American Alchemy - Eric Weinstein Confronts Government Scientist on UFOs (YouTube Content)

Eric Weinstein Confronts Government Scientist on UFOs
Information
Host(s)	Jesse Michels
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein Eric Davis
Length	03:59:02
Release Date	8 March 2026
Links
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Eric Weinstein Confronts Government Scientist on UFOs was a conversation with Eric Weinstein and Eric Davis by Jesse Michels on American Alchemy.

Description

This is the conversation I have been trying to make happen for years. Eric Davis is one of the most credentialed investigator of the UFO crash retrieval program alive with an eidetic memory. Astrophysics PhD from the University of Arizona, 30 years in the field, security clearances through AAWSAP, formally deputized by the DIA under program manager James Lacatski (who himself claims he has stepped inside a UFO and breached the hull). Eric Weinstein is one of the most technically gifted minds outside the classified world, someone Davis himself identified as one of only three people technical and heterodox enough to engage with this material. I put them in a room and let them go at it. This conversation was nothing short of historic.

Transcript

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: So you're gonna create a wormhole on demand?

00:00:02
Eric W. Davis: You should be able to. That's what my research showed.

00:00:07
Eric Weinstein: So walk me through, how do I get to Alpha Centauri by engineering a traversable wormhole?

00:00:14
Eric W. Davis: Well, you're gonna create-

00:00:16
Jesse Michels: Eric Davis, you are kind of synonymous with UFO science. You have an amazing background at Aerospace Corporation, Earth Tech. You've worked with NASA Lewis. Eric Weinstein, you are a math PhD from Harvard who has dared to, uh, present a theory of everything in physics.

00:00:32
Eric W. Davis: The alleged Roswell crash was real. There was a there there. It really happened.

00:00:38
Eric Weinstein: How is it possible that something this large that involves this many people has zero incontrovertible pieces of evidence?

00:00:45
Eric W. Davis: Do you dispute the existence of atomic weapons because you can't access it?

00:00:49
Eric Weinstein: I can access it.

00:00:51
Eric W. Davis: Oh, you can access it.

00:00:53
Eric Weinstein: I have no idea what we just did.

00:00:54
Eric W. Davis: It is a crash retrieval, non-human intelligence, non-human technology.

00:00:59
Jesse Michels: How many of those crash retrieval program people have you met?

00:01:02
Eric W. Davis: I think it's five total. There's no physics in it. They're just-

00:01:05
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't make any sense.

00:01:06
Eric W. Davis: Say again?

00:01:07
Eric Weinstein: It defies the laws of physics. We haven't made progress. We have no physicists. How are they doing on this project decades in?

00:01:15
Eric W. Davis: This thing is not a Manhattan Project, and you know what the Manhattan Project was.

00:01:19
Eric Weinstein: Not one of these proposals excites me. They're boring as sin. I don't like GR. Why are you not tweaking it?

00:01:27
Eric W. Davis: I'm-- don't have intuition on how I could twig-- tweak it.

00:01:33
Jesse Michels: Are there propulsion modalities that you're high conviction in that transcend chemical combustion?

00:01:40
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, it goes way beyond even advanced.

00:01:44
Eric Weinstein: Are you aware of reports that we are being, uh-

00:01:48
Eric W. Davis: Monitored?

00:01:49
Eric Weinstein: ... made to know that we do not control our space?

00:01:52
Eric W. Davis: Yes.

00:01:52
Eric Weinstein: When you see smoke at this level, the question is what is the nature of the fire?

00:01:56
Jesse Michels: That's right.

00:01:56
Eric Weinstein: There are different fires.

00:01:57
Jesse Michels: But there is a fire.

00:01:57
Eric Weinstein: Or there's a smoke machine.

00:01:59
Jesse Michels: Or there's a smoke machine. [laughs]

00:02:00
Eric Weinstein: Right, right. Epstein was running many different programs. It wasn't even Epstein probably running them. Look, I believe we can leave, and if you believe you can leave, you have to imagine that you're being visited.

00:02:13
Announcer: Evolution takes on size. How is this possible? Nothing too unusual about that. Their existence cannot longer be denied.

00:02:35
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Seriously, this stuff works. Thanks so much to Ketone IQ for sponsoring today's episode. As you know, we have a new starship. Of course, we have a healthcare center on board. Ask what my new favorite product in it is? iRestore's Illumina face mask. Some billionaires are rejuvenating in underground light pods. I'm doing my own version in my living room. This mask is like a med bed for your face. It's lightweight, super convenient, cordless, and runs red, blue, and infrared light therapy all at once. The same type of technology NASA studied for skin healing in space. It's safe for your eyes too, so you don't have to sit there like a statue. You can live your life. I wear it when I'm reading, meal prepping, or investigating life's mysteries without feeling like I'm staring into the sun. Ten minutes of light and my skin looks and feels so good. Finding red light therapy was a revelation for me. I've definitely had a few late nights reading about magnetic pole shifts. But with this mask, I look like I actually slept. Did I? That's debatable. It's warm, wireless, convenient, and makes your skin feel super soft. And iRestore's kicking off their spring savings with some very big discounts. Right now, you can get the Elite Plus Illumina face mask bundle at an exclusive deal when you use code Jesse at iRestore.com. That's Jesse, J-E-S-S-E, at iRestore.com. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Dr. Eric Weinstein, Dr. Eric Davis, this is an absolute honor. I can't believe this is finally happening. [laughs] Um, I think often in this space in, uh, when we're talking about UFOs, UFO legacy, reverse engineering programs You have, uh, like a wave function that never sort of collapses. And you have, you know, different sides saying things that are mutually exclusive, and truth, it never collapses into true or false. And, uh, I, I'm really excited to do this because, uh, Eric Weinstein, you probably need no introduction when it comes to kind of a, a general audience. You are a, a math PhD from Harvard, a premier cultural commentator of our generation, uh, who has dared to, uh, present a theory of everything in physics. Uh, and then Eric Davis, you definitely need no introduction in, in UFO space. Uh, but to maybe a more general audience, you know, some of whom who might have seen you in this recent Age of Disclosure movie, uh, you are kind of synonymous with UFO science. You have an amazing background, um, at Aerospace Corporation, uh, Earth Tech, uh, you've worked with NASA Lewis, uh, you've worked on various initiatives in, uh, exotic propulsion, directed energy, and so very excited to have you both. Today, I wanna make this kind of two parts. One part is kind of establishing ground truth on, uh, Eric Davis's, uh, claims because he's invest- he's formally investigated this UFO legacy reverse engineering program. So I wanna figure out what those claims are for the audience. And then part two, and this is why we have you here, Dr. Weinstein, is I want to figure out, and this is kind of actually a follow-up on this thing we did with Hal Puthoff last time, if there is a theoretical physics component to this UFO legacy reverse engineering program, is there physics hiding in private aerospace corporations? Physics you can think of as the rules of reality itself. That would be problematic, to say the least, if that were the case. And so I'm very excited to, to speak to you both.

00:08:02
Eric W. Davis: Thank you. Thank you very much.

00:08:03
Eric Weinstein: Thanks for having me.

00:08:04
Jesse Michels: Awesome. So, um, Eric Davis, I, I wanna start with you. Um, when did you become aware of this UFO legacy reverse engineering program, and, and, and how did you become aware of it, and, and how are you so high confidence in it?

00:08:21
Eric W. Davis: Um, I was working at NIDS, uh, it'd be thirty years this July, and I was the director of Aerospace, Physics and Astrophysics, uh, Research at NIDS. That's National Institute for Discovery Science that Bob Bigelow founded in nineteen ninety-five. And, um, uh, I was hired in July of 'ninety-six, along with Colin Kelleher and George Onet. And, uh, John Alexander was already there on the staff, also served as a, um, a member of the Science Advisory Board. So I worked for Air Force Research Lab after NIDS and before Hal Puthoff hired me at Earth Tech. Okay, so then, uh, during my work at AFRO and then during my fifteen years working with Hal Puthoff, we got involved with the AAWSAP/AATIP, and then later on the sep- the separate attempt called AATIP, and then the UAP Task Force that Jay Stratton led. And, uh, using my security clearances, my need to know, my access, including my letter that I'm deputized by Jim Lakatsky as a representative of the, of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I used all that leverage and authority to get into the crash retrieval program. I couldn't get access to see craft bodies or talk to the people, but I was able to get in to the people who handled all of that at a programmatic level and got confirmation that all of that was real, that all of it happened.

00:09:39
Jesse Michels: And, and what's your conviction level in, say, Roswell, for example, like that being a real crash involving non-human biologics? Well-

00:09:47
Eric W. Davis: It's one hundred percent.

00:09:48
Jesse Michels: One hundred percent.

00:09:49
Eric W. Davis: It's one hundred percent. And it wasn't in Roswell, New Mexico. It was on the Foster Ranch in Corona, New Mexico, which is thirty miles from Roswell.

00:09:56
Announcer: The disc landed at a ranch at Corona, New Mexico, and the rancher turned it over to the Air Force. Army officers say the missile, found sometime last week, has been inspected at Roswell, New Mexico, and sent to Wright Field, Ohio, for further inspection.

00:10:10
Eric W. Davis: I had my, uh, information I got from Ed Mitchell at a science advisory board meeting about the Greer briefings on the disclosure project at, at the Pentagon, and then Admiral Wilson coming back and verifying that the Roswell crash, well, the Corona crash actually, really did happen. It wasn't a mogul balloon. It wasn't a Rawin radar, uh, test balloon project. It wasn't a weather balloon. It wasn't anything of that nature. It was a real craft of unknown origin that was, um, adjudicated to be not of human origin or construct, construct, and, um, it crashed on the, on the Foster Ranch in Corona, New Mexico. And then there's my work with Dave Grusch when I was at the Aerospace Corporation. He was at the Aerospace Corporation building in Colorado Springs because he worked for their government customer, which occupied one or two floors there.

00:10:57
Jesse Michels: What was David Grusch doing in that capacity?

00:10:59
Eric W. Davis: Uh, he was, I think, a security contractor or advisor to a, a program manager. Dave was the NRO liaison officer to the UAP Task Force. So he, uh, took direction from Jay Stratton.

00:11:15
Jesse Michels: Wasn't he National Geospatial Agency?

00:11:17
Eric W. Davis: No, I said the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office.

00:11:20
Jesse Michels: Yeah, you said that, but I thought he was National Geospatial.

00:11:22
Eric W. Davis: No, that was later.

00:11:23
Jesse Michels: That was later. Okay.

00:11:23
Eric W. Davis: That was later. Yeah.

00:11:24
Jesse Michels: Okay. So he's the NRO liaison to the UAPTF.

00:11:26
Eric W. Davis: So he-- So during the UAPTF-

00:11:27
Jesse Michels: Yeah

00:11:28
Eric W. Davis: ... he was the liaison officer on behalf of the NRO to the task force.

00:11:32
Jesse Michels: Yep. Got it.

00:11:33
Eric W. Davis: Okay. So he worked with Travis Taylor, Jay Stratton, um, uh, there's some other folks that don't wanna be named, I know. So I just know that there's a core group of forty-

00:11:43
Jesse Michels: Carl Nell

00:11:43
Eric W. Davis: There's a cor- core group of forty people, but there is a peripheral body of a thousand people that contributed, uh, some time, some of their time and labor and resources and the other government agencies, DoD agencies, intelligence agencies, to feed information to the task force.

00:12:00
Jesse Michels: A lot of people ask about kind of circular reporting when it comes to UFO, you know, testimonies. David Grusch is what a lot of people I think are hinged, hinging their belief on because he's just seems like a very kind of honest, above board guy who stumbled into a lot of this stuff. Um, how many of his witnesses, his 40 witnesses, are more of kind of the hapless engineer type that just worked on the vehicles versus people who have, you know, kind of secondhand or, you know, thirdhand?

00:12:28
Eric W. Davis: No, they're all firsthand. It's just that, uh, it's something that Eric and I had lots of hours and hours of conversations about two years ago.

00:12:36
Jesse Michels: Mm-hmm.

00:12:36
Eric W. Davis: Not a single of them were f- were a physicist.

00:12:40
Jesse Michels: [laughs] That wa-

00:12:41
Eric W. Davis: Not a single one of these guys were physicists.

00:12:42
Jesse Michels: I wa-

00:12:43
Eric W. Davis: They had some discipline in engineering in their, in their ex- in their profession. They were either electrical engineers, material scientists, uh, aerospace engineers-

00:12:51
Jesse Michels: [laughs]

00:12:51
Eric W. Davis: ... aeromechanical, aerothermal, thermal control-

00:12:53
Jesse Michels: Lord take me now

00:12:54
Eric W. Davis: ... fluid mechanics. Yeah. Uh-

00:12:56
Jesse Michels: Save, save that thought because-

00:12:57
Eric W. Davis: There wasn't a real physicist there. Nobody at the PhD level who was either an applied physicist or an ex- or a theoretical physicist.

00:13:03
Jesse Michels: Sa- save that thought please, because that is going to basically be the entire kind of premise for the second part of this.

00:13:10
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

00:13:10
Jesse Michels: Uh, do you have any questions as I'm sort of, you know... [laughs]

00:13:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, look, one of the things that I dislike very strongly about the UAP world is that you spend an inordinate amount of time if you're just trying to be an honest, analytic person with the, is there any actual tangible incontrovertible proof? And it always seems like there's somehow this tight-knit group of people who in general themselves don't have direct proof, but sort of have proof one thing away. And people build entire theories about, you know, the names of crafts and who was where and, and I just have no idea as a civilian, uh, and a technical civilian, um, how to think about this because I don't wanna spend our time in the is it real or not mode, because that basically wastes time and it's also how con- conspirators get people not to work on conspiracy theories that could work, is, is that you demonize and stigmatize the behavior. So I usually would prefer in this, this situation to just decamp and assume the nature of all of these things.

00:14:21
Jesse Michels: Yes.

00:14:21
Eric Weinstein: Y- but just to be honest, and, and it just needs to be said once, I've been looking at this now, I don't know, five years since Jesse first crammed it down my throat, and I would say, uh, I was clearly wrong about it. It's an enormous area. There's so many people who claim to have had contact with this program in one form or another. I, I can't believe that anyone could train an acting troupe at Brando levels of sincerity, uh, to lie to me like that. On the other hand, I've never seen anything like it where I can't get a single shred of incontrovertible proof, and so many people seem to have it, but they all seem to be under some kind of an NDA where they can't give s-something real. So the, just the first frustrating question is, how is it possible that something this large that involves this many people has zero scientifically incontrovertible pieces of evidence so that we can actually... There's no way to predicate a discussion in a way that I know that's, that's responsible. It just completely eludes the scientific community.

00:15:22
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. It's because the incontrovertible evidence is kept in the classified realm and for, for security reasons.

00:15:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, but-

00:15:28
Eric W. Davis: There you go

00:15:28
Eric Weinstein: ... and again, I don't wanna, I don't wanna-

00:15:30
Eric W. Davis: Do you d- do you dispute the existence of atomic weapons because you can't access it?

00:15:34
Eric Weinstein: I can access it.

00:15:36
Eric W. Davis: Oh, you can access it now?

00:15:37
Eric Weinstein: Yes. If I, if, if I look at the, if I look at the Teller-U-

00:15:40
Eric W. Davis: Have you, have you actually been to pick up the plutonium core or?

00:15:41
Eric Weinstein: No. I never kept the demon core in my basement.

00:15:44
Eric W. Davis: Okay. Oh, how about the, uh, how about the-

00:15:45
Eric Weinstein: But I appreciate the-

00:15:46
Eric W. Davis: ... lithium-6 fuel-

00:15:47
Eric Weinstein: What?

00:15:47
Eric W. Davis: ... in the, uh, primary nuclear-

00:15:49
Eric Weinstein: Oh, we used to do that in high school.

00:15:51
Eric W. Davis: Oh.

00:15:51
Eric Weinstein: No, no. What I'm saying is, is that the Teller-Ulam design is released as a highly redacted report, right? And so I have an idea from plenty of sources that this program exists, and what's more, in the case o- of, of atomic weapons, physicists are not perfectly locked down. It's a high trust community, and in general, people are willing to talk, uh, you know, even if they shouldn't, about the role of physics in atomic weapons. I have never heard a colleague, not once, at a high level in physics give any credence to this world. In other words-

00:16:31
Eric W. Davis: Well, that's because they didn't have access. They didn't have need to know. They didn't have a contract where they had to have access or-

00:16:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Which, which, which again, it's not, it's not a challenge in that sense, assume that there is a dividing line. But it means that in the Manhattan Project, right, we, we called in Feynman and Bohr and Fermi and Von Neumann and, and put them under Robert Oppenheimer and, and, and Teller and all these cats.

00:16:57
Eric W. Davis: And-

00:16:58
Eric Weinstein: And, okay

00:16:58
Eric W. Davis: ... Bethe and-

00:16:59
Eric Weinstein: And Beta, right.

00:17:01
Eric W. Davis: Um-

00:17:01
Eric Weinstein: So but in so doing, I would say, okay, I would imagine that if this is an existential threat, that there's stuff from some place we can't understand that moves and, and breaks the laws of physics and all this, we would call that in. Now, one of the great things that came out of our, our discussions before is, is you said this thing, which I repeated on Rogan 'cause I didn't think it was classified. You said, when it comes to being technical, just at this point that they don't invite in physicists, you said, uh, you, you said that, uh, "Eric, you, me, and Hal Puthoff are the three most technical people on this." And I said, "I'm not on this."

00:17:38
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, that's the problem. [laughs]

00:17:39
Eric Weinstein: But, but-

00:17:40
Eric W. Davis: That's the problem. You should be in it.

00:17:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But, but that makes you Oppenheimer, and Von Neumann and Feynman and Beta and Fermi is Hal or something like that. In other words... Or, or the reverse. But are, are you and Hal our Manhattan Project?

00:17:58
Eric W. Davis: No, we're not directly involved. We've been exposed to it officially for the purpose of the AAWSAP's goals

00:18:05
Eric Weinstein: What is the question that I wish to ask? Do you-- Can you figure out-

00:18:08
Jesse Michels: Well, I think, I think what Eric's trying to ask, and then, and I do wanna actually continue along the former lines of just asking about kind of core evidence-

00:18:16
Eric Weinstein: Okay

00:18:16
Jesse Michels: ... with, with Dr. Davis. But I think the question that Eric is trying to ask is, y-you just mentioned that none of Grusch's, you know, 40 witnesses that he, you know, handed over to the, uh, in-intelligence community inspector general, uh, are theoretical physicists.

00:18:31
Eric W. Davis: Right.

00:18:32
Jesse Michels: And so you have, you know, your physics PhD, Hal's an electrical engineer, and that-

00:18:37
Eric W. Davis: Well, he's also-- Well, his, uh, PhD was in laser physics, because when you go to Stanford in the 1960s, you can't get a PhD in physics or a master's

00:18:46
Jesse Michels: So, so it's you two, and then Eric, who is a, a, you know, math PhD at the highest level, who can keep up with, you know, any physicist in the country and has his own-

00:18:54
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yeah

00:18:55
Jesse Michels: ... physics theory of everything.

00:18:55
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I know. Yeah.

00:18:56
Jesse Michels: And so it's, so it's all, all three of you guys, but all three of you are outsiders. He's a real outsider. You two have officially investigated this stuff, and you're saying there are no theoretical physicists on the core program.

00:19:08
Eric W. Davis: I have never seen one. I've never s- gotten evidence from the people, from the leadership at, at the aeros- two aerospace companies I per-personally interviewed with.

00:19:17
Jesse Michels: That's so wild.

00:19:18
Eric W. Davis: Or, uh, I don't mean interviewed with, but who I investigated and interviewed leadership and a few of the worker bees involved.

00:19:25
Jesse Michels: Are there propulsion modalities that you're high conviction in that transcend chemical combustion?

00:19:32
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. It goes way beyond even advanced nuclear and, uh, nuclear and aