became my religion. Because when you look at a big wave, it's like looking in a mirror in
Eric Weinstein 40:44
that moment is the most transcendent thing. I think this goes into the name you can find on Chi show, right?
Kai Lenny 40:50
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's, they made videos and they called it the chi show because I was the only one out
Eric Weinstein 40:55

I'm just saying that it's you can you can search on it from that. Yeah, and What I got out of it was was transcendence like this, this one man, in this very vulnerable position, you don't need to know much about surfing to know what kind of risks you're taking that there.
Kai Lenny 41:11
Yeah, it will. So it stems from passion first. And then it stems from a lot of hard work and focus and determination and over not overcoming fear, but being kind of in line with it. As soon as you eliminate fear, that's when you get injured, especially in big waves because you make brass brash decisions. So
Eric Weinstein 41:30
you are in essence, to me, a risk manager like you, you wouldn't be here to be having this conversation. If you weren't playing the same role that like if you were running a hedge fund, you have to figure what can I afford to take what can I afford to take? It's a calculation the calculation so we all look at this stuff. I mean, and it's also there's like a very weird aspect of the psychology I mean, I don't know it in surfing, I know and and other places. On the one hand, it's like a very alpha male die. And it sort of activity looking. Yeah. But on the other side of that, you have to submit to the way like, Is it gonna win it is in a way it's an act of submission, right and acceptance and acceptance because once you've committed to that thing, your choices disappear to an extent you have a limited amount that you can't can't say, too big for me once you've already committed you're in.
Kai Lenny 42:23
Oh, yeah, no, like, yeah, I mean, what I love most about big wave surfing in the draw is you look at a big wave and it's a mirror and you realize who you like, there's no hiding there's no lying to yourself, who you are in that moment in your life is right in front of you. And you know it clear as day and you can either work on it or you can be stoked that you know of who you are in that moment because it's it's you're you're facing death straight in the face. And fear is never been more relevant or more powerful in that moment. And there's There's something so satisfying and scary though of accepting acceptance of fear, it's like a release, it's like relief, you kick out of the big wave and you were just on that the edge of your life and if you fail, you're just worried you may never come back up or you might get absolutely destroyed. And the fear just washes off of you like, you know, dirt in a shower. And you just stand there and it's just you feel pure, you know, it's like all your sins are forgiven or something and, and, and I do that's, I, that's what I love so much about big wave surfing is it just makes me feel most alive and the more I do it, I think it's given me it's making everyday normal life harder like to cope with.
Eric Weinstein 43:45
So we have talked about this recently with a pornographic actress, that there's an issue about what happens when you do something that hyper stimulates you, and you have trouble getting back to a normal baseline because there is this sort of hedonic shift and what your normal is? Sure. And in large measure, what I see is, how do you have a normal day after your day at the office being playing on the sides of temporary cliffs?

Kai Lenny 44:12
Oh, it's, I mean, if I'm being at all honest, it's a normal average day is torture leisure for it's like, because you don't have that same stimulation, you're not. There's, I guess things start to lose purpose. Because when you're riding a big wave, there's a purpose of living right you know, and the purpose of like living in as you're not you're, you don't want to die. But you're also you're also experiencing something so pure and profound, it feels bigger than yourself. You know, like the act of riding a big wave feels. There's almost like that the egotistical kind of feeling godly for one moment, you know, so this is the thing flying too close to the sun, like Icarus, you know, exactly waiting for your wings to members
Eric Weinstein 44:55
in front of the gods. You see, that's the first element of Greek tragedy and what is Is that I'm used to watching big waves where there's some different.on every wave and I watched the dot, which is this human being, just just hang on for the ride, and they can just do that. That was that was what I was used to. Then like I see the dot jump and do a 360 on the way like it's playing. And it does, it feels like mythically wrong. Like, wait, that wave is huge, but I'm going to play with it rather than just just submit and accept it.
Kai Lenny 45:32
Well, so kind of like, if you have you. You've watched Christopher Nolan's inception, right? You know how they go from a dream into another. Yeah, the way I look at like riding a big wave is you have the baseline, which is just the act of writing it going straight, surviving it kicking out you have that 32nd experience, and then you can and then there's an end and there that takes certain amount of focus. And for me doing maneuvers on big waves, all of a sudden it's it's it's like Like putting that one scary experience and putting it to the side. And as I'm rotating through a maneuver or a trick like a 360 down the wave, I have to I'm looking at what I'm focused on what's going on with myself. And then it's like when I land I pop back into a different part of reality. And then when I kick out, I'm back to like, Normal Reality, my mice my baseline, so
Eric Weinstein 46:23
you're aware of several different colonies living between the same set of ears, the trade off on an individual wave, hundred percent.
Kai Lenny 46:31
Yeah, so and I could go like, I feel like the most I've been able to go is maybe three levels deep. Or maybe four, four. When you go four levels deep. It's when you're riding a wave. And all of a sudden, you don't, you're not, you're on such the edge. You don't know that you don't know what you're doing to make it work. And when you kick out, you start questioning what you did and then you actually forget how you did it. You're like what just happened? And it's kind of like me sitting Here in the heart of Los Angeles, I almost feel like that other kailani that does it I sometimes question like, gosh, like, I've done it. I'm like, let's say I did it 100 times. But I question if I can ever do it again, like, I don't know if I have the confidence to say it again.

Eric Weinstein 47:16
In this case, it's like a different person in this conversation. You're just some cool dude that I met in Maui. And there's nothing that suggests that the person that I've seen on these myriad different videos is that guy in other words, you're talking about this, but Oh, yeah, there's no aspect of the the person who does those incredible things. You're just now just saying, Well, here's what I remember about that. Yeah. And so when you meet somebody, like, you know, if you if you're talking to Albert Einstein, and you were going to McDonald's with him, and you're just ordering hamburger, there would be nothing Albert Einstein ish about his act of ordering a hamburger. And so like, it's a very weird thing. The way the mundane and the transcendent collide and sometimes the person who has this transcended ability when they're in their mundane head, they can't even imagine that that's who they are. Do you ever have that?
Kai Lenny 48:13
Oh, yeah, no, I totally have that. It's kind of like the fear will I ever get to that level again, sort of thing. But there's a there's a moment when I I'm starting to identify when the switch happens. And it usually happens because to get to big waves, you usually round a corner, whether it's on a boat or a car, whatever, or walking down the beach, you come around a corner and all of a sudden the wave is revealed. It's like the reveal of a movie like okay, all of a sudden you see the monster you see the building or you see whatever it is that you feel that oh my god every time so you turn the corner and you see plumes of spray going hundreds of feet in the air. And and in the distance, maybe a mile away. You see this monster breaking and, and your heart starts to skip a little bit and you're like, Oh my gosh, like, here we go. And I could start feeling the switch. Kind of starting to move. And then all the sudden I pull up and I see the the canvas that is the wave breaking and the perfection and any fear that I had the night before. Because it's not like I don't live in fear at all like the night before. I'm like scratching my head. I'm like, I got myself into what am I doing to come in
Eric Weinstein 49:18
this banner is going to have to fight. And he's not the Hulk yet. And so he has to approach the fight. And before it becomes the Hulk at some level, it's terrifying because you're signing up to do something that you're not capable of doing until you make the transformation. It's
Kai Lenny 49:32
a great analogy. Definitely because I'll pull up on the jet ski and all sudden see a wave just sweat and it's a 60 foot wave and it's terrifying and, and and you know, everything about it is like you want to avoid being caught in there. You know, like, how can the human body live through something like that. But then all of a sudden, I get all this energy, and I and I'm like, let's go let's go and I'm whoever I'm with. I'm trying to rush them off the jet ski or I'm trying to grab my board to paddle out or I'm getting them to drive and I'm like, Let's go. And I'll find myself sitting out on the water. Doing like I have kind of this breathing exercise I do, it's like breathe in for two seconds out for just a, it's just really mellow. And it's just really to get a lot of oxygen in my lungs, but it's also to like, have like sharpness of mind. And, and then the sometimes four waves

in a set will come in. So it's not like just one big wave comes in and breaks. There could be four stacked in the horizon, we call those set. And, and, and it's like, it's always a bit of chess to try to figure out which one's going to be the best way. Because I've had millions of waves where I've kicked out and I are not millions, but lots of waves where I've kicked out and you see the perfect big wave behind it, and you're like, Oh my God, why did I go on the first one and you're kicking yourself? But so so I'm usually I'm usually really like, I would say reserved in the fact when like, I hate asking people for to go out of their way for something like hey, you know, is it okay? Like even if I'm staying at someone's house like, so if I get some water, you know, it's just who I am. I would say on the Like a base level, but all of a sudden, I think my commander inside me or kind of like, the general sort of comes out where it's like my driver, I'm telling me exactly when you see I'm like number two, which is the second way. No, no, no, no Faster, faster. Let's go. And I'll send, I'm yelling, and I love this person. And later on, I feel guilty, and I sometimes apologize, but they understand that I'm out there with a purpose and trying to catch a wave. And it's like, you do have assigned to command a situation,
Eric Weinstein 51:28
you do have some kind of a split personality, because like, when we came out and visited you, you could not have been more hospitable to some. Like, I mean, the funny part is, if I understand correctly, you first found out about me because you were a Joe Rogan watcher. Yeah, exactly. And I said, Hey, are you watching what's going on in surfing? That's where innovation is happening now and I shouted out your name that I see on Instagram. Hey, this dude shouted out my name or something. I'm thinking like, how does that guy even know that I exist?
Kai Lenny 51:55
That you know what? It's the same way. How does someone like you
Unknown Speaker 51:57 know, exit? Oh,
Unknown Speaker 51:58 no. It's like
Kai Lenny 52:00
I just feel like you know, in my world I'm trying to break out of my own personal bubble like, and it's not a bubble in terms of like, get seen by other people more but it's like, I think we all find ourselves in our own world and, and, and I innovative if I've learned anything from big wave riding is is trying to be uncomfortable more often like every day if I can be a little uncomfortable, it's probably positive because it means that I'm experiencing something that I'm not used to it whatsoever you know,
Eric Weinstein 52:31

let's talk about some of the technology that's changing what it is that you do if you think about like, you're a painter, you talking about Canvas. Alright, well now you got more brushes and paints to paint with. So what I see and correct me if I'm not getting it from outside. So this foil the Hydra foil underneath the boards is making it possible to be like effectively Aladdin on a magic carpet while you're surfing above the water. Then there's this kite thing going on where You're really accessing the wind to jump at levels that just seem absolutely insane their safety equipment, which is weirdly like only recently available to decrease the the probability that you're going to get held down,
Kai Lenny 53:18
I think what all those things have in common and this is what's really cool about watersports. And the the real connection is things are invented out of necessity, just like everything in life, but really, it's it's in created in the name of fun. Like, how can I have more fun? What can we do to make it more fun? Oh, this is the solution. And like big wave surfing, it's fun until you drown. So that inflation vest you're talking about it's a similar concept is the one that's under your seat when you fly in an airplane, co2 canister and airbag in a wetsuit, pull a cord, the thing inflates and if you become a buoy, and, and it's in the name of fun because now all of a sudden, it's given people like me the opportunity to ride these big waves And focus less on trying to not drown. But more on what can we do on these big waves? Like how what kind of experiences can I have on them. And that's where I say that the limit is still yet to be totally tapped into. Especially with tellen. surfing, paddle surfing, people are put constantly pushing the edge, because it's, it's an act of it's it's really like going hunting with, you know, a knife, you know, it's like going hunting with a knife versus, you know, going out with all the technology in the world, and it's just different. It's a different approach. And some might say, it's, it's not pure whatever will those people don't actually serve big wave, so who cares? But for me, I love technology. Yeah. And I love when they merge with like, what's the craziest
Eric Weinstein 54:47
thing you're thinking about with technology?
Kai Lenny 54:50
I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do something better, you know, and I think what blows people's minds away the most is the hydrofoil. Yeah, and what those capabilities are, it's like Underwater airplane attached to a large fin attached to a board and lets you glide like your seagull and gives you an illusion of flight and I think almost everybody has a dream of wanting to just soar through the air you know, like be a bird and you can't see what's lifting you up out of the water when you're writing these things. All you can all you feel it sees the board around you and the water moving and when I first did it, I started when I was nine years old, but when I kind of build, you know, I'm 27 Okay. But but there was 2016 was kind of the year of reinvention of it, kind of the rebirth of it. Originally, it was adopted from the air chair, which was what you would ride behind a water ski boat, and those guys would sit down on they do incredible maneuvers, but they had the rope and you know you had to promote around the lake and then Laird Hamilton rush Randall Dave Coloma Derek Dorner, all these guys strapped crew took it, put

snowboard boots on it and their goal was read the biggest waves ever written. Nothing Problem was riding big waves and this is what led them to the hydrofoil was the chops going up the face wave gets so big that a normal board you can't go fast enough hydrofoils giant fin it cuts right through it like a hot knife through butter. And so they that was they were pushing into the big wave realm and then come 2016 I had a vision of instead of trying to ride the biggest waves in the world on this, why don't we try to ride the smallest waves in the world on this. And that opened the door the floodgates for making terrible surf anywhere in the world feel like it's the best waves on the planet. And because you don't need a perfect wave to feel like you're on one because you can glide on parts of the wave that are far away from where a traditional surfboard has its limit. And it also opened the door for crossing large bodies of water. Now for fun what we do in Hawaii and we do races now is we cross between each island riding a board that's made at times no wider than four feet, and you're hovering and you feel like a burden. You go from one island
Eric Weinstein 57:06
to another like Molokai to Oahu.
Kai Lenny 57:08
Yeah. Like Molokai to walk every Island you can you can go between. It's just how long do you want to be out in the ocean for what's your time and Molokai to Oahu is for us is a 32 mile channel crossing. And I could do it just above two hours to our mark is right there, which is exciting. But the coolest thing is, is like, if there's a when I first did it, there was this. There's this euphoria
Unknown Speaker 57:33 doing this by pumping.
Kai Lenny 57:36
Well, so pumping is kind of like the flapping of a bird. You know, like that's how they create more lift when they need it. But if you play your cards, right, and you the best way to read the open ocean swells is imagine you're playing a game of chess or if you were playing kind of like you know, what's that game like in an arcade where the ball bounces around and you get a bunch of different points and you try to Get it into that one. Like 1000 point hold Gosh, what is it called? The end?
Eric Weinstein 58:04
The pachenko that the Japanese what a pinball pinball. Okay, you're
Kai Lenny 58:07
trying to pinball between swells Ting Ting Ting, and if you you go from one school to the next to the next then you're you're you're gaining the energy and the lift underwater, the vortex that's coming up these little waves and creating lifts, you don't have to pump so in a perfect and a perfect line. You're You're just turning and you're snowboarding, it feels like you're going

downhill the whole time. If you and you might pumped get to the next swell if you have to if it's spread out far enough. And it's so I would say more even it's physically taxing you use every fiber of your body because you're using your arms to create energy to help your legs pump this board to go faster because it's always about going quicker. And then your mind has to focus on reading the ocean and if you miss time it or you miss read it, you stop you come to a dead stop. And so if you if you're really on it, it's like reading it I feel like it's when I read a really like, dense book, lots of heavy words that I don't understand and have to really think about it. That is like doing a channel crossing because every single wave you see isn't the same. It's all slightly different and you're trying to navigate it. And it's playing chess, you know, you if you make one mistake, all of a sudden, you're, you're down.
Eric Weinstein 59:22
That's interesting. I mean, I have to say, I've seen you do this, and it doesn't have the same visual appeal if you're not part of this world. I've also seen the motorized version of this, which definitely looks like a magic carpet for sure. And it is it is bizarre, just to me, the physics almost don't feel like they make sense to see the board that far out of the water.
Kai Lenny 59:45
It's funny because it's all physics. It's all just all everything that I'm doing now. I mean, obviously is it's all physics, and I never was a kid. I never thought I'd be into physics, but the only way Physics and I understand physics. It's through kind of these devices, or kind of these approaches, it's almost my, my version of math. You know, it's like, well, if you take a board here, and you do this, and with the wind and you rotate that way, you know, it's like,
Eric Weinstein 1:00:13
but let's talk about this in a weird context. So there's that now there are these engineered waves. Oh, yeah. And people are actually saying, look, if you want to regular experience, we can design a wave and a wave pool and make it as pretty unregular as you want. I don't know that we've gotten to the point where you can dial your own irregularities into it, but maybe that's coming.
Kai Lenny 1:00:37
Yeah, I think what makes surfing so fun is when you're on the wave, it's the unpredictability you you can kind of read what the waves doing, and you can make the most informed and best decisions on it. But you get on these mechanical waves like that the surf ranch or
Eric Weinstein 1:00:53 Kelly Slater's Kelly's
Kai Lenny 1:00:53
latest pulling, it's almost like too perfect. You get on it and you're it's like you're all of a sudden Having to figure out your own runs, right? You're like, okay, I can do two turns here and I can get barreled. And I could do this. And you could sort of do that in the ocean. But I mean, the

wave pool is insane. If you want to get better, because you get the wave of the day, every single time you stand up. And a lot of times you never get the wave of the day when you're surfing in the ocean. I think there's something about being in salt water. And I think there's something about kind of that natural element and being in line with nature and one of her most dynamic moments, right? That is, that is that makes you feel good, like really, really good. But that being said, as a professional athlete, the more time I could spend in a waivable the better because it just means that I'm able to focus on things that I couldn't, I may only get one chance to try. So I surfing so hard. It's the hardest sport in the world because you go out there with the intention to learn a new trick. You may never get the opportunity one or you may get one opportunity and you may blow it because You're trying to learn how to do
Eric Weinstein 1:02:01
the high end and the only way to get high end is in a pool like that or to live. You know
Kai Lenny 1:02:07
you are travel, traveling a time and for most people they can't travel a time for me I'm lucky that it's in my job description to do it. With big wave surfing nothing about this would be like surfing. big wave surfing is so rare when the times when I most want to go out there and do something and the most motivated the most physically fit. It just doesn't exist. Nowhere in the world there's moments like right now there's no one on earth that is breaking the way out wants it to break or big enough. So it's like, you know you're looking at the forecast and you're jumping on flights two days before the swell hits. You arrived the day before. jet lag from oil lady Europe. You said surfers. You said to me surfers are some of the world's best urologist. Yeah, no surfers without a doubt are probably some of the best meteorologists because there's more at stake than just a huge storm destroying something those what's at stake is you're enjoying Man, and, and, and it's personal, it's really personal. So the people I talked to, that are surfers that know how to read the ocean read the the, the information that comes out of Noah or any of these other buoys that are scattered across the planet satellites, they, they can tell you to to basically the minute when a certain wave is going to come in. And that's what's really cool is like you without you knowing it, you're a meteorologist because you're like, Okay, this is this tide mixed with this swell direction mixed with these winds is going to make it this way. And in the really good guys, girls, they can call it like, okay, at 7am the waves gonna be pumping is going to turn on and then you show up 6am it's not really that good 7am boom, it hits. So it's, it's really almost predicting the future.
Eric Weinstein 1:03:56
So another question I had is about physics is There's this question about what is possible. And I remember description back in the early skateboarding days of like, Dogtown. Yeah. There was this question, but nobody knew what happened. What would happen if you went over the lip of a swimming pool? Like they, I think they couldn't calculate the actual physical consequences. And so the lip of a spoonful?
Unknown Speaker 1:04:21

Well,
Eric Weinstein 1:04:22
I you know, you had this drought in the early 70s. In California.
Kai Lenny 1:04:25
Right, right. Right. Right. Okay, gotcha. I was for some reason I was thinking something different. But with skating go above it, right. Yeah. And
Eric Weinstein 1:04:32
I think Tony Alva, if I recall
Kai Lenny 1:04:34
correctly, was the first air something was
Eric Weinstein 1:04:36
the first guy who said like, I'm going to try it and we'll find out whether like, they didn't know what would happen physically or something. And it turned out that it worked. And then it was like, oh, okay, that is possible. And now look at them.
Kai Lenny 1:04:47
And now look at them. Oh, my God. And I wonder like, Are there things where you're pretty sure as possible, but you like, you don't know whether it's physically possible. Usually you get I feel like I get about three quarters of the way there. And any you can't go any further and you have to just try it at a certain point. It's like It's like I think I could do that. And you've wrapped you you've kind of played it all out in your head like I got this equipment this woman's gonna allow me to do that. Okay, I need this type of way because it's going to allow me what's up next that might be possible that you don't know this possible. You know what, it's so funny because a lot of the things just sort of hit you like an epiphany like, or like hit you. It's like a baseball bat to the head all of a sudden you're just like what? And I can't tell you what's the DAX because
Unknown Speaker 1:05:36 because you'd have to kill me Well,
Kai Lenny 1:05:37
no, no, I don't know it's what's crazy I'll This is how it happens literally be sitting out in the water. And it's like all the stars all like the five brain cells. I have kind of go to Ting Ting they all line up and all of a sudden, it's like, oh my god that was right in front of me the whole time. It's like staring me in the face but you don't see
Eric Weinstein 1:05:58
me example that One of those in the past that actually work

Kai Lenny 1:06:01
well the Epiphany was the hydrofoil one because everyone was riding big waves and I was doing a lot of channel crossings on stand up paddle boards, or prone paddle boards or on a canal and that's where your your board is a wet the wet surface or
Eric Weinstein 1:06:15
you are the guy who thought to put the hydrofoil into channel crossing. Yeah, I didn't know that.
Kai Lenny 1:06:21
Yeah, so that was kind of like, I guess my sort of contribution to the sport. And it was it came from necessity to want to go faster. So I, I basically pushed my physical limits, and I could probably be faster now as I'm older and I'm better trained blah, blah, equipments better. But on my stand up paddleboard, for example, it was like Gosh, I just want to go fast. All my other sports are I'm going fast all the time. And here I'm limited to maybe maximum 40 miles an hour down when I peak speed, average, let's say nine miles an hour, 10 miles an hour. And, and so the it was like, gosh, like, all of a sudden I put like two and two together. I'm like hydrofoil. And then I've put down winder and they sort of cross and it's like, Well yeah, obviously that should work. I just need a bigger wing there. We're just using two smaller wings. That's why you couldn't you need more lift, you get a bigger wing. And the first time I tried it in a wave, I was like, this is gonna work. Oh my god, this is gonna work. And then I went and did it and I ended up paddling like three miles in the middle of the ocean and got up for 100 yards maybe because the equipment wasn't quite there yet. Right? Right. But I got up and it was just enough to go oh my god and just hit me like in the hex I've been foiling since I was nine years old, like on a tow board with the jetski and how to do it and bigger waves and and then with this, it was like that I've been doing it since I nine and it took me until now I think I was like what 24 or something no 25 1016 and
it's for it to click and I'm like, oh god, it was right there for me the whole time. I don't
Eric Weinstein 1:08:00
Have you ever heard about this guy Freeman Dyson, whose Institute for Advanced Study, and he was a great physicist also mathematician did not have a PhD in either subject. He wrote an article to think might be called missed opportunities. And he talks about Freeman Dyson, the physicist needed a result of Freeman Dyson, the mathematician and Freeman Dyson, the human being who is both of these people was not having that conversation. So the only person who had the result was Freeman Dyson, the mathematician but the physicist who was himself could not figure out how to ask the question to make the connection. Yeah, so there is this feeling that like, the feeling of discovery is often a feeling of stupidity, like, Oh my god, I could have done that at any time. And I just didn't
Kai Lenny 1:08:49
Well, you just don't see it. It doesn't. It's invisible. And then all of a sudden, it's just there. That's the clear as day and you're just like,

Eric Weinstein 1:08:56
it's like how do you find your way out of your How do you find These epiphanies, yeah. And and like, then you go back and you say to yourself, Well, what was it on that particular day that caused me to look at a wall and really see that there was probably a door and you know, or something like that.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:13
And it's about being kind of open minded to anything. And that's I think people will go and back to being uncomfortable all the time. If you're willing to be uncomfortable all the time, you're willing to see things from very different perspectives. And oftentimes, you're going to surprise yourself. I always find myself talking a lot. And then I'm like, put I everything I'm saying, I already know. I kind of, Okay, got a list talking yourself to me. You're listening to yourself talking if you don't do that. I mean, how shocking. This is something I don't know how to convey to people. How shocking is our own voice like that. If you go into a room where there is nobody else, and you actually start talking, and you realize that you're only talking for yourself, it is a terrifying feeling. Realizing that the listener and the speaker not the same person.
Kai Lenny 1:10:02
I know No, it's it's split personalities for sure or
Eric Weinstein 1:10:06
loved your Inception comment along those lines is layers and layers.
Kai Lenny 1:10:10
There's just layers and layers. And I think some people don't ever go beyond layer one because they don't want to,
Eric Weinstein 1:10:18
or they don't know that, or they don't know, there's a question once you've seen that there are layers and layers. Do you start looking for that everywhere in your life? Like, sure, okay. So give me some other any other transferable examples where the same kind of breakthrough takes place that you can talk about?
Kai Lenny 1:10:35
I mean, I think nothing. I Well, there's a lot of things but there's there's little wins I call them you know, when when you have like minor epiphanies or little things that sort of just become apparent and, and, and obvious and, and I think it happens with everyone whether we know it or not where you're doing something and you've been trying it for a really long time, like a trick On a wave, you're trying to for a really, really long time and then all sudden you decide to change one little thing. And a really good saying for surfing is letting go. Yeah, and it's not letting go and the fact that you relax completely or it's relaxing, but it's different. It's not like letting go it's like letting go of your problems. You know, to me, it's like letting go in the sense that you have any

control and and you just kind of like feel it's you let your physical being kind of go into a flow state, the flow state, but you also let someone else take the driving. Well, you know what I mean? Like, in surfing, it's such a connection. And that's, this comes to these moments where I feel like I'm in a movie sometimes, and I'm in the passenger seat, and everything's happening around me. Yeah, but I don't feel like I'm doing it feel like there's someone else doing it for me and I'm in the movie. You know, I'm like seeing it through someone else's eyes.
Eric Weinstein 1:11:54
So this is a weird case like before, we're talking about surrendering to the wave. There's also this question about surrendering to the parts of yourself that you don't yourself control
Kai Lenny 1:12:03
that. Yeah, well, so it's like, all of a sudden I'm in a wave, and it's survival and my what I call it, you know, survival mode comes on. And I'm seeing everything, but my body is moving to make it all happen to work because it wants to make it out. And it's like it's falling control, and I'm just visualizing and seeing it. And then I get back to the shore. And I get back on the beach, and all of a sudden, it's like, the switch flips back over. And all of a sudden, I'm just going like, how did I do that? Like, I don't, I couldn't tell you really, I can imagine I can try to recall. Like, I don't really know what happened. Like, I'm like, like that scared. I'll never be able to repeat that again,
Eric Weinstein 1:12:44
with because well, first of all, each. It's really weird that you have things that are highly regular, and things like a bowling alley, that those pins are always more or less the same. And the wave it's always different.
Kai Lenny 1:13:01
Why so I struggled for a while, like when I saw like, I started big wave surfing and it was like, I want to be a big wave surfer this. It was like, being a kid standing on the cliff going, figuring out the wave from that perspective, not feeling like I knew it like the back of my hand better than guys that were riding it. All of a sudden I blinked, I'm down in the water. And I'm going, Oh my gosh, how this happens so fast. I thought I'd so much more time and then blink again. And it's all sense. Like, I get myself into this mess. You know, like, how did I get myself into the point where I feel like I'm gonna die all the time. You do it regularly. Well, I used to when I first started it was like going, Oh my god, and then you have like, sponsors and then you have like boats and you have safety team and your people on payroll, it's expensive to surf big waves is what I'm saying. Well,
Eric Weinstein 1:13:48
my right that you got yourself into trouble at some point when there was a helicopter that had been hired and you wanted to perform for the helicopter and you took on risks that you shouldn't have.
Kai Lenny 1:13:57

Yeah, and that's that's a that's just that A natural sort of, that's just natural to big wave surfing in general, like you're going to have to go through sir everyone goes through those type situations, if they're willing to go to the level that they want or the highest level the degree in, which would be like a black belt or a tree. Like you have to go through that at one point. There's just, it's like someone telling you what to do, and they have all this wealth of knowledge. But until you go through the experience on your own, you don't truly learn it for yourself. You don't go like it doesn't have the weight necessarily. You can be told all you want but you almost have to experience it on your own accord.
Eric Weinstein 1:14:36
Why am I right, that this is so unpredictable that like, you can't say, I've got this because anything can happen in a big wave.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:45 Absolutely. Um, and that
Eric Weinstein 1:14:46
yeah, if I understand correctly, your foot at some point, had the surfboard come right at it and cleave it into
Kai Lenny 1:14:56
Oh, yeah, no, that was like a classic example of Like, kind of going into what you're saying is, it was probably my third full season surfing big waves. The waves were giant. And we were, we hired a helicopter, we're filming and it was like, I really want to get a shot for this movie that I'm working on. I really want to like, have a blow people's minds. You know, there's that ego part. Ego is just the worst in big waves. It's the best in the worst, in a way, because you kind of need an ego to like, make yourself kind of Prop yourself up to match power with power. But
Eric Weinstein 1:15:34
my right that this is something I talked about and pisses people off like you wouldn't believe the necessity of being both incredibly humble and an egomaniac and having the two of those selves fight each other constantly.
Kai Lenny 1:15:48 Yeah, I think it's it's
Eric Weinstein 1:15:51
your ego or you have to undergo ego death. And I'm thinking, no, you don't you have to actually make sure that
Kai Lenny 1:15:57
well, that's the thing. It's like when people talk about he's fearless. Know you you the everything we have is been an evolution in nature and there's a necessity towards it. Ego is hey there's

certain situations it's awesome and it's more pleasurable for everyone around you not to have an ego but there's other situations like in survival situations where you want to think of yourself as the best there ever was. Because it kind of as a male and this is the only way I know it because I'm a male is it's it's that alpha inside you and it's like going against it's it's the the the tribal instinct of protecting your your tribe protecting what is yours your family, right. But in this case, it's it's the experiences in big ways where it's like, you got a David and Goliath you got to match yourself with the impossible the undefeatable I
Eric Weinstein 1:16:52
also met your mom. Your mom is a total badass like, yeah, you gotta you got a situation where you're gonna make mom proud. You have to go above
Kai Lenny 1:17:01
No exactly and it's um you know I've I've definitely a one thing that I remember when I was really little kid being told all the time was like, don't no one likes a big head no one likes this and it beat there was like kind of been into my head so much from Mike my mentors and certain people around me that it made me really shine reserved and felt like it felt I always felt like I could handle anything, but I don't think anyone else could like, like, if I said something that was maybe the truth or if I said somebody that was like something that was hard or very critical, it would, it would be damaging to someone and I never wanted to hurt anyone. That's like the last thing I'd ever want to do. And so it was actually it's been a long process trying to overcome kind of that.
That habit of like
Eric Weinstein 1:17:54 giving your power away,
Kai Lenny 1:17:55
giving power away, when in CERN says it's okay to be like The most powerful the best, right? The the best athletes that have ever met the the true alphas there they know how to switch it on and off like they they're they're able to be so humble and kind and they don't feel like they need to exert some, but when the time comes for whatever it is that they do, they can turn it on all of a sudden they're just these beasts, these monsters that are angels,
Eric Weinstein 1:18:24
except what it is that you are. I mean, let's be honest, when I, when I called you out, there isn't another surfer on the planet that I was dying to meet. Because of this. This is not I mean, I'm aware of who Laird Hamilton is. I'm aware of Kelly Slater. The tons of people like this guy, Philip Toledo. I'm, I'm watching all these guys. You were the only one from outside that I absolutely had to meet because of the level of innovation and then when I met you, it was so disarming, that you clearly know that you're doing something very different. You can't actually deny You can't fully embrace it either. And so I think that one of the puzzles here is that we have to sort of

pass power back and forth, which is that you give your power away to some extent. And then the community kind of with love just says, you know, no, you really need to take this on because people are looking towards you. And it's a very weird thing to sort of have to balance these things. I think we do a terrible disservice when we tell people to get rid of their egos, because that'll never work. You have to make sure that the thing is like a Mexican standoff. It has.
Kai Lenny 1:19:34
It has you have to anything you have to face everything, like if it's, I was telling my friend, I had like a certain situation that I was kind of going through like, maybe end of last year. And it's like, I told myself for this situation when I was a young kid like because I was pretty aware about like, my Pete, the people around me and the mistakes I had made and how I was like, I was I Always when I was really young, and when my ego is definitely very strong. Inside, I was like, I want to do everything perfect and I want to do it the best anyone's ever done it. I want to be the best ever because as a kid, there's you don't have to confront it yet, you know, but you can imagine you can believe you can do all these things, because but you don't actually have to go through it yet, because you're still a little kid. Anyway, so I told myself this one particular thing, like, I'm going to avoid this, and I'm going to and I'm going to make sure I never end up in this situation. And inevitably, the one thing that you try to avoid is the one thing that will end eventually come for you. You know, you'll eventually meet it. And I learned that the end of the year end of Kung Fu Panda. Great. Yeah, I love that movie. Yeah,
Eric Weinstein 1:20:41
so remember, one often meets one's destiny on the road one takes to avoid it or some
Kai Lenny 1:20:46
way Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, that movie was so smart. For it was a kids movie or whatever. But there was not a kids
Eric Weinstein 1:20:54
movie. Dude, that was a really profound movie.
Kai Lenny 1:20:57
Or Yeah, right. Exactly. It's true though no, it's I know that quote exactly what you're saying. And it's like it truly
Eric Weinstein 1:21:06
in that movie. Sorry I didn't mean to cut you off but way is weirdly putting Shifu on the road to his destiny as he tries to avoid is this they feel like there's this extra layer of his way
Unknown Speaker 1:21:21 actually great filmmaking
Eric Weinstein 1:21:23

great storytelling
Kai Lenny 1:21:24
great storytelling but it's at least it's tell it's whether you don't know it when you watch it or you figure it out later. Yeah, it's it's it's helping you along in your life. You know, there's like there's lessons and that's what stories were all about is meant to pass on lessons, right?
Eric Weinstein 1:21:41
What happens when you bite off more than you can chew in a situation where you You think you can handle something and then you look up at this thing and you're saying, I don't really know that I can handle this but I got no choice now I'm over. I'm past the Rubicon. Well, is this happened to you recently heard more from before,
Kai Lenny 1:21:59
more from before? I mean, it's still I mean, no matter how comfortable I've gotten in big waves Yeah. And you there's it's impossible to totally be comfortable because it's just terrifying. You know, it's just it's huge monsters. But the thing is, is I've many times, you know, you pop up you like, this is a perfect example actually. You're standing out there paddling, you paddle over a giant wave. And then there's mist in there, like, there's just, it's it's so much spray that's coming off. It's hundreds fees, it's torrential downpour. It's sunny, but it's downpour. And in the distance you see this black face this black kind of wall coming in, and your heart just instantly drops and you're sprinting for your life. And you're and all sudden you're you're trying to escape the feeling or the situation by looking at little things and focusing on that like, look at the water just rolling off there. Like look at the sticker on my board, just like you're trying to find any escape but to realize that there's no escape. There's no how you see Interstellar.
Eric Weinstein 1:22:58
Yeah, I love that movie. I love that. You remember when they end up in the water planet and the wave starts to form?
Kai Lenny 1:23:03
It looks just like that. And if I ever get to meet Christopher Nolan, I'm going to tell him that that was the that was the biggest surprise I've ever seen in a movie because as a big wave surfer I was like, so writable and look, you can do 100% man who's any big wave surfer? I don't know if any, but I mean, think about Okay, so in the movie, the waves are created by gravitational forces, right and, and that's a lot like the moon helps pull our tides right. But in the film, here I'm seeing 1000 foot wave that's never breaking and it's continuous for for around the entire world. And I'm like, that seems like the sick you could ride 1000 foot wave, biggest playground ever. Ball. If you fall. You just kind of over the back and then there's another one. And I mean, the person the character dies because I can imagine you're going over 1000 foot waves. You get really high and the wave and it flicks into the air and You fall 1000 feet and you die, right? Or a 200 feet, whatever it is, because I'm just trying to I was always trying to imagine how the person died in that film, because I had to leave them behind or whatever. And I'm like, well, the solution

would have been right. As you get to the top, you just duck under the water and you stay, the water kind of conceals you, and you come back down the backside of it. And then you could stick your head back up and get error. In that case, you're all wearing spacesuits. Perfect. You even have to like hold your breath underwater. That's one one problem taken care of. And, and they're pressurized, so you can just go through it. But anyway, I was just like, that is like, that would be that's one. And it made me actually start thinking like, gosh, I wonder if in my lifetime if space travel is really going to be a thing and maybe someone goes to Titan or Europa like because there's supposedly water some of you obsessed with it. I mean, I'm obsessed with the idea of surfing waves in the world. Yeah,
sure. Like if you have the right suit on I mean, in any element, you could probably go in unless it's like lava. Maybe I don't know I'm not that smart. But what I do know is that just think of all the waves in the universe that is just firing right now and no one out. And if we maybe we have the best waves in the universe, but there has to be a better way as I often look back in time and just how
Eric Weinstein 1:25:16
do you think they're great, undiscovered waves? Hundred percent? We're Who on earth
Kai Lenny 1:25:20
on earth? we've mapped all the great waves? No, well, okay, a great example is this wave NASA. This is a great lead into NASA a NASA re discovered nine years ago, nine years ago. I Scott McNamara by Garrett garibay. Sorry, gear, man. But okay, this is just it's so crazy. Portugal, part of European Union, like the middle of the heart of Portugal, like there's this way. nazzer a biggest wave, possibly in the world, tallest, most consistent, big wave, that's for sure. All right, and you know, it's 2011 or whatever. 2012 2011 It's discovered this how, I don't know it was just like an inside insight. It. It's, it's the things, it's it's okay, we go back to that point where it's like the things that are the most obvious aren't always recognized right away. You know what?
Eric Weinstein 1:26:16
I never got the history of that it's always photograph. I mean, the most dramatic shot of it is somebody gets a picture of the observation deck, looking at the wave, so yeah, and that observation deck looks like it wasn't built recently.
Kai Lenny 1:26:34
No, it's a it's a lighthouse. But it's it's so old. It looks like a castle. Right. And so nazzer A was first surfed whatever, eight or nine years ago, less than a decade in a modern era,
Eric Weinstein 1:26:49 here in Hawaii.
Kai Lenny 1:26:50

Garrett is from Hawaii. Yeah, he's from wahoo. And, and he's always been on the search for the best big ways and it took someone who is always seeking it out that long to find something cars with big waves if they're not breaking, you don't know they exist. You know, there's they're dormant, there's there. You could we, we could literally go down to a coastline we haven't been to somewhere in Africa that's exposed to a great part of the Atlantic Ocean and, and look at a point and be like, Whoa, that could be a wave one day, but you don't realize that it's a sleeping giant and when it wakes up, it's the biggest wave on the planet like that may exist. That totally could exist
Eric Weinstein 1:27:27
you were mapping the seabed. Portugal should stick out like a sore thumb. No.
Kai Lenny 1:27:33
Well, okay, the The bathymetry is a freak of nature.
Eric Weinstein 1:27:37
We say that word again because I don't know
Kai Lenny 1:27:38
symmetry. Okay, which is kind of the bottom contour. You know, it's what what what it was I'm gonna
Eric Weinstein 1:27:44
start dropping that into lots of sentences.
Kai Lenny 1:27:46
makes you sound smarter than Well, it makes me sound smarter than I am. Okay, but so what what's unique about Asbury is it's the largest trench in all of Europe, and I believe it's an ancient it was once a glacier that carved out a huge Valley. And when all the ice caps melted, it filled in the ocean and it covered that trench. And in the trench allows the swell, this raw energy from the Atlantic to come in, it gets sucked into that deeper waters. It focuses it, and it comes in. And then this is where the wave comes in. They call it pride the North Bay, which is, you know, not the North Beach North Point. And that's where the wave breaks in. And so what happens is all the swell comes in, and then it all of a sudden gets accelerated onto shallow water. So there's a point with a ledge and it's all sand. It's a giant beach, and it comes in and then it focuses and what makes nazzer so big is two peaks, two waves, and this is a concept of a rogue wave, you know, you can have a really big ocean of big waves, and then it's one, two big waves come together.
Eric Weinstein 1:28:53 It's the superposition.
Kai Lenny 1:28:55

It's the superposition. Yeah, one. The swell comes in this way and it may Is with another one and the energy combines and it doubles in height. So it Jacks up twice as high and it's just the perfect bottom for that perfect situation and it it produces the tallest waves in the world consistently. And yeah, that's NASA. NASA is a trip you go there and it feels biblical. I mean, the word the word NASA already sound like it's from, you know, the Old Testament. And then add to this, there's a guy there named Jesus. That is, stands up on the lighthouse and calls outsets. If your toes surfing, it's like, Okay, second set, get out there, you know, or like, get the second one. And his name is Jesus from Nazareth, Jesus from Nazareth. Great, and it's just, it's hilarious. It's kind of a hilarious situation like so when you're out there. All of a sudden you're seeing this massive Cliff 200 foot cliff and you're seeing waves that are like half the size of it and on really big days, the same size as the cliff because it It's that big. We haven't seen it in the time that we've served out there, though. You see this sort of tassel lighthouse on the point spray in the air and you're like, where am i right now I feel like I got thrown back in time. And in this just doesn't feel real. And you're looking at these towering mountains of water that looked like Interstellar looks the same. It's just walls popping up everywhere and, and it's all like there's one breaking wave. There's six breaking waves at once. And there's no channel which is the channel is the safe zone. It's where the deep water is. And we're just breaking. Its kind of breaking everywhere. It's a beach break. So world's biggest beach break. It's maybe one of the world's most terrifying day ways to challenge in that there is no safe zone when you're committed. you're committed and
Eric Weinstein 1:30:45
I've seen some disastrous rescue attempts on this.
Kai Lenny 1:30:48
Oh, it's great. And every time I go there, we lose a jetski at least one is that right? Luckily, they're sad so it pushes back up. But imagine like everything around you was built bigger. And all sudden you felt like your scale just went really down. That's what it feels like there. Because the waves are so big all of a sudden you feel like really small, the beach, the beach is really steep and massive and large and you feel smaller on the beach, the way the waves the move up and down, it'll travel 50 to 60 yards up the sand before it returns back to the ocean. And you feel like this is what it feels like to be the size of a Chihuahua.
Eric Weinstein 1:31:24
Do you get off on your own insignificance, like your significance coming from your insignificance there's no place on Earth. Like like that place that wave to make me realize how small human being is definitely
Kai Lenny 1:31:37
gotten used to feeling like insignificant and my place in this whole crazy world is not as important necessarily as I might want think, you know, like, because you look at these waves and they're just power this power and and you're trying to find kind of like symmetry with it. You're trying to be one with it for just a brief moment. You just realize, like, has this waist has

been here forever, for a long time. And, you know, I guess if I can be just in line with something that's bigger than myself, that's what I that was made. That's what makes me feel really good. The best feeling I get from riding big waves is the drive home. Because you just went through this whole crazy experience your relief, relieved, you just went through that and and and you you tapped into something bigger than yourself physically bigger than yourself too.
Eric Weinstein 1:32:31
Well, I'm used to seeing you on some of these monster waves alone and then recently I saw you get a ride. It looked like it. jaws with a friend of yours. Yeah, Nathan florins. And I thought what is it like to actually ride a wave like that? with somebody that you know and care about? Does it feel totally different?
Kai Lenny 1:32:53
Uh, you know what, it's just there's camaraderie involved. You still feel kind of alone. Because
Eric Weinstein 1:33:01 you on the board,
Kai Lenny 1:33:02
it's you on the board and it's your decisions that make the outcome and sometimes it's not even your decision that makes the outcome. It's the the waves that make the outcome. You know, like, you could choose a wave and all of a sudden it, it does something completely unforeseen and different. Riding that wave with faith and we ended up getting really big barrel out of jaws together. And to, for both of us to be in the barrel at the same time was amazing. It's your shit. It's finally you're sharing the experience with somebody. And I think that's why there's a real brotherhood sisterhood. Yeah, out in big wave surfing, because you're, you're sharing an experience. It's so extreme that you know, it's like you can tell everyone all about it, but you know, you still feel like they don't understand they, how do you translate the feeling you can translate the emotions the ideas like the through like verb like like words, but that physical feeling like I wish I could just plug my head head into your head. Yeah, and you could just feel it for a second. Oh, I know. I'm pretty sure.
Eric Weinstein 1:34:06
Did I care? I care about I wish I could do the same thing for you with exactly with mathematics and part that's why
Unknown Speaker 1:34:12 we're terrible with math.
Eric Weinstein 1:34:14
I want to know that you're you know, you don't know that. Well, you brought up an interesting question about the brothers and sisters then we just had I follow this other woman whose name

I don't want to Mangle who's just the first woman year or two ago to be invited into this Eddie Invitational
Kai Lenny 1:34:29
say it and I'll help you to hear a Allah kiala
Unknown Speaker 1:34:33
Yeah, yeah, she's she's like, she's, she's a chart. She's amazing. She's amazing. And
Kai Lenny 1:34:38
I was just surfing with her at jaws like two days ago. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so like, she's a hammer.
Eric Weinstein 1:34:44
So, but clearly she's going to pioneer something where other women are going to say, Okay, yeah, I totally see what she's done. there too. And it's changing the nature of the sport, do you? Do you think that that's going to be a big effect coming up?
Kai Lenny 1:34:58
Yeah, there's a massive shift in Women's big wave surfing and there was there wasn't a whole lot of progression is until recently. And now there's major strides The girls are. It's amazing how people like kiala has inspire the next generation enough to also step into that realm because for the longest time, there were women that were riding big waves but not enough it wasn't inspire maybe I don't want to take anything away from them but it wasn't inspiring the next to the youth or the next generation and along with kiala and Paige alms Bianca Valenti they, these are like three of the top big wave female surfers, yeah, they've and Maya Gabby era who's always out at nazzer as well. They've inspired the next generation of big wave girls, Thompson step into the realm and I've always felt that it's it's big waves, sports in general dive when there's not the next generation Take us to the next level, like they cease to become relevant or even of interest. And this is my own personal perspective. Sure. Because I feel like sports, like action sports, in particular, surfing always needs to be constantly being pushed. And so I do, I do see these young girls inspiring actually the older girls to continue pushing the envelope and when their time is up, or they decided no longer to do it, right, that they've had their fill that the next generation of girls take it to another level. And I've always felt the same way with me, you know, like I saw where Laird and all these legends took it. And I wanted to take it from where they took it to somewhere else, and I don't know where I'm going to take it. But I hope in the future,
Eric Weinstein 1:36:51
it's a relay race. You got to hand it off to somebody else.
Kai Lenny 1:36:53
I hope in the future that I have the privilege of mentoring and helping that next generation spirit of take it to a place that that, that I couldn't anymore because I got it to one person position I just ran out of time. Well,

Eric Weinstein 1:37:10
I think that there's, there's an interesting thing about breaking new ground versus what keeps it something relevant to the world. So for example, in jazz, there was a period where the innovators were doing innovations that were appreciated by the listenership. And at some point, things get so technical, that unless you're actually a performer, he was juggling is a good example. The most technical jugglers and the world will point to one of one of their kind and say, Oh, my God, did you see what that guy did? And to me, you can't even see I can't see it because it's already so many balls, so many rings. Sure. Like the whole thing is so mind blowing, I can't slow it down enough to understand what the innovation was. Whereas at an earlier point, and this is this is one of the reasons why I think you're kind of a very romantic figure in the story, it's because I can see those innovations. It's not like so technical, very often with some of the skateboarding stuff, I have to slow it down a million times to even understand what the trick was.
Kai Lenny 1:38:12
Yeah, and I think that is that is really, really true. And and it touches on the point that we're still only scratching the surface of big wave riding, you know, like, it's such an act on its own, but then adding sort of next level maneuvers and positions that one can ride at least what's nice about big waves is and I always say this is you have all you've all the time you need on a big way. small ways happen really quick. Yeah, things are like bam, bam, bam, you have to be on it really quick. And it's like, it's really fast and big waves I'm always there's a saying by a big wave legend from kawhi on Hawaii, his name was Titus Kinney, maka and it was a Laird and he's like, he has the quote goes like this. He has the ability to slow themselves down. When everyone else wants to run like hell, and it's not slowing down in terms of the speed of your board, it's slowing down your mind. It's like, it's like an I work on this every single day I ride big waves. It's like, I have way more time than I think on this wave. Because when I watched the footage, I realized, well, I could have been this position. And I am I could have waited longer or I could have done this, like, when I go to do a 360 Don't rush to 360 let it move the way that you have to match the way your your mind master match the way well, you just got to know I guess the time you have. And a lot of people think a lot of people feel like they don't have the time so their mind starts racing and then all sudden, the wave itself feels like it's going really fast and everything is moving. And it's how can you compute, you know, how can you keep everything like in line. And then also when you try to slow yourself down a little bit, just like even it's like just, I would say it's like when I sometimes write a really big wave. I'll almost just relax for a second and go Okay, let's continue. That's so cool. And then, and then all of a sudden I see things and I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna hit that. Okay, here we come. All right, perfect. All right, here comes a barrel position, right? I'm in the tube and you calm yourself down and you and, and I, it's like manipulating time for a second. You're just like, I'm gonna let this wave go over. You're not talking to yourself through it. You're just kind of like breathing through it. And my biggest wave I ever wrote in my life still out at jaws. I was my whole focus on the rocks I knew was a big one was just breathing
Eric Weinstein 1:40:33

was that the one on the was photograph that I saw your place? Yeah.
Kai Lenny 1:40:36
So that one I was just as I was jumping in, I was just going.
Unknown Speaker 1:40:41 Wow.
Kai Lenny 1:40:46
And I was just and what I was trying to do is I was just trying to slow everything down, slow it down, slow down. The wave was like, behind me, and I just remember going slow down.
Eric Weinstein 1:40:54
So the breathing is the only way that you can talk to your own autonomic nervous system effectively. That's the one thing that's under conscious control that you can try to do to talk to the part of you that isn't under conscious.
Kai Lenny 1:41:06
Yeah, and I just tried to like I just did that little breathing now I feel way more calm. But when I'm on the wave I like I say, okay, breathe in for two out for to breathe in for 343
Eric Weinstein 1:41:24
Now, I'm not going to push you to talk about something. No, no, I can't. I know it's a question about being respectful when I was at your place, I saw some crazy stuff you were working on but I don't know whether that's under wraps and I don't want to you know, talk about it if it's not ready to be talked about.
Kai Lenny 1:41:40
Um, well, it's it can be talked about but it's it's not quite ready yet.
Eric Weinstein 1:41:45 Should we hold off on it or
Kai Lenny 1:41:48
let's hold off and then I'll come back and tell you all I
Eric Weinstein 1:41:51
totally just yeah. Let me ask you another question. When you're out in these waves surfers are are one life form, but you're not the only One's out there. Yeah. Can you talk about the man in the grey suit and how he affects or she affects your your thinking as you realize that you're part of an ecosystem? I
Kai Lenny 1:42:12

think I've been a part of the ecosystem so much I kind of know my place. And it's not when you see one it's, it's, it's a treat you when you see a shark, or even any animal that sounded like, the last time I served jaws is one of the most beautiful days. And it's, it's, it's funny because when you surf at a place so beautiful, it's kind of like you forget how gnarly it is. Yeah, it's like it's masked in the fact that it's sunny. There's rainbows. There's seals in the light like like monk seals, wind monk seals in the lineup. There's whales going through the lineup, like giant humpback whales. You see a shark come in and it's just cruising and you just realize, you know you're in their domain, because that's where they live. That would be a tiger shark where target Tiger Shark could be any type of Shark, we kind of have them all in Hawaii, which was a tiger shark. Sorry. I would say I would give Tiger Sharks sort of the crown is kind of the landlords of the that area. We do get great whites. But they typically, they typically come to Hawaii and chill like they're there. They're in there. They're taking a rest between their crossing of the Pacific from Australia to the US, or even if they come out here, it's like vacation. Honestly, great whites come to Hawaii for vacation. We still don't know a whole lot about them. But what we do know is when they're out here, they're there. They're always full. They definitely look for and they're kind of like in this migration sort of pattern, where they're just they're just cruising while Tiger Sharks are kind of the garbage man of the the, the trash Person of the the sea, because they just eat everything. You'll see they'll they'll bite tires that are floating out at sea, they'll, they'll chew anything they can but they you know what's awesome about them, they clean up kind of the death out there. Yeah, like dying fish week gets cold. It's just nature and that's how it is. So when you confront or you're given the opportunity to be around one in the water showing, showing confidence and your they smell it, they know it if you showing like, signs of weakness. That's an opportunity.
Eric Weinstein 1:44:20
Alright, so you feel that by projecting confidence. They have enough acuity to pick up
Kai Lenny 1:44:25
they're way smarter than you think. Yeah. And we all think they are. I've looked into when you look into this one of their big black eyes. Yeah. When you look in there, there's a soul living in there. It's not just the hollows
Eric Weinstein 1:44:38
I believe, I believe people who have like rescued sharks find the shark becomes friendly with them. Like it's much our picture of how much is going on with these animals is changed.
Kai Lenny 1:44:51
I mean, Albert Einstein's quote, and I'm probably gonna butcher it, but it was like don't judge a fish because he can't climb a tree. Yeah, you know, like, just he's a fish and simple So but if you don't understand, like, we don't we can't speak their language, we don't understand them on the same level I understand you. So we think of things that we don't understand as being stupid or lesser than and, and, I mean, they have been so they can't make you know, technological advancements necessarily, but who knows, maybe they

Eric Weinstein 1:45:21
have horrible things could be a real big problem. It could
Kai Lenny 1:45:23
be a pretty big problem, but I do I have a huge amount of respect for him. I've had so much and I've had so many encounters my entire life, and I've never once and knock on wood because you never know. Ever felt like I was in mortal danger. But I always felt like they were just these they were the landlords, they're coming by to check you out. And if you showed like, confidence and respect, all right, then they kind of would be like, they'd kind of it's like that, that that give you a little nod professional
Eric Weinstein 1:45:54
courtesy. It's like car well, then what? So there's this island that I've been dreaming About off of Africa called reunion that used to be a pretty decent surf spot. What happened to our relationship?
Kai Lenny 1:46:07
Well, now, different sharks in different places, you know, it's like traveling in different cultures. Right? Right. Same thing with the animals of the sea. Hawaii. It's one way it's I would say really respect based but like Reunion Island. And this is from a lot of my friends who were born and raised there and served there is the biggest the what they think is the biggest problem was when it became a nature reserve, the moment where union became a nature reserve, the sharks that would once the bull sharks that would migrate from Madagascar to reunion, all of a sudden decides to stay because here's an abundant amount of fish. Well, let's just stay. And so people forget that we are in
Eric Weinstein 1:46:52 agreement,
Kai Lenny 1:46:53
will the agreement all of a sudden, it's just like giving the keys to the apartment, but you're only a visitor And, and people forget, I think people think we're not a part of the natural cycle of we think of ourselves too highly that we're not like a part of we become a part of the ecosystem by getting a certain amount of fish and of course I believe we should never over fish or do that. But this is from this is like a real life experiment from people that I know that grew up there that's like, it used to be one of the premier surf destination especially for French surfers, they'd go there all the time because the French you know, territory whatever it it, all of a sudden, as soon as became a natural nature reserve, the bull sharks came, the bull sharks became territorial, very territorial, all of a sudden realized it's really easy to fight an attack and feed on humans because we're pretty slow and the water committed to their prey. And they became the dominant force in the water. And and then there's this big argument now and said, well don't kill the sharks. And of course, don't kill the sharks. We got also like, it's also asserting our

dominance and our are where we rank where the top of the food chain to, and, and it's all in sharks learn from one another.
Eric Weinstein 1:48:11
Well, I'm terrified that we have this weird agreement with the orcas that we don't understand that orc is basically essentially never attack humans in the wild. There's so it's
Kai Lenny 1:48:22
there. So I think orchids are so smart, they realize that maybe the ramifications of if I
Eric Weinstein 1:48:27
swear to God, I think is one of the greatest puzzles ever. And I do have the sense that they're like, we should not mess with these people. It's like, this is the one species. We can take anybody in the water, even the Great Whites leave these guys alone. And of course, you have local culture with orthopods, where they have entirely different styles of hunting and they pass information in ways that we have no idea
Kai Lenny 1:48:51
about. And so I think the fear too, is that these bull sharks can eventually pass this information to other sharks and there are offspring because it becomes part of their DNA that's like, oh, humans are on the menu. And so I think
Eric Weinstein 1:49:06
we're if not their DNA, their cultural memes or whatever, is they some means of transmission.
Kai Lenny 1:49:10
Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's I think it's, it's controversial, but I mean, we, at a certain point have to assert our own dominance in certain ways if we want to
Eric Weinstein 1:49:22 take back reunion dammit,
Kai Lenny 1:49:24
exactly. Or or not leave it. Okay. But but there's no, there's no middle ground here. You know what I mean? It's like kids are getting eaten there all the time. They just want to go surfing. And I
Eric Weinstein 1:49:37
do that we get into this thing where we get into a reverential state about nature without realizing that we're part of it and and we've also break broken that you bought it. It's a much more complicated relationship that we need. And I think it's important
Kai Lenny 1:49:49

for everywhere. It's not the same everywhere, you know, it's not the same. Like what's happens here in California is not the same as in reunion. You know, I think We're not Gods as well. So it's like trying to like, understand things is really difficult. But it's I think I want to say leave it up to the people. Yeah. And leave it up to or leave it up to the people in those places. And there's I don't think there should be any kind of backseat sort of driving from somewhere else. Because it's a different part of the world. It's a different ocean. It's a different culture. It's a different everything and let the tribes deal with those tribe things like we're not like, everyone always argues like, we don't want to police world well, this is exactly that situation. Yeah, we all have our own opinions on how it should be dealt with. Right? No one has a better opinion than the people who live there and understand certain things you know, like, arms just that's that's my perspective on it. I think, however they see fit to take care of the situation is up to them. And for me, I live thousands and thousands of miles away. It's not mine. decision.
Eric Weinstein 1:51:00
So I have three destination questions to finish this off with. I am obsessed with three islands in the middle of the Atlantic and I have no idea whether they have an importance in surf culture. Tell me about All right. So we have this island ascension, St. Halina interest on the kunafa. Do you know about that? Dude, you can't tell you don't know these islands. Where are there right in the middle between Africa and South America.
Kai Lenny 1:51:28
So Napoleon Gosh, I know. The really south, aren't they? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I was looking at
Eric Weinstein 1:51:33
the one of them's all Namibia.
Kai Lenny 1:51:35 Yeah, no, no, it's
those islands I believe. They're like, there's like it's a nature reserve as well. So
Eric Weinstein 1:51:42
you have Edinburgh the seven seas, which is like a settlement with 300 or so people on tryst and akuna which was evacuated. Is it a volcano? It's like there's a book called Rockhopper copper about the only policeman on the island. It's totally obscure that claim is the most remote island in the world. st Halina is above that. And it's globe man this is a gorgeous Island they just got flights. And it was so isolated you could only visited by ship for a long
Kai Lenny 1:52:14
time. My friend of mine sent me a picture and in my quest to try to find the biggest waves in the world and find waves that I haven't been able to serve yet. We were looking at a place like that dude,

Eric Weinstein 1:52:25
I my gosh, it's in such a perfect place. Well, this is the thing I track this island. I'm obsessed with this island. And you get to know like the individuals on the island the shops because it's a tiny place, but
Kai Lenny 1:52:38 you gotta write down.
Eric Weinstein 1:52:40
Yeah, St. Alena is actually kind of a an outpost of civilizations big enough that can have like tiny little towns and culture and roads and stuff. And then the other one is ascension, which is above that. I guess it's closer to like the Azores and things. And I think that all three of these are British Overseas Territory. And we did we got to go. You know, when you said this thing to me, it was very funny. Like you said, thanks for the shout out. We have to go surf. I was like, I don't service like, Don't worry, I'll teach you. I'm thinking, maybe, but maybe it's too much. We should go to St Halina check it out and get Red Bull to do one of the rampages there's a film with a with with pioneering the stuff. But
Kai Lenny 1:53:22
yeah, I mean, there's as much as we think we've kind of discovered everything out there this, I have this gut feeling. There's some massive waves out there that are so good. No one's even tapped into. And it's just waiting to be written, discovered. Well, so
Eric Weinstein 1:53:38
we have to get through the portal to get to these three islands will put the hive mind on it. Yeah. And come back and visit when you can talk about the thing that we were checking out, but I don't want you to do it prematurely. I want you to wait until it's right.
Kai Lenny 1:53:52
Yeah, no, for sure. Let's go. I think Come Come here soon. It'll be there's a lot There's been a lot to talk about and it's exciting every day is really exciting.
Eric Weinstein 1:54:04
Guys, you've been through the portal with Kyle any has been a real dream for me to meet, please go to your web brazzers to YouTube and just put his name in Am I right Chi means wave.
Kai Lenny 1:54:18
Chi means ocean and Hawaiian
Eric Weinstein 1:54:20
ocean and when you'll be treated to some of the most amazing footage you've ever seen, and with any luck, we'll keep at it and stay safe helps us. Remember to check us out on YouTube by

subscribing and clicking the bell to make sure that you're notified when we drop new videos. And please subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts. Kai thanks very much and peace out. We'll see everybody real soon. Shaka Zulu
Transcribed by https://otter.ai

File:ThePortal-Ep24 KaiLenny-EricWeinstein.png

2020-04-12T03:44:34Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

23: Agnes Callard - Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits

2020-04-12T03:40:15Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[File:ThePortal-Ep23 AgnesCallard-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|right|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Agnes Callard (left) on episode 23 of The Portal podcast]]
Philosopher and University of Chicago Professor [[Agnes Callard]] sits down with [[Eric Weinstein|Eric]] on this episode of The Portal. Agnes is a champion of the philosophical tradition of attempting to detach the capacity for inquiry and reason from the fog of feelings and societal taboos that often keep us from delving deeper into the questions that animate our lives.

Agnes began this unusual back and forth by writing an article about status negotiation in first meetings shortly after the pair first met. Eric and Agnes then use the opportunity of this episode to continue this line of thought by exploring the limits of courage and meta-cognition within the examined life of a modern Philosopher. This results in a real-time exploration by two people who mutually respect each other as to whether they can actually negotiate a detached discussion in real time on the very issues of status, feeling, and taboo that may divide them and/or arise between them.

As Agnes has written thoughtfully about the many layers of anger, the conversation culminates by exploring dyadic feelings of hurt and indignation with which we all struggle and suffer in our relationships. Ultimately the two finish this experimental conversation with good cheer, together with a wish to continue the discussion at a later date under continuing mutual fondness and admiration.

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== Transcript ==

[Intro Music]

E - Hello, you've found The Portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstien and today I am here with University of Chicago Professor of Philosophy, Agnes Callard.

A - Hi.

E - Agnes welcome!

A - Thank you.

E - I want to talk to you about everything,

A - Okay.

E - Do you mind?

A - No.

E - So, you just had an interesting and bizarre gambit, I didn't know you were coming out to southern California and you said to me that after a meeting we had in your office at the University of Chicago, "Hey, you should take a look at this article I wrote partially based on our meeting." And the article is one about negotiating initial meetings and what are all the layers of dynamics that are going on when two people collide for the first time.

A - Yeah, I think that when two people collide for the first time I guess there are sort of two things at the base level that are happening. One of them is they are trying to figure out how to get along, how to cooperate, and the other is they are trying to take the measure of one another. And those activities aren't totally separate from one another.

E - And, I've noticed a pattern with you which is that you take great delight in talking about the things that many of us do sort of naturally or unconsciously. It might be very uncomfortable to promote to full consciousness so that you can use your metacognitive facility to interrogate and dissect what is going on many many different levels; Some of them philosophical, some of them rooted in biology, some of them maybe with allusions to literature. When you and I met, were you aware of what you were going through in real time or did it come to you later that this was going to be grist for an article.

A - Oh, totally later. My mind was completely on another article I was working on.

E - Oh, so you weren't concentrating on when we were meeting, on our meeting?

A - No, not really. Oh, I mean, I think that a lot of the time I feel like a lot of the thinking that I do is like unpacking thinking I did earlier but wasn't realizing I was doing. Or something like that. So, like...

[02:29] E - It's hard with this language when you have to say "I" when you're actually realizing you have so many different processes. Okay, keep going.

A - Right, I guess maybe one common thread.. I do like to, yeah maybe I kind of have an affinity towards the provocative or something but maybe at a deeper level I think that there is just, when we talk about ourselves / when we think about our lives there are all these sort of cracks in the facade of, like, who we take ourselves to be and how we present ourselves. But the thing is, like, that we have kind of convinced ourselves that the cracks are part of the design because we have been looking at them so long, right? Like, Ooh look what a pretty pattern. And I want

== Transcript of the last 20 minutes ==

This section of the podcast is where they discuss Agnes Callard's reaction to Episode 19 of The Portal with Bret Weinstein.

Transcript starts at 1 hour, 51 minutes of the audio from Apple podcasts

They are talking about episodes of The Portal that she has listened to. She said she found them interesting but then he asked her about whether they were "worth her while"?

E - But then you sort of said that "no, that wasn't really a great exercise for you, or something like that".

A - yep

E - That hurt me. What are your reactions to that? I think that the show is quite a bit better, particularly one or two of the episodes that you listened to, I think are extraordinary and it made me feel that you could not possibly have seen what it is that I saw in those one or two episodes, because it would have been worth 10 hours of your time because it was so rare. Now, I could be wrong so it's very interesting that, of course, I have a vested interest so I'm budgeting something for my own distortion. I'm also thinking about what the feedback I've had, how specific the feedback has been

A - u-huh

E - made me question whether or not I viewed you as a reliable receiver of the content of the show. Had I over-invested in my image of you as the person capable of processing what we're doing here. And it made me wonder whether or not I'm doing something outside of the academy which the academy sort of realises is some cheap version of intellectualism and story telling and narrative that would never survive in a rigorous academic context. So I went through a bunch of self doubt, accusation, negative feeling, question and uncertainty about you , myself and the project that we were going to sit down and create an episode together.

A - that's a great question. So, I guess - let me report a bunch of different things. So, the first thing, when you said... you asked me, like, how does that feel. To me when you said "that hurt me". Immediately I felt hurt. Like I felt a reflexive, totally non-conscious empathetic response. Though I didn't at the time when I first said it. It didn't hurt me to say that to you. But it, often, I don't...

E - well, I should say both of us are quite disagreeable as people and it's my perception that both of us feel comfortable contradicting something if we... it's an issue of the courage of your convictions and I think that you in general have a very high courage of your convictions and are willing to share.

A - oh, but also it's an issue of I had no perception at all that it hurt you when I said it and I'm often bad at picking up on those signals and it makes it easier to be (corrupted?)...

E - I was asking it because it was obviously a very vulnerable question and so the last thing I wanted to do was signal to you that I could be easily hurt

A - fair enough. But perhaps also I could also have, if I were somewhat otherwise, I would predict that, but I didn't at all actually

E - cool, ok

A - so, um, I guess that was just my instinctive response.and now, like, you know, yeah - I think that your subsequent ruminations, maybe the most interesting bit in them is the bit about academia. So, what's interesting to me is that, at the moment at which I have this response, it is attributed to me as an academic, right? Like...

E - well, episode 19 of this show...

A - yeah

E - it is about the kinds of things that take place in universities all over the country that I'm alleging that has not filtered out to some extent to the general public.

E - right

E - there is a tremendous amount of pressure to survive in academics causing people in my opinion - just as we say... well, let me say it differently. Concentration camp survivors from World War Two, death camp survivors, will often say something if they trust you, which is "don't celebrate us because the ones who survived weren't the good ones. We did what we had to do to survive.It's the ones who perished that you're really thinking about."

A - h-hm

E - it's a very tough thing to say. In general when I meet someone who has succeeded in academics, they are always under a cloud. If they did it under this era, because the pressures simply too severe. Now, some people do better than that, y'know if you're good enough you can have a peacock's tale that you are in fact an ethical academician but in general people are going to have to take intellectual and moral half-measures in order to survive in this competitive of an environment. So, I was trying to talk about that in episode 19, not actually attempting to single out an individual. The weirdness that simply talking about a problem in a particular case when people haven't understood that problem will tend to privilege an individual but by the hundredth case of it you start to realise that this is a general feature pervading the society.

A - good. So, maybe a couple of different responses. So, I found that the scientific content was all new to me. I didn't know anything about this way in which the, kind of, the propensity of a cell to become tumorous - if you want to cut down on that you have to make it bad at repair and that was so interesting to me

E - that is weirdly the central insight rather than the narrative and the drama of interpersonal warfare within the academy, just, what is death? Why is it baked in.

A - right. So, as I say there are a lot of different things and for me that was actually super interesting and I went and looked and read the abstract of a paper and...

E - you're awesome, thank you

A - but I guess the thing is I did feel that the sort of thrust of the episode was supposed to be - this is how things can go wrong and I get that on an interpersonal level I get that it is that but the way I hear the story, there was this incredible scientific discovery that happened partly because of an academic context, and it happened and the truth got out. And like it's your brother, and so you love him and you're heartbroken about stuff that happened to him, but he's not my brother and from my point of view, look at what academia did, it got this truth out....

E - are you fucking kidding, Agnes? Let's actually do this as emotional and cognitive.

A - good

E - who gets to leave children? People who become professors. If you look at the professors who are left by a great professor, the idea that the thought is what got out there and by virtue of the fact that in some sense there was a conflict. This is what I calll the horse and rider problem. Let's knock there order off of the horse and as long as we have the horse then that is what matters. This is a complete misreading of history because the key. thing that we find is a Michael Atiyah, for example, a great mathematician will leave multiple fields medalists as students. People who are at the very top of their game. This whole thing is about the train of transmission. When you actually effectively castrate or give a hysterectomy to a professor so that they cannot reproduce what you're doing is you're harming the ability to propagate the specialness that allows... the machine tools of those discoveries. You're confusing the important measure, with the tool and the machine tool. The machine tool is the tool that makes tools.

A - u-huh

E - it's a... I think it's an incredible opportunity and, you know, you have also written on the topic of anger, right?

A - Yeah

E - This is a question of functional anger. I find that outrageous, what you just said and I don't think I find it outrageous because I am flush with chemicals and I don't think it's because it's my brother. If you were to talk to me about Douglas Prasher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher) Douglas Prasher was one of the people who gave us green flourescent protein or PFP, he was driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville Alabama. Before I was championing my brother, I was championing Douglas Prasher because how could it be that the person who should have been on the Nobel Prize for GFP in full view of the academic community was driving not only a shuttle bus in Huntsville Alabama but after being featured in the New York Times with a full, top, above the fold picture of Doug, a year later he was still driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville Alabama. So, and I mean this with all academic rigour - "what the fuck is wrong with that thought process that that's what you think?"

A - So, I think, like, I'm not sure you're clear in your own mind as to which bit of this you find offensive. It seems to me that from the way that you were just talking about Douglas Prasher that a lot of it for you is about credit and who gets credit

E - it's about reproduction

A - so your problem is that Douglas Prasher didn't get to have students.

E - Douglas Prasher didn't get to have students. This is just like an amazing inability to understand what the game is

A - Well, your brother did get to have students

E - No, he didn't

A - well, I mean

E - No, he didn't

A - well, he went on to teach, didn't he have students?

E - he taught at a weird undergraduate institution with no graduate program. You're really not getting it.

A - But, didn't he choose to teach there? And didn't he see that teaching... his description of that teaching there was that it was extremely valuable to him....

E - yes, it's a very sweet story and, right now for example, I have a discord group and I'm teaching people with no formal background how to see gauge theory. The key point is that you don't understand what a university is. It's a very special place and who gets to reproduce and who doesn't is the story of our future. I mean this is about... so we belong to this Jewish tradition and I always use the same phrase, L'dor va'dor, https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/302 - from generation to generation. What has gone wrong in the academy that it sees things it terms of credit, status and all these things? It's about the resources and the ability to reproduce students in an incredibly intensive relationship where there's a transmission. You see, in my field, in Mathematics, the top mathematicians they have not externalised what they know into their papers - it's a fraction of what they know. You still can't get at these relationships from reading work, you actually have to go and you actually have to sit with the people who produced the papers, it's the machine tools.

A - u-huh, I mean, it's weird to me that in some way we agree more than I thought we would on that point in that, look, I think teaching is the fundamental activity of a university

E - I don't think so.

A - but you... so there's some other magic way that this reproduces?

E - research is the fundamental activity of the research university. The problem with the University is that it's a confusion. If you think about the biathlon, which I always use as an example. The first time I heard about the biathlon, I laughed. Cross-country skiing and riflery. What the hell are these two activities doing in one sport? Well, if you live in Finland you know exactly why you would want to combine those two activities because you've got Russians on your eastern border, so in general there's an activity that's important in Norway and Sweden and Finland and Russia and places like that, because you shoot the enemy while on skis. OK. The teaching university is an incredibly confusing object to many people. Because of the Vanevar Bush pact called the Endless Frontier, we agreed that we were going to have the federal governments investment in blue-sky research only done through the Universities effectively and that meant that we took an incredibly important facility and we confused it with teaching. Now, there's an extent to which those are symbiotic, that they boost each other, that teaching and research are sort of happy complements to each other and there's a way in which they conflict.

A - but I don't understand how you think this reproduction, how you think, so... suppose you're going to reproduce yourself in me. How do you do that without teaching me?

E - well, the kind of teaching that we usually talk about when we talk about teaching, it tends to be very focussed on the undergraduates, so when you said 'didn't my brother get to leave students?' you're talking about relationship... to undergraduate students, because there's no graduate students there

A - I find that for me that line is not as heavy

E - how many members of your department, on the faculty don't have PhDs?

A - Don't have PhDs?

E - like Freeman Dyson doesn't have a PhD

A - Right, I believe all of them have PhDs but that's new in Philosophy. The older generation there were a number that didn't.

E - I understand but now you have a situation in which you have a requirement to be able to reproduce where you have done research. This kind of close teaching, this appreticeship

A - Good. And so, like, I think that you can say. So, this helps to clarify the situation. So, you can say that your brother was deprived of an opportunity to do a certain kind of teaching.

E - Let's talk about Douglas Prasher

A - Douglas Prasher was fully deprived of an opportunity to do any kind of teaching...

E - Furthermore, he wasn't able to do any more of that kind of research. He couldn't get resources. He in fact gave over his work because his grant ran out.

A - Right

E - I'm thinking.. I'm not as interested in the person who's good at administrative games who got to stay in the game, I'm interested in the Douglas Prasher and getting the predators the hell out of the way so that these guys can continue to work. In other words, they need a https://jel.jewish-languages.org/words/1693, yiddish for a strong, you know muscle. So you need muscle to make sure that the sweet people who can actually do great work aren't prayed upon. You have sharp minds and sharp elbows and the key point is that somebody's got to break the sharp elbows. That's very important to me.

A - I mean... but look, there's a question about... and maybe you've seen many hundreds or thousands of these cases

E - I wouldn't say thousands. I would say tens

A - right, and in listening to that podcast. That was listening, to me, to one case. And then I also have to go with my own experience...

E - so, you haven't seen much of this. I mean you're in a Philosophy department. I know nothing about how you guys do. What I will say is that in situations... like let's take a situation where there's no skullduggery within academics, but a career stops. So, Évariste Galois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Évariste_Galois couldn't be a more important mathematician. More or less created group theory and Galois theory the day before he died...

A - in a duel

E - in a duel, right. Does it matter that he died? Yes. Hugely. Why? We have Galois theory, we have Group Theory. Thank you very much

A - right. We could have more.

E - we could have much more. And so the issue of just sort of the casual indifference to saying that the system works. That the story and the work could proceed, is a stunning fact to me. Like, to me, you know Res ipsa loquitur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res_ipsa_loquitur and the idea that that is a normal piece of academics is effectively the proof to me that there's something wildly wrong

A - Yeah, I mean I guess I just think that there's a question. So, like part of that story was a lot of venality and pressures that come from people wanting credit for things and people wanting y'know... caring about name and reputation etc. and there's a question there about suppose we got rid of that. Suppose we changed people's psyches so that they didn't care about that

E - Suppose we had the ability to leave students and gain resources without needing to care. Let's proceed from there because I think this is going to be almost the last thing. So, it comes back to status where we began. So it comes back to status where we began

A - yeah

E - so my claim is that status is a proximate and the ultimate is the ability to transmit and create knowledge and the key issue is that, lacking a PhD and lacking the ability to compete for grants handily, which are status-mediated, means that your line becomes self-extinguishing. That's the real issue.

A - yeah. I do think that this actually, where it gets back to is happiness. That my life can't be about whether my line is extinguished or not. My life has to be something the meaning of which comes home to me and it's not that that's not integrated into an activity where I try to put something forward, but the point of the pursuit of knowledge can't be to always be handing down the tools to hand down the tools some more

E - what a beautiful place for our next disagreement. You were taking the point of view of soma, I of germ, you of the self and I of lineage, so I think we have a great opportunity to begin our next conversation. Agnes, I just want to say. I find you utterly charming. A huge work out mentally. It's a great pleasure, you're welcome to come back any time and thank you so much for dropping by

A - thank you.

File:ThePortal-Ep23 AgnesCallard-EricWeinstein.png

2020-04-12T03:39:58Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

22: Ben Greenfield - Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness

2020-04-12T03:36:46Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[File:ThePortal-Ep22 BenGreenfield-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|right|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Ben Greenfield (left) on episode 22 of The Portal podcast]]
[[Eric Weinstein|Eric]] sits down with leading fitness geek, guru, thinker and human guinea-pig [[Ben Greenfield]] to learn how one of the world's most highly regarded trainers and fitness experts cuts through the nightmare that is our medical literature.

The academic and medical literature in health and medicine is a disaster. Studies are performed and reported in non-standard and idiosyncratic ways which are then further distorted by a press often looking more for headlines and scoops than facts and rigor. In this episode we get to ask one of the most sought after fitness optimizers how ordinary people can better understand their own minds, brains and bodies in light of the cacophony of 'expert' opinion. Ben, here in his role of master pedagogue, gives detailed implementable answers as well as simple to follow priorities that sum up his years of study and training for the mere mortals who wish to better everything in their lives by tackling health at the fundamental level.

<span class="button">[[ep21 | << Previous Episode]]</span> <span class="button">[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/2f106a81-1445-4884-9ba7-7cf6e8e1898f Listen to Episode 22]</span> <span class="button">[https://rss.art19.com/episodes/2f106a81-1445-4884-9ba7-7cf6e8e1898f.mp3 Download episode (mp3)]</span> <span class="button">[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHEwhUvjJ-k Watch Episode 22]</span> <span class="button">[[ep23 | Next Episode >>]]</span>

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== Episode Summary ==
* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1etowRyC8aJcls7rHHg08_On3tfY_OPJtNtV6twHd5L4/edit?pli=1 Episode Summary in Progress]

== Transcript ==
* [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TIitA_o4XJ4I7e2nOQk3QyaFCje5JLewc20i0vemvFE/edit# Transcript in Progress]

File:ThePortal-Ep22 BenGreenfield-EricWeinstein.png

2020-04-12T03:36:29Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart

2020-04-12T03:33:54Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== Description ==
[[File:ThePortal-Ep21 AshleyMathews-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|right|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Ashley Mathews (left), aka Riley Reid, on episode 21 of The Portal podcast]]
Historically, fighting obscenity and indecency charges has always been a central part of the free speech movement. Jim Morrison, Mae West, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin have all been arrested for exciting the public in ways that authorities have found threatening. Recently, however, the erotic and comedic arts have undergone more cryptic attacks via [[Operation Chokepoint]], "cancellation", "no platforming", and inadequate press coverage given to cases of legal intimidation (e.g. the federal case under Miller v California standards brought against director John Stagliano).

In this episode, Eric sits down with the business woman who created the enduring character of the unlikely top pornstar [[Riley Reid]]. Continuing the theme of the [[Distributed Idea Suppression Complex|DISC (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex)]] we discuss issues like Operation Chokepoint and obscenity law as well more subtle issues like the difficulty of finding vendors willing to cross the Rubicon to work with legal erotic businesses.

[[Ashley Mathews]], in the role of the Riley Reid character, has defied all pornographic convention by embracing [[Body Positivity|body positivity]], forgoing plastic surgery and opting for natural body hair at times. Additionally she has made a social statement by doing a popular artistic scene which makes a political and business case for greater [[Transsexual Acceptance|transsexual acceptance]]. Her main tool appears to be a palpable human decency and sweetness coupled to an uncanny ability to assess, manage and survive extreme business risk within a poorly understood industry that has confounded all expectations.

While this episode is generally not explicit, it is not for everyone given the content and so listener discretion is advised.

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== Transcript ==

''Note: This is a partial transcript; we are missing the last ~20 minutes.''

'''Prologue'''

00:00

'''Eric:''' It is a very simple observation that sex is sexy, that is almost, but not quite a tautology. Yet its implications seem, at least to me, to be quite profound and easily missed given that one could argue from first principles that sex is ultimately one of the most powerful forces shaping human society, but whenever we attempt to discuss sex directly, our autonomic nervous system becomes engaged if we're not very careful. As the comedian Tom Lehrer once said, when correctly viewed, everything is lewd. If you look hard enough, you will see that nearly every sentence has a double entendre, like that last one. As a result, when we attempt to analyze and discuss sex and sexuality using our prefrontal cortex, the conversation almost reliably goes off the rails with a probability approaching one. As our lower brains become engaged, aroused, and amused, it's almost designed not to be discussable.

Yet there are two groups of people I see who do better than the rest of us in this regard. Some academics such as evolutionary theorists, physicians and sex researchers, and commercial sex workers. In this episode, I'm interviewing one of the world's most famous actresses, yet her name is all but unknown. She is Ashley Matthews, creator of Riley Reid, one of the top porn stars of our time. My goal in this conversation is to try to stop sex from becoming sexy just long enough so that we might learn a little bit more about how the pornography community and its civilian clientele are now interacting. Now, you may wish to say that you've never found pornography interesting, but that doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that an individual's desire to avoid it doesn't stop it from affecting society as a whole. Like it or not, pornography is like dark matter forming an Einstein lens with an immense gravitational field effecting everything around it.

You don't have to watch it directly to feel it distorting us by monitoring our hypocrisies so that it can cater to our denied selves. It also presents a strange mirror to our society as if there were a Newton's law for pornography. It appears that everything we do here on earth and civilian life is mirrored on planet porn. They have a wage gap, but one that, at least naively, goes in the other direction. When I call Ashley at her office, she has to be sexy to her coworkers simply to be professional and she claims that her experience with onset harassment is near zero. Now, I'm in no position to evaluate these claims, but it takes some getting used to, and just like another planet, there may be no easy way back from a one way ticket to becoming well known as a performer. Now I should probably describe the ground rules for the conversation you're about to hear so that you can better understand the context of the episode.

I asked Ashley to humor me and that we would both try to lay off explicit language for the most part. We also agreed that we were not going to talk about sex much. Rather we were going to try to talk around it. I'm sure the ratings will suffer as a result, but if I'm honest, I'm not really that interested in interviewing the character of Riley Reid. I'm sure that would've been fun, but here I get to do something far more interesting because I'm talking to the person Ashley Matthews, who both created her and plays her. I told Ashley that I wanted to present her in a light in which she is seldom seen. She is, by nature, playful and charming, and that comes through here at times, but she's also hugely successful and courageous as a business woman who has stayed for years at the top of one of the world's most brutal occupations with her charm and her sweetness seemingly intact.

The woman is polite to a fault and humble whenever we speak. She has few, if any of the attributes we usually associate with stereotypes of erotic performers or commercial sex workers. She has also embraced her own bodily vulnerabilities as assets rather than deficits. And she has induced others to talk about such things in public. In that respect, at a bare minimum, she is a role model to us all. So the subject here is not Ashley as a performer, but instead her as an observer and analyst. I don't ask her about details of her sex life because I view everybody's personal sex life, including a porn star’s, as none of anyone else's business in a healthy society. If that is what you're looking for, you can find it in almost anyone else's interview of Ashley. Instead, in the midst of what appears to be peak shame of a new worldwide shame kink bubble fueled by social media, Ashley is one of the few free voices having long ago learned how to turn our shame and discomfort into her profitable business with recurring revenue.

As a result, we get to discuss terrifying topics like the awesome power of the state to harass and target businesses like hers working within our legal framework. This is done by trying behind the scenes to make their access to banking and commercial services far more difficult, such as happened during the Obama era’s quiet Operation Choke Point. While I find this appalling and disturbing, we also need to discuss other means for facing disturbing trends that are going under analyzed within the pornographic industry. Perhaps the most disturbing of these is the mainstreaming and promotion of so-called incest porn on the tube sites which serve up free videos to anyone with an internet connection and a willingness to get past modest access controls. This is a challenge given the obvious risks and concerns to anyone who believes in free speech absolutism. I hope you give Ashley a chance and that this gives us all food for thought. It's a tough conversation, but with a kind and wonderful subject. Without further ado, I bring you Ms. Ashley Matthews.

00:05

'''Eric:''' Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. I'm here in studio with a special guest today, Ashley Matthews. Ashley, thanks for coming by The Portal.

'''Ashley:''' Thank you for having me.

'''Eric:''' Now, it's an unusual episode of The Portal because, the way I see it, you are Ashley Matthews, but you've created a character who's an actress named Riley Reid who portrays a series of characters in erotic films and shorts. So you have a successful business, you're a successful business woman and I came to know about your existence through sort of a kind of an odd chain of events, which is that when I did one of my first large live shows with Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro at the Masonic in San Francisco, I believe that you were tweeting about how excited you were to attend the event. And people said, wow, Riley Reid is going to your event. And I said, who's Riley Reed? And people thought, wow, you really don't know. This is a, an incredibly famous erotic actress who is apparently very interested in rationality, psychedelics, sexuality and sort of understanding where our country is going from an unusual viewpoint. So you were at that show?

'''Ashley:''' Yes, I was.

'''Eric:''' How did that impress you?

00:06

'''Ashley:''' I, to be honest, wanted there to be more conversation about like all the things, I mean, Sam Harris talks about it all, like the free will and this and the, that type of thing. But I think it was a lot of politic type things. Kind of Ben Shapiro and him kind of talking a lot back and forth. I didn't really get to hear much from you yet.

'''Eric:''' Well, I tried to stay out of when they were trying to get into, Is there a God is there no, God, I figured that it's like the Sharks and the Jets or Bloods and the Crips. You don't want to get in the middle of it. Right.

'''Ashley:''' But nonetheless it was, I loved it. It was great.

'''Eric:''' Now, what drew you initially to that world of Sam Harris and his constellation of issues?

'''Ashley:''' The first time I listened to him, a friend of mine recommended one of his podcasts about social media and kind of the, what is it, like how it manipulates you? The manipulation in social media and social media is such a huge part of my life and my job that I thought it was really important for me to take a look and understand it deeper in a way that I've never really even visualized it or even noticed what was going on in the social media world. And so, because I work in it, we kind of all now work in it. I thought it was kind of like a duty to know exactly what we're all doing and kind of like helping influence. So when I first heard that podcast, I was really intrigued by it and thought that it was, I thought that Sam was like so well spoken and it was very interesting and I wanted to look more into his work and whatnot. I listened to a few more of his podcasts and learn about his fight against religion and his perspectives on freewill, which were things that I've never even heard of before. And I grew up religious myself, so to be able to listen to an atheist talk about all of these things that I kind of always felt within myself without ever actually expressing it. I thought it was really interesting and beautiful and I felt like I was like, Oh, here's like somewhere I can relate and things that I feel to be within me, but never actually expressed or found, I guess my following or fellow peers that I could speak to about this. So yeah, I was very, very interested in everything he had to say. And I'm an active listener on his podcasts.

00:08

'''Eric:''' Are you— would you self-describe as an atheist, if that's an appropriate question?

'''Ashley:''' I would say so. I didn't think that at the time that I was, but now kind of learning more of what it is expressed to be. I would consider myself an atheist. Yes.

'''Eric:''' Interesting. Now the way in which you sort of cropped up in my life a second time was that I started looking into the aftermath of something I had known nothing about, which was called Operation Choke Point. And this had been initiated under the Obama administration, if I understand it correctly, where the FDIC and perhaps the Justice Department came to realize that they could put a lot of pressure on the financial system not to do business with people in certain sectors of the economy or to make it very difficult for them to get any access to regular financial institutions. And I recall an article or an interview, maybe it was in a paper, I can't remember where it was, where you were talking about the fact that you couldn't get normal credit and easy access to commercial banking despite the fact that you were running a very successful and profitable business as a business woman.

00:10

'''Ashley:''' Yeah. There was a lot of adult actresses and directors and whatnot. People who have had their accounts shut down in banking institutions and things like that. I have had simple things where like email servers where you can kind of like send blast emails to your subscribers and whatnot kind of reject me in being able to be able to use them. Like MailChimp was one of the programs where I wasn't able to use it. And there's like many, many more. When I was like building my website, I was trying to like build my website from kind of like third parties, not trying to follow the standard adult website brands, because I felt like they took a large percentage of our money. So I was like, what other avenues can I attract that can work with me? And I was searching for months and months to find someone to like a simple to hold my bandwidth and whatnot. And it was really difficult. And I ended up having to speak to like specific owners and reach out directly to be able to be like, listen, this is who I am. This is what I want. Would you be willing to work with me? And now through that I've, I work with certain companies that where I'm like one of their biggest clients. And I think they work with a lot of sports networking and this and that. And still my adult website is there. I'm like their number one client. And so I feel very fortunate that they would take me on. But it took a lot of research and a lot of emails being sent out to people to be able to be like, listen, I am not a criminal. I'm not a bad guy. Like, you know, I understand that there are things that make the adult industry complicated because they have to make sure people are 18 and older and they don't want to be, you know, giving access to people who are not of the age. And how do you find that they are 18 and all of the written regulations? So I understand that there are those kinds of rules that take place that make it a little bit more tricky.

00:12

'''Eric:''' Those are the parts that you accept, that is, I mean, if I refer to you as a commercial sex worker, you're comfortable with the designation?

'''Ashley:''' Yes.

'''Eric:''' All right. So as a CSW, you accept that there are some added requirements for doing this kind of work so that it is legit and above board.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, of course. And so I think that the problem is that so many companies just don't even want to take the risk. That makes it a bit more of a struggle for us to try and find legitimate businesses that want to do business with us, even though I think that they're missing out on a huge market by not doing it. And I'm very curious as to some of the reasons why they even don't do it. It's maybe politically and religion has something to do with it, I'm sure.

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00:14

'''Eric:''' Well, that's one of the things that I'm interested in trying to reopen, which is that during the 1950s, sixties and early seventies, when obscenity was a much hotter topic, in particular because of the need to establish a standard by which something might be deemed obscene, and there were even people who said we should not have any concept of obscenity legally. It was very much on people's minds that obscenity and the erotic arts were part of free speech. So you had, you know, novels like Lady Chatterley's Lover or Tropic of Cancer that were deemed too racy to be, you know, sold. So you weren't even necessarily talking about films or, or pictures, even text was considered too hot to handle, and for whatever reason, that branch of the free speech discussion has somewhat dropped out of most people's consciousness. Do you find that as well?

00:16
'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I would say so. I definitely think that to some extent it's somewhat there and I don't know if it's just into different degrees where it's like gay rights or things like that, but definitely nothing really that is necessarily adult related in our, you know, XXX community.

'''Eric:''' So one person that you've worked with who has caught my attention on a number of occasions is this man, John Stagliano. And John Stagliano is famous for first porting the concept of Gonzo, which was originally popularized by Hunter S Thompson and journalism into porn. That is, he abstracted it away from journalism and started bringing it into pornography in the sense that he was using handheld cameras, he was making use of the switch to VHS from film, and one of the things that he was doing, if I understand correctly, and you should feel free to correct, is that he was showing females enjoying sexuality rather than being spied upon by the lens, actually actively engaged for their own pleasure. And that this was in some weird way a feminist upturning of the concept of pornography. Do I have my facts even vaguely correct?

00:17

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, yeah, I'd say so.

'''Eric:''' So then John weirdly ran afoul of federal prosecutors having to do with the 1973 standard, which needs to be more in all of our consciousness called Miller v. California. Is Miller v. California something that occupies your thoughts?

'''Ashley:''' No

'''Eric:''' Do you know about it?

'''Ashley:''' No

'''Eric:''' Oh boy. Okay. I'm not a legal expert, but this is, I think this is still the governing case law. There was originally, it's– I guess you can't check me, but see if this even plays correctly. My understanding is that in 1957, there was a decision called Roth v. United States, which introduced the idea that an average person applying contemporary community standards, whatever that means, would have to find obscene work to be in the prurient interest, that it arouses passions and maybe makes us lascivious. Right? And that was followed in the mid sixties by 1966 something called Memoirs v. Massachusetts, which was a much more liberal standard, which said that the work in question had to lack all redeeming social importance. And therefore, if you could just put one quotation from Shakespeare somewhere in your work, you were almost certainly going to be safe because anything that was redeeming, would keep something from being deemed obscene. And then the court revisits in 1973 and comes up with a three-pronged approach. And it says that somebody's applying contemporary community standards has to find the work to be in the whole and in the prurient interest of sex, that it has to run a foul of offensive standards, I think on the state books. And, lastly, it has to be seriously lacking in redeeming scientific, literary, political or social importance. So, not totally lacking; it just has to be fairly lacking. That is terrifying in the age of the internet, because what is a contemporary community standard when we have one giant community? If you make porn in the San Fernando Valley, let's say, where its traditional headquarters has been, what if it gets viewed in Ogden, Utah? How do you know you're not violating somebody else's community standard? Are you worried about this at all?

'''Ashley:''' Oh, I'm definitely, I mean the, to me it's like, it's very extreme because what one perspective is to one person is totally different to another. Your life experiences, I mean, are going to be completely different. You're even like, you know, religion has a huge play in all of these types of things and I think that a lot of people just have totally different ideas on what is okay and not okay. And I think a lot of it is even just from lack of experience or perspective or communication with different people. So I think that some people will even like, like many even of my own friends have totally different views on pornography and actors and actresses in the adult entertainment industry. And once they meet them, they're like, wow, I didn't even think that you guys would even, you know, be this type of person. I've had people who like speak to me directly where they're like, I didn't like you until I listened to a podcast where I was like, Oh, she's like a real human being. So I think that in general it's really daunting and terrifying. The fact that I, if I want to do some really intense hardcore scene that to maybe the general public will think it's, you know, you know, regular hot porno, you know, but then the, there might be, you know, 5% of the population who's like, Oh my God, what did she just do?

'''Eric:''' Well, and that's just it. There's no way that you can control where your material will be consumed. So having a pre-internet, like almost 50 years old, decision govern, in part, who can be brought up on federal charges. My understanding was that Stagliano, about 10 years ago was brought up, and was possibly facing three decades in prison for making pornography.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' You're like 28, if that would, that would put you at nearly 60 years old before you got out.

00:22

'''Ashley:''' Oh yeah.

'''Eric:''' So what, what are your thoughts on this? What do we do? If we, I mean, look, as you probably know, we've been talking about free speech issues in this Intellectual Dark Web group, for example, and a lot of the problems that we're finding are not exactly free speech issues. It's not really the government that's trying to shut you down, but instead, it's sort of the informal, the institutions of civil society like newspapers and universities that have suddenly come up with a new concept, which is hate speech and even simple biological reasoning is sometimes now considered hate speech. Do you see any tie in between the erotic community and potentially even the scientific community and the ways in which these amorphous standards might get invoked?

'''Ashley:''' I mean, I could hope that there is some sort of way that we can change these types of laws or perspectives and whatnot. I'm not exactly sure what it would take. I don't know if there's going to be like some sort of new television series that kind of lights people up in a different way that now people can have a perspective where they look at us as like humans and they humanize us. I think that's a huge part of it is not, we're not given the opportunity to humanize ourselves. And I would be really curious to see what it would have to be like if, you know, do we have to all become scientists so that we get the check of a seal of approval?

00:23

'''Eric:''' Well I’m claiming that even the biologists are now running afoul of concepts like hate speech. For example, what if you start talking about a study of trans issues, and you discover that trans is a giant umbrella category where some parts of trans are disorders, some parts of trans is just nature doing what nature is somehow going to do. And somebody says, well, wait a minute, that's, that's completely illegitimate because you're mis-gendering people. I don't think that biology is a way to hide out anymore. I think that in fact the biologists and the pornographers are weirdly and quite unexpectedly, somewhat in the same boat now that we have a very potent political strain that's trying to regulate what can be said and that you guys are in somewhat of a similar boat. But that because there's no, like, I mean I would never encounter you in normal life, probably, because our worlds are just very unlikely to collide.

00:24

'''Ashley:''' When it comes to like I, I know like right now I'm working on this documentary and they're following myself as an adult actress and they're also following a researcher who studies sex, and she speaks about how she gets like death threats and things like that for being this like almost highly sexual woman even though she's literally studying like how vaginal secretion happens or things like that. And I think that it is like we have this lack of free speech and we have this like, I don't know if it's also the era of where everyone is just highly offended by everything as well. I would have thought that through with social media and all of these things and even like music, the way that music has kind of like even become more hypersexual and aggressive, that our culture would be more accepting to these types of, you know, ways of life. Whereas rather than kind of see the opposite side of it, I, I think that like when it comes to being able to be free with what you can do and say in sex work and researchers, I'm not too familiar with the researchers, but I was definitely like, I thought of this book Bunk by Mary Roach when I heard about the research study of this, the researcher in the documentary where it talks about like, I think it was like in the 50s or something like that where they were all studying animals, having sex with animals because it was so taboo and you were like a pervert if you watched two humans have sex, even though that's the only way to actually study people having sex and to get real information. You're not going to get, you'll get information about monkeys if you're watching monkeys have sex. But it was like interesting to me that it was so almost pornographic for them to even be able to watch people and study them. Even though that's how we're trying to understand biology and science.

00:26

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00:27

'''Eric:''' I have to admit that I have a couple of odd theories about this and I was curious how you might find them. One of which is that, in some sense, the normal world, which I understand you call the “civilian world”, is almost hypocritical and in denial by design. That is, we aren't supposed to have an accurate picture of human sexuality, because our society is based on what I call load bearing fictions, that people are supposed to present as relatively asexual. Their default assumption that they go around with is that they are not sexual beings. And you're supposed to hide this aspect. And then there are contradictory expectations. So for example, you might be expected to wear cosmetics in a workplace environment as a sign of professionalism, but the cosmetics in fact may be sexualizing, but then you're not supposed to admit that the cosmetics may in fact be sexualizing. So in some sense the civilian world is a mess by design because we're not supposed to see ourselves accurately, and the world of sex workers is bizarrely a truth telling world, a world in which people are far more honest. And there's another one of these, which I think is the community of evolutionary theorists. And, believe me, you can’t invite those guys to parties either because they'll tell you things that the civilian world does not want to hear. What do you think about the idea that, is it possible that commercial workers are just much more honest and undistorted around issues of sexuality, and that, in fact, this is why they have to be excluded?

00:29

'''Ashley:''' I would say so. I, I believe one time when we spoke previously you mentioned to me, I could be quoting you wrong, but the real estate effect or something like that, where it was like the woman can sell you potentially a not a suitable home because of her sex appeal and where she is dressed in a nice suit. Maybe there's a little cleavage showing, she has the makeup done, and you, as a general person is kind of, you know, you're, you're in a daze because you, you see this woman almost before you see the household. And I think that with adult entertainers we kind of like are always so sexually driven and sex is everywhere. It's our whole lives. I feel like I even personally experienced less sexual tension when I'm on set because we are always naked. They are so used to seeing naked women that it's not even like, it's not even a statement or a question or anything like that.

00:30

'''Eric:''' Well, let's, let's dig into how bizarre your workplace is because very often I hear about sexuality in the workplace and I think, well, what happens when you take something like modeling or going even further commercial sex work on the set of a movie. Take us through what you think some of the major differences might be between your workplace and a typical office. But again, I should just tell the audience, I have asked Ashley to try to keep this as much above the neck as possible so that we can have the broadest possible audience. And so normally we might be making some jokes and having some more fun, but we're trying to keep this as classy as possible.

00:31

'''Ashley:''' I can even just say like even the feeling and the difference of like how I'm working on this documentary right now, when I'm onset with that documentary, it is so different than when I'm typically onset. And it's hard for my brain to almost wrap around it because it's very similar vibe. They're both sets. We have like same kind of production crews and me, I would naturally change my clothing right here in the middle of the set and all of these things, and not even think about, you know, the guy on the sound, he's doing his job, he's looking at the things, cause he doesn't care about me getting nude because that's what he always, every day there's a new girl and a guy getting nude. And when I was on the documentary they were kind of like, Oh no, like, go to your dressing room and change. And as if, and I didn't even think that I could be potentially offending them with my body and whatnot by just undressing, dressing right there. Cause I was like, Oh you want me to change so I'll, I'll just change right now. I'm like totally comfortable with myself. And it didn't even cross my mind that like, Oh maybe this guy is looking at me inappropriately and he has like a wife or this or that or they don't want any set drama or anything like that. And so for me it's very bizarre to pull myself out of my world that is so normal for us to just be like casually having sex, like when the cameras aren't rolling to just maintain the energy, maintain the flow you, we want to make sure the male talent, how you know, stays erect and everything like that. And so while they're changing lights and everything like that, it's so casual for sex to be going on. It's so casual for the male to male– there’s even like a lot of male to male, you know, gay jokes within each other where you know, they'll, they'll joke about like, you know, teasing each other off and like doing all of these fun, playful things. Whereas maybe in the regular work environment you would never male to male be flirting with your, you know, coworkers even in the slightest bit because one, you don't want to become like, I dunno, you don't want all of that. Some guys are so homophobic and whatnot, but in our industry it's so casual for everyone to kind of have this open love for one another and talk about their bodies and their sexuality, that, when I was on this documentary set, it was so bizarrely uncomfortable for me as the sex worker to remove myself from being who I naturally am, which is like just comfortable within myself and my sexuality and my body and that I could be looked at as a piece of meat on their set. So they're like, these men aren't used to seeing women like this all the time. So you have to make sure that you're not subjecting yourself in this way or making them uncomfortable or whatnot. And to me, I think that like if they were around that more, if people were just comfortable with themselves and comfortable with their bodies, then it naturally would be normal and the same, and the guy would be able to adjust the lights without staring at the girl the whole time. You know, not that these guys were, but I guess potentially maybe they would, but they weren't even really given the opportunity. And for us, I think we're just so casual with one another that there, the hypersexualness that goes on on set is just, it's just another playful, casual, normal conversation. Yeah.

00:35

'''Eric:''' So you believe, I mean, not to put words in your mouth, but I'm curious, you believe that in your workplace, bizarrely, and quite unexpectedly, maybe issues of harassment, tension, unwanted sexuality, are actually decreased?

'''Ashley:''' I personally feel that in my experiences, 100%. Like it's, to me it's close to none. I've never felt creepy vibes from a director or anything of that. I'm also very playful and comfortable with myself and jokes and you know, I'm not, I couldn't say that for every female that she doesn't feel maybe possibly offended by certain statements. But I have never felt that there was a boundary that was crossed in our casual work with one another. I've never had any creepy director offering me things that he shouldn't be or whatnot. It's always in a very playful manner and there's always like 10 other people in the room. So it's always like a casual joke or things like that where we're all just, you know, naked and, you know, I pee with the door open. It's just like, we all kind of do, like, we're all just very comfortable with ourselves.

00:36

'''Eric:''' You know, there was a story and I wish I could source it, because I've referenced it a few times, but years ago there was a naked musical called Oh, Calcutta. And I remember hearing a story that somebody had found that after being on stage naked in front of an audience night after night, because this was a relatively successful musical, that the performers could not go back to normal life because they had become habituated to the excitement of being viewed by like hundreds, if not thousands of people. And so, you know, one possibility is that in your world there is a permanent or semi-permanent brain shift that comes from experiencing a level of arousal and familiarity that the rest of us will never, ever experience.

00:37

'''Ashley:''' I would say so to some extent, but even from me personally to some extent, I feel like even quite the opposite has happened where now I like favor and desire more the more intimate one-on-one private sex life experience where it feels more emotionally involved. And I think that's also because I'm often working with people that maybe I don't know them very well or things like that. And there is always other people around, so the level of being able to drop your guard always in completely is very rare because there is a camera involved and we're creating a product in the end. And as much as like I can be enjoying myself, I still am put into literal positions that I can't always be enjoying myself because it's opening up for a camera or things like that.

00:38

'''Eric:''' Right, well, and you're a professional after all.

'''Ashley:''' Yes. Yes, exactly. And so I find even for myself that it's almost taken an opposite turn where I now desire that less and less. And when I first started, that was one of my favorite things was the viewers, the voyeur aspect of there being multiple people in the room and enjoying the fact that there is a guy with a boom stick holding it up, who's, you know, trying to not look but definitely obviously wants to.

'''Eric:''' Got it. Do you see any way in which, are the rest of the rest of us in society moving closer towards pornography with let's say self sexualization on Instagram, where you're sort of part of a mildly erotic feedback loop? If you're a young woman and you notice what, you know, suddenly a photo you've taken has, you know, 10 times the number of likes on it.

00:39

'''Ashley:''' I would say social media has a huge part into doing and kind of almost making somewhat hyper-sexualized in yourself, more casual. And I think a lot of it is this desire of engagement as well as like people becoming an Instagram model or influencer so that they sell products. I know I recently listened to like a Chris D’Elia podcast where he was joking about, yes, convenience.

'''Eric:''' He's amazing. Oh, he's hilarious. I love him.

'''Ashley:''' And in his podcasts, he's making jokes about these girls who are kind of, you know, smashing their chest together, holding a watch, and they're selling a watch. But nobody is obviously looking at the watch. And it's interesting how, you know, in every kind of advertising world and median, they use sex to sell things. And so it's very normal. But now when you're taking the regular girl who's not some Vogue supermodel or it's like a Kendall Jenner where she's obviously selling sex but not selling sex cause it's perfume these other girls are kind of doing the same thing. And I think for them that they almost recognize it more so that they are selling sex because they're not getting this Vogue ad to show that it is showcasing that they're with Vogue.

00:40

'''Eric:''' And I think this is one of the difficulties that a lot of us are having is that traditionally we've always been self-deceptive about sexuality, and that the signals, I mean even biologically, just in terms of evolutionary theory, the signals that we send which constitute the sort of language of sexuality have always been cryptic. They're not sent transparently and in the clear. Maybe that's more the case inside of the world professional pornography, but in fact being deceptive and self-deceptive is what is normal. And I think one of the things that has been very confusing is this passion, partially on behalf of like the psychological community or professional sex educators, you know, be open, be explicit, talk about everything. And that's never been how sexuality has functioned in what you call the civilian world.

'''Ashley:''' No, sometimes I wonder if it has to do with the fact that people enjoy this taboo sense of things where it's almost like if it's unspoken, then it's more enjoyable. If it's, if it's kind of subliminal, it's, it's almost like it's sneaking its way into yourself. And, if it is kind of like less open than maybe they would have, they would have. If it wasn't, if it was direct, then maybe they would have certain other guidelines that they would have to follow, if this perfume commercial was obviously transparent with the fact that they are using sexuality to sell their perfume then maybe in the real world, the civilian world, they would be like, you can't do that. That's inappropriate. Our children see these commercials. It's on aired on television at regular waking hours. And I think that probably has something to do with the part of it where if it is not, if it is subliminal and it's not direct, then it could be more acceptable to the human eye. And it could be something that, where people are like, well, no, that's, it's a lingerie company that's like classy and pretty, even though it's obviously selling sexuality at the same time.

00:43

'''Eric:''' Well I think that the issue of deniability now, I mean we were talking— I should say this is the first day we've ever met. We've talked on the phone a bunch of times. One of the people I've sort of pointed you towards is this evolutionary theorist Bob Trivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers). And he wrote this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Folly_of_Fools). I mean, it's really, you know, one of the most prominent theorists of our time. And he wrote this book called the folly of fools that talks about the evolutionary basis of self-deception as the precursor to being able to manipulate others. And if you think about, for example, I had Bret Easton Ellis in the studio who wrote American Psycho and Less Than Zero. And we were talking about the issue of seduction. And he said that he wants to be seduced all the time. He doesn't want everything to be explicit. He doesn't want everything, you know, as a mutually agreed upon decision, that in part what is wonderful and delicious to him about life has to do with seduction, and that selection involves manipulation. But in a world where I think many more people are colliding without a common understanding of each other, not coming from the same backgrounds, there's really an increased propensity for humans to get these signals wildly wrong. It's probably always been there, but maybe there's an increased ability. So weirdly, the way I see it, the civilian world has always been based on sort of self deception, and then there have been both the problems that come from that and the really much more exciting aspects that come from that. But when it works, probably there's an extra magic to it. Any thoughts on that between like what, what translates to mystique? Do you see that when you're looking at your civilian friends, that they're kind of saying, well, I wonder if he likes me? I got a message. I don't know how to interpret it.

00:45

'''Ashley:''' Oh, well, like 100% when it comes to me. Even just like dating, I am a very transparent, open person in these aspects of where I, I don't, I don't do the whole seduction game and I kind of just am an open book and I find that a lot of times it is faulty, where, you know, a lot of people do want this type of seduction. They like these types of games or whatnot in the sense of where they, they feel like when you're, and I, I think it could be because the general public is not so honest and open with what they want, that it's like a shock value, where they're like, well, this girl is just really being completely open in general with what she enjoys. And it's often something I loop back around with my therapist where I'm like, do I need to start being like the more civilianesque type of a person, to be a more dateable person? Whereas instead of being this vulnerable self where I am just constantly myself and say what I like and what I feel in these moments and

'''Eric:''' Pretty big tradeoff.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, it is. And I often find myself incapable of catering to the general public. I don't know how to do these all in kind of mind games on myself. But it is interesting where I do find that the most common people do enjoy this type of seduction and whatnot. They don't want things to be so blunt and almost easy to an extent. There has to be some sort of work involved and trickery. I believe that it is like a very common theme, at least even in like my dating world. It is.

'''Eric:''' So one of the things that I thought was really terrific that I first heard from you with some of your ideas about how to make sure that if people are considering entering the erotic arts professionally, that they're making good decisions, that you feel that very clearly this has been a great decision for you. It's worked out financially at a great level. You've been in the business for a long time, haven't been chewed up, you seem to have an incredibly positive attitude. But what I was talking to you about was, well, you know, how uncommon is that. You're obviously in a very unusual position, and you came up with this idea of having like a virtual reality simulator of what it would be like to enter the business. Can you say more about that?

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I think that there are so many people, I mean you get to start the industry at age 18. And I think that there are so many people who don't necessarily start for the right reasons. Even when I first became in the industry, I was a very hypersexual adolescent. And when I began the industry, it was mostly for money. Though I started off as an extra, I wasn't partaking in these sexual acts. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I had no idea, the concepts of it all and whatnot. And I think that now if a young male or female can get the opportunity to really grasp the sense of what can happen when he joined the industry, it would be, I think a good filter for a lot of the youth and whatnot. So I think it'd be great to have this idea of a virtual reality that allows people to put themselves inside different types of scenarios. So maybe like one scenario is you go in and you tell your parents that you've now joined the adult industry and one of the reactions are that your parents are distraught, they humiliate you, they shame you, they disown you, things of this sort.

'''Eric:''' These are fairly common?

'''Ashley:''' Yes. Yeah. I think a lot of people have parents who are racist. There are some parents who are like, yes you can do porn but not interracial porn and like weird things like that. And so they're making their children racist by association because maybe this child wouldn't care, you know, they would love to have sex with a person of another race, but they don't want their father or mother to disown them. So by association then listening to their parental rules and guidelines, they will not partake in interracial sex and things like that. So I think that this would be an interesting factor and I think it'd be very interesting to put the parents in these simulations as well for a youthful characters or maybe even older people who get in the industry. So maybe the parents can understand what it's like to be the adult entertainer and to have their parents be so harshly judging and aggressive and whatnot. And maybe your parents are in a religious state. You know, you could maybe fill out a little questionnaire and you're like, my dad is Christian. So like how would his Christian beliefs affect us negatively and put the father in that same, you know, virtual reality. And maybe it could also help change the parents to be more accepting. But there also are obviously the parents who will just be terrible and unaccepting. And I think there are other ways to put the future stars in the virtual reality. Whereas we had a one star, rest in peace, August Ames where yeah, she had commit suicide from what I gather, some internet bullying where she did not partake in a sex scene with a crossover star, which is a star who performs both in male to male scenes and male to female scenes. And I'm sure she struggled with other mental illness issues and things like of that sort. And I think that if we were able to put these adolescents in, or these 18 year olds, or these people, future stars in the industry, they would be able to get the experience of the humiliation, the tweets and the social media hate that you're going to get the, the ongoing, you know, struggle with dating.

'''Eric:''' Ashley, but, how do you do it? I mean, it comes back, it's absolutely brutal.

'''Ashley:''' It is. But I recognize that when I, when I think about it, when I was when I was in elementary school, kids would make fun of me because I, I'm kind of like a hairy girl. I have like hairy arms and whatnot and hairy legs. So they would call me wolf woman or gorilla girl and I would just start howling like a wolf or like grunting around like a, like a monkey. And I think that I have always just personally taken criticism and made it comical. So for me, when I see someone saying some hurtful comments, I'm always like, hi, you're brilliant. Like it's, it's amazing. It's so hilarious to me. So I have a different ability into translating how negative terminology and derogatory statements towards myself that actually impacts me

00:52

'''Eric:''' Well you literally have a tattoo in another language. I don't know which one it was.

'''Ashley:''' Chinese,

'''Eric:''' It says, when life gives you lemons make lemonade. So that seems to be pretty deep.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I've always been able to make things a more positive experience within myself. And I think that if we were able to help see which people could handle these types of experiences, which who could handle the shame, who could handle, you know, all of the terrible aspects that come into being an adult entertainer, then I think it would be a better filter for, you know, allowing these experiences and maybe they should have these experiences for the viewers who are saying the terrible nonsense so that they could understand. Cause I'm pretty sure—

'''Eric:''' How much pain they’re inflicting.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, Like, I think that listening to one of the Sam Harris podcasts, he was talking about to somebody where they were talking about putting men in simulations where they get cat called or you know, sexual suggestions thrown at them where they were now almost be able to think of like, wow, actually maybe I won't treat women that I don't know like this because it's actually not okay. And it made me feel uncomfortable.

'''Eric:''' Well, could I actually I wasn't planning on doing this, but can I give you a compliment? One of the things that really discouraged me from going into podcasting or doing anything on YouTube is that when I started to see, I think that the first time I was on a major YouTube podcast was Dave Rubin’s show. And I noticed that people stop the video at particular places and they say “what's going on at 15:37?” And you may not know this, but the reason that you're sitting to my right is that I have a condition called Duane syndrome. And so the guest always sits in that chair because my left eye is partially paralyzed, and it will not go out. I did not actually have this diagnosed until I was an adult. And as a result, I very frequently appeared with some amount of cross-eyedness and my YouTube comments reflect like, you know, I remember one comment was did you see that at 1821 his right eye goes in to check for information and then it comes back out because it found where it's stored in the brain. That was like, very playful and fun. But then some of them, particularly the ones having to do with the moles on my face, really started to get to me. And what I found, and here comes the compliment, I found, and I have to confess, I can't really watch your really wild stuff, but I have watched some of your discussion about your body image and you talk about being small breasted. You're very open about this, and saying, I don't want silicone and I know that I'm supposed to get silicone in order to earn the big money. And I thought, wow, she's just talking quite openly about this. And then you didn't shave your armpits for a while and then you did a YouTube video about the decision not to shave your armpits and shaving them and you confounded everybody's expectations for what you're supposed to do as a big time, a erotic performer. And I just took so much away from that. It was, it was very inspiring that you would be that courageous and it was something that, you know, personally moved me and helped me a little bit. You know, also people don't think my hair is real because they think it's a wig because I'm too old. I’m not kidding you. So, you know, that was a great image from a most unexpected corner of the world, so thank you.

00:56

'''Ashley:''' Oh, of course. Yeah. I think that like a part of that simulation I was speaking about would be about body image because there are so many young women that I've met who, like one particular model, I won't say her name, but she said that her, she had so many fans and I don't even know what, how so many are, but she had so many fans who told her that her breasts were like pointed in different directions, that she had two breast augmentations. And I could imagine that the people who complimented her greatly outweighed those who didn't. But people sit in, they think about these negative comments and it affects them greatly to the point to where they will change their body. I've, I know girls who have had complaints about their nose or their this or their that and they very openly go on their Instagram and they talk about, well, you guys complain about this on my body. So I fixed it. And, and it's very sad to me that these people who aren't mentally strong enough put themselves out there and allow the feedback from some Joe Schmoe wherever he is saying these hurtful things towards the women or and men. And it affects them greatly to the fact to where they actually will pursue action and will change their body and put silicone breasts in them, which can be very dangerous and it can be life threatening. You put yourself under this anaesthesia, which is already a risk, as well as the risk of the poisoning of the silicone. And it's really like I know quite a few girls who gotten the silicone and then have gotten it removed later. I know a girl who has gotten her her butt done and then removed afterwards and these are very extreme life threatening surgeries to put yourself through over the simple fact of you think your audience will like you more. And to me it's obscene where I've not I, when I first started the industry, I had, my first agent told me if I wanted to be a big star, I would have to dye my hair blonde and get a boob job. And I have done neither of them.

00:58

'''Eric:''' So this is the thing. She's like, you really are. You don't, you're very disagreeable. You don't take all of the standard advice and somehow it's been working out for you. You, I like, let me be a little bit more forthcoming. I don't think I'm entirely comfortable with what it is that you do for a living. But I've tried to get over that because you know, you're just been such a genuine and wonderful person to talk to about all of these things. And so in part you're, you're extremely disarming. You get people to be comfortable with the fact that they do have a sexual response to you and you get people to accept you on your own terms and you've risen to the top without any, you know, seemingly any consequence to just being yourself. How, how did you figure that out, and nobody else did in your area?

'''Ashley:''' I honestly am not sure. I, I think that's, to some extent my parents had, you know, obviously a very large part of that. My mother has always been she was never like the type of person who took her body image into consideration. My mother was like an overweight woman who kind of never really dressed nice. And I think that that kind of helped me a lot too. And she was always proud of herself and her confidence was always very high. And I think a huge part of my ability to just kind of accept myself for myself was to see that as a role model is that she still found herself to be beautiful and, and loved herself even though she may have not been in the standards of beauty. And, and sometimes I wonder if I would be more in my own head if I had this attractive hot mom who dressed the part and put on makeup and all of these things where she was not that at all. And she always was very accepting into whatever we wanted to wear. And like when I went through my goth phase—

'''Eric:''' You had a goth phase?

'''Ashley:''' I did have a goth phase.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Ashley:''' And she supported and got me all of the like funky clothes and all these things. And when I did go through my like more sexually explicit phase, she was always like very, very open to everything that we wanted. When I wanted to start wearing like thong undergarments, she was like, yeah, let, we'll go get them for you.

01:00

'''Eric:''' Do you think that you're sort of set at the factory at a more hyper-sexualized level.

'''Ashley:''' I do think so. I think that like I was always around a lot of like sexual activity. My, I grew up in like a trailer with my uncles who had a lot of girlfriends. Their girlfriends were strippers and they were drug users.

'''Eric:''' So there's probably a developmental aspect. Maybe it's not set at the factory, but that the, that environment—

'''Ashley:''' Yes. And, and my, my dad does claim to be like a sex addict and things like that. So sometimes I wonder if there is some sort of, you know, biological self, something in me that is more hypersexual than others and cause I don't think that everyone is meant to be, you know, into sex. I think that some are more than others. I think like Nikola Tesla was a Virgin when he died and that makes sense. He was studying science the whole time. So like I think that there are certain people who are,

'''Eric:''' Newton was also pretty asexual.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah. And to me it makes sense, like not everyone is meant to be a hyper-sexual person. Like some of us should be studying the arts or sciences or, you know, hunting and gathering rather than procreating.

01:02
'''Eric:''' Okay. I mean, I think I mentioned to you that I had heard a podcast with a professional colleague of yours, Asa Kira, and she had said, I don't think that I'm an appropriate role model for all young women. I think that I'm an appropriate role model for hypersexual young women. And I thought that was fascinating. That hadn't occurred to me that we may be partitioned into different groups and that a hyper-sexualized young woman might need an inappropriate role model that is highly specific. Do you feel comfortable being that in your area?

'''Ashley:''' 100% yeah. I think that since very young age I had always been a very hypersexual person and I never necessarily had like a role model and, and I agree, I wouldn't say that I am a traditional type of role model, although I would like to be. I think to some extent I, I would like to think that the more average girl could admire me and look up to me for other aspects and whatnot. And cause I, like I said, I know I have a lot of girls who know who I am from like podcasts and stuff. They had no idea my work or anything like that and they just admire me for the way I speak in my opinions on things.

'''Eric:''' It's very hard for me to integrate. You know, when I've spoken to on the phone before you say, you know, it's been great talking to you, but unfortunately I have to get back to the set and I have this like, it's like somebody telling me I have to go fight the battle of Stalingrad. Some terrible, crazy things about that. But you're like, Oh no, I love my work. And it's just, it's, it's very funny to see my own discomfort and prudishness crop up.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, it is interesting. It's very, it's a very bizarre thing for me. Even when I meet people like yourself, you know, and like other types of fans like I've, because I have these other avenues of attracting personas. I've had very young adolescents come up to me and asked me for photos for my podcasts with like Logan Paul and this is absolutely mind boggling to me and I, their parent will take the photo and I'm just like, do they even know? And I don't know what I’m supposed to say.

1:04

'''Eric:''' Well, this is the thing. I think that there's a lot of it that's not personal. When it comes to the trepidation it has to do with, I have no plan for how we are going to negotiate all of the issues that come up because in my world we're all wildly sexually hypocritical and that's normal. That's, that's the way the civilian world has always been. And presumably it's likely to be that for the foreseeable future. Whereas I see you as the sort of dangerous truth telling machine, experimenting with things that you know, that are unimaginable. Now you just went to Burning Man, and Burning Man is a very odd thing in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada because for one week, somehow the normal rules are suspended. How do you find this sort of, I didn't find it. I went once, I didn't find it incredibly hot. There was a lot of nakedness and there was a lot of play, but it wasn't a wildly erotic experience in my understanding. Did you find it otherwise?

'''Ashley:''' I also agree to not find it as a very erotic experience and it could just be because it feels kind of dirty with all the dust everywhere. To me, just hygienically I'm not really sure.

'''Eric:''' It was a very creative place. Like the art is astounding.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, it is a beautiful place and I think that it's just a, a place of be people to be able to be comfortable in their bodies. And I think that the fact that it's not hyper erotic is also why people are so comfortable with themselves because they are able to walk around naked and look at, looked at as an art piece rather than looked at as a sexual object. Whereas

1:06

'''Eric:''' Even an erotic art piece that isn't necessarily going to immediately lead to a a sense of arousal.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, exactly. They are able in that moment to embrace themselves for who they are because you'll find young, old, overweight, thin, attractive, unattractive people who are just nude running around and everyone is just so confident in themselves. And I think it's just such a beautiful environment and place for people to really be able to accept themselves. And it's kind of sad that that is the one place that they are able to let their guard down.

01:07

'''Eric:''' It was very interesting. I remember seeing a woman on a bicycle who had very clearly had a radical mastectomy and she was totally topless and she didn't, I mean aggressively, she was having the time of her life and didn't care. And there was this sort of, you know, cocoon of like acceptance and love that was clearly in the air. I don't think it's an easy thing. Now, Burning Man has this very funny thing that they refer to the civilian world as the default world. And so in the default world it's very tough to get that kind of radical acceptance. Do you find that there's some sort of similarity between that deviation from the civilian world or the default world that is burning man and the porn set?

'''Ashley:''' I would say 100%. Like a lot of my friends that I work with are a lot of my friends. I get them to end up working for me. So I've got some friends who are like mainstream editors and I somehow managed to get them to start editing my adult videos. And I have one that I ended up taking to Burning Man with me who had such a, he recently told me how he's had such an epiphany within himself to be able to be so comfortable with his own body and comfortable with other people, other people's bodies by simply editing my videos. He's not on set, he's not partaking in any of the activities or anything like that, but because he's just been editing my videos, he's found that he's able to have a different relationship with nudity and sex and all of these things, whereas in his regular world previously to meeting me, he was more, I guess, vanilla or follow the standards of these civil civilian type people where it was like, no nudity. You will never see him naked unless you are his girlfriend or partner at the time. And now he's in a totally different place where he, he said himself, he's like, by the end of Burning Man, I will be walking around naked too. And I think it, it's like this ability within himself where he is now, he's gotten to be able to put himself in the perspective in the shoes of us on set. He's, he's, he sees the delay of when before camera's cut. He sees like, you know, they start action and there's moments of us getting comfortable with each other. There's moments of us cutting and just kind of like being natural and ourselves. We're like taking a water break and everything like that. And I think that there are elements that definitely have helped people grow within themselves and be able to accept themselves as they're just natural human self.

01:09

'''Eric:''' So it seems to me that there's definitely something to learn from this weird pornographic universe. On the other hand, I can't see that these lessons will ever fully translate. So, for example do you remember this horrible number of the Oscars were, I forget who it was, somebody was singing the song, “we saw your boobs” and it was going through all of the actresses that appeared topless. And the idea being that, well, if I've seen your boobs, then in some sense I've got something on you. And I thought about John Lennon and Yoko Ono doing this album called, I think, Two Virgins. And they are appearing naked on the album, so let's get it over with. So now you've all seen us and let's now, now you don't have any power over us anymore because it's done. Do you think that there's some thing like that that at some level there's this revelation that you have your privacy up until a certain point and then when you've given up your privacy in exchange somehow you get a, a comfort with self?

01:10

'''Ashley:''' Yes, a hundred percent. I think that there was a study done that showed that women who perform an adult entertainment or as a sex worker have higher levels of confidence within themselves. Then the average woman and I, I think a hundred percent that there's something about putting yourself out there to be so vulnerable kind of forces you to kind of have to not care what other people think or say. And I think that there's also, as much as you get these negative statements, there's still so much glorification in that there's still so many people who are applauding you for doing what you do. Like I look like a normal girl, an average girl who is probably going to college or has some sort of basic job. And when I go to the store and target, I'm a very social person. I make small talk with anyone and I often will like, I just start conversations with like maybe this random 60 year old lady and we're kind of like, you know, talking, lollygagging. And she asks me, Oh, like what are you a model? What do you do? And I tell her, well, I'm actually like one of the number one porn stars in the world. And a lot of times they look at me, they like size me up and down and they're like, “you like, you don't have big silicone boobs. “You don't have all this injection in your face”, like, “You?” And I'm like, I explained to them—

'''Eric:''' You're also pathologically polite.

01:12

'''Ashley:''' Yes I am. I am a lovely lady, I think, and I'm a lot of, a lot of times when it's like an older woman, she will tell me how she regrets not being more exploring in her life and regrets not being able to or not have done things that were more adventurous sexually or erotically or maybe like, I think one woman told me she wanted to do like nude modeling, but she never did because her herself was a petite small brunette woman. And it was, it's always so interesting to me that the positive reinforcement I get from older women who are always like, “wow, like I am so happy that you do that. And like, I wish that I have been more—

'''Eric:''' I think there are a lot of post-menopausal regrets. I was friendly with a woman who I take to be maybe in her mid to late sixties, who started for some reason as I was leaving San Francisco telling me more than she might have otherwise. And she talked about how back in the day she had allowed people to eat their meals off of her naked body as a kind of performance art style. And she was just having the time of her life cackling about it. And we were like laughing and making rude jokes. And I thought about the way in which maybe the part of the problem is that men really need women in general in the civilian world to be much more simple in terms of their sexuality, that you want to imagine your mother and your grandmother typically as somehow bringing forth life with, you know, not multiple lovers and not having much of a history and that somehow I wonder whether it's male needs for an idealized concept of woman that make this, this pressure lifelong and that postmenopausally many women just say, well, what, what did I, what did I do? I gave up so much of myself.

01:14

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I agree. I do think that a lot of men want these types of desires. And I don't know if it's biology or what it is. Sometimes I don't even think that necessarily matters. It's probably like environmental. But I know personally when I talk to a lot of guys that are my friends, they're like, I love you and I adore you, but I couldn't date you.

'''Eric:''' What do you make of that? Does that make sense to you?

'''Ashley:''' No, it doesn't make sense to me. Like, and I don't know if it's because I as a woman would, I guess biology, biologically would look for the most suitable male and would probably have multiple children. If it was a primal world, I'd be like, Oh, he's like six feet tall and big hunky man. And he's like a smart, lovely gentleman. Like I would imagine maybe I would have these desires to have these different types of children so it could explain my attraction to a variety of men. But I also feel like men would naturally be that way too. But I, I don't know really what it is. Like, I think I would like, what is it? Some one of the big cats like lions or something. We'll kill the young of another. You know,

01:15

'''Eric:''' It's even worse than that. You wanna get into it? I believe the idea is that if the head of the pride changes and there's a new line at the head, not only will he kill the young offspring of his predecessor, but that, horribly, the female lions response to this is to go into estrus, to become a receptive and aroused by the killing of their young. Right? Like, no, I mean, nature is just so busy. It's so crazy, right? And, and we can't really, except this in part. And so my belief is, is that a lot of what you're seeing is the evolutionary program that says, if I know this person to be so aroused, it's not their personality, their looks, their this, their that. One, they've got a tremendous amount of sexual knowledge. So they're going to know exactly where I am on the totem pole of sexuality, which is terrifying. I think there's another aspect that has to do with how do I know this person isn't going to pick up and take off with somebody else because they've been, they've had their norms adjusted and there's another one that says, how do I know that any child will be mine, but more than anything, my guess is how do I know that I won't be mercilessly teased? Because everyone will say, Hey, I saw your girlfriend naked. I saw her doing this, I saw her doing that. And so the assault on the male ego and you know, just to be honest about it, I think almost none of us are secure enough to deal with it.

01:17

'''Ashley:''' Oh yeah. I know that every guy that I've dated publicly faces a large amount of sliding in the DMs of very aggressive, you know, harassment. And and I'm sure that even after our breakup, they are still dealing with the harassment because we were at one time a public image together and I would see some of the comments and they are absolutely brutal and terrible. And it's even actually one of the reasons why I'm terrified to have children because I think that I'm being the best mother possible by not having children because I think that the life that they could live could be full of suffering, whereas they'll be shamed their entire life possibly. Whereas, you know, that same statement where, how do you know that's your real dad? I've seen your mom take on many partners, you know, and like all of these kinds of very hurtful, terrible things and—

'''Eric:''' Direct assaults on our construct of masculinity. And this is why, you know, I noticed the other day that Jenna Jameson who— it was obviously a person in an era slightly before yours at the top of the porn profession— was following me and tweeting about the Jeffrey Epstein situation. And she is pretty aggressive and she had her kid in her picture at the top of her Twitter profile. And that is a very aggressive mama bear who is not taking any shit from anybody. I think, you know, one of the things I've, you ever see this movie, The Martian?

01:18

'''Ashley:''' It sounds right. Is that the one with—

'''Eric:''' with Matt Damon—

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I've heard of it. I did not actually see it.

'''Eric:''' Okay. You know how, like, it's one thing to get a human to Mars, but it's much more difficult to imagine how we're going to get a human back? So maybe it's easy to go one way? I think of planet porn as like Mars. That very often there's a portal into something where you have a lot to learn and that's part of the reason that, you know, I was eager to have you on the program, but it's not clear that there's a return ticket.

01:19

'''Ashley:''' Oh, I agree. 100% I think that it is a very, that's what I, one thing I was saying earlier is like is the seal of approval that I become a scientist, you know, like what, what do I have to do to become acceptable in the public's eye? Like do I write an amazing film? The screenplay that now is like, wow, she's more than an adult actress.

'''Eric:''' Can we talk about a couple of these? Because I think these are fun. One thing is, I dunno, do you know the story of Marie Curie on her second Nobel prize? Okay. So you know, obviously it's Polish scientist living in France. Second Nobel prize, she's told we're going to give you the prize, but you can't come to Stockholm to pick it up because we think that you're getting busy with a married man. Right. Can you imagine? I was going to write a book called Radium Slut. Because of her work with the radioactive element radium. And we were so wrapped around the axle about her extracurricular life that we couldn't bring ourselves to let her have the pleasure of a second Nobel Prize given her behavior. Some other ones in this category, which I think are kind of interesting— obviously you must know the story of Hetty Lamar? So the spread spectrum technology that allows your phone to keep a call, but to jump from frequency to frequency was apparently co-developed by her. Now she was an actress who was famous for appearing nude. She was like the most beautiful woman of her time early in German films. I think before she came to the U.S. I think it was German films, not quite sure, but again, highly sexualized female, brilliant as the day is long. And that these examples, there's another one that's I would love to have on this program. I can't remember her name exactly. Maybe Brooke Magnanti? And her pen name was Belle de Jour. She was studying for a PhD and she was turning tricks as a high class call girl in the UK because the stipends weren't high enough. She loved the work, she loved her clients, she loved science. And so these are all examples of highly sexualized, self-sexualized females who have been at a very high intellectual level. Now, one possibility is that we should desexualize the work environment and science. However, if there turned out to be a correlation between outsized performance and hypersexualization in females, we wouldn't be running the experiment to be able to see whether there was any kind of a correlation. So these are, these are topics which are weirdly too hard to talk about. And my concern is, is that we're not built, I mean, one of the things I've loved talking about these topics with you is that we've managed to keep this I, and I think I, I'm going to take credit. I can kill the sexuality and sex so that we kept it pretty much above board and above the neck. And that we need to learn how to keep sex from turning sexy in conversation because it's too important a topic, not to be able to discuss. What do you think?

01:22

'''Ashley:''' Oh, I agree 100%. I would like to think that, you know, hypersexuality and intelligence kind of go hand in hand.

'''Eric:''' Well, I think it's a suspicion, but you can't bring that up because the other major force is that the workplace should be highly desexualized. And because I think that there is such incredible denial and you know, there, there isn't a recognition of female sexuality in the workplace. There's only a sense, you know, in general, of male transgression. I think it's very unclear what the way forward is to figure out what is keeping women out of the sciences. My personal opinion is that it has to do with kinwork, that women are taking up most of the work in caring for children, caring for elder relatives, and that the burdens of kinwork are often prohibitive when it comes to a really intense career. But I think we have a very difficult road ahead because I think half the brains of, you know, half the neurons in the world ride on female shoulders, and that that should be a huge source of opportunity, but somehow there's a puzzle of sexuality. Let me ask you a different question, cause you're nodding. Are you familiar with Christina Hoff Sommers? If you're following a Sam Harris who I think is at the American Enterprise Institute, she sort of a second-wave feminist, not a third-wave feminist. She calls herself the factual feminist. She's called a lot of attention to the idea that the wage gap, where women maybe are thought to get 75 cents for every dollar that a man gets paid for equal work. You have a very unusual situation, which is that in your workplace, there is a huge wage gap.

01:24

'''Ashley:''' Oh yeah.

'''Eric:''' Talk to me about that.

'''Ashley:''' There's not only a huge wage gap. I think that there's also like a huge, maybe attention gap.

File:ThePortal-Ep21 AshleyMathews-EricWeinstein.png

2020-04-12T03:33:13Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

Peter Thiel

2020-04-12T03:30:22Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==
[[File:PeterThiel-profile-pic.jpg|600px|thumb|right|Billionaire technologist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel]]
Peter Thiel ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel Wikipedia]) is a billionaire technologist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[1:_Peter_Thiel|Episode #001 - Peter Thiel on "The Portal": "An Era of Stagnation & Universal Institutional Failure." - July 17, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==
[[17:_Anna_Khachiyan_-_Reconstructing_The_Mystical_Feminine_From_The_Ashes_Of_“The_Feminine_Mystique”|Episode #017 - Anna Khachiyan: Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” - December 20, 2019]]

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entrepreneurs]]
[[Category:Billionaires]]

Daniel Schmachtenberger

2020-04-12T03:30:14Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses|Episode #027 - Daniel Schmachtenberger: On Avoiding Apocalypses - March 27, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Futurists]]
[[Category:Philosophers]]

Eric Lewis

2020-04-12T03:28:25Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == Episode #028 - Eric Lewis: The Singular Genius of Elew - March 28, 2020..."

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[28: Eric Lewis - The Singular Genius of Elew|Episode #028 - Eric Lewis: The Singular Genius of Elew - March 28, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Professional Musicians]]

Daniel Schmachtenberger

2020-04-12T03:26:55Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == 27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses|Episode #027 - Daniel Schmachtenberger: On Avoiding Apocalypses -..."

Peter Thiel

2020-04-12T03:25:55Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

James O’Keefe

2020-04-12T03:23:32Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == 26: James O’Keefe: What is (and isn't) Journalism in the 21st century|Episode #026 - James O’Keefe: What is (and isn..."

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[26: James O’Keefe: What is (and isn't) Journalism in the 21st century|Episode #026 - James O’Keefe: What is (and isn't) Journalism in the 21st century - March 19, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Journalists]]

Kai Lenny

2020-04-12T03:21:43Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == 24: Kai Lenny - To Play and Flirt with Giants|Episode #024 - Kai Lenny: To Play and Flirt with Giants - February 28, 202..."

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[24: Kai Lenny - To Play and Flirt with Giants|Episode #024 - Kai Lenny: To Play and Flirt with Giants - February 28, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Professional Athletes]]

Agnes Callard

2020-04-12T03:20:02Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == 23: Agnes Callard - Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits|Episode #023 - Agnes Callard: Courage, Meta-cogn..."

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[23: Agnes Callard - Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits|Episode #023 - Agnes Callard: Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits - February 23, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Philosophers]]

Ben Greenfield

2020-04-12T03:18:37Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == 22: Ben Greenfield - Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness|Episode #022 - Ben Greenfield: Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness..."

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[22: Ben Greenfield - Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness|Episode #022 - Ben Greenfield: Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness - February 15, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]

Ashley Mathews

2020-04-12T03:16:57Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == 21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart|Episode #021 - Ashley Mathews (ak..."

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart|Episode #021 - Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart - January 31, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entertainers]]

Riley Reid

2020-04-12T03:16:47Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==
'''Riley Reid''' is the alter-ego/pseudonym used by pornographic actress, Ashley Mathews. See [[Ashley Mathews]].

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart|Episode #021 - Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart - January 31, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entertainers]]

Sir Roger Penrose

2020-04-12T03:11:57Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[20: Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy|Episode #020 - Sir Roger Penrose: Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy - January 24, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Physicists]]

Bret Weinstein

2020-04-12T03:11:08Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC|Episode #019 - Bret Weinstein: The Prediction and the DISC - January 17, 2020]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Biologists]]
[[Category:Siblings of Eric Weinstein]]

Anna Khachiyan

2020-04-12T03:10:36Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[17:_Anna_Khachiyan_-_Reconstructing_The_Mystical_Feminine_From_The_Ashes_Of_“The_Feminine_Mystique”|Episode #017 - Anna Khachiyan: Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” - December 20, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]

Tyler Cowen

2020-04-12T03:09:53Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized|Episode #016 - Tyler Cowen: The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized - December 16, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Economists]]

Garrett Lisi

2020-04-12T03:09:12Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself|Episode #015 - Garrett Lisi: My Arch-nemesis, Myself - December 6, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Physicists]]

London Tsai

2020-04-12T03:08:44Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[14: London Tsai - The Reclusive Dean of The New Escherians|Episode #014 - London Tsai: The Reclusive Dean of The New Escherians - November 30, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Mathematicians]]
[[Category:Artists]]

Garry Kasparov

2020-04-12T03:08:17Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[13:_Garry_Kasparov_-_Avoiding_Zugzwang_in_AI_and_Politics|Episode #013 - Garry Kasparov: Avoiding Zugzwang in AI and Politics - November 23, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==
[[17:_Anna_Khachiyan_-_Reconstructing_The_Mystical_Feminine_From_The_Ashes_Of_“The_Feminine_Mystique”|Episode #017 - Anna Khachiyan: Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” - December 20, 2019]]

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]

Vitalik Buterin

2020-04-12T03:07:18Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[12:_Vitalik_Buterin_-_The_Ethereal_Prince_and_His_Virtual_Machine|Episode #012 - Vitalik Buterin: The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine - November 21, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==
[[17:_Anna_Khachiyan_-_Reconstructing_The_Mystical_Feminine_From_The_Ashes_Of_“The_Feminine_Mystique”|Episode #017 - Anna Khachiyan: Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” - December 20, 2019]]

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entrepreneurs]]
[[Category:Engineers]]

Sam Harris

2020-04-12T03:06:17Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[11:_Sam_Harris_-_Fighting_with_Friends|Episode #011 - Sam Harris: Fighting with Friends - November 15, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==
[[17:_Anna_Khachiyan_-_Reconstructing_The_Mystical_Feminine_From_The_Ashes_Of_“The_Feminine_Mystique”|Episode #017 - Anna Khachiyan: Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” - December 20, 2019]]

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Neuroscientists]]
[[Category:Philosophers]]

Julie Lindahl

2020-04-12T03:04:17Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree|Episode #010 - Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree - October 31, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Authors]]

Bryan Callen

2020-04-12T03:03:35Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[9:_Bryan_Callen_-_Cracking_Wise|Episode #009 - Bryan Callen: Cracking Wise - October 30, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entertainers]]
[[Category:Comedians]]

Bret Easton Ellis

2020-04-12T03:02:48Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Mentions on The Portal */

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[7:_Bret_Easton_Ellis_-_The_Dark_Laureate_of_Generation_X|Episode #007 - Bret Easton Ellis: The Dark Laureate of Generation X - September 29, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==
[[17:_Anna_Khachiyan_-_Reconstructing_The_Mystical_Feminine_From_The_Ashes_Of_“The_Feminine_Mystique”|Episode #017 - Anna Khachiyan: Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” - December 20, 2019]]

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entertainers]]
[[Category:Authors]]

The Portal Episodes List

2020-04-12T03:01:52Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

* [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal The Portal Podcast Homepage]
* [[Transcripts to be Made]]

{| class="episodes-table wikitable sortable"
|-
! # !! Guest !! Title
|-
| Special || || [[A Portal Special Presentation- Geometric Unity: A First Look]]
|-
| 28 || [[Eric Lewis]] || [[28: Eric Lewis - The Singular Genius of Elew]]
|-
| 27 || [[Daniel Schmachtenberger]] || [[27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses]]
|-
| 26 || [[James O’Keefe]] || [[26: James O’Keefe: What is (and isn't) Journalism in the 21st century]]
|-
| 25 || || [[25: The Construct: Jeffrey Epstein]]
|-
| 24 || [[Kai Lenny]] || [[24: Kai Lenny - To Play and Flirt with Giants]]
|-
| 23 || [[Agnes Callard]] || [[23: Agnes Callard - Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits]]
|-
| 22 || [[Ben Greenfield]] || [[22: Ben Greenfield - Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness]]
|-
| 21 || [[Ashley Mathews]] (aka [[Riley Reid]]) || [[21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart]]
|-
| 20 || [[Sir Roger Penrose]] || [[20: Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy]]
|-
| 19 || [[Bret Weinstein]] || [[19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC]]
|-
| 18 || || [[18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal & Chapter 2020]]
|-
| 17 || [[Anna Khachiyan]] || [[17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”]]
|-
| 16 || [[Tyler Cowen]] || [[16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized]]
|-
| 15 || [[Garrett Lisi]] || [[15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself]]
|-
| 14 || [[London Tsai]] || [[14: London Tsai - The Reclusive Dean of The New Escherians]]
|-
| 13 || [[Garry Kasparov]] || [[13: Garry Kasparov - Avoiding Zugzwang in AI and Politics]]
|-
| 12 || [[Vitalik Buterin]] || [[12: Vitalik Buterin - The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine]]
|-
| 11 || [[Sam Harris]] || [[11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends]]
|-
| 10 || [[Julie Lindahl]] || [[10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree]]
|-
| 9 || [[Bryan Callen]] || [[9: Bryan Callen - Cracking Wise]]
|-
| 8 || [[Andrew Yang]] || [[8: Andrew Yang - The Dangerously Different Candidate The Media Wants You To Ignore]]
|-
| 7 || [[Bret Easton Ellis]] || [[7: Bret Easton Ellis - The Dark Laureate of Generation X]]
|-
| 6 || [[Jocko Willink]] || [[6: Jocko Willink - The Way of the Violent Intellectual]]
|-
| 5 || [[David Wolpe]] || [[5: Rabbi Wolpe - “So a Rabbi and an atheist walk into a podcast...”]]
|-
| 4 || [[Timur Kuran]] || [[4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception]]
|-
| 3 || [[Werner Herzog]] || [[3: Werner Herzog]]
|-
| 2 || || [[2: What Is The Portal?]]
|-
| 1 || [[Peter Thiel]] || [[1: Peter Thiel]]
|-
| 0 || || [[0: Welcome to The Portal]]
|}

Bret Easton Ellis

2020-04-12T02:58:40Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[7:_Bret_Easton_Ellis_-_The_Dark_Laureate_of_Generation_X|Episode #007 - Bret Easton Ellis: The Dark Laureate of Generation X - September 29, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entertainers]]
[[Category:Authors]]

Jocko Willink

2020-04-12T02:57:36Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[6:_Jocko_Willink_-_The_Way_of_the_Violent_Intellectual|Episode #006 - Jocko Willink: The Way of the Violent Intellectual - September 7, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]

Timur Kuran

2020-04-12T02:55:56Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[4:_Timur_Kuran_-_The_Economics_of_Revolution_and_Mass_Deception|Episode #004 - Professor Timur Kuran: The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception - August 20, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Economists]]

David Wolpe

2020-04-12T02:55:17Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[5:_Rabbi_Wolpe_-_“So_a_Rabbi_and_an_atheist_walk_into_a_podcast...”|Episode #005 - Rabbi David Wolpe: "So a Rabbi and an atheist walk into a podcast..." - August 30, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]

Andrew Yang

2020-04-12T02:54:03Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[8:_Andrew_Yang_-_The_Dangerously_Different_Candidate_The_Media_Wants_You_To_Ignore|Episode #008 - Andrew Yang: The Dangerously Different Candidate The Media Wants You To Ignore - October 2, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==
[[17:_Anna_Khachiyan_-_Reconstructing_The_Mystical_Feminine_From_The_Ashes_Of_“The_Feminine_Mystique”|Episode #017 - Anna Khachiyan: Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” - December 20, 2019]]

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entrepreneurs]]
[[Category:Politicians]]

Peter Thiel

2020-04-12T02:52:55Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

Werner Herzog

2020-04-12T02:52:18Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

== General Info ==

== Appearances on The Portal ==
[[3:_Werner_Herzog|Episode #003 - Werner Herzog: The Outlaw as Revelator - July 25, 2019]]

== Mentions on The Portal ==

[[Category:Living People]]
[[Category:Portal Guests]]
[[Category:Entertainers]]

21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart

2020-04-12T02:49:52Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
Historically, fighting obscenity and indecency charges has always been a central part of the free speech movement. Jim Morrison, Mae West, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin have all been arrested for exciting the public in ways that authorities have found threatening. Recently, however, the erotic and comedic arts have undergone more cryptic attacks via [[Operation Chokepoint]], "cancellation", "no platforming", and inadequate press coverage given to cases of legal intimidation (e.g. the federal case under Miller v California standards brought against director John Stagliano).

In this episode, Eric sits down with the business woman who created the enduring character of the unlikely top pornstar [[Riley Reid]]. Continuing the theme of the [[Distributed Idea Suppression Complex|DISC (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex)]] we discuss issues like Operation Chokepoint and obscenity law as well more subtle issues like the difficulty of finding vendors willing to cross the Rubicon to work with legal erotic businesses.

[[Ashley Mathews|Ashley]], in the role of the Riley Reid character, has defied all pornographic convention by embracing [[Body Positivity|body positivity]], forgoing plastic surgery and opting for natural body hair at times. Additionally she has made a social statement by doing a popular artistic scene which makes a political and business case for greater [[Transsexual Acceptance|transsexual acceptance]]. Her main tool appears to be a palpable human decency and sweetness coupled to an uncanny ability to assess, manage and survive extreme business risk within a poorly understood industry that has confounded all expectations.

While this episode is generally not explicit, it is not for everyone given the content and so listener discretion is advised.

<span class="button">[[ep20 | << Previous Episode]]</span> <span class="button">[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/1bdfe96f-d3b7-41be-b884-8bfe8fb8e897 Listen to Episode 21]</span> <span class="button">[https://rss.art19.com/episodes/1bdfe96f-d3b7-41be-b884-8bfe8fb8e897.mp3 Download episode (mp3)]</span> <span class="button">[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHNBCVGH34c Watch Episode 21]</span> <span class="button">[[ep22 | Next Episode >>]]</span>

[[All Episodes]]

== Sponsors ==

[[Athletic Greens]]: Get 20 FREE Athletic Greens Travel Packs, valued at $79, with your first purchase http://athleticgreens.com/portal

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== Transcript ==

''Note: This is a partial transcript; we are missing the last ~20 minutes.''

'''Prologue'''

00:00

'''Eric:''' It is a very simple observation that sex is sexy, that is almost, but not quite a tautology. Yet its implications seem, at least to me, to be quite profound and easily missed given that one could argue from first principles that sex is ultimately one of the most powerful forces shaping human society, but whenever we attempt to discuss sex directly, our autonomic nervous system becomes engaged if we're not very careful. As the comedian Tom Lehrer once said, when correctly viewed, everything is lewd. If you look hard enough, you will see that nearly every sentence has a double entendre, like that last one. As a result, when we attempt to analyze and discuss sex and sexuality using our prefrontal cortex, the conversation almost reliably goes off the rails with a probability approaching one. As our lower brains become engaged, aroused, and amused, it's almost designed not to be discussable.

Yet there are two groups of people I see who do better than the rest of us in this regard. Some academics such as evolutionary theorists, physicians and sex researchers, and commercial sex workers. In this episode, I'm interviewing one of the world's most famous actresses, yet her name is all but unknown. She is Ashley Matthews, creator of Riley Reid, one of the top porn stars of our time. My goal in this conversation is to try to stop sex from becoming sexy just long enough so that we might learn a little bit more about how the pornography community and its civilian clientele are now interacting. Now, you may wish to say that you've never found pornography interesting, but that doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that an individual's desire to avoid it doesn't stop it from affecting society as a whole. Like it or not, pornography is like dark matter forming an Einstein lens with an immense gravitational field effecting everything around it.

You don't have to watch it directly to feel it distorting us by monitoring our hypocrisies so that it can cater to our denied selves. It also presents a strange mirror to our society as if there were a Newton's law for pornography. It appears that everything we do here on earth and civilian life is mirrored on planet porn. They have a wage gap, but one that, at least naively, goes in the other direction. When I call Ashley at her office, she has to be sexy to her coworkers simply to be professional and she claims that her experience with onset harassment is near zero. Now, I'm in no position to evaluate these claims, but it takes some getting used to, and just like another planet, there may be no easy way back from a one way ticket to becoming well known as a performer. Now I should probably describe the ground rules for the conversation you're about to hear so that you can better understand the context of the episode.

I asked Ashley to humor me and that we would both try to lay off explicit language for the most part. We also agreed that we were not going to talk about sex much. Rather we were going to try to talk around it. I'm sure the ratings will suffer as a result, but if I'm honest, I'm not really that interested in interviewing the character of Riley Reid. I'm sure that would've been fun, but here I get to do something far more interesting because I'm talking to the person Ashley Matthews, who both created her and plays her. I told Ashley that I wanted to present her in a light in which she is seldom seen. She is, by nature, playful and charming, and that comes through here at times, but she's also hugely successful and courageous as a business woman who has stayed for years at the top of one of the world's most brutal occupations with her charm and her sweetness seemingly intact.

The woman is polite to a fault and humble whenever we speak. She has few, if any of the attributes we usually associate with stereotypes of erotic performers or commercial sex workers. She has also embraced her own bodily vulnerabilities as assets rather than deficits. And she has induced others to talk about such things in public. In that respect, at a bare minimum, she is a role model to us all. So the subject here is not Ashley as a performer, but instead her as an observer and analyst. I don't ask her about details of her sex life because I view everybody's personal sex life, including a porn star’s, as none of anyone else's business in a healthy society. If that is what you're looking for, you can find it in almost anyone else's interview of Ashley. Instead, in the midst of what appears to be peak shame of a new worldwide shame kink bubble fueled by social media, Ashley is one of the few free voices having long ago learned how to turn our shame and discomfort into her profitable business with recurring revenue.

As a result, we get to discuss terrifying topics like the awesome power of the state to harass and target businesses like hers working within our legal framework. This is done by trying behind the scenes to make their access to banking and commercial services far more difficult, such as happened during the Obama era’s quiet Operation Choke Point. While I find this appalling and disturbing, we also need to discuss other means for facing disturbing trends that are going under analyzed within the pornographic industry. Perhaps the most disturbing of these is the mainstreaming and promotion of so-called incest porn on the tube sites which serve up free videos to anyone with an internet connection and a willingness to get past modest access controls. This is a challenge given the obvious risks and concerns to anyone who believes in free speech absolutism. I hope you give Ashley a chance and that this gives us all food for thought. It's a tough conversation, but with a kind and wonderful subject. Without further ado, I bring you Ms. Ashley Matthews.

00:05

'''Eric:''' Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. I'm here in studio with a special guest today, Ashley Matthews. Ashley, thanks for coming by The Portal.

'''Ashley:''' Thank you for having me.

'''Eric:''' Now, it's an unusual episode of The Portal because, the way I see it, you are Ashley Matthews, but you've created a character who's an actress named Riley Reid who portrays a series of characters in erotic films and shorts. So you have a successful business, you're a successful business woman and I came to know about your existence through sort of a kind of an odd chain of events, which is that when I did one of my first large live shows with Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro at the Masonic in San Francisco, I believe that you were tweeting about how excited you were to attend the event. And people said, wow, Riley Reid is going to your event. And I said, who's Riley Reed? And people thought, wow, you really don't know. This is a, an incredibly famous erotic actress who is apparently very interested in rationality, psychedelics, sexuality and sort of understanding where our country is going from an unusual viewpoint. So you were at that show?

'''Ashley:''' Yes, I was.

'''Eric:''' How did that impress you?

00:06

'''Ashley:''' I, to be honest, wanted there to be more conversation about like all the things, I mean, Sam Harris talks about it all, like the free will and this and the, that type of thing. But I think it was a lot of politic type things. Kind of Ben Shapiro and him kind of talking a lot back and forth. I didn't really get to hear much from you yet.

'''Eric:''' Well, I tried to stay out of when they were trying to get into, Is there a God is there no, God, I figured that it's like the Sharks and the Jets or Bloods and the Crips. You don't want to get in the middle of it. Right.

'''Ashley:''' But nonetheless it was, I loved it. It was great.

'''Eric:''' Now, what drew you initially to that world of Sam Harris and his constellation of issues?

'''Ashley:''' The first time I listened to him, a friend of mine recommended one of his podcasts about social media and kind of the, what is it, like how it manipulates you? The manipulation in social media and social media is such a huge part of my life and my job that I thought it was really important for me to take a look and understand it deeper in a way that I've never really even visualized it or even noticed what was going on in the social media world. And so, because I work in it, we kind of all now work in it. I thought it was kind of like a duty to know exactly what we're all doing and kind of like helping influence. So when I first heard that podcast, I was really intrigued by it and thought that it was, I thought that Sam was like so well spoken and it was very interesting and I wanted to look more into his work and whatnot. I listened to a few more of his podcasts and learn about his fight against religion and his perspectives on freewill, which were things that I've never even heard of before. And I grew up religious myself, so to be able to listen to an atheist talk about all of these things that I kind of always felt within myself without ever actually expressing it. I thought it was really interesting and beautiful and I felt like I was like, Oh, here's like somewhere I can relate and things that I feel to be within me, but never actually expressed or found, I guess my following or fellow peers that I could speak to about this. So yeah, I was very, very interested in everything he had to say. And I'm an active listener on his podcasts.

00:08

'''Eric:''' Are you— would you self-describe as an atheist, if that's an appropriate question?

'''Ashley:''' I would say so. I didn't think that at the time that I was, but now kind of learning more of what it is expressed to be. I would consider myself an atheist. Yes.

'''Eric:''' Interesting. Now the way in which you sort of cropped up in my life a second time was that I started looking into the aftermath of something I had known nothing about, which was called Operation Choke Point. And this had been initiated under the Obama administration, if I understand it correctly, where the FDIC and perhaps the Justice Department came to realize that they could put a lot of pressure on the financial system not to do business with people in certain sectors of the economy or to make it very difficult for them to get any access to regular financial institutions. And I recall an article or an interview, maybe it was in a paper, I can't remember where it was, where you were talking about the fact that you couldn't get normal credit and easy access to commercial banking despite the fact that you were running a very successful and profitable business as a business woman.

00:10

'''Ashley:''' Yeah. There was a lot of adult actresses and directors and whatnot. People who have had their accounts shut down in banking institutions and things like that. I have had simple things where like email servers where you can kind of like send blast emails to your subscribers and whatnot kind of reject me in being able to be able to use them. Like MailChimp was one of the programs where I wasn't able to use it. And there's like many, many more. When I was like building my website, I was trying to like build my website from kind of like third parties, not trying to follow the standard adult website brands, because I felt like they took a large percentage of our money. So I was like, what other avenues can I attract that can work with me? And I was searching for months and months to find someone to like a simple to hold my bandwidth and whatnot. And it was really difficult. And I ended up having to speak to like specific owners and reach out directly to be able to be like, listen, this is who I am. This is what I want. Would you be willing to work with me? And now through that I've, I work with certain companies that where I'm like one of their biggest clients. And I think they work with a lot of sports networking and this and that. And still my adult website is there. I'm like their number one client. And so I feel very fortunate that they would take me on. But it took a lot of research and a lot of emails being sent out to people to be able to be like, listen, I am not a criminal. I'm not a bad guy. Like, you know, I understand that there are things that make the adult industry complicated because they have to make sure people are 18 and older and they don't want to be, you know, giving access to people who are not of the age. And how do you find that they are 18 and all of the written regulations? So I understand that there are those kinds of rules that take place that make it a little bit more tricky.

00:12

'''Eric:''' Those are the parts that you accept, that is, I mean, if I refer to you as a commercial sex worker, you're comfortable with the designation?

'''Ashley:''' Yes.

'''Eric:''' All right. So as a CSW, you accept that there are some added requirements for doing this kind of work so that it is legit and above board.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, of course. And so I think that the problem is that so many companies just don't even want to take the risk. That makes it a bit more of a struggle for us to try and find legitimate businesses that want to do business with us, even though I think that they're missing out on a huge market by not doing it. And I'm very curious as to some of the reasons why they even don't do it. It's maybe politically and religion has something to do with it, I'm sure.

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00:14

'''Eric:''' Well, that's one of the things that I'm interested in trying to reopen, which is that during the 1950s, sixties and early seventies, when obscenity was a much hotter topic, in particular because of the need to establish a standard by which something might be deemed obscene, and there were even people who said we should not have any concept of obscenity legally. It was very much on people's minds that obscenity and the erotic arts were part of free speech. So you had, you know, novels like Lady Chatterley's Lover or Tropic of Cancer that were deemed too racy to be, you know, sold. So you weren't even necessarily talking about films or, or pictures, even text was considered too hot to handle, and for whatever reason, that branch of the free speech discussion has somewhat dropped out of most people's consciousness. Do you find that as well?

00:16
'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I would say so. I definitely think that to some extent it's somewhat there and I don't know if it's just into different degrees where it's like gay rights or things like that, but definitely nothing really that is necessarily adult related in our, you know, XXX community.

'''Eric:''' So one person that you've worked with who has caught my attention on a number of occasions is this man, John Stagliano. And John Stagliano is famous for first porting the concept of Gonzo, which was originally popularized by Hunter S Thompson and journalism into porn. That is, he abstracted it away from journalism and started bringing it into pornography in the sense that he was using handheld cameras, he was making use of the switch to VHS from film, and one of the things that he was doing, if I understand correctly, and you should feel free to correct, is that he was showing females enjoying sexuality rather than being spied upon by the lens, actually actively engaged for their own pleasure. And that this was in some weird way a feminist upturning of the concept of pornography. Do I have my facts even vaguely correct?

00:17

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, yeah, I'd say so.

'''Eric:''' So then John weirdly ran afoul of federal prosecutors having to do with the 1973 standard, which needs to be more in all of our consciousness called Miller v. California. Is Miller v. California something that occupies your thoughts?

'''Ashley:''' No

'''Eric:''' Do you know about it?

'''Ashley:''' No

'''Eric:''' Oh boy. Okay. I'm not a legal expert, but this is, I think this is still the governing case law. There was originally, it's– I guess you can't check me, but see if this even plays correctly. My understanding is that in 1957, there was a decision called Roth v. United States, which introduced the idea that an average person applying contemporary community standards, whatever that means, would have to find obscene work to be in the prurient interest, that it arouses passions and maybe makes us lascivious. Right? And that was followed in the mid sixties by 1966 something called Memoirs v. Massachusetts, which was a much more liberal standard, which said that the work in question had to lack all redeeming social importance. And therefore, if you could just put one quotation from Shakespeare somewhere in your work, you were almost certainly going to be safe because anything that was redeeming, would keep something from being deemed obscene. And then the court revisits in 1973 and comes up with a three-pronged approach. And it says that somebody's applying contemporary community standards has to find the work to be in the whole and in the prurient interest of sex, that it has to run a foul of offensive standards, I think on the state books. And, lastly, it has to be seriously lacking in redeeming scientific, literary, political or social importance. So, not totally lacking; it just has to be fairly lacking. That is terrifying in the age of the internet, because what is a contemporary community standard when we have one giant community? If you make porn in the San Fernando Valley, let's say, where its traditional headquarters has been, what if it gets viewed in Ogden, Utah? How do you know you're not violating somebody else's community standard? Are you worried about this at all?

'''Ashley:''' Oh, I'm definitely, I mean the, to me it's like, it's very extreme because what one perspective is to one person is totally different to another. Your life experiences, I mean, are going to be completely different. You're even like, you know, religion has a huge play in all of these types of things and I think that a lot of people just have totally different ideas on what is okay and not okay. And I think a lot of it is even just from lack of experience or perspective or communication with different people. So I think that some people will even like, like many even of my own friends have totally different views on pornography and actors and actresses in the adult entertainment industry. And once they meet them, they're like, wow, I didn't even think that you guys would even, you know, be this type of person. I've had people who like speak to me directly where they're like, I didn't like you until I listened to a podcast where I was like, Oh, she's like a real human being. So I think that in general it's really daunting and terrifying. The fact that I, if I want to do some really intense hardcore scene that to maybe the general public will think it's, you know, you know, regular hot porno, you know, but then the, there might be, you know, 5% of the population who's like, Oh my God, what did she just do?

'''Eric:''' Well, and that's just it. There's no way that you can control where your material will be consumed. So having a pre-internet, like almost 50 years old, decision govern, in part, who can be brought up on federal charges. My understanding was that Stagliano, about 10 years ago was brought up, and was possibly facing three decades in prison for making pornography.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' You're like 28, if that would, that would put you at nearly 60 years old before you got out.

00:22

'''Ashley:''' Oh yeah.

'''Eric:''' So what, what are your thoughts on this? What do we do? If we, I mean, look, as you probably know, we've been talking about free speech issues in this Intellectual Dark Web group, for example, and a lot of the problems that we're finding are not exactly free speech issues. It's not really the government that's trying to shut you down, but instead, it's sort of the informal, the institutions of civil society like newspapers and universities that have suddenly come up with a new concept, which is hate speech and even simple biological reasoning is sometimes now considered hate speech. Do you see any tie in between the erotic community and potentially even the scientific community and the ways in which these amorphous standards might get invoked?

'''Ashley:''' I mean, I could hope that there is some sort of way that we can change these types of laws or perspectives and whatnot. I'm not exactly sure what it would take. I don't know if there's going to be like some sort of new television series that kind of lights people up in a different way that now people can have a perspective where they look at us as like humans and they humanize us. I think that's a huge part of it is not, we're not given the opportunity to humanize ourselves. And I would be really curious to see what it would have to be like if, you know, do we have to all become scientists so that we get the check of a seal of approval?

00:23

'''Eric:''' Well I’m claiming that even the biologists are now running afoul of concepts like hate speech. For example, what if you start talking about a study of trans issues, and you discover that trans is a giant umbrella category where some parts of trans are disorders, some parts of trans is just nature doing what nature is somehow going to do. And somebody says, well, wait a minute, that's, that's completely illegitimate because you're mis-gendering people. I don't think that biology is a way to hide out anymore. I think that in fact the biologists and the pornographers are weirdly and quite unexpectedly, somewhat in the same boat now that we have a very potent political strain that's trying to regulate what can be said and that you guys are in somewhat of a similar boat. But that because there's no, like, I mean I would never encounter you in normal life, probably, because our worlds are just very unlikely to collide.

00:24

'''Ashley:''' When it comes to like I, I know like right now I'm working on this documentary and they're following myself as an adult actress and they're also following a researcher who studies sex, and she speaks about how she gets like death threats and things like that for being this like almost highly sexual woman even though she's literally studying like how vaginal secretion happens or things like that. And I think that it is like we have this lack of free speech and we have this like, I don't know if it's also the era of where everyone is just highly offended by everything as well. I would have thought that through with social media and all of these things and even like music, the way that music has kind of like even become more hypersexual and aggressive, that our culture would be more accepting to these types of, you know, ways of life. Whereas rather than kind of see the opposite side of it, I, I think that like when it comes to being able to be free with what you can do and say in sex work and researchers, I'm not too familiar with the researchers, but I was definitely like, I thought of this book Bunk by Mary Roach when I heard about the research study of this, the researcher in the documentary where it talks about like, I think it was like in the 50s or something like that where they were all studying animals, having sex with animals because it was so taboo and you were like a pervert if you watched two humans have sex, even though that's the only way to actually study people having sex and to get real information. You're not going to get, you'll get information about monkeys if you're watching monkeys have sex. But it was like interesting to me that it was so almost pornographic for them to even be able to watch people and study them. Even though that's how we're trying to understand biology and science.

00:26

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00:27

'''Eric:''' I have to admit that I have a couple of odd theories about this and I was curious how you might find them. One of which is that, in some sense, the normal world, which I understand you call the “civilian world”, is almost hypocritical and in denial by design. That is, we aren't supposed to have an accurate picture of human sexuality, because our society is based on what I call load bearing fictions, that people are supposed to present as relatively asexual. Their default assumption that they go around with is that they are not sexual beings. And you're supposed to hide this aspect. And then there are contradictory expectations. So for example, you might be expected to wear cosmetics in a workplace environment as a sign of professionalism, but the cosmetics in fact may be sexualizing, but then you're not supposed to admit that the cosmetics may in fact be sexualizing. So in some sense the civilian world is a mess by design because we're not supposed to see ourselves accurately, and the world of sex workers is bizarrely a truth telling world, a world in which people are far more honest. And there's another one of these, which I think is the community of evolutionary theorists. And, believe me, you can’t invite those guys to parties either because they'll tell you things that the civilian world does not want to hear. What do you think about the idea that, is it possible that commercial workers are just much more honest and undistorted around issues of sexuality, and that, in fact, this is why they have to be excluded?

00:29

'''Ashley:''' I would say so. I, I believe one time when we spoke previously you mentioned to me, I could be quoting you wrong, but the real estate effect or something like that, where it was like the woman can sell you potentially a not a suitable home because of her sex appeal and where she is dressed in a nice suit. Maybe there's a little cleavage showing, she has the makeup done, and you, as a general person is kind of, you know, you're, you're in a daze because you, you see this woman almost before you see the household. And I think that with adult entertainers we kind of like are always so sexually driven and sex is everywhere. It's our whole lives. I feel like I even personally experienced less sexual tension when I'm on set because we are always naked. They are so used to seeing naked women that it's not even like, it's not even a statement or a question or anything like that.

00:30

'''Eric:''' Well, let's, let's dig into how bizarre your workplace is because very often I hear about sexuality in the workplace and I think, well, what happens when you take something like modeling or going even further commercial sex work on the set of a movie. Take us through what you think some of the major differences might be between your workplace and a typical office. But again, I should just tell the audience, I have asked Ashley to try to keep this as much above the neck as possible so that we can have the broadest possible audience. And so normally we might be making some jokes and having some more fun, but we're trying to keep this as classy as possible.

00:31

'''Ashley:''' I can even just say like even the feeling and the difference of like how I'm working on this documentary right now, when I'm onset with that documentary, it is so different than when I'm typically onset. And it's hard for my brain to almost wrap around it because it's very similar vibe. They're both sets. We have like same kind of production crews and me, I would naturally change my clothing right here in the middle of the set and all of these things, and not even think about, you know, the guy on the sound, he's doing his job, he's looking at the things, cause he doesn't care about me getting nude because that's what he always, every day there's a new girl and a guy getting nude. And when I was on the documentary they were kind of like, Oh no, like, go to your dressing room and change. And as if, and I didn't even think that I could be potentially offending them with my body and whatnot by just undressing, dressing right there. Cause I was like, Oh you want me to change so I'll, I'll just change right now. I'm like totally comfortable with myself. And it didn't even cross my mind that like, Oh maybe this guy is looking at me inappropriately and he has like a wife or this or that or they don't want any set drama or anything like that. And so for me it's very bizarre to pull myself out of my world that is so normal for us to just be like casually having sex, like when the cameras aren't rolling to just maintain the energy, maintain the flow you, we want to make sure the male talent, how you know, stays erect and everything like that. And so while they're changing lights and everything like that, it's so casual for sex to be going on. It's so casual for the male to male– there’s even like a lot of male to male, you know, gay jokes within each other where you know, they'll, they'll joke about like, you know, teasing each other off and like doing all of these fun, playful things. Whereas maybe in the regular work environment you would never male to male be flirting with your, you know, coworkers even in the slightest bit because one, you don't want to become like, I dunno, you don't want all of that. Some guys are so homophobic and whatnot, but in our industry it's so casual for everyone to kind of have this open love for one another and talk about their bodies and their sexuality, that, when I was on this documentary set, it was so bizarrely uncomfortable for me as the sex worker to remove myself from being who I naturally am, which is like just comfortable within myself and my sexuality and my body and that I could be looked at as a piece of meat on their set. So they're like, these men aren't used to seeing women like this all the time. So you have to make sure that you're not subjecting yourself in this way or making them uncomfortable or whatnot. And to me, I think that like if they were around that more, if people were just comfortable with themselves and comfortable with their bodies, then it naturally would be normal and the same, and the guy would be able to adjust the lights without staring at the girl the whole time. You know, not that these guys were, but I guess potentially maybe they would, but they weren't even really given the opportunity. And for us, I think we're just so casual with one another that there, the hypersexualness that goes on on set is just, it's just another playful, casual, normal conversation. Yeah.

00:35

'''Eric:''' So you believe, I mean, not to put words in your mouth, but I'm curious, you believe that in your workplace, bizarrely, and quite unexpectedly, maybe issues of harassment, tension, unwanted sexuality, are actually decreased?

'''Ashley:''' I personally feel that in my experiences, 100%. Like it's, to me it's close to none. I've never felt creepy vibes from a director or anything of that. I'm also very playful and comfortable with myself and jokes and you know, I'm not, I couldn't say that for every female that she doesn't feel maybe possibly offended by certain statements. But I have never felt that there was a boundary that was crossed in our casual work with one another. I've never had any creepy director offering me things that he shouldn't be or whatnot. It's always in a very playful manner and there's always like 10 other people in the room. So it's always like a casual joke or things like that where we're all just, you know, naked and, you know, I pee with the door open. It's just like, we all kind of do, like, we're all just very comfortable with ourselves.

00:36

'''Eric:''' You know, there was a story and I wish I could source it, because I've referenced it a few times, but years ago there was a naked musical called Oh, Calcutta. And I remember hearing a story that somebody had found that after being on stage naked in front of an audience night after night, because this was a relatively successful musical, that the performers could not go back to normal life because they had become habituated to the excitement of being viewed by like hundreds, if not thousands of people. And so, you know, one possibility is that in your world there is a permanent or semi-permanent brain shift that comes from experiencing a level of arousal and familiarity that the rest of us will never, ever experience.

00:37

'''Ashley:''' I would say so to some extent, but even from me personally to some extent, I feel like even quite the opposite has happened where now I like favor and desire more the more intimate one-on-one private sex life experience where it feels more emotionally involved. And I think that's also because I'm often working with people that maybe I don't know them very well or things like that. And there is always other people around, so the level of being able to drop your guard always in completely is very rare because there is a camera involved and we're creating a product in the end. And as much as like I can be enjoying myself, I still am put into literal positions that I can't always be enjoying myself because it's opening up for a camera or things like that.

00:38

'''Eric:''' Right, well, and you're a professional after all.

'''Ashley:''' Yes. Yes, exactly. And so I find even for myself that it's almost taken an opposite turn where I now desire that less and less. And when I first started, that was one of my favorite things was the viewers, the voyeur aspect of there being multiple people in the room and enjoying the fact that there is a guy with a boom stick holding it up, who's, you know, trying to not look but definitely obviously wants to.

'''Eric:''' Got it. Do you see any way in which, are the rest of the rest of us in society moving closer towards pornography with let's say self sexualization on Instagram, where you're sort of part of a mildly erotic feedback loop? If you're a young woman and you notice what, you know, suddenly a photo you've taken has, you know, 10 times the number of likes on it.

00:39

'''Ashley:''' I would say social media has a huge part into doing and kind of almost making somewhat hyper-sexualized in yourself, more casual. And I think a lot of it is this desire of engagement as well as like people becoming an Instagram model or influencer so that they sell products. I know I recently listened to like a Chris D’Elia podcast where he was joking about, yes, convenience.

'''Eric:''' He's amazing. Oh, he's hilarious. I love him.

'''Ashley:''' And in his podcasts, he's making jokes about these girls who are kind of, you know, smashing their chest together, holding a watch, and they're selling a watch. But nobody is obviously looking at the watch. And it's interesting how, you know, in every kind of advertising world and median, they use sex to sell things. And so it's very normal. But now when you're taking the regular girl who's not some Vogue supermodel or it's like a Kendall Jenner where she's obviously selling sex but not selling sex cause it's perfume these other girls are kind of doing the same thing. And I think for them that they almost recognize it more so that they are selling sex because they're not getting this Vogue ad to show that it is showcasing that they're with Vogue.

00:40

'''Eric:''' And I think this is one of the difficulties that a lot of us are having is that traditionally we've always been self-deceptive about sexuality, and that the signals, I mean even biologically, just in terms of evolutionary theory, the signals that we send which constitute the sort of language of sexuality have always been cryptic. They're not sent transparently and in the clear. Maybe that's more the case inside of the world professional pornography, but in fact being deceptive and self-deceptive is what is normal. And I think one of the things that has been very confusing is this passion, partially on behalf of like the psychological community or professional sex educators, you know, be open, be explicit, talk about everything. And that's never been how sexuality has functioned in what you call the civilian world.

'''Ashley:''' No, sometimes I wonder if it has to do with the fact that people enjoy this taboo sense of things where it's almost like if it's unspoken, then it's more enjoyable. If it's, if it's kind of subliminal, it's, it's almost like it's sneaking its way into yourself. And, if it is kind of like less open than maybe they would have, they would have. If it wasn't, if it was direct, then maybe they would have certain other guidelines that they would have to follow, if this perfume commercial was obviously transparent with the fact that they are using sexuality to sell their perfume then maybe in the real world, the civilian world, they would be like, you can't do that. That's inappropriate. Our children see these commercials. It's on aired on television at regular waking hours. And I think that probably has something to do with the part of it where if it is not, if it is subliminal and it's not direct, then it could be more acceptable to the human eye. And it could be something that, where people are like, well, no, that's, it's a lingerie company that's like classy and pretty, even though it's obviously selling sexuality at the same time.

00:43

'''Eric:''' Well I think that the issue of deniability now, I mean we were talking— I should say this is the first day we've ever met. We've talked on the phone a bunch of times. One of the people I've sort of pointed you towards is this evolutionary theorist Bob Trivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers). And he wrote this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Folly_of_Fools). I mean, it's really, you know, one of the most prominent theorists of our time. And he wrote this book called the folly of fools that talks about the evolutionary basis of self-deception as the precursor to being able to manipulate others. And if you think about, for example, I had Bret Easton Ellis in the studio who wrote American Psycho and Less Than Zero. And we were talking about the issue of seduction. And he said that he wants to be seduced all the time. He doesn't want everything to be explicit. He doesn't want everything, you know, as a mutually agreed upon decision, that in part what is wonderful and delicious to him about life has to do with seduction, and that selection involves manipulation. But in a world where I think many more people are colliding without a common understanding of each other, not coming from the same backgrounds, there's really an increased propensity for humans to get these signals wildly wrong. It's probably always been there, but maybe there's an increased ability. So weirdly, the way I see it, the civilian world has always been based on sort of self deception, and then there have been both the problems that come from that and the really much more exciting aspects that come from that. But when it works, probably there's an extra magic to it. Any thoughts on that between like what, what translates to mystique? Do you see that when you're looking at your civilian friends, that they're kind of saying, well, I wonder if he likes me? I got a message. I don't know how to interpret it.

00:45

'''Ashley:''' Oh, well, like 100% when it comes to me. Even just like dating, I am a very transparent, open person in these aspects of where I, I don't, I don't do the whole seduction game and I kind of just am an open book and I find that a lot of times it is faulty, where, you know, a lot of people do want this type of seduction. They like these types of games or whatnot in the sense of where they, they feel like when you're, and I, I think it could be because the general public is not so honest and open with what they want, that it's like a shock value, where they're like, well, this girl is just really being completely open in general with what she enjoys. And it's often something I loop back around with my therapist where I'm like, do I need to start being like the more civilianesque type of a person, to be a more dateable person? Whereas instead of being this vulnerable self where I am just constantly myself and say what I like and what I feel in these moments and

'''Eric:''' Pretty big tradeoff.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, it is. And I often find myself incapable of catering to the general public. I don't know how to do these all in kind of mind games on myself. But it is interesting where I do find that the most common people do enjoy this type of seduction and whatnot. They don't want things to be so blunt and almost easy to an extent. There has to be some sort of work involved and trickery. I believe that it is like a very common theme, at least even in like my dating world. It is.

'''Eric:''' So one of the things that I thought was really terrific that I first heard from you with some of your ideas about how to make sure that if people are considering entering the erotic arts professionally, that they're making good decisions, that you feel that very clearly this has been a great decision for you. It's worked out financially at a great level. You've been in the business for a long time, haven't been chewed up, you seem to have an incredibly positive attitude. But what I was talking to you about was, well, you know, how uncommon is that. You're obviously in a very unusual position, and you came up with this idea of having like a virtual reality simulator of what it would be like to enter the business. Can you say more about that?

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I think that there are so many people, I mean you get to start the industry at age 18. And I think that there are so many people who don't necessarily start for the right reasons. Even when I first became in the industry, I was a very hypersexual adolescent. And when I began the industry, it was mostly for money. Though I started off as an extra, I wasn't partaking in these sexual acts. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I had no idea, the concepts of it all and whatnot. And I think that now if a young male or female can get the opportunity to really grasp the sense of what can happen when he joined the industry, it would be, I think a good filter for a lot of the youth and whatnot. So I think it'd be great to have this idea of a virtual reality that allows people to put themselves inside different types of scenarios. So maybe like one scenario is you go in and you tell your parents that you've now joined the adult industry and one of the reactions are that your parents are distraught, they humiliate you, they shame you, they disown you, things of this sort.

'''Eric:''' These are fairly common?

'''Ashley:''' Yes. Yeah. I think a lot of people have parents who are racist. There are some parents who are like, yes you can do porn but not interracial porn and like weird things like that. And so they're making their children racist by association because maybe this child wouldn't care, you know, they would love to have sex with a person of another race, but they don't want their father or mother to disown them. So by association then listening to their parental rules and guidelines, they will not partake in interracial sex and things like that. So I think that this would be an interesting factor and I think it'd be very interesting to put the parents in these simulations as well for a youthful characters or maybe even older people who get in the industry. So maybe the parents can understand what it's like to be the adult entertainer and to have their parents be so harshly judging and aggressive and whatnot. And maybe your parents are in a religious state. You know, you could maybe fill out a little questionnaire and you're like, my dad is Christian. So like how would his Christian beliefs affect us negatively and put the father in that same, you know, virtual reality. And maybe it could also help change the parents to be more accepting. But there also are obviously the parents who will just be terrible and unaccepting. And I think there are other ways to put the future stars in the virtual reality. Whereas we had a one star, rest in peace, August Ames where yeah, she had commit suicide from what I gather, some internet bullying where she did not partake in a sex scene with a crossover star, which is a star who performs both in male to male scenes and male to female scenes. And I'm sure she struggled with other mental illness issues and things like of that sort. And I think that if we were able to put these adolescents in, or these 18 year olds, or these people, future stars in the industry, they would be able to get the experience of the humiliation, the tweets and the social media hate that you're going to get the, the ongoing, you know, struggle with dating.

'''Eric:''' Ashley, but, how do you do it? I mean, it comes back, it's absolutely brutal.

'''Ashley:''' It is. But I recognize that when I, when I think about it, when I was when I was in elementary school, kids would make fun of me because I, I'm kind of like a hairy girl. I have like hairy arms and whatnot and hairy legs. So they would call me wolf woman or gorilla girl and I would just start howling like a wolf or like grunting around like a, like a monkey. And I think that I have always just personally taken criticism and made it comical. So for me, when I see someone saying some hurtful comments, I'm always like, hi, you're brilliant. Like it's, it's amazing. It's so hilarious to me. So I have a different ability into translating how negative terminology and derogatory statements towards myself that actually impacts me

00:52

'''Eric:''' Well you literally have a tattoo in another language. I don't know which one it was.

'''Ashley:''' Chinese,

'''Eric:''' It says, when life gives you lemons make lemonade. So that seems to be pretty deep.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I've always been able to make things a more positive experience within myself. And I think that if we were able to help see which people could handle these types of experiences, which who could handle the shame, who could handle, you know, all of the terrible aspects that come into being an adult entertainer, then I think it would be a better filter for, you know, allowing these experiences and maybe they should have these experiences for the viewers who are saying the terrible nonsense so that they could understand. Cause I'm pretty sure—

'''Eric:''' How much pain they’re inflicting.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, Like, I think that listening to one of the Sam Harris podcasts, he was talking about to somebody where they were talking about putting men in simulations where they get cat called or you know, sexual suggestions thrown at them where they were now almost be able to think of like, wow, actually maybe I won't treat women that I don't know like this because it's actually not okay. And it made me feel uncomfortable.

'''Eric:''' Well, could I actually I wasn't planning on doing this, but can I give you a compliment? One of the things that really discouraged me from going into podcasting or doing anything on YouTube is that when I started to see, I think that the first time I was on a major YouTube podcast was Dave Rubin’s show. And I noticed that people stop the video at particular places and they say “what's going on at 15:37?” And you may not know this, but the reason that you're sitting to my right is that I have a condition called Duane syndrome. And so the guest always sits in that chair because my left eye is partially paralyzed, and it will not go out. I did not actually have this diagnosed until I was an adult. And as a result, I very frequently appeared with some amount of cross-eyedness and my YouTube comments reflect like, you know, I remember one comment was did you see that at 1821 his right eye goes in to check for information and then it comes back out because it found where it's stored in the brain. That was like, very playful and fun. But then some of them, particularly the ones having to do with the moles on my face, really started to get to me. And what I found, and here comes the compliment, I found, and I have to confess, I can't really watch your really wild stuff, but I have watched some of your discussion about your body image and you talk about being small breasted. You're very open about this, and saying, I don't want silicone and I know that I'm supposed to get silicone in order to earn the big money. And I thought, wow, she's just talking quite openly about this. And then you didn't shave your armpits for a while and then you did a YouTube video about the decision not to shave your armpits and shaving them and you confounded everybody's expectations for what you're supposed to do as a big time, a erotic performer. And I just took so much away from that. It was, it was very inspiring that you would be that courageous and it was something that, you know, personally moved me and helped me a little bit. You know, also people don't think my hair is real because they think it's a wig because I'm too old. I’m not kidding you. So, you know, that was a great image from a most unexpected corner of the world, so thank you.

00:56

'''Ashley:''' Oh, of course. Yeah. I think that like a part of that simulation I was speaking about would be about body image because there are so many young women that I've met who, like one particular model, I won't say her name, but she said that her, she had so many fans and I don't even know what, how so many are, but she had so many fans who told her that her breasts were like pointed in different directions, that she had two breast augmentations. And I could imagine that the people who complimented her greatly outweighed those who didn't. But people sit in, they think about these negative comments and it affects them greatly to the point to where they will change their body. I've, I know girls who have had complaints about their nose or their this or their that and they very openly go on their Instagram and they talk about, well, you guys complain about this on my body. So I fixed it. And, and it's very sad to me that these people who aren't mentally strong enough put themselves out there and allow the feedback from some Joe Schmoe wherever he is saying these hurtful things towards the women or and men. And it affects them greatly to the fact to where they actually will pursue action and will change their body and put silicone breasts in them, which can be very dangerous and it can be life threatening. You put yourself under this anaesthesia, which is already a risk, as well as the risk of the poisoning of the silicone. And it's really like I know quite a few girls who gotten the silicone and then have gotten it removed later. I know a girl who has gotten her her butt done and then removed afterwards and these are very extreme life threatening surgeries to put yourself through over the simple fact of you think your audience will like you more. And to me it's obscene where I've not I, when I first started the industry, I had, my first agent told me if I wanted to be a big star, I would have to dye my hair blonde and get a boob job. And I have done neither of them.

00:58

'''Eric:''' So this is the thing. She's like, you really are. You don't, you're very disagreeable. You don't take all of the standard advice and somehow it's been working out for you. You, I like, let me be a little bit more forthcoming. I don't think I'm entirely comfortable with what it is that you do for a living. But I've tried to get over that because you know, you're just been such a genuine and wonderful person to talk to about all of these things. And so in part you're, you're extremely disarming. You get people to be comfortable with the fact that they do have a sexual response to you and you get people to accept you on your own terms and you've risen to the top without any, you know, seemingly any consequence to just being yourself. How, how did you figure that out, and nobody else did in your area?

'''Ashley:''' I honestly am not sure. I, I think that's, to some extent my parents had, you know, obviously a very large part of that. My mother has always been she was never like the type of person who took her body image into consideration. My mother was like an overweight woman who kind of never really dressed nice. And I think that that kind of helped me a lot too. And she was always proud of herself and her confidence was always very high. And I think a huge part of my ability to just kind of accept myself for myself was to see that as a role model is that she still found herself to be beautiful and, and loved herself even though she may have not been in the standards of beauty. And, and sometimes I wonder if I would be more in my own head if I had this attractive hot mom who dressed the part and put on makeup and all of these things where she was not that at all. And she always was very accepting into whatever we wanted to wear. And like when I went through my goth phase—

'''Eric:''' You had a goth phase?

'''Ashley:''' I did have a goth phase.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Ashley:''' And she supported and got me all of the like funky clothes and all these things. And when I did go through my like more sexually explicit phase, she was always like very, very open to everything that we wanted. When I wanted to start wearing like thong undergarments, she was like, yeah, let, we'll go get them for you.

01:00

'''Eric:''' Do you think that you're sort of set at the factory at a more hyper-sexualized level.

'''Ashley:''' I do think so. I think that like I was always around a lot of like sexual activity. My, I grew up in like a trailer with my uncles who had a lot of girlfriends. Their girlfriends were strippers and they were drug users.

'''Eric:''' So there's probably a developmental aspect. Maybe it's not set at the factory, but that the, that environment—

'''Ashley:''' Yes. And, and my, my dad does claim to be like a sex addict and things like that. So sometimes I wonder if there is some sort of, you know, biological self, something in me that is more hypersexual than others and cause I don't think that everyone is meant to be, you know, into sex. I think that some are more than others. I think like Nikola Tesla was a Virgin when he died and that makes sense. He was studying science the whole time. So like I think that there are certain people who are,

'''Eric:''' Newton was also pretty asexual.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah. And to me it makes sense, like not everyone is meant to be a hyper-sexual person. Like some of us should be studying the arts or sciences or, you know, hunting and gathering rather than procreating.

01:02
'''Eric:''' Okay. I mean, I think I mentioned to you that I had heard a podcast with a professional colleague of yours, Asa Kira, and she had said, I don't think that I'm an appropriate role model for all young women. I think that I'm an appropriate role model for hypersexual young women. And I thought that was fascinating. That hadn't occurred to me that we may be partitioned into different groups and that a hyper-sexualized young woman might need an inappropriate role model that is highly specific. Do you feel comfortable being that in your area?

'''Ashley:''' 100% yeah. I think that since very young age I had always been a very hypersexual person and I never necessarily had like a role model and, and I agree, I wouldn't say that I am a traditional type of role model, although I would like to be. I think to some extent I, I would like to think that the more average girl could admire me and look up to me for other aspects and whatnot. And cause I, like I said, I know I have a lot of girls who know who I am from like podcasts and stuff. They had no idea my work or anything like that and they just admire me for the way I speak in my opinions on things.

'''Eric:''' It's very hard for me to integrate. You know, when I've spoken to on the phone before you say, you know, it's been great talking to you, but unfortunately I have to get back to the set and I have this like, it's like somebody telling me I have to go fight the battle of Stalingrad. Some terrible, crazy things about that. But you're like, Oh no, I love my work. And it's just, it's, it's very funny to see my own discomfort and prudishness crop up.

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, it is interesting. It's very, it's a very bizarre thing for me. Even when I meet people like yourself, you know, and like other types of fans like I've, because I have these other avenues of attracting personas. I've had very young adolescents come up to me and asked me for photos for my podcasts with like Logan Paul and this is absolutely mind boggling to me and I, their parent will take the photo and I'm just like, do they even know? And I don't know what I’m supposed to say.

1:04

'''Eric:''' Well, this is the thing. I think that there's a lot of it that's not personal. When it comes to the trepidation it has to do with, I have no plan for how we are going to negotiate all of the issues that come up because in my world we're all wildly sexually hypocritical and that's normal. That's, that's the way the civilian world has always been. And presumably it's likely to be that for the foreseeable future. Whereas I see you as the sort of dangerous truth telling machine, experimenting with things that you know, that are unimaginable. Now you just went to Burning Man, and Burning Man is a very odd thing in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada because for one week, somehow the normal rules are suspended. How do you find this sort of, I didn't find it. I went once, I didn't find it incredibly hot. There was a lot of nakedness and there was a lot of play, but it wasn't a wildly erotic experience in my understanding. Did you find it otherwise?

'''Ashley:''' I also agree to not find it as a very erotic experience and it could just be because it feels kind of dirty with all the dust everywhere. To me, just hygienically I'm not really sure.

'''Eric:''' It was a very creative place. Like the art is astounding.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, it is a beautiful place and I think that it's just a, a place of be people to be able to be comfortable in their bodies. And I think that the fact that it's not hyper erotic is also why people are so comfortable with themselves because they are able to walk around naked and look at, looked at as an art piece rather than looked at as a sexual object. Whereas

1:06

'''Eric:''' Even an erotic art piece that isn't necessarily going to immediately lead to a a sense of arousal.

'''Ashley:''' Yes, exactly. They are able in that moment to embrace themselves for who they are because you'll find young, old, overweight, thin, attractive, unattractive people who are just nude running around and everyone is just so confident in themselves. And I think it's just such a beautiful environment and place for people to really be able to accept themselves. And it's kind of sad that that is the one place that they are able to let their guard down.

01:07

'''Eric:''' It was very interesting. I remember seeing a woman on a bicycle who had very clearly had a radical mastectomy and she was totally topless and she didn't, I mean aggressively, she was having the time of her life and didn't care. And there was this sort of, you know, cocoon of like acceptance and love that was clearly in the air. I don't think it's an easy thing. Now, Burning Man has this very funny thing that they refer to the civilian world as the default world. And so in the default world it's very tough to get that kind of radical acceptance. Do you find that there's some sort of similarity between that deviation from the civilian world or the default world that is burning man and the porn set?

'''Ashley:''' I would say 100%. Like a lot of my friends that I work with are a lot of my friends. I get them to end up working for me. So I've got some friends who are like mainstream editors and I somehow managed to get them to start editing my adult videos. And I have one that I ended up taking to Burning Man with me who had such a, he recently told me how he's had such an epiphany within himself to be able to be so comfortable with his own body and comfortable with other people, other people's bodies by simply editing my videos. He's not on set, he's not partaking in any of the activities or anything like that, but because he's just been editing my videos, he's found that he's able to have a different relationship with nudity and sex and all of these things, whereas in his regular world previously to meeting me, he was more, I guess, vanilla or follow the standards of these civil civilian type people where it was like, no nudity. You will never see him naked unless you are his girlfriend or partner at the time. And now he's in a totally different place where he, he said himself, he's like, by the end of Burning Man, I will be walking around naked too. And I think it, it's like this ability within himself where he is now, he's gotten to be able to put himself in the perspective in the shoes of us on set. He's, he's, he sees the delay of when before camera's cut. He sees like, you know, they start action and there's moments of us getting comfortable with each other. There's moments of us cutting and just kind of like being natural and ourselves. We're like taking a water break and everything like that. And I think that there are elements that definitely have helped people grow within themselves and be able to accept themselves as they're just natural human self.

01:09

'''Eric:''' So it seems to me that there's definitely something to learn from this weird pornographic universe. On the other hand, I can't see that these lessons will ever fully translate. So, for example do you remember this horrible number of the Oscars were, I forget who it was, somebody was singing the song, “we saw your boobs” and it was going through all of the actresses that appeared topless. And the idea being that, well, if I've seen your boobs, then in some sense I've got something on you. And I thought about John Lennon and Yoko Ono doing this album called, I think, Two Virgins. And they are appearing naked on the album, so let's get it over with. So now you've all seen us and let's now, now you don't have any power over us anymore because it's done. Do you think that there's some thing like that that at some level there's this revelation that you have your privacy up until a certain point and then when you've given up your privacy in exchange somehow you get a, a comfort with self?

01:10

'''Ashley:''' Yes, a hundred percent. I think that there was a study done that showed that women who perform an adult entertainment or as a sex worker have higher levels of confidence within themselves. Then the average woman and I, I think a hundred percent that there's something about putting yourself out there to be so vulnerable kind of forces you to kind of have to not care what other people think or say. And I think that there's also, as much as you get these negative statements, there's still so much glorification in that there's still so many people who are applauding you for doing what you do. Like I look like a normal girl, an average girl who is probably going to college or has some sort of basic job. And when I go to the store and target, I'm a very social person. I make small talk with anyone and I often will like, I just start conversations with like maybe this random 60 year old lady and we're kind of like, you know, talking, lollygagging. And she asks me, Oh, like what are you a model? What do you do? And I tell her, well, I'm actually like one of the number one porn stars in the world. And a lot of times they look at me, they like size me up and down and they're like, “you like, you don't have big silicone boobs. “You don't have all this injection in your face”, like, “You?” And I'm like, I explained to them—

'''Eric:''' You're also pathologically polite.

01:12

'''Ashley:''' Yes I am. I am a lovely lady, I think, and I'm a lot of, a lot of times when it's like an older woman, she will tell me how she regrets not being more exploring in her life and regrets not being able to or not have done things that were more adventurous sexually or erotically or maybe like, I think one woman told me she wanted to do like nude modeling, but she never did because her herself was a petite small brunette woman. And it was, it's always so interesting to me that the positive reinforcement I get from older women who are always like, “wow, like I am so happy that you do that. And like, I wish that I have been more—

'''Eric:''' I think there are a lot of post-menopausal regrets. I was friendly with a woman who I take to be maybe in her mid to late sixties, who started for some reason as I was leaving San Francisco telling me more than she might have otherwise. And she talked about how back in the day she had allowed people to eat their meals off of her naked body as a kind of performance art style. And she was just having the time of her life cackling about it. And we were like laughing and making rude jokes. And I thought about the way in which maybe the part of the problem is that men really need women in general in the civilian world to be much more simple in terms of their sexuality, that you want to imagine your mother and your grandmother typically as somehow bringing forth life with, you know, not multiple lovers and not having much of a history and that somehow I wonder whether it's male needs for an idealized concept of woman that make this, this pressure lifelong and that postmenopausally many women just say, well, what, what did I, what did I do? I gave up so much of myself.

01:14

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I agree. I do think that a lot of men want these types of desires. And I don't know if it's biology or what it is. Sometimes I don't even think that necessarily matters. It's probably like environmental. But I know personally when I talk to a lot of guys that are my friends, they're like, I love you and I adore you, but I couldn't date you.

'''Eric:''' What do you make of that? Does that make sense to you?

'''Ashley:''' No, it doesn't make sense to me. Like, and I don't know if it's because I as a woman would, I guess biology, biologically would look for the most suitable male and would probably have multiple children. If it was a primal world, I'd be like, Oh, he's like six feet tall and big hunky man. And he's like a smart, lovely gentleman. Like I would imagine maybe I would have these desires to have these different types of children so it could explain my attraction to a variety of men. But I also feel like men would naturally be that way too. But I, I don't know really what it is. Like, I think I would like, what is it? Some one of the big cats like lions or something. We'll kill the young of another. You know,

01:15

'''Eric:''' It's even worse than that. You wanna get into it? I believe the idea is that if the head of the pride changes and there's a new line at the head, not only will he kill the young offspring of his predecessor, but that, horribly, the female lions response to this is to go into estrus, to become a receptive and aroused by the killing of their young. Right? Like, no, I mean, nature is just so busy. It's so crazy, right? And, and we can't really, except this in part. And so my belief is, is that a lot of what you're seeing is the evolutionary program that says, if I know this person to be so aroused, it's not their personality, their looks, their this, their that. One, they've got a tremendous amount of sexual knowledge. So they're going to know exactly where I am on the totem pole of sexuality, which is terrifying. I think there's another aspect that has to do with how do I know this person isn't going to pick up and take off with somebody else because they've been, they've had their norms adjusted and there's another one that says, how do I know that any child will be mine, but more than anything, my guess is how do I know that I won't be mercilessly teased? Because everyone will say, Hey, I saw your girlfriend naked. I saw her doing this, I saw her doing that. And so the assault on the male ego and you know, just to be honest about it, I think almost none of us are secure enough to deal with it.

01:17

'''Ashley:''' Oh yeah. I know that every guy that I've dated publicly faces a large amount of sliding in the DMs of very aggressive, you know, harassment. And and I'm sure that even after our breakup, they are still dealing with the harassment because we were at one time a public image together and I would see some of the comments and they are absolutely brutal and terrible. And it's even actually one of the reasons why I'm terrified to have children because I think that I'm being the best mother possible by not having children because I think that the life that they could live could be full of suffering, whereas they'll be shamed their entire life possibly. Whereas, you know, that same statement where, how do you know that's your real dad? I've seen your mom take on many partners, you know, and like all of these kinds of very hurtful, terrible things and—

'''Eric:''' Direct assaults on our construct of masculinity. And this is why, you know, I noticed the other day that Jenna Jameson who— it was obviously a person in an era slightly before yours at the top of the porn profession— was following me and tweeting about the Jeffrey Epstein situation. And she is pretty aggressive and she had her kid in her picture at the top of her Twitter profile. And that is a very aggressive mama bear who is not taking any shit from anybody. I think, you know, one of the things I've, you ever see this movie, The Martian?

01:18

'''Ashley:''' It sounds right. Is that the one with—

'''Eric:''' with Matt Damon—

'''Ashley:''' Yeah, I've heard of it. I did not actually see it.

'''Eric:''' Okay. You know how, like, it's one thing to get a human to Mars, but it's much more difficult to imagine how we're going to get a human back? So maybe it's easy to go one way? I think of planet porn as like Mars. That very often there's a portal into something where you have a lot to learn and that's part of the reason that, you know, I was eager to have you on the program, but it's not clear that there's a return ticket.

01:19

'''Ashley:''' Oh, I agree. 100% I think that it is a very, that's what I, one thing I was saying earlier is like is the seal of approval that I become a scientist, you know, like what, what do I have to do to become acceptable in the public's eye? Like do I write an amazing film? The screenplay that now is like, wow, she's more than an adult actress.

'''Eric:''' Can we talk about a couple of these? Because I think these are fun. One thing is, I dunno, do you know the story of Marie Curie on her second Nobel prize? Okay. So you know, obviously it's Polish scientist living in France. Second Nobel prize, she's told we're going to give you the prize, but you can't come to Stockholm to pick it up because we think that you're getting busy with a married man. Right. Can you imagine? I was going to write a book called Radium Slut. Because of her work with the radioactive element radium. And we were so wrapped around the axle about her extracurricular life that we couldn't bring ourselves to let her have the pleasure of a second Nobel Prize given her behavior. Some other ones in this category, which I think are kind of interesting— obviously you must know the story of Hetty Lamar? So the spread spectrum technology that allows your phone to keep a call, but to jump from frequency to frequency was apparently co-developed by her. Now she was an actress who was famous for appearing nude. She was like the most beautiful woman of her time early in German films. I think before she came to the U.S. I think it was German films, not quite sure, but again, highly sexualized female, brilliant as the day is long. And that these examples, there's another one that's I would love to have on this program. I can't remember her name exactly. Maybe Brooke Magnanti? And her pen name was Belle de Jour. She was studying for a PhD and she was turning tricks as a high class call girl in the UK because the stipends weren't high enough. She loved the work, she loved her clients, she loved science. And so these are all examples of highly sexualized, self-sexualized females who have been at a very high intellectual level. Now, one possibility is that we should desexualize the work environment and science. However, if there turned out to be a correlation between outsized performance and hypersexualization in females, we wouldn't be running the experiment to be able to see whether there was any kind of a correlation. So these are, these are topics which are weirdly too hard to talk about. And my concern is, is that we're not built, I mean, one of the things I've loved talking about these topics with you is that we've managed to keep this I, and I think I, I'm going to take credit. I can kill the sexuality and sex so that we kept it pretty much above board and above the neck. And that we need to learn how to keep sex from turning sexy in conversation because it's too important a topic, not to be able to discuss. What do you think?

01:22

'''Ashley:''' Oh, I agree 100%. I would like to think that, you know, hypersexuality and intelligence kind of go hand in hand.

'''Eric:''' Well, I think it's a suspicion, but you can't bring that up because the other major force is that the workplace should be highly desexualized. And because I think that there is such incredible denial and you know, there, there isn't a recognition of female sexuality in the workplace. There's only a sense, you know, in general, of male transgression. I think it's very unclear what the way forward is to figure out what is keeping women out of the sciences. My personal opinion is that it has to do with kinwork, that women are taking up most of the work in caring for children, caring for elder relatives, and that the burdens of kinwork are often prohibitive when it comes to a really intense career. But I think we have a very difficult road ahead because I think half the brains of, you know, half the neurons in the world ride on female shoulders, and that that should be a huge source of opportunity, but somehow there's a puzzle of sexuality. Let me ask you a different question, cause you're nodding. Are you familiar with Christina Hoff Sommers? If you're following a Sam Harris who I think is at the American Enterprise Institute, she sort of a second-wave feminist, not a third-wave feminist. She calls herself the factual feminist. She's called a lot of attention to the idea that the wage gap, where women maybe are thought to get 75 cents for every dollar that a man gets paid for equal work. You have a very unusual situation, which is that in your workplace, there is a huge wage gap.

01:24

'''Ashley:''' Oh yeah.

'''Eric:''' Talk to me about that.

'''Ashley:''' There's not only a huge wage gap. I think that there's also like a huge, maybe attention gap.

File:ThePortal-Ep20 RogerPenrose-EricWeinstein.png

2020-04-12T02:48:30Z

Arby McDinkleberg:

Sir Roger Penrose

2020-04-12T02:48:00Z

Arby McDinkleberg: Created page with "== General Info == == Appearances on The Portal == 20: Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy|Episode #020 - Sir Roger Penrose: Plotting the Twist o..."

20: Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy

2020-04-12T02:47:07Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[File:ThePortal-Ep20 RogerPenrose-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|right|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Sir Roger Penrose (left) on episode 20 of The Portal podcast]]
[[Sir Roger Penrose]] is arguably the most important living descendant of [[Albert Einstein]]’s school of [[geometric physics]]. In this episode of [[The Portal]], we avoid the usual questions put to Roger about quantum foundations and [[quantum consciousness]]. Instead we go back to ask about the current status of his thinking on what would have been called “[[Unified Field Theory]]” before it fell out of fashion a couple of generations ago. In particular, Roger is the dean of one of the only rival schools of thought to have survived the “[[String Theory Wars|String Theory wars]]” of the 1980s-2000s. We discuss his view of this [[Twistor Theory]] and its prospects for unification. Instead of spoon feeding the audience, however, the material is presented as it might occur between colleagues in neighboring fields so that the Portal audience might glimpse something closer to scientific communication rather than made for TV performance pedagogy. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Professor Penrose.

<span class="button">[[ep19 | << Previous Episode]]</span> <span class="button">[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/40fa44bd-9cb8-468d-b4e0-7bb5a8d4e313 Listen to Episode 20]</span> <span class="button">[https://rss.art19.com/episodes/40fa44bd-9cb8-468d-b4e0-7bb5a8d4e313.mp3 Download episode (mp3)]</span> <span class="button">[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg93Dm-vYc8 Watch Episode 20]</span> <span class="button">[[ep21 | Next Episode >>]]</span>

[[All Episodes]]

== Participants ==

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein Eric Weinstein] (WEIN)
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose Roger Penrose] (PEN)

== Housekeeping ==

WEIN - Hello, this is Eric. 2 pieces of housekeeping:

# On Bret and Heather (we will resume that thread when they return from the jungle)
# On today’s guest. Eric mentions;

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind The Emperor’s New Mind]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation Many Worlds]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement Quantum Entanglement]
* Penrose’s early work, for example with Hawking (eg; [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose–Hawking_singularity_theorems|the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems]]).

1:00 = Roger is famous for being one of the greatest [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry#Physics Geometric Physicists] now living and perhaps the best descendent of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein Albert Einstein] currently still working in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics Theoretical Physics] in this particular line of thought. Also, he is an example of what the UK does well.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Don't_Panic Don’t Panic!])

1:30 = …if you start to feel as though you are being left behind by one line of thinking, what we do in general is wait to see if a different line of thinking opens up… …this is normal.

2:30 = welcome Roger

3:00 = WEIN - “I know you as one of the most important people at the nexus of Geometry and Physics”

Lyrics from the Leonard Cohen song, “[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKwr3DDvFpw The Future]” (“You don’t know me from the wind, you never will, you never did, but I’m the little jew who wrote the bible”)

Book: [https://www.amazon.com.au/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679776311 The Road to Reality], by Roger Penrose (this appears to be easily accessible online as a pdf)

4:00 = WEIN - “Where are we in the history of coming to understand what this place is in which we find ourselves? What we are made of? And what we know about our own context?”

PEN - “I now feel I should re-write part of it (the Road to Reality) because since I wrote it things have changed in one important way” *

<<<Did he say what the one way it had changed was?

PEN - “A lot has not changed - the thing that has changed… …is to do with Cosmology.”

PEN - I have a proposal… which is new since I wrote that book

[NOTE: I’m not sure if he ever gets back to saying what this proposal is. It looks like it might be “Conformal Cyclic Cosmology”, see eg; [https://physicsworld.com/a/new-evidence-for-cyclic-universe-claimed-by-roger-penrose-and-colleagues/ Physics World], [https://physicsworld.com/a/inside-penroses-universe/ ibid], his own book, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time Cycles of Time]]

6:00 =

== Penrose brief biography. ==

Penrose;

* Born ‘31.
* Took classes from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac Paul Dirac]
* Was undergraduate at [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ UCL]
* Went to [https://www.cam.ac.uk/ Cambridge] for graduate studies.
* Went to study [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AlgebraicGeometry.html Algebraic Geometry], not Physics

PEN - “I’d encountered a friend of my brothers, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_W._Sciama Dennis Sciama].” * (see also the note below)

<<<This name took some finding

Sciama gave lectures on Cosmology and talked about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model steady state theories] in which the Universe expands but doesn’t change because it’s continually ‘replenished’ by the creation of new matter.

Penrose’s older brother, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Penrose Oliver Penrose] who was studying [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics Statistical Mechanics] was the precocious one (of the two brothers).

Penrose had also been listening to talks by[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle Fred Hoyle] who suggested that when the matter in the accelerating expansion reaches the speed of light it disappears.

Penrose didn’t think that was quite right and started drawing pictures with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone Light Cones] and thought they would gradually fade, but not disappear.

8:00 = Talking to his brother in the Kingswood Restaurant, Cambridge *, Roger expressed his doubts and was referred to Dennis.

[NOTE: I tried to find a link for this restaurant, which appears to no longer exist, and came across this really interesting paper by Professor Penrose and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._R._Ellis George Ellis], which is a kind of “scientific eulogy”* for Dennis Sciama, in which the same anecdote is recalled, amongst others: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.2009.0023 (pdf) ]

<<<There’s probably a better term for this, right?

<<<When I search for ‘“the kingswood restaurant” cambridge’ I don’t turn up anything that seems relevant and when I add the word “remember” to that search I start to turn up links to Sir Roger himself.Possibly it was called by a different name. Also possible that no trace of it has made it onto the internet other than his telling.

Dennis Sciama was impressed! Later, when Roger came up, he took him under his wing.

Penrose’s supervisor was Hodge - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._V._D._Hodge W.V.D Hodge]

But later he threw Roger out and Todd became his supervisor - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._A._Todd J.A Todd] *

<<<The links I’ve added to Hodge and Todd both seem right but I’m not personally familiar

Ad Break

9:00 = advert for a watches. Masculinity, something, something….

10:00 = advert for lamps. Mention of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrimandir the Matrimandir] (looks nice, might buy a lamp)

== Dennis Sciama ==

[[File:Sciama.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Dennis Sciama|Dennis Sciama]]

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_W._Sciama Dennis Sciama])

11:00 = Dennis wanted Roger to be a Cosmologist

Dennis had a knack of making sure people met each other. In one case it was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking Stephen Hawking]

Dennis was the last (at the time the only) graduate student of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac Paul Dirac].

Book: [https://www.amazon.com/Strangest-Man-Hidden-Dirac-Mystic/dp/0465022103 The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom] by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Farmelo Graham Farmelo]

PEN - Dirac was hard to get to know.

WEIN - Dirac would be neck and neck with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein Einstein] for greatest 20th Century Physicist.

Eric imputes that Dirac’s hair was not as good as Einstein’s.

PEN - Dirac was the one who put QM in order

== Taste and Beauty ==

[[File:Hopf_Fibration.png|thumb|none|alt=The Hopf Fibration by Niles Johnson|The Hopf Fibration by Niles Johnson]]

The Hopf Fibration ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration#/media/File:Hopf_Fibration.png source],[https://nilesjohnson.net/hopf.html gif])

WEIN - “you have wielded taste and beauty as a weapon your entire life, your drawings are among the most compelling”

13:00 = “Our friend Joe Rogan” *

[[File:Joe Rogan.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Joe Rogan|Joe Rogan]]

Joe Rogan * is a prominent Podcaster and Cage-fighting Commentator

<<<Roger Penrose and Eric Weinstein are friends with the guy who does the commentary for the cage fighting. It’s quite a time to be alive.

<<<If you have ever been on Joe Rogan’s Podcast and now have your own podcast, you are contractually obliged to mention his name at least every 2.5 episodes

WEIN - The hopf fibration is the only non-trivial principal bundle that can be visually seen

WEIN - since the world seems to be about principal bundles, it’s a bit odd that the general public doesn’t know that stuff of which we are.

PEN - The “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration Hopf fibration]”, or the “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_parallel Clifford Parallels]” was instrumental in the subject of Twistor Theory.

14:00 = Penrose’s diagram

There were three versions. The third version is in The Road to Reality. He thinks the second version is probably the best.

(I think they are talking about the diagram of the Hopf Fibration ?? as seen at the link above )

I '''think''' this is the one from “The Road to Reality”, which would make it Version 3: * **

please correct this if you know better[[File:image_5.jpg|image alt text]]

There’s also this diagram, which I found at a blog here: http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/tag/penrose/

[[File:Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels|Penrose-Rindler-Clifford parallels]]

And there’s this diagram, which I found at this link ( http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tweb/00001/ ) which is an HTML presentation of “On the Origins of Twistor Theory” - Roger Penrose, 1987

[[File:Robinson.jpg|thumb|none|alt= A time-slice (t=0) of a Robinson congruence.| A time-slice (t=0) of a Robinson congruence.]]

[NOTE: these latter two might be Versions 1 and 2? Or later reproductions.]

Penrose thinks Version 2 was the best.

WEIN - Dirac famously brought in these bizarre objects called Spinors, which are a prerequisite to getting to Twistors.

== Dirac’s Spinors ==

[[File:Paul Dirac, 1933.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Paul Dirac, 1933|Paul Dirac, 1933]]

15:00 = Dirac gave a course (2 courses) of lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Course 1 - Basic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Quantum Mechanics]

Course 2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory Quantum Field Theory] but also Spinors

In the second course (when Penrose took the course) Dirac deviated from his normal course of lectures to give two or three lectures on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor#Component_spinors Two Component Spinors]. ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.3824 Spinors])

WEIN - For the lay audience… If we think of all of matter as waves, the question is "what medium are they waves ''in''? And the medium would be a medium of Spinors, which is not something that’s easy for people to understand.

Denis recommended to Roger a book by Corson (presumably this one: [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tensors-Spinors-Relativistic-Wave-Equations/dp/B0000CIMO7 Introduction to Tensors, Spinors, and Relativistic Wave-Equations], 1953 by [https://www.ias.edu/scholars/edward-michael-corson E.M. Corson] *

The book was reviewed by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam Abdus Salam] in 1955 (https://www.nature.com/articles/175831b0 )

<<<Dr Corson doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page which is a shame, considering some of the people who do

Roger found the book incomprehensible.

But then he took Dirac’s (2nd) course.

Dirac talked about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor#Component_spinors Two Component Spinors] and this was exactly what Roger needed.

Other people said that Dirac’s course was just like his book but Roger hadn’t read the book.

(I assume this one? Dirac - [https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Quantum-Mechanics-P-Dirac/dp/1607965607 Principles of Quantum Mechanics])

18:00 = WEIN - "do you think Dirac understood (Spinors)?…

Mention of Mathematicians:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Killing Wilhelm Killing]
* “Lee”? - this Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Lee was in Differential Geometry but was born in 1950. Maybe his father?
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lie_Cartan Élie Cartan]

WEIN - let me throw out a dangerous idea. I don’t think any of us understand them (Spinors) .

WEIN - Dirac understood what could be said about Spinors

20:00 = PEN - "usually one talks about the Dirac Spinors, which are the 4 spinors, but they split into these 2 and 2 (WEIN - in even dimensions) Yes, that’s right.

[[File:image_9.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

Sir Roger Penrose’s favourite film is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) 2001: A Space Odyssey]

== Geometric Interpretation of Spinors ==

Roger describes the way he thinks of spinors geometrically.

“I had this picture of a flag. You have the flag-pole, goes along the light-cone (WEIN - that’s the vector-like piece of it) and then you have an extra piece of data which is this flag plane. You get a pretty good geometrical understanding. The one little catch is that if you rotate it through 360 degrees, so you might think just to where it started, it’s not the same as before, it’s changed its sign.”

[[File:Spinor.png|thumb|none|alt=A Spinor|A Spinor]]

Taken from Introduction to [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.3824.pdf Spinors - Andrew M Steane 2013] (pdf)

WEIN: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle Klein Bottle]:

== Interlude: Klein Bottles ==

Get your Klein Bottle today from our friends at [https://www.kleinbottle.com/ Acme Klein Bottles]

Here’s a good [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAsICMPwGPY video about Klein Bottles]

(the presenter is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll Clifford Stoll], Astronomer and proprietor of [https://www.kleinbottle.com/ Acme Klein Bottles] )

* The Klein Bottle is “two [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip Möbius Strips] stitched together” (after [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Ferdinand_M%C3%B6bius August Ferdinand Möbius])
* The Klein Bottle is named after [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Klein Felix Klein]
* The Klein Bottle only has one side
* Klein bottles is 3D Universes must have a self-intersection
* Klein hats are continuously deformable back to themselves
* Clifford’s friend, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Lang Robert Lang], made an [https://langorigami.com/crease-pattern/klein-bottle-opus-444/ Origami Klein Bottle] *

Here is another, related video, also from Numberphile, about the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VydFQmtZ8&list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIpgtcFs_7fHGUedGEKu73p&index=8&t=0s Topology of a Twisted Torus]

<<<NB: This is a link to the actual pattern so that you can make your very own Origami Klein bottle.

This video is about slicing up toroids. The presenter is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_H._S%C3%A9quin Carlo H. Séquin]. Later in the podcast, Roger talks about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_parallel Clifford Parallels] dividing up space in a similar way. This helped me to visualise that.

<<<One of his sculptures is not far from where I live. May have to make a visit.

It also introduced me to [http://www2.memenet.or.jp/~keizo/index.html Keizo Ushio] who makes amazing toroidal sculptures, like this one *

[[File:NiihamaSculpture.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Niihama Sculpture|Niihama Sculpture]]

([http://www2.memenet.or.jp/~keizo/NiihamaSculptureProject.htm source])

Here is an interview with [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkInMmWcblI Keizo Ushio].

In [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w1qkiRHQ4E this video] he can be heard speaking in English.

And here is a limerick about Klein bottles.

A mathematician named Klein

Thought the Moebius band was divine

Said he: "If you glue

The edges of two

You’ll get a weird bottle like mine."

([http://komplexify.com/math/harmony/Limericks.html source]) *

There are some more interesting (if somewhat amateur) visualisations in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRTKSzAOBr4 this Youtube video], from which I learned:

* The Klein Bottle is a [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonorientableSurface.html non-orientable], [https://www2.cs.duke.edu/courses/fall06/cps296.1/Lectures/sec-II-1.pdf 2-dimensional manifold].
* It can be “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_(mathematics) immersed]” into [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_space Euclidean 3-dimensional space] with a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersection_theory self-intersection].
* Non-orientable means “there exists no continuous normal unit vector field”

<<<Also relevant:

A mathematician confided

That the Moebius band is one-sided

And you’ll get quite a laugh

If you cut one in half

’Cause it stays in one piece when divided.

== The Square Root of the Klein Bottle (Weyl’s Cones) ==

21:00 = WEIN - The Klein bottle has (in certain sense that can be made precise) a square-root that is a torus.

[Note: googling for “the square root of the Klein Bottle” didn’t get me far but searching for “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_cover double cover]” I got useful things like [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1073425/two-sheeted-covering-of-the-klein-bottle-by-the-torus this question on math Stackexchange], where someone has drawn this:

[[File:image_12.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

And the top respondent says “Most topologists would be happy just drawing the diagram you’ve drawn” (to prove that there is a two-sheeted covering of the Klein bottle by the Torus)

Reading that answer and then this one: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/140439/torus-as-double-cover-of-the-klein-bottle gave me a pretty good idea of what’s going on.]

WEIN - It’s really the square-root of the rotations that has this double effect (but we say it linguistically in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to understand)

PEN - I understood that a spinor was the square root of a vector and I couldn’t make head of tail of it. When I went to Dirac’s course it did make sense.

Dirac gave a demonstration due to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Weyl Hermann Weyl] of rolling one [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone cone] on another

Here is a google-books link to Penrose describing the same model in the [https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Qk5Q74166qcC&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41#v=onepage&q&f=false Hermann Weyl Centenary Lectures].

[http://www.weylmann.com This site] also has a description of the model (http://www.weylmann.com/2010archive.shtml - you need to search for the word “cone” to find the right article) and lots of other information about Weyl himself. It includes this diagram to illustrate the model:

[[File:image_13.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

The author of the site is William O. Straub and he has written other papers about Spinors, including eg; [http://www.weylmann.com/weyldirac.pdf Weyl Spinors and Dirac’s Electron Equation].

This [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLH4l_SoIy0 video on Youtube] is a visualisation of rolling one coin around another.

22:00 =

PEN - You imagine increasing the semi-angle of the cone until it becomes almost flat. And then what’s the other one? It’s just a little wobble.

This demonstrates

WEIN - with a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulley pulley] system

In the place where you can see this most easily, it’s slightly confusing.

23:50 = WEIN - “we have to use the visual cortex we’re handed and then we have to trick it into imagining worlds beyond where we’ve seen.”

Ad Break

24:00 = advert for supplements.

25:00 = advert for online courses

26:00 =

== Dirac’s Scissors ==

Dirac’s scissors, aka the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_trick Plate Trick], (related to?) the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaIR-cWk_-o&feature=youtu.be Belt Trick]

Air on a Dirac String: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYBqIRM8GiY

Fermions have a spin which is half an odd number. They have this curious property that rotate them and they get back to minus themselves. And it’s crucial for matter.

Without this, we wouldn’t have anything.

Bosons are the opposite. They’d rather like to be in the same state. For the Fermions it’s completely the opposite.

The Spin Statistics Theorem - "if things have a spin of a

When we want to treat these objects quantum mechanically, we have two

PEN - well, you’ve got these two types of matter.

[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion Fermions]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson Bosons]

34:00 = [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory Phlogiston]

[NOTE: Phlogiston was the supposed substance that inhered in bodies capable of combustion

Apropos of nothing much, I have always loved this quote about writing:

“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marge_Piercy Marge Piercy]

''']'''

== Maxwell’s Equations ==

35: 00 = “[http://www.maxwells-equations.com/ Maxwell’s Equations] completely changed our way of looking at the world”

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday Faraday] had a lot of the influential ideas.

Faraday had clues that there were connections to light, but he didn’t have the equations.

[[File:image_14.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

Charles Darwin

Book: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin Darwin] - ON THE VARIOUS CONTRIVANCES BY WHICH BRITISH AND FOREIGN ORCHIDS ARE FERTILISED BY INSECTS, AND ON THE GOOD EFFECTS OF INTERCROSSING. BY CHARLES DARWIN, M.A., F.R.S., &c. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

([http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F800&viewtype=text&pageseq=1 full text as HTML])

In which Eric claims Darwin reveals that he did not understand his own theories.

== Aharonov, Escher, Bohm ==

This bizarre effect of passing an electron around an insulated wire

The gentleman mentioned is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakir_Aharonov Yakir Aharonov] *

They are talking about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharonov%E2%80%93Bohm_effect Aharonov–Bohm effect] *

<<<or possibly the related Al’tshuler-Aronov-Spivak effect? Where ‘Aranov’ is a different person? I’m pretty sure it’s the aharanov-Bohm effect

We learned that if you have an insulated solenoid, the phase of the electron beam going in a circle around it would be shifted despite the fact that the electromagnetic field could be treated as zero because the electromagnetic potential, this precursor, had been shown to carry the actual content… it turned out that geometric object was more important

38:00 = [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascending_and_Descending MC ESCHER - Ascending and Descending] (The Penrose Stairs)

[[File:image_15.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

Ascending and Descending - M.C. Escher

39:00 = PEN - anecdote about visiting Amsterdam. Mentions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_Wylie Shaun Wyile] *

this is a guess, please check I have the right person

41:00 = “I played around with this and whittled it down to the triangle which people refer to as a ‘tribar’.” NB: He’s being modest and we actually call it a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_triangle Penrose Triangle]. ([http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PenroseTriangle.html Penrose Triangle on Wolfram])

I’m pretty sure this is the paper: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1958.tb00634.x impossible objects a special type of visual illusion] - L.S. Penrose and R. Penrose *

<<<NB: Wiley want $7 to rent this 62 year old paper for 48 hours (!) or $42 (!!) to buy it as a PDF. It is on SciHub and is 3 pages long. If you had to buy Penrose’s (paperback) book (tRtR) for the same per-page price, it would cost $14,000 a copy

Escher gave Penrose a print and it is in the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashmolean_Museum Ashmolean Museum]

<<<I can’t read this article: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roger-penrose-on-his-friend-mc-escher-the-genius-that-galleries-ignored-90nhp8gsd0l because it’s behind a paywall, but the google link-summary says “… and he chose Fish and Scales, now on loan to the Ashmolean in Oxford”

(I think) the print was [https://www.wikiart.org/en/m-c-escher/fishes-and-scales Fishes and Scales] *

[[File:image_16.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

43:00 =

== Eric Explains General Relativity ==

You have to begin with 4 degrees of freedom

Then you put rulers and protractors into it

That rise is

Those don’t fit together

The degree of “Escher-ness”

You throw one of them away, called the Weyl

That’s a long causal chain, but it is an accurate

== Cohomology ==

It also illustrates co-homology.

What can you use Twistor-theory for? You can use it to solve Maxwell’s equations.

the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception movie inception]

But that effect is the soul of the Aharanov-Bohm effect

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Reutersv%C3%A4rd Oscar Reutersvärd]

We’ve mistold our stories

You were quite close to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Atiyah Michael Atiyah]

His partner was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isadore_Singer Isadore Singer]

They came up with the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atiyah%E2%80%93Singer_index_theorem Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem] which governs worlds in which there are no time dimensions but only space dimensions, or only time dimensions but no space

PEN - they could be just equations

Soap films look like elliptic equations

PEN - Atiyah-Singer is extremely general

WEIN - it tells you that… some high dimension… topological knotedness tells you something about the kinds of waves that can dance on that space.

53:00 =

== Is The Real World Complex? ==

How to make Twistor-theory work in curved spaces

I ran into a problem that had to do with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_geometry complex geometry].

Complex Geometry:

The analysis is particularly fascinating.

When you talk about real numbers, you can draw a function.

Smooth? Continuous? Curvature? How many degrees of smoothness? 1,2,3,4 or infinite?

Then we learn about complex. Do it all again using complex numbers and suddenly you find that if it’s smooth, everything comes with it.

WEIN - mathematicians quite often view the case of complex numbers as the natural case.

WEIN - You (Penrose) have been instrumental in making the case

…and then I learned about Quantum Mechanics. Yeah - there they are!

Suddenly these numbers are right there at the base of the subject

== Minkowskian Geometry ==

57:00 = One of the ways of explaining what Twistor theory is

You are taking space-time and replacing it

You can ‘pull it upstairs’ to this Twistor space

Has this complex-number baked into it.

PEN - these things come together and take many years, sometimes, before they come together.

I was struck by the fact that

According to Einstein, special relativity, objects get flattened

It was these two-component spinors

If you think about the sky

Think of vector which is something that has a magnitude and also a direction to it.

You have particular vectors that you call ‘null’ - these are the ones along the light cone.

1:00 = in Minkowskian Geometry

1:01 = Minkowski showed

One event, say, and the light from that event reaches… a position in space time.

An event, or a point, in space-time

Imagine a particle moving between two points.

Minkowski realised that special-relativity is best described by this Minkowskian geometry.

Your idea was…

PEN - it took years but the initial idea isn’t so hard to understand.

If you look up in the sky, what are you seeing?

The world-line of that photon is ‘tilted over’

Suppose the photon is emitted at one event and received at another event.

That time measure is

Suppose you travel to a planet that is 8 light years away

Less than the time that someone on Earth would think it took you to get there.

And if you actually travel the speed of light, that time would be zero.

You’re not travelling at the speed of light, because you can’t get to the speed of light.

Even people who do this day and night choose never to work in some world.

If you go back and look at when Einstein introduced his relativity.

In that innocent decision to break off one degree of freedom and treat it different.

== The Twistor Theory Cult ==

1:06 = “at that time, mathematicians and physicists were barely talking to each other”

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Jackiw Roman Jackiw] - “when we talked to the geometers, we started to learn new things”

Jakiw is interviewed [https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/34449 here at aip] *

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric Schwarzchild Singularity] - what we’d now call a ‘horizon’

<<<I haven’t found the direct quote, if you can find it, add a link

1:10 = you were sort of seen as running a cult

[https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/lmason/Tn/ Twistor Newsletter]

1:11 = PEN - “let me describe the basics of (Twistor Theory)”

== Twistor Theory ==

Let me think of it the other way round, that is my past light cone

Imagine this cone stretching out into the past

Those stars in the sky look like points.

WEIN - imagine the world is transparent?

PEN - no, let’s go out into space

An astronaut whizzing by looks up.

Thanks to aberration, these will not be in quite the same place

It’s distorted, but it’s distorted conformally

If I see a circle, the astronaut will also see a circle

The thing about that transformation - something I knew about

You think about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere Riemann Sphere]

[[File:image_17.png|image alt text]][[File:image_18.png|image alt text]]

The Reimann Sphere and a Candy (or Toffee) Apple

The Riemann sphere folds all this up.

If you had a caramel coating around an apple (a [https://www.justataste.com/candy-apples/ Candy Apple]) and at the point where the stick goes into that apple.

And it (the Riemann Sphere) has this property that it’s conformal.

The transformation is ‘analytic’ or ‘holomorphic’

WEIN - the analog of smooth for real numbers

Those transformations which send the sphere to the sphere are exactly those in Relativity.

The mapping from their sky to my sky is exactly this

And you get these two-component spinors

People find this puzzling. I find it puzzling!

The boundary of the thing will remain a circle.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Bott Raoul Bott]

“[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bott_periodicity_theorem Bott periodicity]”

Low-dimensional coincidences

Spinors grow exponentially whereas vectors grow linearly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_group The Lorentz group].

The rotations of space and time

When you do it (relativity) in the two spinor form.

Complex one-dimensional space.

Each complex number carries the information of two real numbers

The complex line

The language is intended to make things hostile to the newbie *

<<<Is it really '''intended''' for that purpose? Is it “the DISC”?

An object with the smallest spin you can have. Spin 1/2

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics) Chirality]

(I think this is what’s called the [http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh1/gyroscopes/screwrule.html Right-hand Screw Rule])

The complex numbers come in to describe these possible directions of spin.

These rather abstract numbers and the concrete directions in space.

== The World is Given Only Once ==

1:22 = WEIN - “do you wed yourself to the world that’s given”

“the world is given only once”, attributed to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mach Ernst Mach]

“Do you wish to have a more general theory?”

What I see you having done is to work with mathematics that are particularising themselves to the world we live in.

1:23 = “You’re getting married to the world while other people are dating it, trying to keep their options open”

String Theory: People talk about (high) dimensions and, sure, we’ve got mathematics to describe that.

PEN - I’m looking for a way to describe the world that’s very particualar to the world we see

10 is two more than 8 and in 8 you have triality.

WEIN - “They (string theorists) never grow up to playing with reality”

PEN - I’m looking for a route that works specifically for the dimensionality we have

WEIN - If there weren’t a beautiful mathematics to catch you. You’re stage diving at a punk concert…

… the political economy of science means fewer people are willing to make strong predictions.

A dying breed of people who are prepared to go down with the ship for the privelege of commanding it.

Yours has been one of the most important, idiosyncratic programmes.

It is at least a deep insight into how to transform one problem into another to allow solutionis that wouldn’t have been easily gleaned in the original formulation.

WEIN - “do you believe Twistors are a more fundamental description of the world?”

PEN - “I do, yes. I don’t usually say that out loud”

WEIN - “I think that’s fucking great”

1:27 = one of the aims of mathematics is being more and more general

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atiyah%E2%80%93Singer_index_theorem Atiyah-Singer Theorem]

Deformation Complexes: 1st term - symmetries, 2nd - fields/waves, 3rd - equations

Cut it off at that point and have an elliptic complex

In dimension 4 we glean, something bizarre, that there are infinite ways to do calculus in 4 dimensional space and only one way to do it in every other dimension.

WEIN - '''Maybe differentiable structures are part of Physics'''

PEN - '''it’s quite possible'''

== A Brief Critique of Particle Physics ==

If you have two Lie groups that act transitively on the same sphere in usual position, then either their intersection acts transitively on that sphere or the dimension of that sphere is 15. And I believe the intersection of the groups looks like the electro-strong group.

PEN - “I’ve never been someone who studied particle physics closely”

Pulled out of nowhere just by talking about sphere-transitive group actions.

Particle Physics?

We may be a long way from understanding what’s going on there.

WEIN - I didn’t know that

WEIN - I think we’re almost at the end

PEN - Understanding why the groups are the groups that we see.

1:30 = let me ask you a couple of questions

People like:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Lee_Glashow Sheldon Lee Glashow]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Georgi Howard Georgi]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Petit Jean-Pierre Petit] *
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam Abdus Salam]

Unifying symmetries that remain very odd because they’re so attractive and powerful.

<<<This guy seems to have a very wide variety of interests. I double checked I have the right person and it seems right but please change it if you know differently.

The prettiest of them being spin-10, which physicists insist on calling SO 10 for reasons that escape me.

PEN - “Is this the one that doesn’t exist?”

Spin-5 (lives inside spin-10) was disproven

WEIN - Glashow and Georgi “rushed to commit ritual suicide far too quickly”

PEN - from the outside, I’m not convinced that…

Somehow (particle physics) has not got to the point… I’m hoping that Twistor theory might have something to say about it but the area that needs to be explored hasn’t been explored"

== Particles in Twistor Theory ==

PEN - there was a question about how we treat massive particles in Twistor theory.

Twistor theory describes massless things.

Massless things have a privileged treatment.

PEN - There is a way of describing the Maxwell equations …which comes directly out of Twistor theory.

If you want to talk about massive particles, the way it seems to lead you is

A massive particle has a momentum vector which is time-like, so it points within the cone.

One way you can describe a time-like one is to think of two null ones. So you think of a zig-zag, so it’s got a zig and a zag and that’s one convenient way of doing it.

Or you might have one that’s made of three: zig, zag, zog - something like that.

You can get at the time-like line, it can be built from primitives.

You get these groups in Twistor theory and they look like the particle physics groups.

You get SU-2 and SU-3

SU-2 is ubiquitous and does not impress Eric.

but SU-3, representing the strong force, can be gauged to give QCD (genuine gauge theory)

Weak isospin.

Gauging doesn’t really work for SU-2

It’s not the full group and so on and there’s something wrong with it

1:34 - this is all guessing

The idea is you could develop a particle physics using many Twistors.

We have a problem in the standard model. We have an origin story with two gods.

The God of Einstein and the other god of SU-2 x SU-3.

The other gives us the quantum numbers.

This has no connection to the space and time data.

PEN - “they must be tied up at some stage but we haven’t got to that”

The idea was to do it via twistors.

When people discovered Charm this suddenly didn’t fit.

By charm you mean the addition of entirely separate versions of the familiar family of matter.

The addition of genera

1:36 = PEN - “I think we should go back to that”

Twistor Theory starts off as a theory about flat space-time

WEIN - “that’s what bothers me”

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbert_Sch%C3%BCcking Engelbert Schücking]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Kerr Roy Kerr]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_K._Sachs Rainer K. Sachs]

== Origins of Twistor Theory ==

1:37 = PEN - “… the question is where did twistor theory come from”

WEIN - The Riemann Sphere of a with the Riemann Sphere of b

The world we see is Real numbers but the dynamics is controlled by the complex numbers.

Space-time has 4 dimensions.

Wanted to add another one because I wanted to incorporate an idea that was

Think of a Riemann sphere again

Complex numbers on one side and again on the other.

Rather than splitting everything into fourier components

Space-time is 4 dimensional and if you try to complexify it, you get 8 dimensions

1:39 = PEN - Anecdote about the day the JFK was shot and the day after when they visited San Antonio.

He travelled back with [https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2038878487_Istvan_Ozsvath István Ozsváth] * who didn’t speak much and started to think about

these constructions of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Robinson_(physicist) Ivor Robinson] * (in Dallas) which were solutions to the Maxwell equations that had these curious twists in them. I’d understood these things and realised that they were described by the Hopf map or the Clifford Parallels:

<<<I think? This was another hard one to look for.

<<<Please correct any links that you think are wrong?

Hopf fibration/Clifford parallels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration

== Robinson Congruences ==

You can think of a three dimensional sphere in four dimensions and you have these circles which fill the whole space, no two intersect and every two link. Beautiful configuration. This was the thing that geometrically described the solutions Ivor had found.

Think of a light ray and then think of all the light rays that meet that one and that family of light rays, you could have solutions of Maxwell’s equations that point along those rays.

It pushes the light ray into the complex.

You don’t see the light ray anymore.

You describe it by this family.

As I called them later, Robinson Congruences.

Six-dimensional family.

And one dimension, they can twist one way or the other.

WEIN - and that had three complex dimensions

PEN - it was a complex-projected three-space.

You have a 5-dimensional space that divides this 6-dimensional space into two.

1:44 - Isadore Singer took the work of Jim Simons and Frank Yang and on the trip to Oxford said “oh my god, this is the quaternionic rather than the complex hopf fibration”. He realised the self-dual equations were going to be a revolution.

1:45 = 4 complex dimensions means 8 real dimensions.

== The Wu Yang Dictionary ==

WEIN - I am not a devotee of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory String Theory], nor of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity Loop Quantum Gravity]

1:47 = if you look at curvature.

The Wu Yang dictionary. A geometer who becomes the most successful hedge fund manager in human history ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_Tsun_Wu Wu]) meets a physicsist (Yang) *

<<<I’m confused about who the hedge fund manager is ? When I look up the two scientists I can’t see any mention of a hedge fund. Have I mis-identified one of them?

Steenrod’s fibre bundles ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Steenrod Norman Steenrod])

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ehresmann Charles Ehresmann], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehresmann_connection Ehresmann][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehresmann_connection connection][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehresmann_connection s], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_potential vector potentials] and what have you

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_quantization Geometric quantisation] revolution

Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations come out of curvature

The pre-quantum line bundle

The key point is that what we’d previously treated as the annoyance of the HUP now became the beauty… the underlying quantum theory is now geometric.

Michael Atiyah

This weird grab bag that is called QFT - regimes where the number of particles changes, you need QFT, you can’t do it in QM.

QFT would have been discovered by topologists and geometers.

These are three separate revolutions. With people noones ever heard of. *

This thing, which is as gorgeous as anyting I’ve ever seen

What the F? Am I wildly off?

Quillam Theory?

1:51 = if you find the way through this you will really find the key.

That’s picked up a beautiful area of mathematics and turned it into physics.

I think there are things that are hiding in there.

What do you make of the fact that we now have three separate geometries?

# Reimannian Geometry - Parent of General Relativity
# Ehresmannian Geometry - Parent of the Maxwell Theory, also strong/weak force
# And then you’ve got this other geometric theory which is the geometric quantum.

Simons and Yang find … has gauge theory

Because Einstein takes curvature and uses something called

The opportunity to use gauge theory is lost.

He did this amazing thing by developing relativity.

He died before Quarks

There are huge, beautiful things in Mathematics and they do have a role.

The way the world works depends on deep mathematics.

They can be generalising ideas and revealing all sorts

The proportion of these that has relevance to Physics is very small

I’m sure that we will find other things, but the temptation is that there are so many directions

Once we had people who had a lot of different ideas.

Almost every new idea is dead on arrival unless you specifically keep it from predicting things that we don’t see.

== A Brief Critique of String Theory ==

A class of “naughty boys” who get to make all sorts of claims…*

1:57 = “twistor theory is, at a minimum, an incredible valuable tool”

However, it’s also somewhat tolerated within the system

It’s a minority point of view but it’s allowed to play a parallel game to the String community.

String Theory is the smartest community out there - smarter than the relativists, smarter than the geometers, very clever and very insufferable.

The problem with that community is that they’ve accomplished a great deal that isn’t of a stringy nature.

Instead of quantising geometry, it backfired and they had the geometry geometrise the quantum. That’s the main legacy of these people.

They took off for Paris and landed in Tokyo. Very impressive as a feat but not what they intended to do.

I think I agree with that.

The influence I

== Supersymmetry ==

What do you think about the legacy of something like Supersymmetry?

When I (Penrose) first heard of it

You needed complex analysis.

I visited (Bruno) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Zumino Zumino]

Deep supersymmetric model (the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wess–Zumino_model|Wess-Zumino model]])

2:00 = Dirac had written this paper using two spinors - all the different spins with 2 spinors, clearer, etc.

Realised you could write it in

2:02 = Feynamn said these two things are proportional

Bell-Robinson Tensor

Bianci Identities written in 2-spinors

The higher the spin, the more indices

== The Torsion Tensor ==

“We don’t really understand the things that we are given for free”

Re-deduces the Bianci identities

“I worry that we never really grounded these fields”

The torsion tensor.

Never shows up in any meaningful way anywhere.

2:04 PEN: I don’t use it.

what we have learned is of a very frightening nature.

Einsteins equations come from the simplest possible thing that could be optimised.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian The Lagrangian].

== Dirac and the Bianci Identities ==

Dirac’s third equation is the equation for matter which generates all of something called K-theory, which is absolutely fundamental.

2:06 PEN: I wanted to finish a story

At one point Dirac was a fellow at the same college.

I said to him “would he have opportunity to talk to me about it”

I wrote down this wave equation that represents the Bianci equations

He asked where it came from and he said “what are the Bianci identities”

He simply re-discovered them himself, he didn’t know they were called the Bianci identities.

In vacuum, say, and you take the Weil curvature which is all that’s left of the Riemann curvature and you write that in spinors and it’s a spinor with four indices completely symmetrical and then when you write the derivative, it’s the derivative acting on those four things and one contraction - the derivative two indices and you contract one of those - and that’s your equation. That vanishes, that’s the equation. Same as the Maxwell equations, same as the neutrino if you have one index and no mass, and it’s the way I think about these things.

Did you read his 1963 article in

Against naive application of the scientific method.

He says Schrodinger would not have been led into error if he had not been pressed into agreement with experiment.

Secretly he was talking about himself.

Dirac trying to give us a gift from mount Olympus

Give yourself more room to play, to imagine and to be wrong.

2:10 PEN - Dirac didn’t like to be wrong. He was very worried about saying things that were wrong and so would say nothing.

== The Future of Analytic Geometry ==

WEIN - Let me ask you a hard question… …you’re going to be in your 90’s soon

There’s a failure to pass torches. Who would you be pointing to?

PEN - A Human Being? …I don’t think I’m going to take you up on that one… …it’s proably someone I don’t know.

WEIN - Do you worry that the Oxford School of geometric physics won’t continue?

PEN - I suppose I do a bit.

WEIN - the UK tolerates and encourages personal idiosyncrasies.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Hitchin Nigel Hitchin]
* Mason - possibly [https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/lionel.mason Lionel Mason]?
* [https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/philip.candelas Philip Candelas]

You’re asking me a bigger thing than… yeah

== Penrose Tiles ==

Have you been to the courtyard of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons_Center_for_Geometry_and_Physics Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics]

They have a wall there - the so called iconic wall

They’re in a place that can be visited with a key and I always think about, in a fantastic world, unlocking that wall and seeing if it’s a gateway to something else.

2:15 = We all worry that we won’t get to see the end

What if I don’t get to see the end? Does that animates you?

There’s a huge amount of chance involved in these things. It’s all a gamble. *

TO see a real end is too remote

<<<Imagine how he must have seen the fellow-minds of his generation die, decade by decade

== The Googly Problem ==

On the other hand we didn’t really discuss twistor theory - it’s been stuck and now it’s got unstuck.

The main theory

Construct solutions of the Einstein equations or the Ricci-flat which were completely

as long as they were anti-self dual

Why do we want complex solutions anyway?

Once I thought that the complex solutions were wavefunctions

I called in the non-linear graviton, which got stuck with the googly problem.

A googly is a ball bowled in the game of Cricket.

The ball bounces and to make it spin left-handed requires a special action but when you throw a googly, you use the same action which spins the ball left to instead spin it right.

I struggled and struggled and came up with all sorts of wild ideas and I found one that worked but it required a Cosmological Constant.

I was talking to

“That’s not the point, there are so many things that work better if you put this Cosmological Constant in”

It enables you to have a construction that enables you to solve the problem.

You talk about this algebra

Instead of patching

A point made clear to me by Michael Atiyah

This enables you to find a general solution of the Einstein equations.

But this is Lorentzian and not positive definite.

And that’s not the thing I’m good at doing

WEIN - sounds like you need a collaborator?

WEIN - stay away from that consciousness stuff

WEIN - stick with what you’ve done in Physics and try ot push that ball forwards.

WEIN - people are hungry to hear what it sounds like

PEN - as important as the details if not more.

2:22 = Thank You Very Much

Please subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to us on youtube.

== Transcript ==
[https://theportal.wiki/images/5/5d/Penrose.vtt Raw transcript file]

== Resources ==
<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="00:14:00">
[[File:Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg|thumb|Clifford parallels]]
</div>
<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="00:38:00">
[[File:Ascending and Descending.jpg|thumb|Ascending and Descending, by M. C. Escher. Lithograph, 1960.]]
</div>

== Notes ==
<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="00:14:00">
There were three versions. The third version is in The Road to Reality. He thinks the second version is probably the best.
</div>
<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="00:38:00">
MC ESCHER - Ascending and Descending (The Penrose Stairs)
</div>

== Experimental Markup for player ==

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:00:01">
Eric Weinstein interviews Sir Roger Penrose, Episode 20 of The Portal
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:00:01">
Player by Demp

Annotations by R1chard5mith
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:00:01">
[[File:Eric weinstein.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:00:02">
[[File:Roger penrose.jpg|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:05">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f9/Sciama2.jpg/200px-Sciama2.jpg
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_W._Sciama Dennis Sciama]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:10">
https://static.scientificamerican.com/blogs/cache/file/7DAF801B-9AED-4B63-B7EAD43F5E9B1B2D_source.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:17">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics Physics]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:31">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Stephen_Hawking.StarChild.jpg/220px-Stephen_Hawking.StarChild.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:31">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking Stephen Hawking]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:40">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/Paul_Dirac%2C_1933.jpg/220px-Paul_Dirac%2C_1933.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:40">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac Paul Dirac]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:50">
Book: [https://www.amazon.com/Strangest-Man-Hidden-Dirac-Mystic/dp/0465022103 The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom] by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Farmelo Graham Farmelo]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:12:22">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein Albert Einstein]
<div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:12:35">
Eric imputes that Dirac’s hair was not as good as Einstein’s.
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:12:34">
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/wildcards/images/c/c7/Einstein.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:12:42">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Quantum mechanics]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:12:42">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png/290px-Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:00">
http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:08">
NB:Roger Penrose and Eric Weinstein are friends with the guy who does the commentary for the cage fighting. What a time to be alive.
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzQUP1qoWDoEbmsQxvdjxgQ Joe Rogan Experience]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:08">
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/027/944/everdonedmt.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:11">
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GrotesqueApprehensiveCusimanse-mobile.mp4
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:11">
The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration Hopf Fibration] is the only non-trivial principal bundle that can be visually seen
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:11">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Hopf_Fibration.png/250px-Hopf_Fibration.png
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:13">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_bundle Fibre Bundles]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:13">
The “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration Hopf fibration]”, or the “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_parallel Clifford Parallels]” was instrumental in the subject of Twistor Theory.
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:20">
There’s also this diagram, which I found at a blog here: http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/tag/penrose/
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:20">
http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:22">
And there’s this diagram, which I found at this link ( http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tweb/00001/ ) which is an HTML presentation of “On the Origins of Twistor Theory” - Roger Penrose, 1987
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:22">
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tweb/00001/robinson.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:14:17">
[[File:Road to reality hopf.jpg|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:39">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor Spinors]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:14:39">
[[File:Spinors flag.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:43">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistor_theory Twistor Theory]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:54">
quantum mechanics and the first course
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:59">
Dirac gave a course (2 courses) of lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Course 1 - Basic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Quantum Mechanics]

Course 2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory Quantum Field Theory] but also Spinors
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:15:00">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Spinor_on_the_circle.png/330px-Spinor_on_the_circle.png
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:15:02">
In the second course (when Penrose took the course) Dirac deviated from his normal course of lectures to give two or three lectures on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor#Component_spinors Two Component Spinors]. ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.3824 Spinors])

</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:16:06">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark Quarks]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:16:06">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Proton_quark_structure.svg/225px-Proton_quark_structure.svg.png
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:16:12">
General phenomenon of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave Waves]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:16:12">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Superpositionprinciple.gif/220px-Superpositionprinciple.gif
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:16:39">
[[File:Cordon spinors book.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:16:39">
Denis recommended to Roger a book by Corson (presumably this one: [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tensors-Spinors-Relativistic-Wave-Equations/dp/B0000CIMO7 Introduction to Tensors, Spinors, and Relativistic Wave-Equations], 1953 by [https://www.ias.edu/scholars/edward-michael-corson E.M. Corson] *
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:17:39">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory Quantum Field Theory]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:17:39">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg/211px-Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg.png
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:00">
https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/assets/8c/c2317c444c70a04633e4fd29095ef1adda7d8f.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:18:26">
Other people said that Dirac’s course was just like his book but Roger hadn’t read the book.

(I assume this one? Dirac - [https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Quantum-Mechanics-P-Dirac/dp/1607965607 Principles of Quantum Mechanics])
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:26">
[[File:Dirac principles book.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:39">
[[File:Paul Dirac.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:18:55">

Mention of Mathematicians:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Killing Wilhelm Killing]
* “Lee”? - this Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Lee was in Differential Geometry but was born in 1950. Maybe his father?
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lie_Cartan Élie Cartan]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:55">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Wilhelm_Karl_Joseph_Killing.jpeg/220px-Wilhelm_Karl_Joseph_Killing.jpeg

Wilhelm Killing
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:55">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e8/Elie_Cartan.jpg/220px-Elie_Cartan.jpg

Elie Cartan
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:00">
[[File:Eric gesticulating.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:19:17">
Sir Roger Penrose’s favourite film is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) 2001: A Space Odyssey]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:15">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/11/2001_A_Space_Odyssey_%281968%29.png/220px-2001_A_Space_Odyssey_%281968%29.png
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:20">
[[File:2001 monolith.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:25">
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/optical-illusions/images/6/62/Note.gif
</div>

20: Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy

2020-04-12T02:46:54Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[File:ThePortal-Ep20 RogerPenrose-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|right|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Sir Roger Penrose (left) on episode 20 of The Portal podcast]]
[[Sir Roger Penrose]] is arguably the most important living descendant of [[Albert Einstein]]’s school of [[geometric physics]]. In this episode of [[The Portal]], we avoid the usual questions put to Roger about quantum foundations and [[quantum consciousness]]. Instead we go back to ask about the current status of his thinking on what would have been called “[[Unified Field Theory]]” before it fell out of fashion a couple of generations ago. In particular, Roger is the dean of one of the only rival schools of thought to have survived the “[[String Theory Wars|String Theory wars]]” of the 1980s-2000s. We discuss his view of this [[Twistor Theory]] and its prospects for unification. Instead of spoon feeding the audience, however, the material is presented as it might occur between colleagues in neighboring fields so that the Portal audience might glimpse something closer to scientific communication rather than made for TV performance pedagogy. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Professor Penrose.

<span class="button">[[ep19 | Previous Episode]]</span> <span class="button">[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/40fa44bd-9cb8-468d-b4e0-7bb5a8d4e313 Listen to Episode 20]</span> <span class="button">[https://rss.art19.com/episodes/40fa44bd-9cb8-468d-b4e0-7bb5a8d4e313.mp3 Download episode (mp3)]</span> <span class="button">[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg93Dm-vYc8 Watch Episode 20]</span> <span class="button">[[ep21 | Next Episode]]</span>

[[All Episodes]]

== Participants ==

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein Eric Weinstein] (WEIN)
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose Roger Penrose] (PEN)

== Housekeeping ==

WEIN - Hello, this is Eric. 2 pieces of housekeeping:

# On Bret and Heather (we will resume that thread when they return from the jungle)
# On today’s guest. Eric mentions;

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind The Emperor’s New Mind]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation Many Worlds]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement Quantum Entanglement]
* Penrose’s early work, for example with Hawking (eg; [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose–Hawking_singularity_theorems|the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems]]).

1:00 = Roger is famous for being one of the greatest [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry#Physics Geometric Physicists] now living and perhaps the best descendent of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein Albert Einstein] currently still working in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics Theoretical Physics] in this particular line of thought. Also, he is an example of what the UK does well.

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Don't_Panic Don’t Panic!])

1:30 = …if you start to feel as though you are being left behind by one line of thinking, what we do in general is wait to see if a different line of thinking opens up… …this is normal.

2:30 = welcome Roger

3:00 = WEIN - “I know you as one of the most important people at the nexus of Geometry and Physics”

Lyrics from the Leonard Cohen song, “[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKwr3DDvFpw The Future]” (“You don’t know me from the wind, you never will, you never did, but I’m the little jew who wrote the bible”)

Book: [https://www.amazon.com.au/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679776311 The Road to Reality], by Roger Penrose (this appears to be easily accessible online as a pdf)

4:00 = WEIN - “Where are we in the history of coming to understand what this place is in which we find ourselves? What we are made of? And what we know about our own context?”

PEN - “I now feel I should re-write part of it (the Road to Reality) because since I wrote it things have changed in one important way” *

<<<Did he say what the one way it had changed was?

PEN - “A lot has not changed - the thing that has changed… …is to do with Cosmology.”

PEN - I have a proposal… which is new since I wrote that book

[NOTE: I’m not sure if he ever gets back to saying what this proposal is. It looks like it might be “Conformal Cyclic Cosmology”, see eg; [https://physicsworld.com/a/new-evidence-for-cyclic-universe-claimed-by-roger-penrose-and-colleagues/ Physics World], [https://physicsworld.com/a/inside-penroses-universe/ ibid], his own book, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time Cycles of Time]]

6:00 =

== Penrose brief biography. ==

Penrose;

* Born ‘31.
* Took classes from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac Paul Dirac]
* Was undergraduate at [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ UCL]
* Went to [https://www.cam.ac.uk/ Cambridge] for graduate studies.
* Went to study [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AlgebraicGeometry.html Algebraic Geometry], not Physics

PEN - “I’d encountered a friend of my brothers, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_W._Sciama Dennis Sciama].” * (see also the note below)

<<<This name took some finding

Sciama gave lectures on Cosmology and talked about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model steady state theories] in which the Universe expands but doesn’t change because it’s continually ‘replenished’ by the creation of new matter.

Penrose’s older brother, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Penrose Oliver Penrose] who was studying [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics Statistical Mechanics] was the precocious one (of the two brothers).

Penrose had also been listening to talks by[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle Fred Hoyle] who suggested that when the matter in the accelerating expansion reaches the speed of light it disappears.

Penrose didn’t think that was quite right and started drawing pictures with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone Light Cones] and thought they would gradually fade, but not disappear.

8:00 = Talking to his brother in the Kingswood Restaurant, Cambridge *, Roger expressed his doubts and was referred to Dennis.

[NOTE: I tried to find a link for this restaurant, which appears to no longer exist, and came across this really interesting paper by Professor Penrose and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._R._Ellis George Ellis], which is a kind of “scientific eulogy”* for Dennis Sciama, in which the same anecdote is recalled, amongst others: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.2009.0023 (pdf) ]

<<<There’s probably a better term for this, right?

<<<When I search for ‘“the kingswood restaurant” cambridge’ I don’t turn up anything that seems relevant and when I add the word “remember” to that search I start to turn up links to Sir Roger himself.Possibly it was called by a different name. Also possible that no trace of it has made it onto the internet other than his telling.

Dennis Sciama was impressed! Later, when Roger came up, he took him under his wing.

Penrose’s supervisor was Hodge - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._V._D._Hodge W.V.D Hodge]

But later he threw Roger out and Todd became his supervisor - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._A._Todd J.A Todd] *

<<<The links I’ve added to Hodge and Todd both seem right but I’m not personally familiar

Ad Break

9:00 = advert for a watches. Masculinity, something, something….

10:00 = advert for lamps. Mention of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrimandir the Matrimandir] (looks nice, might buy a lamp)

== Dennis Sciama ==

[[File:Sciama.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Dennis Sciama|Dennis Sciama]]

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_W._Sciama Dennis Sciama])

11:00 = Dennis wanted Roger to be a Cosmologist

Dennis had a knack of making sure people met each other. In one case it was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking Stephen Hawking]

Dennis was the last (at the time the only) graduate student of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac Paul Dirac].

Book: [https://www.amazon.com/Strangest-Man-Hidden-Dirac-Mystic/dp/0465022103 The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom] by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Farmelo Graham Farmelo]

PEN - Dirac was hard to get to know.

WEIN - Dirac would be neck and neck with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein Einstein] for greatest 20th Century Physicist.

Eric imputes that Dirac’s hair was not as good as Einstein’s.

PEN - Dirac was the one who put QM in order

== Taste and Beauty ==

[[File:Hopf_Fibration.png|thumb|none|alt=The Hopf Fibration by Niles Johnson|The Hopf Fibration by Niles Johnson]]

The Hopf Fibration ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration#/media/File:Hopf_Fibration.png source],[https://nilesjohnson.net/hopf.html gif])

WEIN - “you have wielded taste and beauty as a weapon your entire life, your drawings are among the most compelling”

13:00 = “Our friend Joe Rogan” *

[[File:Joe Rogan.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Joe Rogan|Joe Rogan]]

Joe Rogan * is a prominent Podcaster and Cage-fighting Commentator

<<<Roger Penrose and Eric Weinstein are friends with the guy who does the commentary for the cage fighting. It’s quite a time to be alive.

<<<If you have ever been on Joe Rogan’s Podcast and now have your own podcast, you are contractually obliged to mention his name at least every 2.5 episodes

WEIN - The hopf fibration is the only non-trivial principal bundle that can be visually seen

WEIN - since the world seems to be about principal bundles, it’s a bit odd that the general public doesn’t know that stuff of which we are.

PEN - The “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration Hopf fibration]”, or the “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_parallel Clifford Parallels]” was instrumental in the subject of Twistor Theory.

14:00 = Penrose’s diagram

There were three versions. The third version is in The Road to Reality. He thinks the second version is probably the best.

(I think they are talking about the diagram of the Hopf Fibration ?? as seen at the link above )

I '''think''' this is the one from “The Road to Reality”, which would make it Version 3: * **

please correct this if you know better[[File:image_5.jpg|image alt text]]

There’s also this diagram, which I found at a blog here: http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/tag/penrose/

[[File:Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels|Penrose-Rindler-Clifford parallels]]

And there’s this diagram, which I found at this link ( http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tweb/00001/ ) which is an HTML presentation of “On the Origins of Twistor Theory” - Roger Penrose, 1987

[[File:Robinson.jpg|thumb|none|alt= A time-slice (t=0) of a Robinson congruence.| A time-slice (t=0) of a Robinson congruence.]]

[NOTE: these latter two might be Versions 1 and 2? Or later reproductions.]

Penrose thinks Version 2 was the best.

WEIN - Dirac famously brought in these bizarre objects called Spinors, which are a prerequisite to getting to Twistors.

== Dirac’s Spinors ==

[[File:Paul Dirac, 1933.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Paul Dirac, 1933|Paul Dirac, 1933]]

15:00 = Dirac gave a course (2 courses) of lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Course 1 - Basic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Quantum Mechanics]

Course 2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory Quantum Field Theory] but also Spinors

In the second course (when Penrose took the course) Dirac deviated from his normal course of lectures to give two or three lectures on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor#Component_spinors Two Component Spinors]. ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.3824 Spinors])

WEIN - For the lay audience… If we think of all of matter as waves, the question is "what medium are they waves ''in''? And the medium would be a medium of Spinors, which is not something that’s easy for people to understand.

Denis recommended to Roger a book by Corson (presumably this one: [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tensors-Spinors-Relativistic-Wave-Equations/dp/B0000CIMO7 Introduction to Tensors, Spinors, and Relativistic Wave-Equations], 1953 by [https://www.ias.edu/scholars/edward-michael-corson E.M. Corson] *

The book was reviewed by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam Abdus Salam] in 1955 (https://www.nature.com/articles/175831b0 )

<<<Dr Corson doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page which is a shame, considering some of the people who do

Roger found the book incomprehensible.

But then he took Dirac’s (2nd) course.

Dirac talked about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor#Component_spinors Two Component Spinors] and this was exactly what Roger needed.

Other people said that Dirac’s course was just like his book but Roger hadn’t read the book.

(I assume this one? Dirac - [https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Quantum-Mechanics-P-Dirac/dp/1607965607 Principles of Quantum Mechanics])

18:00 = WEIN - "do you think Dirac understood (Spinors)?…

Mention of Mathematicians:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Killing Wilhelm Killing]
* “Lee”? - this Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Lee was in Differential Geometry but was born in 1950. Maybe his father?
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lie_Cartan Élie Cartan]

WEIN - let me throw out a dangerous idea. I don’t think any of us understand them (Spinors) .

WEIN - Dirac understood what could be said about Spinors

20:00 = PEN - "usually one talks about the Dirac Spinors, which are the 4 spinors, but they split into these 2 and 2 (WEIN - in even dimensions) Yes, that’s right.

[[File:image_9.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

Sir Roger Penrose’s favourite film is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) 2001: A Space Odyssey]

== Geometric Interpretation of Spinors ==

Roger describes the way he thinks of spinors geometrically.

“I had this picture of a flag. You have the flag-pole, goes along the light-cone (WEIN - that’s the vector-like piece of it) and then you have an extra piece of data which is this flag plane. You get a pretty good geometrical understanding. The one little catch is that if you rotate it through 360 degrees, so you might think just to where it started, it’s not the same as before, it’s changed its sign.”

[[File:Spinor.png|thumb|none|alt=A Spinor|A Spinor]]

Taken from Introduction to [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.3824.pdf Spinors - Andrew M Steane 2013] (pdf)

WEIN: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle Klein Bottle]:

== Interlude: Klein Bottles ==

Get your Klein Bottle today from our friends at [https://www.kleinbottle.com/ Acme Klein Bottles]

Here’s a good [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAsICMPwGPY video about Klein Bottles]

(the presenter is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll Clifford Stoll], Astronomer and proprietor of [https://www.kleinbottle.com/ Acme Klein Bottles] )

* The Klein Bottle is “two [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip Möbius Strips] stitched together” (after [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Ferdinand_M%C3%B6bius August Ferdinand Möbius])
* The Klein Bottle is named after [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Klein Felix Klein]
* The Klein Bottle only has one side
* Klein bottles is 3D Universes must have a self-intersection
* Klein hats are continuously deformable back to themselves
* Clifford’s friend, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Lang Robert Lang], made an [https://langorigami.com/crease-pattern/klein-bottle-opus-444/ Origami Klein Bottle] *

Here is another, related video, also from Numberphile, about the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VydFQmtZ8&list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIpgtcFs_7fHGUedGEKu73p&index=8&t=0s Topology of a Twisted Torus]

<<<NB: This is a link to the actual pattern so that you can make your very own Origami Klein bottle.

This video is about slicing up toroids. The presenter is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_H._S%C3%A9quin Carlo H. Séquin]. Later in the podcast, Roger talks about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_parallel Clifford Parallels] dividing up space in a similar way. This helped me to visualise that.

<<<One of his sculptures is not far from where I live. May have to make a visit.

It also introduced me to [http://www2.memenet.or.jp/~keizo/index.html Keizo Ushio] who makes amazing toroidal sculptures, like this one *

[[File:NiihamaSculpture.jpg|thumb|none|alt=Niihama Sculpture|Niihama Sculpture]]

([http://www2.memenet.or.jp/~keizo/NiihamaSculptureProject.htm source])

Here is an interview with [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkInMmWcblI Keizo Ushio].

In [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w1qkiRHQ4E this video] he can be heard speaking in English.

And here is a limerick about Klein bottles.

A mathematician named Klein

Thought the Moebius band was divine

Said he: "If you glue

The edges of two

You’ll get a weird bottle like mine."

([http://komplexify.com/math/harmony/Limericks.html source]) *

There are some more interesting (if somewhat amateur) visualisations in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRTKSzAOBr4 this Youtube video], from which I learned:

* The Klein Bottle is a [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonorientableSurface.html non-orientable], [https://www2.cs.duke.edu/courses/fall06/cps296.1/Lectures/sec-II-1.pdf 2-dimensional manifold].
* It can be “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_(mathematics) immersed]” into [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_space Euclidean 3-dimensional space] with a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersection_theory self-intersection].
* Non-orientable means “there exists no continuous normal unit vector field”

<<<Also relevant:

A mathematician confided

That the Moebius band is one-sided

And you’ll get quite a laugh

If you cut one in half

’Cause it stays in one piece when divided.

== The Square Root of the Klein Bottle (Weyl’s Cones) ==

21:00 = WEIN - The Klein bottle has (in certain sense that can be made precise) a square-root that is a torus.

[Note: googling for “the square root of the Klein Bottle” didn’t get me far but searching for “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_cover double cover]” I got useful things like [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1073425/two-sheeted-covering-of-the-klein-bottle-by-the-torus this question on math Stackexchange], where someone has drawn this:

[[File:image_12.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

And the top respondent says “Most topologists would be happy just drawing the diagram you’ve drawn” (to prove that there is a two-sheeted covering of the Klein bottle by the Torus)

Reading that answer and then this one: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/140439/torus-as-double-cover-of-the-klein-bottle gave me a pretty good idea of what’s going on.]

WEIN - It’s really the square-root of the rotations that has this double effect (but we say it linguistically in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to understand)

PEN - I understood that a spinor was the square root of a vector and I couldn’t make head of tail of it. When I went to Dirac’s course it did make sense.

Dirac gave a demonstration due to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Weyl Hermann Weyl] of rolling one [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone cone] on another

Here is a google-books link to Penrose describing the same model in the [https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Qk5Q74166qcC&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41#v=onepage&q&f=false Hermann Weyl Centenary Lectures].

[http://www.weylmann.com This site] also has a description of the model (http://www.weylmann.com/2010archive.shtml - you need to search for the word “cone” to find the right article) and lots of other information about Weyl himself. It includes this diagram to illustrate the model:

[[File:image_13.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

The author of the site is William O. Straub and he has written other papers about Spinors, including eg; [http://www.weylmann.com/weyldirac.pdf Weyl Spinors and Dirac’s Electron Equation].

This [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLH4l_SoIy0 video on Youtube] is a visualisation of rolling one coin around another.

22:00 =

PEN - You imagine increasing the semi-angle of the cone until it becomes almost flat. And then what’s the other one? It’s just a little wobble.

This demonstrates

WEIN - with a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulley pulley] system

In the place where you can see this most easily, it’s slightly confusing.

23:50 = WEIN - “we have to use the visual cortex we’re handed and then we have to trick it into imagining worlds beyond where we’ve seen.”

Ad Break

24:00 = advert for supplements.

25:00 = advert for online courses

26:00 =

== Dirac’s Scissors ==

Dirac’s scissors, aka the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_trick Plate Trick], (related to?) the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaIR-cWk_-o&feature=youtu.be Belt Trick]

Air on a Dirac String: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYBqIRM8GiY

Fermions have a spin which is half an odd number. They have this curious property that rotate them and they get back to minus themselves. And it’s crucial for matter.

Without this, we wouldn’t have anything.

Bosons are the opposite. They’d rather like to be in the same state. For the Fermions it’s completely the opposite.

The Spin Statistics Theorem - "if things have a spin of a

When we want to treat these objects quantum mechanically, we have two

PEN - well, you’ve got these two types of matter.

[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion Fermions]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson Bosons]

34:00 = [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory Phlogiston]

[NOTE: Phlogiston was the supposed substance that inhered in bodies capable of combustion

Apropos of nothing much, I have always loved this quote about writing:

“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marge_Piercy Marge Piercy]

''']'''

== Maxwell’s Equations ==

35: 00 = “[http://www.maxwells-equations.com/ Maxwell’s Equations] completely changed our way of looking at the world”

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday Faraday] had a lot of the influential ideas.

Faraday had clues that there were connections to light, but he didn’t have the equations.

[[File:image_14.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

Charles Darwin

Book: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin Darwin] - ON THE VARIOUS CONTRIVANCES BY WHICH BRITISH AND FOREIGN ORCHIDS ARE FERTILISED BY INSECTS, AND ON THE GOOD EFFECTS OF INTERCROSSING. BY CHARLES DARWIN, M.A., F.R.S., &c. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

([http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F800&viewtype=text&pageseq=1 full text as HTML])

In which Eric claims Darwin reveals that he did not understand his own theories.

== Aharonov, Escher, Bohm ==

This bizarre effect of passing an electron around an insulated wire

The gentleman mentioned is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakir_Aharonov Yakir Aharonov] *

They are talking about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharonov%E2%80%93Bohm_effect Aharonov–Bohm effect] *

<<<or possibly the related Al’tshuler-Aronov-Spivak effect? Where ‘Aranov’ is a different person? I’m pretty sure it’s the aharanov-Bohm effect

We learned that if you have an insulated solenoid, the phase of the electron beam going in a circle around it would be shifted despite the fact that the electromagnetic field could be treated as zero because the electromagnetic potential, this precursor, had been shown to carry the actual content… it turned out that geometric object was more important

38:00 = [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascending_and_Descending MC ESCHER - Ascending and Descending] (The Penrose Stairs)

[[File:image_15.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

Ascending and Descending - M.C. Escher

39:00 = PEN - anecdote about visiting Amsterdam. Mentions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_Wylie Shaun Wyile] *

this is a guess, please check I have the right person

41:00 = “I played around with this and whittled it down to the triangle which people refer to as a ‘tribar’.” NB: He’s being modest and we actually call it a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_triangle Penrose Triangle]. ([http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PenroseTriangle.html Penrose Triangle on Wolfram])

I’m pretty sure this is the paper: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1958.tb00634.x impossible objects a special type of visual illusion] - L.S. Penrose and R. Penrose *

<<<NB: Wiley want $7 to rent this 62 year old paper for 48 hours (!) or $42 (!!) to buy it as a PDF. It is on SciHub and is 3 pages long. If you had to buy Penrose’s (paperback) book (tRtR) for the same per-page price, it would cost $14,000 a copy

Escher gave Penrose a print and it is in the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashmolean_Museum Ashmolean Museum]

<<<I can’t read this article: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roger-penrose-on-his-friend-mc-escher-the-genius-that-galleries-ignored-90nhp8gsd0l because it’s behind a paywall, but the google link-summary says “… and he chose Fish and Scales, now on loan to the Ashmolean in Oxford”

(I think) the print was [https://www.wikiart.org/en/m-c-escher/fishes-and-scales Fishes and Scales] *

[[File:image_16.png|thumb|none|alt=image alt text|image alt text]]

43:00 =

== Eric Explains General Relativity ==

You have to begin with 4 degrees of freedom

Then you put rulers and protractors into it

That rise is

Those don’t fit together

The degree of “Escher-ness”

You throw one of them away, called the Weyl

That’s a long causal chain, but it is an accurate

== Cohomology ==

It also illustrates co-homology.

What can you use Twistor-theory for? You can use it to solve Maxwell’s equations.

the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception movie inception]

But that effect is the soul of the Aharanov-Bohm effect

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Reutersv%C3%A4rd Oscar Reutersvärd]

We’ve mistold our stories

You were quite close to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Atiyah Michael Atiyah]

His partner was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isadore_Singer Isadore Singer]

They came up with the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atiyah%E2%80%93Singer_index_theorem Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem] which governs worlds in which there are no time dimensions but only space dimensions, or only time dimensions but no space

PEN - they could be just equations

Soap films look like elliptic equations

PEN - Atiyah-Singer is extremely general

WEIN - it tells you that… some high dimension… topological knotedness tells you something about the kinds of waves that can dance on that space.

53:00 =

== Is The Real World Complex? ==

How to make Twistor-theory work in curved spaces

I ran into a problem that had to do with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_geometry complex geometry].

Complex Geometry:

The analysis is particularly fascinating.

When you talk about real numbers, you can draw a function.

Smooth? Continuous? Curvature? How many degrees of smoothness? 1,2,3,4 or infinite?

Then we learn about complex. Do it all again using complex numbers and suddenly you find that if it’s smooth, everything comes with it.

WEIN - mathematicians quite often view the case of complex numbers as the natural case.

WEIN - You (Penrose) have been instrumental in making the case

…and then I learned about Quantum Mechanics. Yeah - there they are!

Suddenly these numbers are right there at the base of the subject

== Minkowskian Geometry ==

57:00 = One of the ways of explaining what Twistor theory is

You are taking space-time and replacing it

You can ‘pull it upstairs’ to this Twistor space

Has this complex-number baked into it.

PEN - these things come together and take many years, sometimes, before they come together.

I was struck by the fact that

According to Einstein, special relativity, objects get flattened

It was these two-component spinors

If you think about the sky

Think of vector which is something that has a magnitude and also a direction to it.

You have particular vectors that you call ‘null’ - these are the ones along the light cone.

1:00 = in Minkowskian Geometry

1:01 = Minkowski showed

One event, say, and the light from that event reaches… a position in space time.

An event, or a point, in space-time

Imagine a particle moving between two points.

Minkowski realised that special-relativity is best described by this Minkowskian geometry.

Your idea was…

PEN - it took years but the initial idea isn’t so hard to understand.

If you look up in the sky, what are you seeing?

The world-line of that photon is ‘tilted over’

Suppose the photon is emitted at one event and received at another event.

That time measure is

Suppose you travel to a planet that is 8 light years away

Less than the time that someone on Earth would think it took you to get there.

And if you actually travel the speed of light, that time would be zero.

You’re not travelling at the speed of light, because you can’t get to the speed of light.

Even people who do this day and night choose never to work in some world.

If you go back and look at when Einstein introduced his relativity.

In that innocent decision to break off one degree of freedom and treat it different.

== The Twistor Theory Cult ==

1:06 = “at that time, mathematicians and physicists were barely talking to each other”

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Jackiw Roman Jackiw] - “when we talked to the geometers, we started to learn new things”

Jakiw is interviewed [https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/34449 here at aip] *

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric Schwarzchild Singularity] - what we’d now call a ‘horizon’

<<<I haven’t found the direct quote, if you can find it, add a link

1:10 = you were sort of seen as running a cult

[https://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/lmason/Tn/ Twistor Newsletter]

1:11 = PEN - “let me describe the basics of (Twistor Theory)”

== Twistor Theory ==

Let me think of it the other way round, that is my past light cone

Imagine this cone stretching out into the past

Those stars in the sky look like points.

WEIN - imagine the world is transparent?

PEN - no, let’s go out into space

An astronaut whizzing by looks up.

Thanks to aberration, these will not be in quite the same place

It’s distorted, but it’s distorted conformally

If I see a circle, the astronaut will also see a circle

The thing about that transformation - something I knew about

You think about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere Riemann Sphere]

[[File:image_17.png|image alt text]][[File:image_18.png|image alt text]]

The Reimann Sphere and a Candy (or Toffee) Apple

The Riemann sphere folds all this up.

If you had a caramel coating around an apple (a [https://www.justataste.com/candy-apples/ Candy Apple]) and at the point where the stick goes into that apple.

And it (the Riemann Sphere) has this property that it’s conformal.

The transformation is ‘analytic’ or ‘holomorphic’

WEIN - the analog of smooth for real numbers

Those transformations which send the sphere to the sphere are exactly those in Relativity.

The mapping from their sky to my sky is exactly this

And you get these two-component spinors

People find this puzzling. I find it puzzling!

The boundary of the thing will remain a circle.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Bott Raoul Bott]

“[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bott_periodicity_theorem Bott periodicity]”

Low-dimensional coincidences

Spinors grow exponentially whereas vectors grow linearly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_group The Lorentz group].

The rotations of space and time

When you do it (relativity) in the two spinor form.

Complex one-dimensional space.

Each complex number carries the information of two real numbers

The complex line

The language is intended to make things hostile to the newbie *

<<<Is it really '''intended''' for that purpose? Is it “the DISC”?

An object with the smallest spin you can have. Spin 1/2

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics) Chirality]

(I think this is what’s called the [http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh1/gyroscopes/screwrule.html Right-hand Screw Rule])

The complex numbers come in to describe these possible directions of spin.

These rather abstract numbers and the concrete directions in space.

== The World is Given Only Once ==

1:22 = WEIN - “do you wed yourself to the world that’s given”

“the world is given only once”, attributed to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mach Ernst Mach]

“Do you wish to have a more general theory?”

What I see you having done is to work with mathematics that are particularising themselves to the world we live in.

1:23 = “You’re getting married to the world while other people are dating it, trying to keep their options open”

String Theory: People talk about (high) dimensions and, sure, we’ve got mathematics to describe that.

PEN - I’m looking for a way to describe the world that’s very particualar to the world we see

10 is two more than 8 and in 8 you have triality.

WEIN - “They (string theorists) never grow up to playing with reality”

PEN - I’m looking for a route that works specifically for the dimensionality we have

WEIN - If there weren’t a beautiful mathematics to catch you. You’re stage diving at a punk concert…

… the political economy of science means fewer people are willing to make strong predictions.

A dying breed of people who are prepared to go down with the ship for the privelege of commanding it.

Yours has been one of the most important, idiosyncratic programmes.

It is at least a deep insight into how to transform one problem into another to allow solutionis that wouldn’t have been easily gleaned in the original formulation.

WEIN - “do you believe Twistors are a more fundamental description of the world?”

PEN - “I do, yes. I don’t usually say that out loud”

WEIN - “I think that’s fucking great”

1:27 = one of the aims of mathematics is being more and more general

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atiyah%E2%80%93Singer_index_theorem Atiyah-Singer Theorem]

Deformation Complexes: 1st term - symmetries, 2nd - fields/waves, 3rd - equations

Cut it off at that point and have an elliptic complex

In dimension 4 we glean, something bizarre, that there are infinite ways to do calculus in 4 dimensional space and only one way to do it in every other dimension.

WEIN - '''Maybe differentiable structures are part of Physics'''

PEN - '''it’s quite possible'''

== A Brief Critique of Particle Physics ==

If you have two Lie groups that act transitively on the same sphere in usual position, then either their intersection acts transitively on that sphere or the dimension of that sphere is 15. And I believe the intersection of the groups looks like the electro-strong group.

PEN - “I’ve never been someone who studied particle physics closely”

Pulled out of nowhere just by talking about sphere-transitive group actions.

Particle Physics?

We may be a long way from understanding what’s going on there.

WEIN - I didn’t know that

WEIN - I think we’re almost at the end

PEN - Understanding why the groups are the groups that we see.

1:30 = let me ask you a couple of questions

People like:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Lee_Glashow Sheldon Lee Glashow]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Georgi Howard Georgi]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Petit Jean-Pierre Petit] *
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdus_Salam Abdus Salam]

Unifying symmetries that remain very odd because they’re so attractive and powerful.

<<<This guy seems to have a very wide variety of interests. I double checked I have the right person and it seems right but please change it if you know differently.

The prettiest of them being spin-10, which physicists insist on calling SO 10 for reasons that escape me.

PEN - “Is this the one that doesn’t exist?”

Spin-5 (lives inside spin-10) was disproven

WEIN - Glashow and Georgi “rushed to commit ritual suicide far too quickly”

PEN - from the outside, I’m not convinced that…

Somehow (particle physics) has not got to the point… I’m hoping that Twistor theory might have something to say about it but the area that needs to be explored hasn’t been explored"

== Particles in Twistor Theory ==

PEN - there was a question about how we treat massive particles in Twistor theory.

Twistor theory describes massless things.

Massless things have a privileged treatment.

PEN - There is a way of describing the Maxwell equations …which comes directly out of Twistor theory.

If you want to talk about massive particles, the way it seems to lead you is

A massive particle has a momentum vector which is time-like, so it points within the cone.

One way you can describe a time-like one is to think of two null ones. So you think of a zig-zag, so it’s got a zig and a zag and that’s one convenient way of doing it.

Or you might have one that’s made of three: zig, zag, zog - something like that.

You can get at the time-like line, it can be built from primitives.

You get these groups in Twistor theory and they look like the particle physics groups.

You get SU-2 and SU-3

SU-2 is ubiquitous and does not impress Eric.

but SU-3, representing the strong force, can be gauged to give QCD (genuine gauge theory)

Weak isospin.

Gauging doesn’t really work for SU-2

It’s not the full group and so on and there’s something wrong with it

1:34 - this is all guessing

The idea is you could develop a particle physics using many Twistors.

We have a problem in the standard model. We have an origin story with two gods.

The God of Einstein and the other god of SU-2 x SU-3.

The other gives us the quantum numbers.

This has no connection to the space and time data.

PEN - “they must be tied up at some stage but we haven’t got to that”

The idea was to do it via twistors.

When people discovered Charm this suddenly didn’t fit.

By charm you mean the addition of entirely separate versions of the familiar family of matter.

The addition of genera

1:36 = PEN - “I think we should go back to that”

Twistor Theory starts off as a theory about flat space-time

WEIN - “that’s what bothers me”

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbert_Sch%C3%BCcking Engelbert Schücking]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Kerr Roy Kerr]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_K._Sachs Rainer K. Sachs]

== Origins of Twistor Theory ==

1:37 = PEN - “… the question is where did twistor theory come from”

WEIN - The Riemann Sphere of a with the Riemann Sphere of b

The world we see is Real numbers but the dynamics is controlled by the complex numbers.

Space-time has 4 dimensions.

Wanted to add another one because I wanted to incorporate an idea that was

Think of a Riemann sphere again

Complex numbers on one side and again on the other.

Rather than splitting everything into fourier components

Space-time is 4 dimensional and if you try to complexify it, you get 8 dimensions

1:39 = PEN - Anecdote about the day the JFK was shot and the day after when they visited San Antonio.

He travelled back with [https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2038878487_Istvan_Ozsvath István Ozsváth] * who didn’t speak much and started to think about

these constructions of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Robinson_(physicist) Ivor Robinson] * (in Dallas) which were solutions to the Maxwell equations that had these curious twists in them. I’d understood these things and realised that they were described by the Hopf map or the Clifford Parallels:

<<<I think? This was another hard one to look for.

<<<Please correct any links that you think are wrong?

Hopf fibration/Clifford parallels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration

== Robinson Congruences ==

You can think of a three dimensional sphere in four dimensions and you have these circles which fill the whole space, no two intersect and every two link. Beautiful configuration. This was the thing that geometrically described the solutions Ivor had found.

Think of a light ray and then think of all the light rays that meet that one and that family of light rays, you could have solutions of Maxwell’s equations that point along those rays.

It pushes the light ray into the complex.

You don’t see the light ray anymore.

You describe it by this family.

As I called them later, Robinson Congruences.

Six-dimensional family.

And one dimension, they can twist one way or the other.

WEIN - and that had three complex dimensions

PEN - it was a complex-projected three-space.

You have a 5-dimensional space that divides this 6-dimensional space into two.

1:44 - Isadore Singer took the work of Jim Simons and Frank Yang and on the trip to Oxford said “oh my god, this is the quaternionic rather than the complex hopf fibration”. He realised the self-dual equations were going to be a revolution.

1:45 = 4 complex dimensions means 8 real dimensions.

== The Wu Yang Dictionary ==

WEIN - I am not a devotee of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory String Theory], nor of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity Loop Quantum Gravity]

1:47 = if you look at curvature.

The Wu Yang dictionary. A geometer who becomes the most successful hedge fund manager in human history ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_Tsun_Wu Wu]) meets a physicsist (Yang) *

<<<I’m confused about who the hedge fund manager is ? When I look up the two scientists I can’t see any mention of a hedge fund. Have I mis-identified one of them?

Steenrod’s fibre bundles ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Steenrod Norman Steenrod])

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ehresmann Charles Ehresmann], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehresmann_connection Ehresmann][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehresmann_connection connection][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehresmann_connection s], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_potential vector potentials] and what have you

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_quantization Geometric quantisation] revolution

Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations come out of curvature

The pre-quantum line bundle

The key point is that what we’d previously treated as the annoyance of the HUP now became the beauty… the underlying quantum theory is now geometric.

Michael Atiyah

This weird grab bag that is called QFT - regimes where the number of particles changes, you need QFT, you can’t do it in QM.

QFT would have been discovered by topologists and geometers.

These are three separate revolutions. With people noones ever heard of. *

This thing, which is as gorgeous as anyting I’ve ever seen

What the F? Am I wildly off?

Quillam Theory?

1:51 = if you find the way through this you will really find the key.

That’s picked up a beautiful area of mathematics and turned it into physics.

I think there are things that are hiding in there.

What do you make of the fact that we now have three separate geometries?

# Reimannian Geometry - Parent of General Relativity
# Ehresmannian Geometry - Parent of the Maxwell Theory, also strong/weak force
# And then you’ve got this other geometric theory which is the geometric quantum.

Simons and Yang find … has gauge theory

Because Einstein takes curvature and uses something called

The opportunity to use gauge theory is lost.

He did this amazing thing by developing relativity.

He died before Quarks

There are huge, beautiful things in Mathematics and they do have a role.

The way the world works depends on deep mathematics.

They can be generalising ideas and revealing all sorts

The proportion of these that has relevance to Physics is very small

I’m sure that we will find other things, but the temptation is that there are so many directions

Once we had people who had a lot of different ideas.

Almost every new idea is dead on arrival unless you specifically keep it from predicting things that we don’t see.

== A Brief Critique of String Theory ==

A class of “naughty boys” who get to make all sorts of claims…*

1:57 = “twistor theory is, at a minimum, an incredible valuable tool”

However, it’s also somewhat tolerated within the system

It’s a minority point of view but it’s allowed to play a parallel game to the String community.

String Theory is the smartest community out there - smarter than the relativists, smarter than the geometers, very clever and very insufferable.

The problem with that community is that they’ve accomplished a great deal that isn’t of a stringy nature.

Instead of quantising geometry, it backfired and they had the geometry geometrise the quantum. That’s the main legacy of these people.

They took off for Paris and landed in Tokyo. Very impressive as a feat but not what they intended to do.

I think I agree with that.

The influence I

== Supersymmetry ==

What do you think about the legacy of something like Supersymmetry?

When I (Penrose) first heard of it

You needed complex analysis.

I visited (Bruno) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Zumino Zumino]

Deep supersymmetric model (the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wess–Zumino_model|Wess-Zumino model]])

2:00 = Dirac had written this paper using two spinors - all the different spins with 2 spinors, clearer, etc.

Realised you could write it in

2:02 = Feynamn said these two things are proportional

Bell-Robinson Tensor

Bianci Identities written in 2-spinors

The higher the spin, the more indices

== The Torsion Tensor ==

“We don’t really understand the things that we are given for free”

Re-deduces the Bianci identities

“I worry that we never really grounded these fields”

The torsion tensor.

Never shows up in any meaningful way anywhere.

2:04 PEN: I don’t use it.

what we have learned is of a very frightening nature.

Einsteins equations come from the simplest possible thing that could be optimised.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian The Lagrangian].

== Dirac and the Bianci Identities ==

Dirac’s third equation is the equation for matter which generates all of something called K-theory, which is absolutely fundamental.

2:06 PEN: I wanted to finish a story

At one point Dirac was a fellow at the same college.

I said to him “would he have opportunity to talk to me about it”

I wrote down this wave equation that represents the Bianci equations

He asked where it came from and he said “what are the Bianci identities”

He simply re-discovered them himself, he didn’t know they were called the Bianci identities.

In vacuum, say, and you take the Weil curvature which is all that’s left of the Riemann curvature and you write that in spinors and it’s a spinor with four indices completely symmetrical and then when you write the derivative, it’s the derivative acting on those four things and one contraction - the derivative two indices and you contract one of those - and that’s your equation. That vanishes, that’s the equation. Same as the Maxwell equations, same as the neutrino if you have one index and no mass, and it’s the way I think about these things.

Did you read his 1963 article in

Against naive application of the scientific method.

He says Schrodinger would not have been led into error if he had not been pressed into agreement with experiment.

Secretly he was talking about himself.

Dirac trying to give us a gift from mount Olympus

Give yourself more room to play, to imagine and to be wrong.

2:10 PEN - Dirac didn’t like to be wrong. He was very worried about saying things that were wrong and so would say nothing.

== The Future of Analytic Geometry ==

WEIN - Let me ask you a hard question… …you’re going to be in your 90’s soon

There’s a failure to pass torches. Who would you be pointing to?

PEN - A Human Being? …I don’t think I’m going to take you up on that one… …it’s proably someone I don’t know.

WEIN - Do you worry that the Oxford School of geometric physics won’t continue?

PEN - I suppose I do a bit.

WEIN - the UK tolerates and encourages personal idiosyncrasies.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Hitchin Nigel Hitchin]
* Mason - possibly [https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/lionel.mason Lionel Mason]?
* [https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/philip.candelas Philip Candelas]

You’re asking me a bigger thing than… yeah

== Penrose Tiles ==

Have you been to the courtyard of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons_Center_for_Geometry_and_Physics Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics]

They have a wall there - the so called iconic wall

They’re in a place that can be visited with a key and I always think about, in a fantastic world, unlocking that wall and seeing if it’s a gateway to something else.

2:15 = We all worry that we won’t get to see the end

What if I don’t get to see the end? Does that animates you?

There’s a huge amount of chance involved in these things. It’s all a gamble. *

TO see a real end is too remote

<<<Imagine how he must have seen the fellow-minds of his generation die, decade by decade

== The Googly Problem ==

On the other hand we didn’t really discuss twistor theory - it’s been stuck and now it’s got unstuck.

The main theory

Construct solutions of the Einstein equations or the Ricci-flat which were completely

as long as they were anti-self dual

Why do we want complex solutions anyway?

Once I thought that the complex solutions were wavefunctions

I called in the non-linear graviton, which got stuck with the googly problem.

A googly is a ball bowled in the game of Cricket.

The ball bounces and to make it spin left-handed requires a special action but when you throw a googly, you use the same action which spins the ball left to instead spin it right.

I struggled and struggled and came up with all sorts of wild ideas and I found one that worked but it required a Cosmological Constant.

I was talking to

“That’s not the point, there are so many things that work better if you put this Cosmological Constant in”

It enables you to have a construction that enables you to solve the problem.

You talk about this algebra

Instead of patching

A point made clear to me by Michael Atiyah

This enables you to find a general solution of the Einstein equations.

But this is Lorentzian and not positive definite.

And that’s not the thing I’m good at doing

WEIN - sounds like you need a collaborator?

WEIN - stay away from that consciousness stuff

WEIN - stick with what you’ve done in Physics and try ot push that ball forwards.

WEIN - people are hungry to hear what it sounds like

PEN - as important as the details if not more.

2:22 = Thank You Very Much

Please subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to us on youtube.

== Transcript ==
[https://theportal.wiki/images/5/5d/Penrose.vtt Raw transcript file]

== Resources ==
<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="00:14:00">
[[File:Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg|thumb|Clifford parallels]]
</div>
<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="00:38:00">
[[File:Ascending and Descending.jpg|thumb|Ascending and Descending, by M. C. Escher. Lithograph, 1960.]]
</div>

== Notes ==
<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="00:14:00">
There were three versions. The third version is in The Road to Reality. He thinks the second version is probably the best.
</div>
<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="00:38:00">
MC ESCHER - Ascending and Descending (The Penrose Stairs)
</div>

== Experimental Markup for player ==

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:00:01">
Eric Weinstein interviews Sir Roger Penrose, Episode 20 of The Portal
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:00:01">
Player by Demp

Annotations by R1chard5mith
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:00:01">
[[File:Eric weinstein.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:00:02">
[[File:Roger penrose.jpg|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:05">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f9/Sciama2.jpg/200px-Sciama2.jpg
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_W._Sciama Dennis Sciama]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:10">
https://static.scientificamerican.com/blogs/cache/file/7DAF801B-9AED-4B63-B7EAD43F5E9B1B2D_source.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:17">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics Physics]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:31">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Stephen_Hawking.StarChild.jpg/220px-Stephen_Hawking.StarChild.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:31">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking Stephen Hawking]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:11:40">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/Paul_Dirac%2C_1933.jpg/220px-Paul_Dirac%2C_1933.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:40">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac Paul Dirac]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:11:50">
Book: [https://www.amazon.com/Strangest-Man-Hidden-Dirac-Mystic/dp/0465022103 The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom] by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Farmelo Graham Farmelo]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:12:22">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein Albert Einstein]
<div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:12:35">
Eric imputes that Dirac’s hair was not as good as Einstein’s.
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:12:34">
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/wildcards/images/c/c7/Einstein.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:12:42">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Quantum mechanics]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:12:42">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png/290px-Hydrogen_Density_Plots.png
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:00">
http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:08">
NB:Roger Penrose and Eric Weinstein are friends with the guy who does the commentary for the cage fighting. What a time to be alive.
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzQUP1qoWDoEbmsQxvdjxgQ Joe Rogan Experience]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:08">
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/027/944/everdonedmt.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:11">
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GrotesqueApprehensiveCusimanse-mobile.mp4
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:11">
The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration Hopf Fibration] is the only non-trivial principal bundle that can be visually seen
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:11">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Hopf_Fibration.png/250px-Hopf_Fibration.png
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:13">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_bundle Fibre Bundles]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:13">
The “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration Hopf fibration]”, or the “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_parallel Clifford Parallels]” was instrumental in the subject of Twistor Theory.
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:20">
There’s also this diagram, which I found at a blog here: http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/tag/penrose/
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:20">
http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.eu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:13:22">
And there’s this diagram, which I found at this link ( http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tweb/00001/ ) which is an HTML presentation of “On the Origins of Twistor Theory” - Roger Penrose, 1987
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:13:22">
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tweb/00001/robinson.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:14:17">
[[File:Road to reality hopf.jpg|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:39">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor Spinors]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:14:39">
[[File:Spinors flag.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:43">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistor_theory Twistor Theory]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:54">
quantum mechanics and the first course
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:14:59">
Dirac gave a course (2 courses) of lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Course 1 - Basic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Quantum Mechanics]

Course 2 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory Quantum Field Theory] but also Spinors
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:15:00">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Spinor_on_the_circle.png/330px-Spinor_on_the_circle.png
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:15:02">
In the second course (when Penrose took the course) Dirac deviated from his normal course of lectures to give two or three lectures on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinor#Component_spinors Two Component Spinors]. ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.3824 Spinors])

</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:16:06">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark Quarks]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:16:06">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Proton_quark_structure.svg/225px-Proton_quark_structure.svg.png
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:16:12">
General phenomenon of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave Waves]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:16:12">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Superpositionprinciple.gif/220px-Superpositionprinciple.gif
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:16:39">
[[File:Cordon spinors book.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:16:39">
Denis recommended to Roger a book by Corson (presumably this one: [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tensors-Spinors-Relativistic-Wave-Equations/dp/B0000CIMO7 Introduction to Tensors, Spinors, and Relativistic Wave-Equations], 1953 by [https://www.ias.edu/scholars/edward-michael-corson E.M. Corson] *
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:17:39">
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory Quantum Field Theory]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:17:39">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg/211px-Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg.png
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:00">
https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/assets/8c/c2317c444c70a04633e4fd29095ef1adda7d8f.jpg
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:18:26">
Other people said that Dirac’s course was just like his book but Roger hadn’t read the book.

(I assume this one? Dirac - [https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Quantum-Mechanics-P-Dirac/dp/1607965607 Principles of Quantum Mechanics])
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:26">
[[File:Dirac principles book.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:39">
[[File:Paul Dirac.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:18:55">

Mention of Mathematicians:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Killing Wilhelm Killing]
* “Lee”? - this Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Lee was in Differential Geometry but was born in 1950. Maybe his father?
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lie_Cartan Élie Cartan]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:55">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Wilhelm_Karl_Joseph_Killing.jpeg/220px-Wilhelm_Karl_Joseph_Killing.jpeg

Wilhelm Killing
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:18:55">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e8/Elie_Cartan.jpg/220px-Elie_Cartan.jpg

Elie Cartan
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:00">
[[File:Eric gesticulating.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="note" data-timestamp="0:19:17">
Sir Roger Penrose’s favourite film is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film) 2001: A Space Odyssey]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:15">
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/11/2001_A_Space_Odyssey_%281968%29.png/220px-2001_A_Space_Odyssey_%281968%29.png
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:20">
[[File:2001 monolith.png|thumb]]
</div>

<div data-type="resource" data-timestamp="0:19:25">
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/optical-illusions/images/6/62/Note.gif
</div>

19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC

2020-04-12T02:43:30Z

Arby McDinkleberg: /* Description */

== Description ==
[[File:ThePortal-Ep19 BretWeinstein-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|right|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with his brother, Bret Weinstein (left), on episode 19 of The Portal podcast]]
All of our Mice are Broken. On this episode of The Portal, [[Bret Weinstein|Bret]] and [[Eric Weinstein|Eric]] Weinstein sit down alone with each other for the first time in public. There was no plan.

There was however, a remarkable story of science at its both best and worst that had not been told in years. After an initial tussle, we dusted off the cobwebs and decided to reconstruct it raw and share it with you, our Portal audience, for the first time. I don't think it will be the last as we are now again looking for our old notes to tighten it up for the next telling. We hope you find it interesting, and that it inspires you younger and less established scientists to tell your stories using this new medium of long form podcasting. We hope the next place you hear this story will be in a biology department seminar room in perhaps Cambridge, Chicago, Princeton, the Bay Area or elsewhere. Until then, be well and have a listen to this initial and raw version.

<span class="button">[[ep18 | << Previous Episode]]</span> <span class="button">[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/7591b76e-f107-4cba-beff-f5ec3f5da2f2 Listen to Episode 19]</span> <span class="button">[https://rss.art19.com/episodes/7591b76e-f107-4cba-beff-f5ec3f5da2f2.mp3 Download episode (mp3)]</span> <span class="button">[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s Watch Episode 19]</span> <span class="button">[[ep20 | Next Episode >>]]</span>

[[All Episodes]]

== Relevant Links ==

'''Bret Weinstein's''' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein Wikipedia], [https://bretweinstein.net/ Personal Webpage], [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi5N_uAqApEUIlg32QzkPlg Youtube Channel], and an archived version of Bret's website, [https://web.archive.org/web/20020722173540/http://www.telomere.org/ Telomere.org]

===Papers and articles===

* Bret Weinstein and Deborah Ciszek's 2002 paper in Experimental Gerontology, [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0531556502000128 "The Reserve-Capacity Hypothesis"]

* Bret Weinstein and Deborah Ciszek's 2002 unpublished manuscript, [https://web.archive.org/web/20030316223515/http://www.telomere.org/Downloads/LifesSlowFuse.pdf "Life's Slow Fuse"]

* Bret's PhD Thesis, [https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/63672/fruitbat_1.pdf?sequence=1 Evolutionary Trade-offs: Emergent Constraints And Their Adaptive Consequences]

* Carol Greider and Mike Hemann's [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC113886/ 2000 paper in Nucleic Acids Research]

* Bret Weinstein's [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513804000820?via%3Dihub 2005 paper in Evolution and Human Behavior]

* [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/of-mice-and-men-unseen-da_b_1352201?guccounter=1 2012 HuffPost article] about Bret's telomere length discovery

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20030316015522/http://www.telomere.org/Downloads/Medawar-UPB.pdf "An Unsolved Problem of Biology"], Medawar (1952), a classic paper on senescence

* [https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/laboratory-life/ "Laboratory Life"], a 2010 NY Times Opinionator article that mentions Bret and cites Greider's 2000 paper

===Evolutionary Biologists===

* Dr. Carol Greider [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_W._Greider Wikipedia], [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2009/greider/facts/ NobelPrize.org Bio], [https://www.mbg.jhmi.edu/people/faculty/carol-greider Johns Hopkins Faculty page], [http://www.greiderlab.org/ Research page] [https://twitter.com/CWGreider Twitter] [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/13conv.html NY Times article]

* Dr. Michael Hemann [https://biology.mit.edu/profile/michael-t-hemann/ MIT Faculty page]

* Dr. Richard D. Alexander [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Alexander Wikipedia]

* Dr. Richard Dawkins [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins Wikipedia], [https://www.richarddawkins.net/ personal website], [https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins Twitter]

* Dr. Robert Trivers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers Wikipedia]

* Dr. Heather Heying [http://heatherheying.com/ personal website]

* Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Blackburn Wikipedia], [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2009/blackburn/biographical/ NobelPrize.org Bio]

* Dr. Jack Szostak [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_W._Szostak Wikipedia], [https://molbio.mgh.harvard.edu/szostakweb/ Harvard Faculty research page], [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2009/szostak/facts/ NobelPrize.org Bio]

* Dr. George C. Williams [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Williams_(biologist) Wikipedia]

* Bill Hamilton [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton Wikipedia]

* Dr. John Maynard Smith [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Smith Wikipedia]

* Dr. Judith Campisi [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Campisi Wikipedia]

* Peter Medawar [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Medawar Wikipedia]

===Laboratory mice info===

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_mouse Laboratory mice general info on Wikipedia]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_mouse#Genetics_and_strains Genetics and Strains of laboratory mice]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus_(genus) Mus (genus)]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_mouse Mus musculus (aka house mouse)]

* JAX Lab [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Laboratory Wikipedia], [https://www.jax.org/ company website]

* [https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services/find-and-order-jax-mice/most-popular-jax-mice-strains JAX Lab's popular mouse strains]

===Other Concepts and Terms===

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthopan Xanthopan (moth)]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angraecum_sesquipedale Darwin's Orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale)]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophrys Ophrys orchid]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality Eusocial]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera Hymenoptera]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy Haplodiploidy]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat Naked Mole-rat]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere Telomeres]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit Hayflick Limit]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence Senescence]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell Somatic cell]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germline Germline]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome Genome]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiotropy Pleiotropy]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypothesis Antagonistic Pleiotropy Hypothesis]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase Telomerase]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insult_(medical) (Environmental) Insult]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histology Histology]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib Rofecoxib (Vioxx)]

===Margot O'Toole, Imanishi-Kari & David Baltimore story===

* Thereza Imanishi-Kari [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thereza_Imanishi-Kari Wikipedia]

* David Baltimore [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Baltimore Wikipedia]

* [https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/22/us/biologist-who-disputed-a-study-paid-dearly.html NY Times article]

* [https://news.mit.edu/1996/imanishi-0724 MIT article]

* [https://www.nature.com/articles/351180a0.pdf Nature News and Views: Margot O'Toole's Record of Events]

* [https://people.com/archive/when-lab-researcher-margot-otoole-caught-her-boss-fudging-data-she-lost-her-job-but-not-the-will-to-fight-back-vol-35-no-14/ People.com article]

===Institutions===

* Evergreen State College [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College Wikipedia]

===Events===

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Straight_Hall#1969_building_takeover Takeover at Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969]

* [https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Professor-Who-Roiled/240267 Chronicle article about Bret's stand against racism at UPenn in 1987]

* [https://archive.is/4ANX2 NY Times opinion article about Evergreen Student Takeover in 2017]

* [https://youtu.be/hYzU-DoEV6k Bret's conversation with Richard Dawkins in 2018]

===Books===

* [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/476218.The_Tapir_s_Morning_Bath The Tapir's Morning Bath - Elizabeth Royte]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilisation_of_Orchids Fertilisation of Orchids - Charles Darwin]

== Remaining Questions ==

1) Telomere length delta from wild type in both absolute length and variance.

2) Changes and variation in lab-bred rodent telomere length over time.

3) Notification history of all of the above to all affected parties.

4) Estimated impacts of all of the above deltas from wild type.

5) Communication protocol with the JAX lab and other suppliers and pharma companies for journalists and researchers wishing to understand all of the above.

== Transcript ==

'''Eric:''' Hello. This is Eric Weinstein. I'm going to be recording a short introduction to this episode because I think it's probably the most important episode of The Portal to date. That said, under normal circumstances, I probably would have either edited this heavily or not released it at all. It starts off quite slow and it gets quite awkward before finding its pace. Now what's going on is that the interview subject is none other than my brother Bret Weinstein. In Bret's case, you probably know him if you know him at all as the heroic professor who stood up against what can only be described—I swear I'm not making this up—as an Maoist insurrection at an American college in the Pacific Northwest, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College Evergreen State College]. It was a very strange situation because somehow the national media that we would normally have thought would have covered such a story—for example, the media that covered the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Straight_Hall#1969_building_takeover takeover of Straight Hall at Cornell] in the 60s—that media was almost absent completely. At least, they were absent for a very long time before they entered late in the game. And why is that? Because the story ran counter-narrative—that is, the students at the Evergreen State College who were behaving in a racist fashion were actually students of color, and this was an exactly counter-narrative story. And Bret, who stood up to this racist insurrection, was in fact somebody with a history of standing up against racism. He had, in fact, been a student at the University of Pennsylvania, my Alma mater, an Ivy league school, and had to leave because of death threats when he stood up for women of color who were being abused for the amusement and the sexual amusement of white fraternity students. So Bret was supposed to be familiar to many of you from that, from an old national news story, and he was also the hero of a book called [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/476218.The_Tapir_s_Morning_Bath The Tapir’s Morning Bath].

But somehow, the news media, who chose not to report on the Evergreen story, was not very interested either in figuring out who Bret was, because the stories showed that there was a contradictory problem with the main narrative. In some sense, that's going to be recapitulated in this episode. There is an official narrative about what happened in the scientific episode, and there is a narrative which I think is much closer to the truth, which I happened to be one of a very small number of witnesses to this alternate story. Now the key question is whether to tell the story or not, and you're going to see that both of us have a certain amount of trepidation and energy around the question of whether or not to break a longstanding public silence. When Bret found himself as professor in exile along with his wife, [http://heatherheying.com/ Heather Heying], I had thought that the American biology establishment would realize that one of their own had been thrown overboard as jetsam, and that he would have been invited to many universities to give seminars in biology.

It took awhile for me to understand that, because he was found at Evergreen State College, the people who taught at highly ranked research universities thought that Bret was something more like a teacher rather than a researcher. In fact, he had been the top student of one of the most important evolutionary theorists in the United States, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Alexander Richard Alexander] at the University of Michigan, as well as a student of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Trivers Bob Trivers], formerly of Harvard, arguably one of the greatest living evolutionary theorists, I think presently at Rutgers. Bret was somebody who had actually done really interesting work in his thesis, and for some reason, the system found it very disturbing to consider the full implications of his work.

I think in this episode we're going to do something interesting. I see Bret in two separate ways: On the one hand, I view him as a very heroic figure and he's an absolutely brilliant person. It's been a pleasure sparring with him throughout my life. However, I'm also his older brother and you're going to hear me at sort of my overbearing best, brow beating him a bit. Now the point isn't to push him down, but quite the contrary. I'm rather competitive as Bret's older brother and I don't want to compete with the weakest version of Bret, the professor and exile. Instead, I want him seated again inside of the institution where he always belonged. And in order to do that, I want him to tell the tale, not with embellishment, but as it actually happened, because I think it's one of the most fascinating episodes in modern biology that I've ever heard.

So I hope that you like it. We're going to put it in front of you as an experiment and we're going to test to see whether or not I'm correct that can be used to augment the usual channels.

I believe that a lot of us are sitting on intellectual gold. I don't think that the story that somebody’s work didn't see the light of day, or got attributed to somebody else, is as exotic as the institutions would have you believe. In fact, I think it's quite common. I think many of us find that we don't have careers inside of science because something goes wrong quite early when we're quite vulnerable. And my hope is that some of you listening, who I know are struggling as graduate students or as postdocs or as undergraduates, will listen to this and find some courage to stand up for yourself, because, quite frankly, if you choose not to do it in order to make nice with your fields, the chances are you will probably won't have a career in the long term. You might as well swing for the fences and you might as well clear your throat and tell your story as it actually happened, without fear.

I don't know that this is going to succeed, but we're going to run an experiment and I think both Bret and I are up for it to find out wherever it goes. The one thing I would say is that if anyone else in the story wants to tell their version of events, it would be an honor to have you on The Portal. There are no bad people in the story, in my opinion; there are a lot of bad incentives. And if we're going to actually fix the system, we're going to have to look past the interpersonal. But the point of this, in my opinion, is that I think it's sufficient to open the case again and to seat Bret Weinstein inside of the university system—that is, the research university system, where he has always belonged. So have a listen, and I hope you like it.

(00:06:01)

'''Eric:''' Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm joined today by none other than my own brother, Dr. Bret Weinstein. Bret, welcome.

'''Bret:''' Thanks for having me.

'''Eric:''' Okay, well what should we do? What do you think?

'''Bret:''' Wow. Well, I dunno. I would imagine a certain fraction of your audience is going through the usual sort of a—

'''Eric:''' Well they randomly call us either Bret or Eric.

'''Bret:''' Yes.

'''Eric:''' So far as I can tell.

'''Bret:''' Which our parents also did while we were growing up.

'''Eric:''' I suppose that's true.

'''Bret:''' Including the pets names were also sometimes thrown in, if I recall correctly.

'''Eric:''' That's true. Okay. So if you don't mind, I was trying to think about the fact that we have an opportunity to do something that might be slightly different because you and I share a lot, and what I thought is that we should begin to really focus on areas of your expertise with respect to biology rather than the way in which many people have come to know you. So can I ask you to just quickly dispense with, in 30 seconds, how the world has come to recognize you if they recognize you at all?

'''Bret:''' Sure. To the extent that I am recognized, it is typically as a result of the meltdown at Evergreen and my stance—

'''Eric:''' That's Evergreen State College.

'''Bret:''' Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where I taught for 14 years, along with my wife, Heather Heying, who taught there for 15 years. We faced a mob of people who accused me of racism. And these were students, they were students I had never met. And the event was so colorful, and eventually when the world caught on to the fact that the protesters, who became rioters, had uploaded footage to the net, and so the whole event could effectively be seen from their perspective, it raised interest in some other quadrants. So, for example, I ended up on Joe Rogan's program, which is the place I'm probably most recognized from. And you know, my first appearance there, we talked about the Evergreen situation. And anyway, that's the bulk of how people know me.

'''Eric:''' All right. So you were a biologist teaching at a relatively obscure college that had previously been known for social activism. And I didn't love your introduction because when you say, “Well, the students accused me of racism” that leaves sort of a weird question. Like, “Why was he accused of racism?” Let me solve the puzzle just immediately—maybe you can't do this—because that was the closest we'd seen to a Maoist takeover inside of the United States of America, ever. Like, it was a case of mass insanity, and the videos showed it to be mass insanity, and unless you had been indoctrinated to believe that Maoism of some form, Maoist re-education, was normal, the rest of the world said, “OMG, what the heck is going on at this completely insane—”. It wasn't just like one of these college craziness pieces. This is really an episode of broad institutional madness that was localized there. And I want to take it to be self-evident because it is self-evident. The video exists. And if you took the people who were trying to pretend that you were a racist in their own terms, that was sufficient to—it was like the unreliable narrator. They were, debunking themselves in the eyes of everyone who hadn't come under the spell of this particular kind of madness.

'''Bret:''' Well, there's a little more to it in the sense that they were entirely unprepared for a white guy willing to say, “No, I'm simply not a racist”. And it just didn't occur to them that that was going to happen. And it didn't occur to them that my own students weren't going to flee to their side at the point that they leveled their accusation, because those things would have been normal in this environment. But, in my case, I grew up in a home—there were plenty of flaws in that home, as you know—but one of the places I don't think it was flawed was that it was very clear-headed about issues of inequality, race justice. And so I, I really have the sense that these issues were really not new to me, and I had a long history at the college, lots of students of color—

(00:10:43)

'''Eric:''' You’re explaining too much. And I don't mean to be rude about it, but, they were just crazy.

'''Bret:''' They were crazy. But my point is, the accusation is in and of itself so powerful in modern circumstances that people, the idea of standing up to it doesn't occur to most people. And the fact is I was not well enough positioned. The thing descended into madness. It descended into literal anarchy with armed students, roving the campus, the same mob was looking for me, searching car to car, for example. It was a very dangerous situation

'''Eric:''' With baseball bats

'''Bret:''' With baseball bats. But what I'm getting at is I checked with myself and did not feel vulnerable to this accusation. I felt most people could not endure it, but I was in a position to, and in an odd way—

'''Eric:''' You'd been effectively driven out of your own university as an undergraduate, standing up against racism.

'''Bret:''' Indeed.

'''Eric:''' These people had flipped the script, and said, if you don't sign up for our racism, you're a racist. Yeah.

'''Bret:''' They did.

'''Eric:''' I don't, you know, here's the thing. I have two documents that I've studied that have a lot of longevity to them. One begins with, “We hold these truths to be self evident” and the other one begins with “In the beginning”. And I think we've made a huge mistake taking this as an argument. It's a non-serious position held by morons and idiots, or people who've been indoctrinated and infected with an idea that there's something left-wing about being a racist. I'm not interested in it, and I also think that it's really important to stop giving these people their due. Like, it's really important to exclude them from the conversation, because if you have to have a three day symposium as to whether or not racism can be redefined in a way that makes it impossible for certain people to be racist but impossible for other people not to be racist, there's just no point. It's just needs to be thrown in the garbage because it just, it's a suicide idea that wastes everyone's time and plunges the world into stupidity, madness and hatred.

'''Bret:''' Well, you and I are in total agreement about the necessity to shut the bad actors out of the conversation.

'''Eric:''' Great.

'''Bret:''' I do have some concern about a large number of people who fall into one of two camps. They're either confused, or they suffer from so much cowardice that they will sign up for ideas that they ought to know are wrong.

'''Eric:''' Yeah. But I think you're not getting the message. We've made a huge mistake, and I refuse to spend time, because these people have decided that this is a tax that we should pay, that they have a serious point. It's a non-serious point. It's a terrifying moronic non-serious point that you can redefine racism to be anti-racism and anti-racism to be racism.

'''Bret:''' Nobody knows this better than me.

'''Eric:''' Great. Okay. Are we done?

'''Bret:''' We are.

'''Eric:''' Good. With that aside, my concern—you know that I play this game, which is called “What is the least interesting, interesting thing about X?”, where I take a person and I take their top characteristic. So for example, the least interesting, interesting thing about Dolly Parton is that she's busty. The most interesting thing is she's a genius level songwriter, and a fantastic singer, and an entertainer, and a great business woman. Doesn't matter. But the key point is we get hung up on some stupid superficial characteristic, and we don't see the actual interest or majesty in a person, and I feel like that has happened to you. I feel like, at some level, having known you for a very long time, you are an incredibly interesting person for totally different reasons than the reasons for which you have become famous. And I would like to use this episode and, by the way, you're welcome back anytime. Love to do a series with you. Love to, you know, make this a regular part of our lives if people like it.

(00:14:43)

'''Bret:''' Cool. I think you know, you and I both hear a lot of curiosity about what our relationship is like, and what our discussions sound like. And so I think there's lots of room for that.

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(00:16:57)

'''Eric:''' What I'd like to do is to try to be the foil for you that I don't think anybody else can be, because I was tracking the story very early. And by the way, when I originally tried to get you help and allies, I think almost the only person who could get what was happening at Evergreen State was our mutual friend, Sam Harris, who was willing to amplify and retweet this, because it was so confusing that most of the rest of the world had just never seen these kinds of arguments. And now it's much more common for people to be aware of these problems. But when it started happening, we didn't even have any framework for how to think about these things.

'''Bret:''' Yeah, and in fact, Sam, I remember even the content of his tweet where he entered this discussion, where he suggested that what was necessary was a deprogramming for these people. And from living inside of this very confusing scenario, to hear a message of reason from the outside, that it was visible how insane this was, meant a lot to me. It really, it changed things. It was like a reality check.

(00:18:00)

'''Eric:''' Yep. Sam's a real hero in that regard. It's just amazing that he got there early and he got there correct. And, you know, more power to him.

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' Okay. As you know, I was not happy about you being at Evergreen State College, long before this problem was occurring. I viewed you as sort of retreating into this very obscure college and using the undergraduates as if they were graduate students, teaching very advanced concepts, and running kind of a weird Harvard-style program with very adventurous material, with no recognition that this kind of unusual educational environment was even occurring. Fair? Unfair?

'''Bret:''' Well, it's mostly fair. It was not really an appropriate place. I don't regret it. I think for the last year or two, Heather and I were living on borrowed time, that this could have come for us in a worse way, and it could've come for us at any moment. But the thing about the job I had was that it was the upside of a crazy experiment in education. The founders of the college had broken every rule of a normal university, and half of what they did in breaking it was crazy, and half of what they did was brilliant. Nobody ever bothered to separate the two from the prototype, and, you know, fix the broken part. Didn't happen. But, the administrators had no power, and very little knowledge about what was going on in the classroom, which meant that I could create a learning environment that worked both from the point of view of students and worked from the point of view of me in my objectives to keep advancing a research program that frankly I would have had no way to keep on at a normal college. I would have been so burdened by teaching that I couldn't have combined the two things. So anyway, I do think one has to figure out how to make their way in the world financially. One has to figure out where to raise their kids. And from many perspectives, as much of a mismatch as Evergreen was for me in some ways, in some other ways, it was not a bad place to be parked. It gave me—I was anonymous from the point of the world and I could make progress on biology. So I have fewer regrets than I might.

(00:20:36)

'''Eric:''' Okay. This is so uncomfortable, but it is also the real substance of our relationship. I always resented the fact that you really excelled at, and enjoyed, teaching as much as you did, and you saw this in terms of a place to play with ideas, to teach students to have a pleasant and enjoyable life, healthy as it was in the great outdoors, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah blah. And I still see these characteristics in you, and it drives me nuts because you're your own worst enemy in some ways, to me. What you really are, to me, is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, and beneath this kind of very nice, friendly pedagogue is a thinker that the world doesn't know. And I watched recently your interactions with Richard Dawkins, and it was absolutely infuriating. I mean, you know, he's very clear. It's like, “Well, Bret is a real hero, so far as free speech and standing up for free inquiry goes. But he's very confused.” Well, no, I don't think that that's right. I think that you guys had a really substantive interaction about biology, which I wish he would spend more time on because he's phenomenal at it when he's focused on it, and you're phenomenal. And that was supposed to be a really different conversation. But because we got to know you the wrong way, in my opinion, you're always the guy who was strong enough to stand up to students at an obscure place, and this completely masks who you've always been, and you're not willing to take up the yoke, which is the more important role for you.

(00:22:21)

'''Bret:''' Well, I don't know that I'm not willing. I think you and I have a different approach to this and it may be, you know, birth order stuff or whatever, but, you know, and I also, I have the benefit of you in the world, doing what you do, which, I do wonder sometimes what would've happened to me at Evergreen had I only had my own tools at my disposal. It is quite possible I would have been effectively snuffed out in private and I don't know what I would be doing at the moment. As it happens, the Evergreen story turned into rocket fuel that propelled me into a strata where there's lots of interesting things to do, that may not be exactly what you're talking about, but they make sense.

(00:23:07)

'''Eric:''' Yeah, it's frustrating. I'm trying—I don't think you understand what it is that I'm trying to do here. I believe that you're miscategorized, and you're really not grasping that this is my opportunity—

'''Bret:''' No, I am. I am grasping it. What I think distinguishes us is that we have very different styles with respect to approaching things. I, for example, take a certain perverse pleasure in watching Dawkins slowly move in my direction, which I believe is happening.

Now. I would like him to move faster. He's not a young man and I think it's actually quite important that he recognize where the errors in his own thinking are. And to be honest, I believe I know where at least several major ones live, and I know what he would see if he could be brought to understand the nature of those errors and to confront the, frankly, the portal that opens if you walk through a slightly different door than he's been walking through. But you know, it didn't work in one evening—I always wondered if it would, but there is still the possibility that he will have the epiphany that I hope he will have.

(00:24:27)

'''Eric:''' I really don't understand even where we are in this conversation.

'''Bret:''' Okay.

'''Eric:''' Okay. You're not getting it. You were found at Evergreen State College. That is a communication to the world that you weren't very good.

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' And every time I try to say this is completely wrong, you miss— you don't catch the ball that's being thrown to you, which is, you're not understanding what you're up against. He doesn't take you seriously because you don't have a list of publications that speaks to who it is that you actually are, or what you've done, or where you've been, and as a result, you continue to be the good guy, who is very well spoken, very thoughtful, says very interesting things, and constantly gives away power to other people.

(00:25:14)

'''Bret:''' Mmm, I don't think so. There's a question about how to confront the opportunities that you've got, the hand you've been dealt, and I think you and I share a certain delight—when we do our homework and we discover something interesting and absolutely nobody else gets it?

'''Eric:''' Mm-hmm

'''Bret:''' That would feel bad to most people, because they would feel like, “What am I doing wrong? Why does nobody else understand this point?” To you and me, that feels good. It is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody else can even recognize it, gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be. The question is what to do with those things, and there, I think the question is if I went through something with— I said something intemperate to the New Atheists, and suddenly Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and Neil Shubin came at me all at once, not on the topic that I had caused offense– on a totally different topic. They had picked something off my YouTube channel. Jerry Coyne had claimed to have debunked it. He was wrong, but nonetheless it provided fodder for them to attack. Their point was that I didn't understand natural selection and that, to the extent I might believe I knew something that other people didn't know, the right thing to do was to submit it to a journal and go through peer review. I pointed out to them that peer review was not Richard Dawkins style, and that he in fact advanced the ball for the field, substantially, but has barely published a paper. That backed them off that course, and their tune changed to, “Well, how about a book then? That's what Dawkins did.” And to me that's a win. The idea— I'm not against peer review. I want peers to review my work, but I don't want it snuffed out in private. And so, to the extent that that little battle was the result of them underestimating me and not knowing that something was going to come back that was cogent and responsive to the world as it actually is, and having them back off their position and say, “Yes, actually a book would be a fine thing.” That was positive movement from my perspective. They underestimated me, and they had to back down. So I can't regret that too much. To me, on a different timescale, I believe I'm making progress toward a goal that you and I agree is the right one, but I'm not sure that coming at it, guns blazing is the way to go.

(00:28:16)

'''Eric:''' Well, I'm happy to stop the interview right here and right now, because that's adorable, and it's sweet, and it's incredibly patient, and it's a beautiful sentiment, but I also feel like I sat through all of the wars and battles to get your ideas into the world, and I'm not funding that program.

'''Bret:''' Does it sound to you like I'm surrendering?

'''Eric:''' No, it sounds to me like you're boring me. Like, this is really uninteresting.

'''Bret:''' *''sigh''*

'''Eric:''' If I think about what actually happened—

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' This is a miss-telling. This is not even honest.

'''Bret:''' Okay. Floor is yours.

'''Eric:''' Okay. I want to talk about something I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, and it has nothing to do with Richard Dawkins and peer review and Jerry Coyne and a bunch of other things that almost nobody cares about. It has to do with about a 50 year period in which great ideas got buried no matter where they occurred. Because great ideas were very likely to be highly disruptive to an institutional order. And between you and your wife, and me and my wife, three of our four theses ran into incredible problems, because they were trying to break really new ground. And the amount of delay that you suffered, I mean you're now 50 years old. This is a very late start in a career. You're coming from a very inauspicious place. You've been fitted with a story, which is “He's a sweet guy who stood up to a mob and that's his claim to fame” and you're not really understanding that you're not being taken fully seriously as a biologist. In part what Jerry Coyne is saying to you is, “Hey, you're really unknown to us. I'm at Chicago. Richard Dawkins was at Oxford.” You know, he was the Simoni professor for the—

'''Bret:''' Public Understanding of Science.

'''Eric:''' Right. The point is you're not part of the Super Club. Don't get confused. You're just, some guy who stood up.

'''Bret:''' Oh, I understand. That's what's being said.

'''Eric:''' Okay, so my point is I don't have time for your fairy tale about a healthy and kind and sweet—

'''Bret:''' Who said anything about healthy? I'm, look, I'm interested in winning for a couple of reasons: One, the payload. Yeah, the insight that opens the portal to the part of biology we don't know because we've had bad Darwinian tools, and for those who heard that as an attack on Darwinism, it is not. Darwinism needs fixing, and there's nothing wrong with what Darwin contributed— it's what happened after.

'''Eric:''' Will you do me a favor?

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' I really, you've got your own podcast. It's called The Dark Horse, right? The Dark Horse podcast. I think this is a great place for you to explore gradual change, incremental progression, turning minds around, opening hearts, all this stuff. This isn't your podcast.

'''Bret:''' Yep

'''Eric:''' This is my podcast.

'''Bret:''' Right. But we're talking about my life. Am I right?

'''Eric:''' We are talking about your life, but if that's what you want to do, I don't know that I'm that interested in doing what I was going to do, which was to try to get your ideas out into the world, curated by somebody who isn't you.

(00:31:43)

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(00:32:52)

'''Eric:''' You know one of the things, and by the way, I've had this issue with you—

'''Bret:''' Do I take it we are not in a podcast at the moment?

'''Eric:''' We are in a podcast. Oh, believe me, I'm going to put the hurt on you because you are backing out of your role in history, and I'm sick of it. Look, I love you like, like you were my own brother.

'''Bret:''' Amazing.

'''Eric:''' Okay. It is the case that you have always done this, and it means that you're not taking your place properly. And I had to go to the extraordinary length of tricking your advisor, Richard Alexander, one of the great evolutionary theorists of our times—

'''Bret:''' Absolutely.

'''Eric:''' Right? One of the absolute tops. Member of the National Academy of Sciences, chaired professor at the University of Michigan. I had to trick him into writing a letter of recommendation for you so that we would have some record, as he was getting on in years, of who you actually were, because I knew that Evergreen was not going to be—it's not part of the game.

(00:33:59)

'''Bret:''' It's true.

'''Eric:''' Okay. Here's what he had to say about you. “Bret Weinstein may well be the brightest graduate student I have ever known. His thesis defense involved only one of his four thesis chapters, and it alone was far more than sufficient as a thesis. I don't know anyone who knows more than Bret about not only a wide variety of topics in biological evolution, but the problems and possibilities of cultural change and the means of bringing people together and solving difficult problems. For 40 years, I held frequent, sometimes almost daily seminars with my doctoral students in evolutionary biology. While he was a student, Bret was a major element in all of those seminars. When he spoke, there was almost always respectful silence, even when he was junior to most of the people involved. Bret's thesis topics are so significant and timely, and so well treated on the lifetime patterns of humans and other species, the function and importance of telomeres and explaining lifetimes as hedges against cancer and several other important topics such as species diversity and sexual selection, that he dramatically converted, on the spot, two reluctant—” And by the way, reluctant is British understatement here— “I will say mildly and skeptically evolutionist members of the committee. I think that, despite his youthfulness, in terms of the characteristics I listed earlier, Bret is the best candidate.”

You were the number one student of Richard Alexander, who ended up at the Evergreen State College, which was a giant mistake. And it was always a mistake. You should never have been there. I was completely right. I'm sorry to be overbearing about it, but, like, how many years did I tell you, “You gotta get out of that place.”

'''Bret:''' Well, look, first of all, Dick was very clear with me about the fact that, we're he trying to compete in the modern academy, he did not believe he would have succeeded. And he was clear about the fact that there was no good solution to the problem. So, you know. I can't say that I've ever heard that letter. I believe you have quoted parts of it to me.

(00:36:06)

'''Eric:''' Yeah, because you're going to do this thing where you downplay your gift, and I'm sick of it. I'm tired of it. I've just, I've had it. And part of it, what happened is that you are now distorting the history of science. You have a place in the history of science that you are not taking up, you are not advocating for, there's something that you don't like about this.

'''Bret:''' No, no, I don't think this is true. I just think I'm pursuing it—maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it doesn't work out in the end, or maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it would, maybe there's more than one path.

'''Eric:''' I've been through too much helping you, trying to make this happen, where people become aware of the complex of ideas that you've been pushing out, and my feeling about this is that you maintain this very beautiful, very calm position, and it's enough already. Like, you have a story and that story is an explosive story. I mean, I'm happy to bury this podcast so that nobody ever hears it, but I want to actually explore the truth, rather than this extremely good for you, high fiber, you know, low sugar, bowl of granola.

'''Bret:''' I just don't think that's where we are. I've been very clear and very public about the fact that I think my entire field is spinning its wheels, that they've gotten caught by a few bad assumptions and that they are spending decades in the weeds for no good reason, that there is a way out, that I didn't know what it was for a long time. I did figure out what it was, and getting their attention on the question of what they're doing wrong is a Herculean task. I've made that clear. The question is what is the best use of the opportunity that I've got, the cards that I hold, and we have a difference of opinion about what that might be. And you may be right. I'm not saying you're not right, but I am saying that there's at least a discussion to be had about what the best way to play the—

(00:38:01)

'''Eric:''' Why don't we have that on your podcast. I accept your invitation to come on. This is my podcast. We're going to do it my way.

'''Bret:''' Let's do it your way.

'''Eric:''' Alright. I'm the older brother.

'''Bret:''' I've noticed I have the ultimate Marcia Marcia market problem.

'''Eric:''' All right. Bret, this is not the story of your career and your life. What happened is that you got stuck at the university of Michigan for a very long period of time, because you made people very uncomfortable. What he's saying in that letter of recommendation is that you wrote four different theses, so far as I can remember, and they were on widely different topics. Furthermore, here's an interesting one: no one that I know of, despite the amount of discussion that's been spilled in ink over Evergreen has put you together with the hero of a book called The Tapir’s Morning Bath, that appeared years earlier.

'''Bret:''' It's odd that it never shows up.

'''Eric:''' Right? It never shows up. And then you're also the recipient of the Golden Gazelle award, I think of the National Organization of Women, for standing up to ZBT at the University of Pennsylvania. And you got ejected, effectively, from an Ivy League school due to threats of physical violence for standing up for black women being exploited by white men. I mean, like, then you're like the, the field assistant and main student as an undergraduate of another legendary evolutionary theorist, Bob Trivers. And somehow, you know, Richard Dawkins is treating you as a guy who isn't really his equal. “You're not really a major theorist. You're very confused and you need to learn more about the extended phenotype” and all this kind of nonsense. And you're so polite that you're not even just, I dunno, I think you're out to lunch. No offense.

'''Bret:''' I get it. I get it. And you know, like I said, you may be right.

'''Eric:''' Okay. I want to talk about the subjects that you're most associated with starting with your thesis. And I want to get into the science of it using podcast. If people get left behind, they get left behind.

'''Bret:''' Okay.

'''Eric:''' Okay. Now Dick Alexander is a legend in evolutionary theory because it's very hard to use evolutionary theory to make predictions that can be verified in the world. It's sort of this loose amorphous collection of techniques and viewpoints. And people sometimes think it's not even a theory because it doesn't seem to be predictive.

(00:40:37)

'''Eric:''' And then there are a few predictions. So, am I right? Darwin started this game off by predicting that there would be [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthopan a moth with a really long tongue] because there was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angraecum_sesquipedale a flower that had a really long distance to go] before you could get the nectar out of it.

'''Bret:''' Yeah, he had been sent an orchid by Bateson, maybe, with a foot long corolla tube. And he reasoned very straightforwardly that it would make no sense for this plant to have invested in this very long structure if there were not a tongue that could reach down to gather the nectar. And I believe he did not live to see the discovery of that animal.

'''Eric:''' I didn't know that.

'''Bret:''' But he was absolutely correct. There is a moth that has this beautifully long tongue. It's a Sphingid Hawkmoth one of these sort of hummingbird-esque moths, and anyway, yeah, it's one of the major predictions, demonstrations, that evolutionary theory actually can be used predict phenomena that you haven't been able to observe.

(00:41:34)

'''Eric:''' Okay. And you know, Darwin famously couldn't, for example, like, I don't know how much I've talked about this in the open, but my favorite Darwin book is the one he wrote after [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species Origin of Species], which is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilisation_of_Orchids On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilized by Insects]. It makes absolutely no sense as a title, I think that's what's so funny about it. But because orchids are so highly speciated, it turned out to be the perfect place to explore the consequences of evolution. And he couldn't figure out my favorite, I don't know whether it's clade or a group—

'''Bret:''' Clade is pretty safe.

'''Eric:''' Yeah, clade of orchids, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophrys Ophrys] system, which is just unbelievable because it mimics the pollinators, the female of the pollinator species using pheromones and some sort of replica good enough to fool males into copulating with the lower pedal of an orchid—

'''Bret:''' A 3D replica of the female that smells like her. And it just so happens that when the male lands on it to copulate, he gets these pollen packets glued to him, and then he screws up and makes the same mistake at another flower and delivers—

'''Eric:''' Well, he may, he may or may not

'''Bret:''' Put it this way—

'''Eric:''' Only the ones that screw up twice get to fertilize.

'''Bret:''' The reason that it gets glued to him is that it has worked enough times for this strategy to have been so beautifully refined.

'''Eric:''' Right. So Darwin saw that there was this mimicry going on, but he couldn't put it together. He spent pages and pages not getting it. So I think it's very funny. So he predicts some things, but he can't predict something else in a very closely related system. Okay. Fast forward, Dick Alexander comes out with a crazy prediction, which I still don't fully— I mean, it's just amazing that he made it— where he says, I bet that you will find the kind of behavior we associate with wasps and bees, which is in this clade called Hymenopteran ants of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality eusocial] breeding patterns and organization, but in mammals that will live underground.

'''Bret:''' So, I think, the way this story actually worked, he didn't say you will find it—

'''Eric:''' Or, you could find it.

'''Bret:''' What he said is, in principle, there's no reason that a eusocial animal has to be an insect. That in fact, you could get such a thing in a mammal. And then he predicted—I forget how many characteristics there were—but he named some large—

'''Eric:''' So we should say that there's something funny about the system of ants, bees, wasps, which is that they've got this very strange [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy haplodiploid] chromosomal characteristic. Do you want to say a word about that? Cause that makes the prediction more—

'''Bret:''' Sure. So it has long been understood that the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera Hymenoptera] behave in this incredibly cooperative fashion, which effectively all of the workers of the colony forgo reproduction in order to advance the reproductive interests of the queen. And it was late discovered that actually their genetic system is unlike our genetic system, and that males have basically half a full complement of genes. They have enough greens to function, but they have half the female complement of genes. And, for reasons that are mathematically slightly complicated and require a chalkboard, the females are more closely related to the daughters produced by their mother than they would be to their own offspring, their three quarters relatives to her offspring. And there they would be 50% relatives to their own offspring.

'''Eric:''' Spot on.

'''Bret:''' So, they are actually evolutionarily favored by very standard mechanisms. Once you understand the crazy genetics underlying the thing, they are favored to engage in behavior where they forgot reproducing and fostered.

'''Eric:''' So, once you understand the chromosomal difference of the system, it is far less surprising that it would behave as a loosely coupled, in some way—don't overreact—unified organism, which is distributed. That there are ways in which the hive behaves as a superorganism, and there are ways in which it does not.

(00:45:40)

'''Bret:''' Yeah. Well, all I want to say is, I'm not sure how clear we have the story with respect to what precedes what— it's completely plausible that the behavior precedes the evolution of the genetic system.

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:''' And I actually, frankly just don't know where that research stands at the moment. We have found many other insect systems that have various versions of this. Interestingly, though, the termites are not hymenopteras.

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:''' And the termites engage in this behavior—

'''Eric:''' Termites are eusocial, but they're not haplodiploid.

'''Bret:''' They’re eusocial, they behave very much like ants.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Bret:''' But they don't have the strange genetic system, proving that the behavior can evolve even in the absence of this genetic system—

'''Eric:''' Well, the reason I bring this up is that if you look at, for example, Prince Peter Kropotkin, the great anarchists theorist, he was obsessed by finding analogs in nature of preferred human structures. And so it's very simple to say, why can't we work together the way an ant colony all works together? And then there's a counter to that, which is, well, they have different chromosomal structures, and then you say, well, but yes, but that's a kind of a cheap way of achieving eusociality. There are other ways of—so through this crazy kind of investigation, we get to Dick Alexander, who, and I think you're quite correct, says there is nothing prohibiting us from finding a mammalian species that exhibits ant- and wasp-like behavior. And it would be likely to have these characteristics, it would live underground, in a—

'''Bret:''' Yeah, underground, I believe eating tubers, was on the thing. It was a crazy list. And you know, my understanding from, from Dick—Dick is now unfortunately dead. He died a couple of years ago. But my understanding from him was that he didn't actually expect to find such an animal. He was speaking very abstractly, just completely theoretically. And at the point that he unleashed this idea, it may even have been in a talk, rather than a paper. The information made it back to him, actually—what about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat naked mole-rats]? They match your characteristics, and study reveals then that actually they are eusocial, they behave very much like ants, bees, wasps, termites, et cetera.

'''Eric:''' And this is like one of the great moments in modern science.

'''Bret:''' I really think it is. It's certainly the moment that people who know who Dick Alexander was, reference as sort of the high watermark because it's comprehensible. You know, Dick did a lot of things. He was very interested in people and other things, but this particular demonstration was so, it would be impossible to have predicted such a thing and have gotten lucky. He had to have understood some things that were extremely deep in order for that to have worked out. And so, yeah, it's really, I don't know of another example in evolutionary theory of a prediction that clean, of something that obscure.

'''Eric:''' I know one.

'''Bret:''' Oh yeah?

'''Eric:''' Yeah. I once heard a story about a graduate student who predicted that the breeding protocols of laboratory rodents would compromise the laboratory system in terms of its relationship to so called “wild type” versions of the same species. So you have the bred rodents and you have the wild rodents, and that they would be distinguished by virtue of the fact that the non-coding nucleotide sequence at the end of the chromosome, known as “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere <span title="A telomere is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighboring chromosomes. Over time, due to each cell division, the telomere ends become shorter. They are replenished by an enzyme, telomerase reverse transcriptase.">telomeres</span>]”, would be wildly different in length if the prediction were true from pure evolutionary theory.

'''Bret:''' Wow.

'''Eric:''' Yeah.

'''Bret:''' Yeah. Yeah, that story that didn't happen exactly the way you said it, but you know, it's been a lot of years, and it takes a second to get back there.

'''Eric:''' Yeah. I mean it's, you, you did that.

'''Bret:''' Yeah, I did that.

'''Eric:''' And that story, unfortunately, has not really been told, and it is, in some sense, your central origin story as a biologist.

'''Bret:''' It's a pretty good one, and it definitely changed the way I saw myself in a way that has been very productive.

'''Eric:''' Okay. I want you to talk to me about that story, and because I lived with you, I know that it happened, and I know that it got buried, and I know that it's part of what I'm calling the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex because, quite frankly, you were not the only person who was a part of the story, and the story had to die because it said something, which is that the power of your theory was sufficient to predict, from first principles, a manifestly observed and surprising result, within molecular biology, from pure evolutionary principles.

(00:50:47)

'''Bret:''' Yup. All right. I'll try to do a short version of it.

'''Eric:''' You know, this is long form podcasting, and you tell—however long the story is, I guarantee you when people finally figure out that it may be that the rodents that we've used to test drugs on, let's say, might be compromised, and compromised in a way that would be potentially extra permitting of potential toxins in the form of pharmaceuticals. I think that it's going to be fascinating. And it's going to repay the study that it will take to understand the story. The floor is yours.

'''Bret:''' All right, so let me just set the stage a little bit. Evolutionary biology has—

'''Eric:''' But, do me a favor.

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' You can get into a very patient careful pedagogical mode. This is an exciting story. Tell it the way it actually occurred.

'''Bret:''' I'm going to tell it the way it actually occurred. And I'm going to be careful. I'm going to try not to be—there are parts of it that were for a very long time kind of emotionally fraught. But anyway, I think I remember it well enough to do a sparse but complete version.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Bret:''' Evolutionary biology has long been biased in the direction of abstraction. Rather than thinking about mechanism, that is to say we deal in the phenomenology of things. We talk about gross patterns that we see in nature rather than talking about the fine detail of what drives them. That has been changing in recent decades, but it has a long history, and it comes from a very mundane place. That mundane place is that we just haven't had the tools to look, for example, inside of cells and we haven't been able to read genomes. You know, we could have been able to read a gene here and there at great expense, but the ability to peer into genomes is pretty new. The ability to peer into these molecular pathways is pretty new. So anyway, there's a historical bias in evolutionary biology against mechanism and in the direction of phenomenology. I have never been particularly fond of that bias. I have always been interested in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(biology) mechanism]. I'm interested in the phenomenology too, but I've always kept my foot in the door with respect to mechanism. And as an undergraduate, I took lots of mechanism classes. I took a development class at the time, developmental biology was in my opinion, a bit stuck. It is now unstuck in a very dramatic way. But anyway, I took a developmental biology class. I took some or immunobiology. And anyway, I was armed with these things in an environment in evolutionary biology where most people were not, most people were in the phenomenology. And one day I happened to be in a seminar. Dick Alexander was running a seminar for graduate students, and a student was there who was very out of place. He was studying cancer, and he, on a lark, decided to take an evolution seminar that looked good to him in the catalog, and it wasn't right for him. And he gave a talk at some point, and his talk was on his work with cancer and frankly, because all the other people in the room were evolutionarily oriented, nobody was really tracking what he was saying. But what he said struck me like a bolt of lightning. He said that in the realm of cancer research, people were looking at telomeres, which are these repetitive sequences at the ends of chromosomes. And they were toying with the possibility that the fact that these telomeres shorten every time a cell divides, that that is providing a resistance to tumor formation. Very straightforward—counter counts down, and that would prevent—

'''Eric:''' So just for the audience that maybe needs a tiny refresher, we're taught in general that DNA is a string of letters called nucleotides, A, C, T and G, and that, in general, three of those that are adjacent to each other form words called codons. And for every word there is an amino acid or an instruction to stop coding for amino acids. So this is the instruction tape that tells us how to string together amino acids into proteins to make machines, molecular machines. This is some weird different thing, where the region of DNA could be interpreted as coding for a protein, but in fact might be instead just counting how many nucleotides are at the end. So it comes across as a counter.

(00:55:33)

'''Bret:''' It's a little better. It was known not to be a coding sequence. It wasn't a useful sequence. So what you had is a bunch of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that were just repetitive, and the length of the number of repeats varies. And the number of repeats correlates with basically how many times the cell can divide before it refuses. This being interpreted as a cancer prevention thing made perfect sense. But the reason it struck me like a bolt of lightning was that I was well aware of the existence of tumors and their implication in something entirely different. What they had been implicated in, as far as I was aware, was something called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit Hayflick limits], which were the tendency of perfectly healthy, happy cells to grow and grow and grow and grow in a Petri dish, until they hit some number of divisions and then to stop without apparent dysfunction. So—

'''Eric:''' So this was the theory of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Hayflick Leonard Hayflick]?

'''Bret:''' Yup. It was the discovery of Leonard Hayflick, who basically overturned the prior wisdom about cells, which was that they would grow indefinitely as long as you kept feeding them and making an environment that was conducive to division. So I don't exactly know why that result had been misunderstood at first. Maybe somebody had a cancerous cell line and so they got the wrong idea and it just spread, but Hayflick checked it and it turned out to be false. It turned out there was a number of cell divisions that healthy cells would go through, and then they'd stop. The mechanism was not obvious to Hayflick, but later it became clearer and clearer that the mechanism was these sequences at the ends of chromosomes which shorten each time the cell divides. And the implication was that, potentially, this was a cause of what we call [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence “senescence”]. What in common parlance would often be called “aging”, the tendency to grow feeble and inefficient with age. If your cells are each in a cell line and that line has a fixed number of times that it can replace itself before it has to stop, then some point your repair program starts to fail. And that repair program, failing across the body, looks like what you would expect aging—aging follows the pattern you would expect if cell lines one-by-one stopped being able to replace themselves. So—

'''Eric:''' We know that there's a special sort of a, I don't want to call it cell line cause you keep correcting me for every tiny mistake I make in speech. But, if we divide our body into two kinds of cells, soma and germ, where germ lines are that which has a hope of immortality through reproduction, then it's the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell somatic cells] that have finite limits on their ability to undergo mitosis and cellular repair and whatnot.

(00:58:25)

'''Bret:''' And the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germline germline] can't because if it did, your lineage would go extinct as a result of small—

'''Eric:''' Small addendums.

'''Bret:''' So it's the soma, the parts of your body that don't go on to produce babies, that have this effect. The reason it struck me like a bolt of lightning was that I was aware of another very elegant piece of research done by a guy named [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Williams_(biologist) George Williams]. George Williams had finally—

'''Eric:''' One of the greatest of modern—

'''Bret:''' One of the greatest modern evolutionary biologists. I actually knew him a bit too. He is also now gone, unfortunately. But George Williams had laid out in a beautifully elegant paper, the evolutionary theory of senescence. It is an absolutely elegant argument that says that, in a lifetime there are, well, let's start somewhere else. A creature is built of parts and traits. It has a relatively small [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome genome] and a relatively high complexity. At the time it was thought there might be 100,000 genes or something and you have maybe 30 trillion cells with a ton of complexity. In order to get that small number of genes to dictate how to produce a creature that complex, the genes are doing multiple things.

William's point was when a gene has multiple effects, what we call a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiotropy pleiotropy], those effects may be good or bad. If effects are good early in life—

'''Eric:''' By good we mean contributing to fitness—

'''Bret:''' Fitness enhancing traits at some costs late in life, then they will tend to be accumulated by selection. And the reason for that is because, well, there are two ways to think of it, really. If a negative trait occurs very late in life, then a large number of individuals who have the gene for that trait will not live long enough to experience the harm. So if it came bound to a positive thing early in life and you're dead before the late life harm accrues, you got away with it. Right? So William's point was, he was building on earlier work of Medawar, but let's skip that for the moment.

His point was, because of tradeoffs, you will have lots of traits that are good early and bad late. Selection sees the early traits much more clearly than it sees the late traits, and it prioritizes them because of the discounting that arises because so many individuals aren't around to experience the late-life harm, and if they are around experienced the late-life harm, a lot of their reproduction is behind them anyway. So they count less. Selection counts more early in life. And this timer starts at the moment of first reproduction, the usual moment of first reproduction for your species. So this was a beautiful hypothesis, and it was beautifully articulated with many predictions, which is the way really good work is done. And we knew, at the point that I was entering graduate school, we knew that the hypothesis was right. It was a theory.

(01:01:36)

'''Bret:''' And the reason that we knew it was real,

'''Eric:''' The hypothesis is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypothesis Antagonistic Pleiotropy Hypothesis].

'''Bret:''' The Antagonistic Pleiotropy Hypothesis for senescence. We knew that it was right because it predicted so many phenomenon in nature that we could readily go out and measure. And this is again where the phenomenology versus mechanism comes out.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Bret:''' We know that creatures that are poisonous or have a shell that protects them or can fly away from danger, are disproportionately long-lived for their size. Small creatures tend to live shorter lives than large creatures. But if you can fly, then you're off the line of the other creatures of your size. So for example, their small bats who have been recovered after 30 years in the wild. So creatures that have special protections have disproportionate longevity. This matches William's hypothesis, because it is their ability to fly away from danger that makes the likelihood of their experiencing late-life costs go up.

'''Eric:''' Yep.

'''Bret:''' So selection sees their late life more easily than it sees a small Creek.

'''Eric:''' I just want to say something. This is a podcast. It's an unusual podcast and we can talk science and I'm thrilled, but we always have our colleagues in our minds when we're talking to a general audience and the colleagues are always in a “gotcha” mode. Well, you forgot about this. You didn't mention that. I'm even interjecting little bits because I want to make sure that you're immunized from all the bullshit that the academics, so I just want to make a general statement, which is we can come back and get into any level of specificity that somebody wants to, if they want to take you down, I don't care. What I'd love to do is to tell the story with enough punch that people understand what happens.

'''Bret:''' So we're about to jump into the meat of the matter. The theory of antagonistic pleiotropy was well established, but in four decades of research on the genome, nobody had found a gene that matched it, so that we knew that this explanation was right, but we couldn't find the genes that caused it. The mechanism was missing. So, anyway—

'''Eric:''' Does that mean, to be a gene, it has to be protein encoding?

'''Bret:''' Yeah. Anyway, I knew this assertively, I was well familiar with William's paper. At the point that I saw this talk on cancer and I knew already about the question of senescence, everything came together. This was obviously the answer, where the missing pleiotropy was. Well, the missing pleiotropy had to do with a telomere, which wasn't exactly a gene. It was genetic, it was DNA, but it wasn't a gene, but it was perfectly capable of producing exactly the effects that we see in senescence across the body, tissue—

'''Eric:''' So a counter, and not a protein, could be the answer.

'''Bret:''' Right. Now, I saw this instantly at the point I heard this talk, I raised my hand, and I tried to articulate what was so obvious in that moment, and I couldn't compel a single person in the room. They couldn't even understand what I was trying to say—

'''Eric:''' Which is bizarre.

'''Bret:''' It was bizarre. I mean Dick was in the room and you know, Dick was very broad-minded and I just couldn't make it clear.

'''Eric:''' Look, let me just interject something, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression of it is that it was a very simple idea attended to by an outrageous amount of irrelevant complexity that had to be very carefully pried off of the central idea.

(01:05:04)

'''Bret:''' Yeah, I think, I think that's well said. So anyway, I left the room feeling like I had just glimpsed something so important, kind of, you know, I wondered could it be right and I started to just do the first bit of library research to figure out whether somebody else knew what I knew or—

'''Eric:''' So I'm not even sure that you fully said it. I want to make sure that I'm even clear on it and I'm going to, I think I'm right, but correct me if I'm wrong. What you're saying is, “What if the Hayflick limit is a protection against dying from immortality at a cytological level”, that some cell gets a dream of immortality that it shouldn't have because, let's say, it's a somatic cell, and it says, “Okay, I just want to keep dividing and dividing and dividing”. Nature knows how to do this, and that immortality, which sounds good at first, is actually called cancer. And so in computer science we would say, okay, you've introduced a recursion limit into a while loop or a for loop to make sure that you don't have a resource leak, which is what a tumor is.

'''Bret:''' Yeah, so let me say it this way. If you have a damage to a tissue cut on your arm or something, the cells on both sides of that cut suddenly become aware that there is a problem, a gap, because the can't hear a neighbor on one side of them and their natural reaction is to start growing into the gap until they can hear a neighbor which is the sign to stop. If you imagine that something like that is occurring in every tissue, or almost every tissue, the problem is that that means that every tissue in your body for which that story is about right, is in danger of having damage from radiation or whatever, turn it deaf to its neighbors. A single cell that has turned deaf to its neighbors will suddenly start replicating, and if it is deaf to its neighbors, then there's no message that it's going to hear that's going to tell it to stop. So that thing, imagine any cell in your body just taking off and growing and growing and growing—

'''Eric:''' Okay, this is terrifying. What you're saying to me is, is that if I'm comprise of let's say 30 trillion cells and I view them as each let's say subroutines, any subroutine that is not denucleated, right? Like this wouldn't happen in the in the lens of your eye because the nucleus has been removed, but any other reasonable cell is potentially your assassin, because it's mitosis process might completely go rogue.

'''Bret:''' It can run away.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Bret:''' And so the rather elegant and very simple idea is that there would be a hard limit so that any cell that had become damaged, so it started down this path would just simply run into the number of cell divisions it was allowed in a lifetime and it would stop.

'''Eric:''' So like, the moles on my face that some of my less couth commenters loved to talk about—

'''Bret:''' Yep.

(01:08:01)

'''Eric:''' Are effectively attempts to kill me that may have stopped. And that the perimeter where they stop is where the Hayflick limit took over and said, “This cell line must die so that the patient will live”?

'''Bret:''' Yeah. The name I gave him was “prototumor” and the idea is a prototumor is a patch of cells arrested at their Hayflick limit. Because they had become unregulated. If you go to the dermatologist and you say, what do I look for? You know, they tell you certain things to look for. So a round patch of cells that suddenly becomes irregular in shape. Well that's what would happen if you took one of those cells and gave it a second mutation and it started growing again.

'''Eric:''' Got it.

'''Bret:''' Right. So anyway, the idea that a limit on cellular reproduction—

'''Eric:''' Yep.

'''Bret:''' Is adaptive to protect you from cancer—

'''Eric:''' K, so there's a little bit of a mind bender because what you're telling me is that I've got to avoid immortality, which can kill me, and that the solution to not dying is death.

'''Bret:''' Yes, and that what selection does is it balances these two competing forces to give you as much vigor and longevity as it can.

(01:09:00)

'''Eric:''' So all of the other diseases and insults and things that I can die from sort of start to fade away. And at the complete core of biology, in this theory, there are two things that I can't get away from, one of which is death by immortality, and the other one is death by recursion limit.

'''Bret:''' That's it.

'''Eric:''' It's a very elegant thing. And now the problem is, is that there's all this weird attended complexity that you had to deal with.

'''Bret:''' Right

'''Eric:''' So it was like stem cells versus germ versus ...

'''Bret:''' So when I went into the literature, what I found was that people had played around in the neighborhood, but that there was a particular fact which blocked every attempt to make sense of what was going on. And the fact was that rodents were understood to have ultra long, hypervariable telomeres. And I didn't know what that meant at first, but the more I looked into this possibility, the more I realized that dozens of longstanding problems would be solved if my hypothesis was true, but that my hypothesis couldn't be true because basically mice have long telomeres in short lives. Why is that? And I banged my head on the table for a couple of weeks trying to figure out what was going on.

'''Eric:''' Figuratively

'''Bret:''' Yes, maybe even literally on occasion. But the question was, I began to wonder if there was something wrong with the idea that mice had long telomeres. Sometimes, like in Hayflick's case it turned out that a bunch of people were copying some wrong result, so it seemed like a lot of people had seen it, but only one had. And I checked, was it true, that there was some, that everybody was parroting one study that said mice had long telomeres?

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:''' It turns out lots of people had tested it. Mice have long telomeres like 10 times the length of human telomeres. It just didn't fit. So finally, it occurred to me that it was possible that what was going on—I discovered something in trying to figure out what they meant by “mice”. Right? There's a lot of species of mice, but all the mice that we use in the lab, with rare exception, are from one genus, and often from a particular target species.

'''Eric:''' So you were focused, if I recall correctly, on mus spretus

'''Bret:''' Mus musculus, which is the common one. What shocked me was that it turned out all the mus musculus that were being used in labs across the country, and in many cases, farther afield than that were coming from one place, which I had no idea. There was one—

'''Eric:''' I remember getting a phone call when you said, what do you know about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Laboratory JAX Lab]?

'''Bret:''' The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Laboratory JAX Lab] in Bar Harbor Maine, right? They seemed to be the source of everybody's mice. And so it began to be—it was a possibility I could not shut down in my mind, that there was something about what was going on at the JAX Lab that had resulted in the mice that were being sent out to all these other labs—

'''Eric:''' Is it that they were representative animals—

(01:12:04)

'''Bret:''' Right, these are a model organism. People were just using mice because mice were a convenient mammal, but they're all coming from one place, and it began to occur to me that that one place was not just a source of mice in the sense that we might think it, it was actually a selective environment that was impacting those mice. And when I dug deeper, it turned out that the mice had all, they were descendants of a long lineage that had lived in captivity under conditions at the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Laboratory JAX Lab]. And at some point I realized that the most likely thing going on was that there was something about this environment that had wildly elongated the telomeres of these mice. And that was simultaneously an unbelievable idea, but the only one I could think of that made sense of everything I had seen. And so—

'''Eric:''' Well, it's unbelievable because the consequences, I mean, look, I have not even heard whether anyone has said, “Yeah, we did that, we screwed that up.” But it is, like, your favorite model organism for mammalian trials being screwed up by a central facility. Because also there's this weird thing where medical people very often stop taking into account evolutionary theory because they treat that as “Well, that's that class I took in college or the beginning of graduate school.”

'''Bret:''' Right. So I began to focus on this question and I did something that was the right thing to do, but I did it in a way I will forever regret. I found somebody who was represented in the literature, who I regarded as very well versed. They made sense to me, their papers. Her name was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_W._Greider Carol Greider]. Carol Greider is now a Nobel Laureate. She was not at the time. She was the co-discoverer of the enzyme [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase telomerase], which is the enzyme that elongates telomeres, when that occurs—

(01:14:01)

'''Eric:''' With the famous and co-Nobel recipient—she was the student of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Blackburn Elizabeth Blackburn].

'''Bret:''' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Blackburn Elizabeth Blackburn]. Exactly. She was her student and they shared the Nobel prize with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_W._Szostak Szostak]. In any case, her work seemed good to me. I called her up, cold, you know, I went into the insect division office and I sat down at the phone. I called her, I said, Carol, you don't know me. I'm a graduate student at Michigan. I'm an evolutionary biologist. I'm racking my brains trying to understand something. Can you tell me, is it possible that mice don't have ultra long telomeres? That it's only laboratory mice that do? And she said, huh, that's really interesting. I'm pretty sure that mice have long telomeres universally. But it is odd that if you order mus spretus instead of mus musculus and you order from European suppliers, the lengths are very different than what you get if you order mus musculus from the JAX Lab. I said, Whoa.

And she said, yeah, that's really interesting. And then she said, I can't remember if it was the same phone call or if we had a second phone call, but she said she was gonna put her student, her graduate student, [https://biology.mit.edu/profile/michael-t-hemann/ Mike Hemann], who I think is now at MIT, on the project. And he was going to do a little work to figure out whether there was anything to this. And Mike did some work. They sourced some different strains of mice that were, they were actually not wild mice. Wild mice would have been the right test, but she couldn't get wild mice for obvious reasons.

'''Eric:''' You’d have to go out into the woods.

'''Bret:''' Right, exactly. And so she got several different strains of mice that had just been in captivity much less time. She actually got one strain of mice that was treated very differently in captivity. But nevermind. She put her graduate student on it, and he measured their telomere lengths. And I get this excited email. [https://biology.mit.edu/profile/michael-t-hemann/ Mike Hemann] sends me any email that says effectively, “Whoa! The hypothesis is true, mice have short telomeres!” Right? Now—

'''Eric:''' I'm sorry, this is like as close to a who'd done it Discovery J'accuse— the mice, you know, I remember, you were over the moon.

'''Bret:''' I still am! I still can look at this email and it is the moment at which I realized, A, there's no way I'm kidding myself about how well I understand this.

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:''' Right? That prediction was—

'''Eric:''' How old are you?

'''Bret:''' Now? Or then?

'''Eric:''' No, when you get this email.

'''Bret:''' When I got that email it was 1999? 98? Something like that.

'''Eric:''' Okay. So over 20 years ago.

'''Bret:''' Yeah. So I get this email, and—

'''Eric:''' By the way, that puts you at about 30. You're at the beginning of your career, and you—in this story, you've just predicted that—

'''Bret:''' It's a stunning coup for a graduate student. And, it wasn't in my advisor’s wheelhouse, so it was clearly my own work. And, I mean, Dick was great about not blurring those things, but—

'''Eric:''' Okay, either you are a dirty dog liar—

'''Bret:''' Right

(01:17:10)

'''Eric:''' And I was there at the time—

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' Or, so we're both dirty dog liars about this particular story—

'''Bret:''' Or—

'''Eric:''' Or, one of the great moments in evolutionary theory, which is—and let me just curate this, because I'm not a biologist, but I think I can more or less get this—because it's a breeding protocol that is the alteration in the evolutionary landscape for these laboratory mice, and because it's acting on a non-protein coding region, the adaptation to a change in the breeding protocol can be extremely rapid. It doesn't have to undergo some sort of completely crazy typical Darwinian story about random mutation and some of them being retained and others being rejected.

'''Bret:''' It's even better than that. The creatures are presumably—so we haven't gotten to what the breeding protocol has to do with this—but the creatures are built in some sense to detect how dangerous their environment is, and to the extent that the level of extrinsic danger changes, their telomeres respond quickly so that they are better adapted to the environment. So, they're built to detect the environment and then what is actually a strict matter of market forces.

'''Eric:''' Okay, so there are no predators in this environment.

'''Bret:''' No predators in this environment.

'''Eric:''' And we're not killing them particularly early based on their skills. So environmental insult is sort of absent.

'''Bret:''' Environmental insult is more or less absent. What we are doing is imposing an economic rule on breeding so that we can maximize the rate at which we turn mouse chow into mice, which is obviously economically the right thing to do, if you're selling mice to all these labs, you want to produce as many mice as cheaply as possible. So producing as many mice as people—

'''Eric:''' The genius of the market!

'''Bret:''' It's the genius of the market.

(01:19:08)

'''Eric:''' There you go.

'''Bret:''' So in order to produce as many mice as cheaply as possible, what you do is you don't breed animals past eight months. They breed faster when they're younger because of senescence. And so you don't breed older mice. You throw them out and you replace them with younger mice who breed faster. What that effectively did was it eliminated the selection against cancer, and it turbocharged the selection in favor of youthful vigor

'''Eric:''' Well let me see if I get this—in general, almost all cancers, like, cancer of the germline happens early in life, but all the other cancer, in general, is much more common later in life.

'''Bret:''' I gotta pause. I realize I forgot to tell you one thing Carol told me in my first phone call with her that’s vital.

'''Eric:''' Sure.

'''Bret:''' In addition to telling me that there was something funny about mus spretus, she told me that, consistent with the hypothesis that I was conveying to her, that all mice die of cancer. She said, “If you let them live long enough, and then you do the necropsy, you find cancer of one kind or another”, and that was perfectly consistent because they had these wildly long telomeres and no cancer protection. That would be the prediction of the hypothesis—

'''Eric:''' That’s an extrapolation—it's not really all mice. It's all mice that we see in the lab, which happens to be the mice that are ordered.

'''Bret:''' Right. She was still speaking from the mindset of somebody who thought that the mice she was getting in the mail representative representative of mice in the wild.

'''Eric:''' Got it.

'''Bret:''' Okay, so let me clear up why the breeding protocol—and I should say, that it is the breeding protocol that is causing this? That part, I would say, is still a hypothesis. It has not been directly tested by anybody, but, what I would say is that many hypotheses were tested in the aftermath of the discovery, that lab mice have bizarrely long telomeres, and wild mice don’t, and no other hypothesis has stood up to scrutiny. So it is the last hypothesis standing and I'm all but certain that it will turn out to be true.

'''Eric:''' Yeah.

'''Bret:''' The reason that the breeding protocol has this weird effect, is that when you throw out the mice at eight months of age, you eliminate selection against cancer, you turbocharge selection in favor of—

'''Eric:''' Sorry, when you throw out the mice, for breeding purposes, at eight months of age.

'''Bret:''' Right,

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Bret:''' When you throw them out for breeding purposes at eight months of age, you are increasing the importance of their early life breeding, and you are discounting anything related to their ability to fend off cancer because they don't live long enough in that period of time to get cancers that kill them. And so what has happened, according to this hypothesis, is that the mice that have longer telomeres have driven out the other animals from the colony. The trait of having long telomeres has swept through the colony and the telomeres have been elongated to an absurd degree, creating animals that do all die of cancer. And interestingly enough, another thing that's evident from the literature is that if you look at their tissues, their tissues do not age in the way that a normal mammal’s tissues age, they remain young.

'''Eric:''' So there's one aspect of aging, but that there's a far darker interpretation of what you've just said. If I'm understanding you—correct me, I’ve never taken a class in biology, but I lived this adventure with you—those tissues have, at a histological level, the level of how cells are organized, the possibility of radical histological repair.

'''Bret:''' Yes, radical effectively indefinite capacity to repair, which is going to come back in this story in the worst possible way. So—

'''Eric:''' This is like a—I mean, I just forget how great of a—

'''Bret:''' Me too, I go years sometimes without thinking deeply about it.

'''Eric:''' Without telling the story. Alright.

(01:23:06)

'''Bret:''' Yeah. Okay. So the story now gets kind of ugly. I recognize I've got all the pieces of the puzzle necessary to tell the story correctly. I have taken on a coauthor, we've found the literature necessary to do it in proper scientific form.

'''Eric:''' This came from you, but I want to mention your coauthor’s name.

'''Bret:''' Yeah. Debbie Ciszek.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Bret:''' And Debbie was an excellent coauthor, strong contributor to the paper. Anyway, we put together over the course of a year, I took a break from, effectively, my real dissertation work, and wrote a paper. Dick thought it was a fantastic paper. He was blown away by it—

'''Eric:''' Well I remember the revisions, and I remember this was like, I mean, if I think about what's on the line, like this combines one of these freak situations where you're using evolutionary theory to predict something, and in this case it's at the level of molecular biology, so with Darwin's orchid it's a tongue, and with Dick's thing, its behavior in naked mole rats. This thing is actually at a molecular level, and, it couldn't be more important if mice are going to be the major system in which we are going to test drugs, which are highly sensitive to what? Histological repair.

'''Bret:''' Yup. It's so profound on several different levels that I'm super energized about getting this into the world. It's transformative. Dick looks at the paper, he says, “This is fantastic”. He puts me through the ringer to get it really tight. We get it tight. We send it to George Williams, the—

'''Eric:''' The number one guy in the world.

'''Bret:''' The number one senescence guy at the evolutionary level in the world, and he writes a beautiful recommendation letter for this piece. We're going to send it to Nature. George Williams tells Nature, you need to take this piece very seriously. We send it to Nature and they send it back with one of their absurd form letters that says that “The nature of the article is such that it's probably not—

'''Eric:''' Of limited interest—

'''Bret:''' To their readers. And we're, you know, I mean, we had a good laugh about that. You know, it's cancer, it's senescence—

(01:25:10)

'''Eric:''' Dude, it's so bad. Like, this is a response that indicates either malfeasance, or an Eliza program, or the janitor ended up responding who didn't know any bio—

'''Bret:''' It’s the craziest thing, and you know, the cherry on top is that they're turning down George Williams recommendation? Like, how cra— do they know who he is? Like, what? Where?

'''Eric:''' On what planet?

'''Bret:''' On what planet do you turn down his recommendation to look at something about senescence? So, anyway, I get back this rejection, and I have purposefully not shown Carol Greider the paper in preparation, which I am afraid she might've read some way. The reason I didn't show it to her was because I wanted to preserve her independence as a reviewer for the paper. I was hoping, because I still thought she was an ally of mine, I was hoping that Nature would send it to her to review, and that she would look favorably on it, especially since it was, you know, very clear that she had done—

'''Eric:''' It was her lab that made the confirmation.

'''Bret:''' Yeah. And I, oh, another thing I forgot, I asked her at some point, something that now rings in my ears—I asked her, Carol, you've now got this result about, no, actually lab mice have long telomeres, but wild mice have short telomeres. That's a big result.

'''Eric:''' That’s a hell of a delta.

'''Bret:''' Where are you going to publish it so that I can cite it—

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:'''In my paper, which is the natural thing to do. And she says, “we're not going to publish it. We're going to keep the information “in house.” That was her phrase. I was too young to understand what the hell she was talking about.

'''Eric:''' I'll be honest, I'm 54 and I don't quite understand it myself.

'''Bret:''' Well, it's so heartbreaking. What she has effectively done is decided, “I could publish this result”

'''Eric:''' And then everyone would have it.

'''Bret:''' It would be huge, but then I'm on a level playing field with everybody else. If I don't publish this result—

(01:27:16)

'''Eric:''' I have a stream of papers I can get at.

'''Bret:''' Then I can start predicting other results. Nobody will know how I am doing that thing. I will look like a super genius. And so, holding it “in house” is a mechanism for a whole slew of papers.

'''Eric:''' to be, to be 100. You can afford to bend over backwards and not make inferences. Let's say the following, holding it in house is any seemingly inexplicable decision in science, but for the fact that it fits at least one story of this kind, which is that it is consistent with wishing to publish a stream, rather than the source of the information that would allow you—so you can either do one discovery or you can do a stream of predictions and that makes a certain amount of sense, given the ruthlessly competitive grant-winning environment. And we don't know exactly what happened, but there is no world that I know of in which you're allowed to hold back that kind of information, because, in part, of what's on the line.

'''Bret:''' Right. So—

'''Eric:''' I mean, this is not just a question of academic interest—

'''Bret:''' No.

'''Eric:''' Because these mice are used for medical testing.

'''Bret:''' Not even that. It's medical testing, but it's also all of the science relative, at least, to cancer, senescence, wound healing—all of the science that is stacked on these mice that is contingent on their function relative to their tiers is all compromised. You're letting year after year of this stuff accumulate. It's malpractice at an incredible level. So, I don't know that she has turned on me, but I call her up, and I say, “Carol, we are stunned to find that our paper was turned away without review from Nature—”

'''Eric:''' Without review.

'''Bret:''' Without review. We need your help. Can I send you the paper and have you look at it? And she says yes. And I sent her the paper and she sends back the paper with an unbelievable number of intense criticisms that are not sensible. She pans the paper, does not believe it—

'''Eric:''' Do you still have that copy?

'''Bret:''' I have that paper, I have that paper with her handwriting. I believe I also have the FedEx envelope in which she sent it to me. But she hates the paper, and I have now forgotten a bit of the sequence. But as I am attempting to fix this up for another journal—oh, here's a, sorry, I hate to tangle this story, but it's important to get it right.

'''Eric:''' No but you haven’t told this in enough—

'''Bret:''' I haven't told it in a very long time. After the rejection from nature, after Carol has seen the paper, and said it's cruddy, I get a letter I don't expect from a journal I don't—I know it exists, but I'm not super familiar with it, Experimental Gerontology. Experimental Gerontology says, “We are the editors of experimental gerontology. We have heard a rumor of your work. We're very interested. Would you be willing to submit a version to our journal?” and, oh, this is happening prior to Carol looking at my paper and panning it.

'''Eric:''' So the only way they would have known about this would have been from Nature or from Dick, or—

'''Bret:''' I'm pretty sure I know, based on what they, again, I was too young to sort out really what they were saying, but they indicate that they're fans of antagonistic pleiotropy, so what happened was George Williams, having heard that it got rejected, contacted some friends of his and was like, you should really take a look at this. So I begin the process of revising it. I've shown it to Carol, she's panned it. I send the revised version to experimental gerontology. They send it out for review. As you know, review is blind. You don't know who your reviewers are, but you can often tell who they are. It's not as obscure—

'''Eric:''' If it’s a small field.

(01:32:00)

'''Bret:''' Yeah. So they read the acknowledgements of my paper, which are now on alert about Carol. I have to thank her in the paper for the work she did, but I'm now on alert that she's gone strange on the subject matter of this paper, and so I've broken her out separately in the acknowledgements. I don't want to be as gracious to her, because she's being hostile to me.

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:''' But I don't want to not acknowledge her, so I acknowledge her separately. Experimental Gerontology then—I am 99% sure—sends the paper to her as the reviewer. She pans it. Absolutely brutal critiques, just pages and pages and pages of them. They are not high quality critiques. I could go through every single one.

'''Eric:''' Don’t bother, this is a podcast, just—

'''Bret:''' No, I can't do it here, but I could have then—

'''Eric:''' No, okay?

'''Bret:''' But I didn't know what to do because she was in line for a Nobel Prize, that was well understood. I didn't want to accuse a leading light of the field of,

'''Eric:''' Okay, this is exactly why I got angry with the beginning of the podcast, you moron. No, no offense. You were in line for a Nobel Prize. You didn't. I mean, I'm sorry. There is an aspect of this about giving away your power, before you’ve even accumulated—you don't even have a PhD at this time.

'''Bret:''' I'm just saying, at the time, if you mentioned her name, people would say, “Oh yeah, her Nobel Prize is one of these years.” Right? So my point was, I was in the awkward position—I didn't understand what I was supposed to do. I didn't want to send back a review that said, “I don't know who the person is who reviewed this, but they don't understand the material, and all of their critiques suck”, because I didn't want to accuse somebody who was that powerful of not getting it.

'''Eric:''' I mean, here's the problem. What do you do? You don't actually have evidence in the hard form where like you have got videotape, but on the other hand, these are small worlds. This, all of this is preposterous.

'''Bret:''' Right. So I sit on the review for too long, not knowing what to—

'''Eric:''' Well you don't know how to play the game!

'''Bret:''' I don't know how to handle it.

'''Eric:''' I'm sorry, but, like, I had no advisor. Your advisor was not equipped for the modern era.

'''Bret:''' He wasn't equipped for the modern era. He wasn't equipped for molecular biology.

'''Eric:''' That's true.

'''Bret:''' I finally settle on a strategy that I can live with and I send back a note. I send back the review and my note says, “I don't know why, but this entire list of critiques is not high quality. If you would like to point me to any of the critiques in this list that you would like me to address, I am more than happy to do it, but I don't think it makes sense to address the entire list”, and as I recall it, I hit send on the email, and within minutes, maybe it was an hour, I got back a response: “Your paper has been accepted for publication”, which blew me away because I—

'''Eric:''' It makes no sense according to regular protocols.

'''Bret:''' Right. It makes no sense, because, clearly, they're supposed to send it out for review. The reviewer is supposed to say whether it's supposed to get published. The reviewer said it shouldn't be published. I said, “I refuse to address these critiques unless you ask me to.” The editors have overridden the reviewer. They understood the reviews were cruddy. They needed me to say that in order to justify the move that they wanted to make. They knew the paper was good and the review was crap. So they effectively overrode normal peer review. Was my paper peer reviewed? Well, it was by the editors who were experts.

(01:35:28)

'''Eric:''' Let me jump in. Peer review is a cancer from outer space. It came from the biomedical community, it invaded science. The old system, because—I have to say this because many people who are now professional scientists have an idea that peer review has always been in our literature and it absolutely motherfucking has not.

'''Bret:''' Right.

'''Eric:''' Okay? It used to be that the editor of a journal took responsibility for the quality of the journal, which is why we had things like Nature crop up in the first place, because they had courageous, knowledgeable, forward thinking editors. And so I just want to be very clear, because there's a mind virus out there that says “peer review is the sine qua non of scientific excellence, yada, yada, yada, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit”. And if you don't believe me, go back and learn that this is a recent invasive problem in the sciences.

'''Bret:''' Recent invasive problem that has no justification for existing in light of the fact that—

'''Eric:''' Well, no, not only does it have no justification for existing. When Watson and Crick did the double helix, and this is the cleanest example we have, the paper was agreed should not be sent out for review because anyone who is competent would understand immediately what its implications were. There are reasons that great work cannot be peer reviewed. Furthermore, you have entire fields that are existing now with electronic archives that are not peer reviewed. Peer review is not peer review. It sounds like peer review. It is peer injunction. It is the ability for your peers to keep the world from learning about your work.

'''Bret:''' Keep the world from learning about your work—

'''Eric:''' Because peer review is what happens— real peer review is what happens after you've passed the bullshit thing called peer review.

(01:37:18)

'''Bret:''' Yes. Okay, so the paper was accepted by Experimental Gerontology. They went on to publish it.

'''Eric:''' This is called “Life’s Slow Fuse”?

'''Bret:''' No, “Life’s Slow Fuse” was the title as sent to Nature, and I changed the title because I did not want to compromise the story—I didn't want to confuse the story.

'''Eric:''' The original submission was called “Life’s Slow Fuse”.

'''Bret:''' Right.

'''Eric:''' We probably have a copy of that somewhere?

'''Bret:''' Oh, of course.

'''Eric:''' All right. Then the Experimental Gerontology paper, what is it called?

'''Bret:''' The Reserve Capacity Hypothesis, which is a much less catchy title, but, nonetheless, the paper, I'm very proud of how it's written. People read it who were not expert, could understand it. The abstract is extremely clear, and it ends with the clear point that, because we have unearthed, we have predicted, and Carol Greider has shown, that wild mice telomeres are short, and the telomeres had been elongated by captivity, that there is a clear danger that the mice we are using for drug safety testing are biased in an egregious way. And the bias would look like this: a mouse that has very long telomeres has an indefinitely large capacity to replace damaged tissue, and, it has a vulnerability to cancer that is preternaturally high. So, we may be overrating—if we use these mice, we may be overrating the danger of causing cancer, and vastly underrating the danger of toxicity. And, in fact, one of the things—so, the point was you give a mouse who's got an effectively infinite capacity to replace its tissues, a toxin, and either the toxin is so deadly that it dies right away, but if it doesn't die right away, it just eats up the insult. So those animals would lead us to release drugs—

'''Eric:''' By insult, what you mean is cellular necrosis?

'''Bret:''' Damage. Yeah. What this would cause us to do is release drugs onto the market for human use that are highly toxic across the body.

'''Eric:''' Wait a second—if the mouse standard was the last standard—

'''Bret:''' Well, no, even if it's not the last standard, because—

'''Eric:''' Well, it’s important to say this—

'''Bret:''' The problem is, I mean, you can imagine how hard it is to test on large, slowly reproducing animals.

'''Eric:''' Well, and the ethics of testing on humans is very—

'''Bret:''' Absolutely.

'''Eric:''' —restricted, so mice is the last cheap place—

'''Bret:''' It's the last cheap place—

'''Eric:''' —to get large N data.

'''Bret:''' Not only large N, but it's the one place that you can make the following move. You can imagine that in many circumstances the accelerated lifespan, the accelerated life cycle of mice allows you to see long term damage as it would accrue in humans on a very short timescale. That doesn't work with monkeys. It doesn't work with human patients. It works with mice, maybe, but in the case of mice with ultra long telomeres, those insults will be invisible.

(01:40:36)

'''Eric:''' Let's just, I want to back up because I think this is a really important part of the story. What you're saying is if you take an organism that has an expected, let's say, 40 year lifetime, it's very expensive timewise to say, “We ran this experiment and found that there was no immediate damage that was visible, but towards the very end of their lives we saw a marked increase in morbidity” or—

'''Bret:''' Yeah, I mean if you took a drug and it knocked 15 years off your life on average, that might not show up in any notable way in a short term study.

'''Eric:''' If there was pressure to—

'''Bret:''' Right. And nobody is going to want to let drugs, you know, you don't want to wait 40, 50 years to find out what happens to these patients. So what we do is we make the assumption that if we give large amounts of a drug to an animal that lives a very short life, we will see those effects early. And if the animal happens to have ultra long telomeres, you won't see those effects early. So, it's a perfect storm for causing us to release drugs that should never have been released into public.

'''Eric:''' Can you think of one?

'''Bret:''' Oh, I sure can. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib Vioxx], for example. So Vioxx was discovered to do heart damage, right? Heart damage. How do you, why do we know that it's heart damage? Well, the thing about hearts, for reasons we can get into maybe another time, hearts have a very low capacity for self-repair, right? That's why they're vulnerable to heart attack.

'''Eric:''' Not much turnover.

'''Bret:''' Not much capacity for repair, and not much turnover. Now, there's an adaptive reason for that, but hearts don't repair themselves very well in a healthy person. And when they fail, it's hard to ignore, right? If somebody who's 30 has their heart fail, there's questions asked, right? So anyway, Vioxx was released into the public having passed drug safety testing.

'''Eric:''' This isn’t the only system that doesn't have a lot of mitosis, like for example, neurons.

'''Bret:''' Neurons don't have a lot, cartilage doesn't have a lot.

'''Eric:''' Got it.

'''Bret:''' Your eye cells don't. Now note, all of the tissues I've just mentioned, when's the last time you heard about anybody having, you know, cancer of the cartilage, of their knee, cancer of the heart,

'''Eric:''' If they get brain cancer, it tends to be glial—

'''Bret:''' It’s glial cells, exactly. So the tissues that have very low capacity for self repair do tend to wear out and they don't tend to get cancer, which is exactly one of the predictions of my paper.

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:''' Okay. So Vioxx is known to do heart damage. That created a big scandal because how the hell did it get through drug safety testing? It turns out a lot of drugs have done this. We've seen it with Gleevec, Fen Phen, Arithromycin. Your doctors probably still doesn't know that Arithromycin does heart damage—

'''Eric:''' Yikes

'''Bret:''' Right. There's all of these cases of drugs that were released and then later understood to do heart damage. Now my claim is they don't actually do heart damage. They do cellular damage and the heart is the most conspicuous.

'''Eric:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Geez. This is like another layer of this thing.

'''Bret:''' It's like a huge fucking nightmare, right? Because—

'''Eric:''' Well, but it's this thing about, like, perseverance and disagreeability. You've got all sorts of things that sound like something that invalidates the theory, and then it’s sort of theories upon theories that allow you to see the original simplicity of the idea. I see the original idea is very simple—

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' —but if you know a lot of weird facts about what you think are just mice, or something about hearts, you can't put together what is going on. The idea that ambient damages only manifest in the heart because that's the one system—you know, or the neural system—that, like, really doesn't have a lot of mitosis.

(01:44:17)

'''Bret:''' So, well, piece of advice to anybody who finds themselves in remotely similar waters. The signal that you are on the right track is that stuff starts canceling. Complexity in the story, which has accumulated because something was missing, starts disappearing in the story. You begin to take on a model. Anyway, so yes, we've got a situation where we've got a bunch of drugs mysteriously producing heart damage.

'''Eric:''' K, so now you've got a paper that's out. You've got a real world application. You've got a theory coming out of evolutionary theory. It's making a molecular prediction.

'''Bret:''' Yup. Successfully predicts mouse telomeres.

'''Eric:''' One of the world's leading labs has confirmed the prediction.

'''Bret:''' Yup.

'''Eric:''' Where are we now? What year is this?

'''Bret:''' God, well, let's see. The paper came out

'''Eric:''' And my recollection—and, just to be horrible about this—is that your fucking department at the university of Michigan, which has some great people, is also holding you back and enervating you year after year by not allowing—because this is groundbreaking stuff. This is Nobel quality work, at least one or two times over, in my opinion. I could be wrong. I'm biased because I'm your brother, but what concerns me here is that you are not comfortable with what this story really might be.

'''Bret:''' No I— Look, it's not mine to judge. I'm very proud of this work and the work—

'''Eric:''' But the problem, Bret, is that Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins did not know that Dick Alexander, Leonard Hayflick, and George Williams were all on this thing, because that community had broken down.

(01:45:59)

'''Bret:''' You know, the irony is, I sent a letter to Dawkins when this was going on, asking for his help, and he sent back a letter saying, “This is very interesting. It's not my area of specialty. You should talk to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton Bill Hamilton].” And I was in the process of writing a letter to Bill Hamilton on Dawkin’s suggestion, at the point that Bill Hamilton came back from Africa having—he was pursuing a remote hypothesis about humans having accidentally unleashed AIDS into the world with a polio vaccine. But anyway, so—

'''Eric:''' Bill Hamilton, I'm sorry, not everybody's going to know—this is the guy who came up with inclusive fitness?

'''Bret:''' Yes. He was one of the great geniuses of evolutionary biology in the late 20th century.

'''Eric:''' He was held back by John Maynard, right?

'''Bret:''' I don't know that story. I, you know—

'''Eric:''' I think Maynard is interviewed on Web of Stories where you—

'''Bret:''' Maynard Smith.

'''Eric:''' Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Maynard Smith. Right.

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' And Maynard Smith talks about like, you know, “It was very unfortunate. I didn't really understand who he was.” You should check it out. It's pretty amazing.

'''Bret:''' Well, as long as we're doing this, years after this story had cooled—

'''Eric:''' Yeah.

'''Bret:''' —I ran across a paper from John Maynard Smith that, I now don't remember exactly what its nature was, but it appeared to predict my whole story.

'''Eric:''' Uh-huh

'''Bret:''' Right? And John Maynard Smith was dead. I couldn't contact him. I really wanted to say, “Oh my God, you nailed it.” Right. But anyway, so I was in the process of writing to Bill Hamilton to get his help. You know, he was sort of on a par with George Williams, and he went into a coma on his trip back from Africa having contracted malaria. And then there was, I think complication with the aspirin that he took or something. And he never woke from his coma and he died, tragically. So he never got the letter, and who knows what he would've done.

'''Eric:''' Okay, but look, that's a tragic and interesting story, but Hayflick was positive towards you. Williams was positive towards you and Dick Alexander. Those were the three that blew me away. That's a huge amount of firepower.

'''Bret:''' That’s a lot of firepower, and it wasn't enough. But, here's the punchline to the story, effectively. At the point that my paper is out—

'''Eric:''' Right.

'''Bret:''' —and it very directly alleges the danger with these drugs being released when they're not safe, and the drugs have started emerging and turning out not to be safe, and the government is now really interested in what's going on, the government puts together a FDA commission to study the question of—the book that they put out, literally a book that they put out, at the end of their study is called The Future of Drug Safety

'''Eric:''' I hope it’s a Blue Ribbon panel.

(01:48:53)

'''Bret:'''It's not exactly clear what it was. What is clear is that you can search the manuscript of this book. Nowhere does it mention “mouse”—

'''Eric:''' Antagonistic pleiotropy?

'''Bret:''' It doesn't mention antagonistic pleiotropy. It doesn't mention the genus “mus”. It doesn't mention “telomeres”. It's not in there. It's alleged in the literature in broad daylight that this is what is causing the problem, and—

'''Eric:''' Now you're—see, this is the Vampire Effect, where you don't exist if nobody reacts.

'''Bret:''' Right. And, so I start going to members of the press, I think, “This is a huge goddamn story. Somebody is going to make—

'''Eric:''' “Oh my god, you’re self promoting!”

'''Bret:''' —career on it”, and I call up members of the press, and it's always the same, right?

'''Eric:''' Always the same.

'''Bret:''' It’s always the same. They're very excited about this story.

'''Eric:''' No, they’re initially, the reporter—

'''Bret:''' The reporter is excited.

'''Eric:''' Yep

'''Bret:''' And then the reporter—

'''Eric:''' Talks to someone.

'''Bret:''' They talk to someone, and then either they stop returning your calls, or they say, “I'm sorry, the story doesn't hang together”. It's again and again and again.

(01:49:48)

'''Eric:''' Yeah.

'''Bret:''' And there's just nothing you can do.

'''Eric:''' Remember what I said about the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex

'''Bret:''' Yeah. And the people who man it don't even know what they are. For most of them, they don't know what role they're playing.

'''Eric:''' Look, you see the same thing with like string theory because none of the reporters are actually string theorists, so they're dependent upon this. You saw this with this woman alleging that she had the Epstein story three years earlier, but that the editors said, well, we might lose access to the baby pictures of the Royal grandchildren like, you know, you're seeing this with catch and kill. There's this, I mean, I want you to take this seriously. You're just showing a part of what I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. We have 50 years of such stories, and it happens that in our family, three out of four of us created such a story trying to get a PhD. And the idea for me is that every time you have to go into some closed system, like, there's a committee meeting or there's a blue ribbon commission or there's a peer review process, or there's a, what do they call them, the panels—study groups, for grants. That's where the DISC lives. We know that it's localized to the things that protect the integrity of science. It's an autoimmune disease, where what we have is an ability to stop highly disruptive ideas from getting a hearing in the general population of experts, by virtue of the fact that a carefully chosen group of experts can stop publication. Because look, if you're wrong about this stuff, there's a cost. It's not, it's not cheap.

'''Bret:''' No, I mean, in fact, it would have been career ending. I'm pretty sure, had I been—

'''Eric:''' I don't know that it would be career ending if it was done in good faith, but you know, this is my, my problem with this is that you're sitting on one of the great scientific stories—I would say that I've ever heard. But you know, I'm sort of, kind of saying, “Well, Bret, what happens next?” You know, obviously I know a lot of this stuff. I've forgotten it, but I lived this with you and this is, I can vouch that this is more or less the order of events as it was taking place, as we didn't understand what was happening.

'''Bret:''' So I have to go through the final Carol Greider chapter. In order for this story to fully make sense,

'''Eric:''' Where the Nobel Prize is given?

'''Bret:''' That's the very tail end.

'''Eric:''' Make sure you include that.

(01:52:46)

'''Bret:''' Okay. So at the point that my relationship with Carol is changing its tenor and she is becoming hostile and I'm not clear on what's going on, I contact her and I discover through talking to her that she and Mike are about to publish their paper on the long telomeres of laboratory mice.

'''Eric:''' So this is the Delta between a wild type and laboratory mice.

'''Bret:''' Yeah. And I'm shocked because she's told me they're keeping it in house and instead they've got a paper that there, she says in final revisions there that day submitting their final revisions to nucleic acid research with their paper. And I say, Carol, can I see the paper? And she says yes. And she sends me a manuscript, not the pre-print of the paper. She sends me a manuscript of the paper, no acknowledgements, no figures. And I contact her and I say, can I see the acknowledgements and the figures? She sends them to me, and I contact her and I say, “Carol, I'm disturbed. This was my hypothesis that you were testing. I should probably be an author on this paper, but at the very least I need to be an acknowledgement in this paper so that I can go back and point to it and say that was”—

'''Eric:''' It changes everything. That it was a prediction. It wasn't just something that was stumbled upon.

'''Bret:''' Absolutely.

'''Eric:''' Yeah.

'''Bret:''' And her response is, “I have been through my email and I see no evidence of the communications you are talking about.” Now, when I said at the beginning that—

'''Eric:''' You had called her.

'''Bret:''' I had called her.

'''Eric:''' Holy Shit.

'''Bret:''' That was my error.

'''Eric:''' This is such fucked up. I mean, I don't swear a lot in this program.

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' But this is such fucking academic, petty, stupid ass bullshit. This is like one of the great stories of all times.

'''Bret:''' One of the great stories of all time, maybe, and human life hangs in the balance on this one.

'''Eric:''' No kidding.

'''Bret:''' Right. Okay. So Carol does get awarded the Nobel prize, Carol Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn and Szostak. Szostak, who mentions at the point that the Nobel Prize is awarded that he was shocked as all hell to get a Nobel Prize because his work was so deep in the history of telomeres that he just didn't expect it. And suddenly—

(01:55:14)

'''Eric:''' No, I should say, I want to be very clear, right. All of these people have made fantastic Nobel-worthy discoveries.

'''Bret:''' Totally.

'''Eric:''' There's zero allegation that these people—

'''Bret:''' Weren't deserving. No,

'''Eric:''' Absolutely.

'''Bret:''' No. And they, you know, Carol and Elizabeth got their Nobel prize for the discovery of telomerase, which is a huge, huge progress. So anyway, I don't deny that they were worthy of this prize. What Carol Greider does with her Nobel lecture, right. Nobel lecture being the biggest lecture a scientist will ever give, the lecture that—

'''Eric:''' And filmed.

'''Bret:''' And filmed—is she delivers a paper in which she very oddly has now embraced my entire set of hypotheses about the effect. She has come over from the comparison between the paper of mine that she panned and said didn't make any sense. She is now a total convert to the idea that senescence across the body is being caused by Hayflick limits that are telomere based.

'''Eric:''' Okay, and this is the first public incident that we know of in which the delta between the negative comments on your paper, which is not an anonymous peer review.

'''Bret:''' We have it in an envelope from her.

'''Eric:''' Got it. And it's immediately after the Nobel prize that the wisdom of that line of thinking is embraced.

(01:56:43)

'''Bret:''' Right. But there's more to the Nobel lecture. So she spends her Nobel lecture on what is admittedly a very beautiful presentation of the connection between telomeres and senescence. She goes through tissue after tissue, says cirrhosis of the liver is what happens when you have short telomeres and your liver, etc. She goes through tissue after tissue. She projects the data, the blot actually from the paper with Mike Hemann, the paper that I should have been a coauthor on, she projects it on the screen, but she does some weird freaking dance, where she, instead of describing the long telomeres of laboratory mice as a major bug in the system, she describes it as a happy accident, effectively, because it allows us to test certain things like, “Oh, isn't it delightful that they have long telomeres?” And it's like, what the hell are you doing? There is so much riding on correcting this and you're presenting it like it’s just a bonus. And she, in her presentation, she's got several experiments that I did not know she had run that I had suggested to her and I said, you know, things like, “Carol, do you have any idea if a cell has many different telomere lengths, is it the shortest telomere that controls how many reproductions a cell can do?” She's run that experiment. Interesting. Low and behold, it's the shortest telomere. It's a good guess. But anyway, so, she goes through this. There's no mention of me, there's no mention of the actual implications of the the long telomeres for things like science and safety testing and all of that. And I can't seem to raise the issue of the safety question with anybody. Right? At best, I get journalists who are interested until they call somebody, and the somebodies on the other end, I know what they say. They say “everybody that mice aren't great models”. In fact, there's a paper out there that says something like the mice lie. It's not about this issue. It's just about the fact that mice aren't a perfect match. The issue in question could be solved. It could be addressed thoroughly. And, for all I know, once the JAX Lab figured out what they were doing—

'''Eric:''' They could change the protocols.

'''Bret:''' For all I know they quietly have fixed this and there was a private, you know, I've heard that there was a private meeting in which they decided—

'''Eric:''' Look, this is the thing.

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' You see something like this in statistics, everybody knows that most distributions that are bell-shaped are not normal. Right?

'''Bret:''' Yup.

'''Eric:''' And on the other hand, we all use normal distributions, and as a result, there are lots of things that at one level everybody knows—

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' But don't percolate down to the important layers in which we test things. And I don't know where, like you and I have never been able to fully put together, cause we're not molecular researchers and I'm not even a biologist. How important are these results? How robust are they? Has there been a change? This is a quiet world at some level.

'''Bret:''' It's a quiet world. But I think what I have concluded, yeah, working backwards from the phenomenology of the field and how it reacts to this problem, is that there's a tremendous amount resting on failing to acknowledge the error. Even though the error was obviously an honest error to begin with, they would rather sweep it under the rug. I mean, imagine you've got all these knockout mice, right? These knockout mice, there's a major investment in them. It takes a lot of work to knock out a particular gene.

'''Eric:''' No, dude, you've got a central, you've got a single point of failure—

'''Bret:''' Right.

'''Eric:''' Whose projections are tendrils into everything.

'''Bret:''' Right? And you've got how many careers built on papers that are now suspect.

'''Eric:''' This is like an era. This is like a centralized irreproducibility crisis.

(02:00:37)

'''Bret:''' Yes, it's that bad or worse.

'''Eric:''' Okay.

'''Bret:''' And, and you know what happens if, let's say somebody hears this podcast and they check into it and they find out, lo and behold, this story is true.

'''Eric:''' Yeah.

'''Bret:''' Well now the FDA has a problem.

'''Eric:''' What would, wait, wait a second. I don't want to get too far out over our skis. We have enough listeners that people will get a chance to hear an unbelievable story. And if there are things in the story that are not true or misremembered or unkind or there've been changes or maybe we don't really fully understand how the drug testing works. I'm open and I, and I want to be very clear, and I want this in the podcast, I'm open to the idea that the most straightforward implications of the story are subject to adjustment. However, having lived the story, I can say that this was an egregious story at multiple points, with conflicts between the evolutionary community, the biomedical community, the professional publishing community. This is a terrible story, and it's also an amazing and beautiful and wonderful story. And you know, I felt really lousy at the beginning of this podcast goading you and prodding you. But I am so bored of you, no offense, as the guy who stood up to the funny kids at Evergreen, and you know, we know what's in the heads of these people. If you're at Evergreen, you're not that good.

'''Bret:''' Yep.

'''Eric:''' Right. And that was like, this is the, I just want to be open about it.

(02:02:17)

'''Bret:''' No, I look, I appreciate it, and I'm glad to have this story out. The story has many different layers of meanings. I know, I remember where I was when I finally sat down to watch Carol Greider's Nobel lecture and I had one of the oddest experiences of my life. I was actually in a hammock watching her lecture, watching her present my hypothesis without my name anywhere on it, and then she projects this image from her paper with Mike Hemann, and I was flooded with two simultaneous emotions that are just completely incompatible. Right? I've never felt anything like it. I was absolutely elated to see my work projected on a Nobel stage, right? That changed me.

'''Eric:''' You know I called the horse and rider problem?

'''Bret:''' No.

'''Eric:''' The point of the official complex of science is to knock the rider and take the horse, where the horse is the theory and the rider is the attribution.

'''Bret:''' Well, this was it. I was elated and livid simultaneously, and I can still almost feel what it was almost like my body was trying to figure out one half supposed to feel one thing and the other feels the other? But, this story has many levels of importance. Personally, it gave me the ability—I was already, as you are, very good at not being persuaded by the fact that everybody else disagrees with you, that that has an implication. Every great idea starts with a minority of one and you have to be able to endure being alone with a great idea in order to advance the ball significantly. This story was so extreme and so clear in the end that it just left no doubt. And I must say, I don't know how young students can arrange to confront materials so that if they're really good, they get a clear demonstration like this, that they're really good. So they know to keep going.

(02:04:40)

'''Eric:''' Bret, look, I think you're selfish, and I don't mean to be horrible about it. I think that the story is an inspiration. I've lived the story with you. I have my own version of the story where instead of it being the slide from the paper of Grider and Hemann, it's equations that are known as the Sieberg-Witten equations. And you see what you did, with somebody else putting, you know, putting it up on a board, it starts to change the field, and you suddenly say, you mean I'm not an idiot? Right? And what I'm claiming is that the next layer of this is, “Well, why don't you just submit a paper? If you have ideas, submit a paper, submit a paper, submit a paper.” Who is this fucking suppose to fool?

'''Bret:''' Well, right, and this, this—

'''Eric:''' I mean, I just, I think the idea is that if you have a seat on the exchange, you know that by submitting a paper, your paper will get reviewed because you have, you present a credible threat. It doesn't occur to you that what you're saying is effectively like “let them eat cake”, to somebody whose paper is going to be reviewed by the person who's, like, holding them back.

'''Bret:''' No, this is exactly—when Jerry Coyne came at me with, you know, “Bret doesn't understand his, his explorer mode stuff is, is nonsense”. And then Richard Dawkins echoed it “Bret doesn't understand natural selection. And, you know, if he did, he'd submit a paper.” My feeling is, I lived this story, and you're going to pretend that there is even a mechanism to get a proper hearing?

'''Eric:''' Look, here's my proposal proposal. All right?

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' I think that you, Pia. and myself are indicative of an entire layer of GenX academicians, and now probably millennial academicians, whose work was suppressed, and we don't feel comfortable saying these words, which is that the purpose of the university system, in the time that we were there, was in large measure to make sure that big disruptive new ideas did not upset the apple cart because there was the ability to deny, I mean, this is what you guys call interference competition, which is that you keep people from sitting down in the chairs in a game of musical chairs. And then the idea is we have lovely parting gifts for our contestants. Doug Prasher, who did green fluorescent protein, ends up driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama, features in the, you know, I don't know, was it the front page of the Science Times? A year later he's still driving a fucking shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama. Meanwhile, we're being told that Americans don't care about STEM. We're not really good at science, but thank God, thank God our friends in Asia are amazing at science, because, as bad as our children are thinking for themselves, we've got huge numbers of people who want to come from China, South Korea, India, and Taiwan in order to do the study in the labs, which is actually work, and I'm the guy who found the secret study in 1986 which says, “Hey, we're going to have to pay these American academicians over six figures very soon because of the supply demand relationships.” And then they took away the demand curves and they only showed the supply curves. They said this was a demographic rather than an economic analysis, so price and wage certainly didn't enter into it. Like, our problem is that the American scientific enterprise, headquartered in the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, and our university systems is fraudulent, and it serves to suppress radical new ideas. And I'm not saying that everything is guaranteed to be right about your story, but this is a story that you and Carol should have warred out, in public, without your submitting into a system where you don't know who reviewed this, you don't know how to respond to the comments. You can't measure the delta where somebody in one year says, “this is crap” and the next year they say, “this is my theory”. Right? And what I want. I would love to invite Carol Greider onto this program, because I think she deserves the right to rebut what you're saying.

(02:08:58)

'''Bret:''' Yup. That'd be cool.

'''Eric:''' And Elizabeth Blackburn is fantastic. I'd love to have—and these are great scientists.

'''Bret:''' Frankly, you're going to say, this is me being too nice.

'''Eric:''' Yeah.

'''Bret:''' I'd even like Carol to come clean and just put this behind us. I'm not, you know, at this point—

'''Eric:''' No, it's not a question of that Bret, there is—you have the right to offer somebody a hand up.

'''Bret:''' Yup.

'''Eric:''' But you're skipping the step of—let me be blunt—how many universities offered you a position after you were run out of this crappy Evergreen State College by a weak president who refused to stand up for academic freedom, freedom of speech, and anti-racism, which you exemplified.

'''Bret:''' Professorship? Zero.

'''Eric:''' How many biology lectures were you invited to give at top tier AAU universities? American Association of Universities? Or, Association of American Universities.

'''Bret:''' None

'''Eric:''' Okay. What the fuck is that? I mean, let's, let's just say the word “fuck” a lot, cause I had Andrew Yang in that chair. I don't say fuck a lot.

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' Okay. So the idea is you have a Maoist insurgency against a student of Dick Alexander, who is supported by George Williams, with support from Leonard Hayflick. He's predicting something from evolutionary theory, registers in molecular biology. It may have drug testing implications, and, like, nothing, silence. And you're terrified to talk about this.

'''Bret:''' I don't think I'm terrified to talk about it.

'''Eric:''' Well, I'm sorry. Can you tell me something? Where have you told— you have a podcast?

'''Bret:''' Yeah.

'''Eric:''' Where is the story written up? Where is the story lodged? You and I have the ability to lodge it. I'm forcing you to do this on my podcast. I haven't heard you do a podcast about this. I hear you talking about free speech. I hear you doing things with the Heterodox Academy. I hear you doing things in the Intellectual Dark Web, something with Andy Ngo, something with Antifa. Okay. The whole purpose of the Intellectual Dark Web is to keep the channel open based on merit, because if we do something like the diversity of ideas, you know, for all I know, the people who are suppressing you are more diverse than you are, you know? Okay. These are ideas that needed to come out. There are health implications potentially of these ideas. This is not ethical to suppress. In effect, it's not ethical for you not to talk about, not to be rude.

'''Bret:''' No, no. Look, I get this. I tried for a decade to get this story to come out. Now, I'm sure I would have been less aggressive on the social front. I would have let Carol go in order to get the story out and get the drug safety issue addressed. I don't know what you regard that as. Maybe that's—

'''Eric:''' It's not a question of this. Look, there is a Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn and everybody else in like senescence land, Judith Campisi, who knows. Everybody's got a problem, which is there's way too much transparency, and there's too little funding, and there's not enough autonomy, and there's too much peer review, and for whatever reason, a new game has cropped up where everybody says we need more transparency, more diversity. We need to make sure that we're not wasting taxpayer dollars. We have, you know, ever more oversight. All of this is denaturing our society. We have to compete with China now. We are going to have issues with Iran and Russia, and we are losing our minds because we are serving a baby boom group. Almost, like, you pick a leading university. It is headed currently by a Baby Boomer. That's almost true without even telling—if I ask you, “Hey Bret, pick a university. Don't tell me which one it is.” I will tell you that the number of administrators that that university has soared above the levels of admissions, the tuition has soared above medical inflation, which is above regular inflation. If I ask you about the grant structure, older professors that are winning more grants and younger people are winning fewer grants. This is a giant complex. I am going to have somebody from Sugar Baby University, which is a subset of Seeking Arrangement, because the Baby Boomers made student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. And now this group is offering older men the ability to date younger women with an allowance, right? So we're starting to get into gray area sex work, where the Baby Boomers to keep this lifestyle to which they've become accustomed are effectively enslaving—

(02:13:44)

'''Bret:''' Well, they're hoarding wellbeing on every front, including the sexual, which is no surprise at all.

'''Eric:''' But here’s my claim: we are in a holding pattern. I'm in my 50s. You're in your 50s. I've done work that has never seen the light of day. You've done work that's never seen the light of day. Pia has done work that's never seen the light of day. I don't know about Heather. My claim is: it's time to crash land the planes into the control tower. It's enough.

'''Bret:''' Wholeheartedly agree.

'''Eric:''' Okay. Bret, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Come back anytime. I want to say that anybody who is misportrayed by this podcast is welcome. We are not claiming to have absolute and universal knowledge. You are more than welcome to correct the story if you have knowledge about this that checks out. But the problem is that this is a story that needs to be told. It's like the story of Margot O'Toole and David Baltimore that played out at MIT, when, I believe that she found that she couldn't reproduce the work of Dr. Imanishi-Kari. And of course the system turned on the person who was trying to say, “Hey, I'm seeing irregularities. I'm seeing problems.”

We have a biomedical complex that needs whistleblowers. It needs iconoclasts. It needs challengers. The food pyramid has been off for years. Our health recommendations are completely off. I think that this is an essential story. You need to move out of Intellectual Dark Web stuff, which was about keeping the pipe open. Let somebody else do that. And it is time to hire you as a professor at a top tier university. And I'll be happy to talk to you about what happened when you and Richard Dawkins encountered each other on stage in Chicago, because I think in terms of pure evolutionary theory, it is time to boost a young Richard Dawkins who contributed two of the most important ideas in the form of extended phenotype in the mean, which largely dislodges the old Richard Dawkins and his hatred of religion, which has appeared to take over his thinking as regards his own contributions to biology. We got a lot of work to do.

'''Bret:''' No question.

'''Eric:''' All right, my friend.

'''Bret:''' Well, thanks for having me.

'''Eric:''' Thanks for coming. You've been through The Portal with Dr. Bret Weinstein, professor in exile from the Evergreen State College. Please subscribe on Apple or on Stitcher or on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, navigate over to our YouTube channel and not only subscribe, but remember to click the bell icon to be notified with our next episode drops. And hope to see you back on the next episode of The Portal.

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2020-04-12T02:42:52Z

Arby McDinkleberg: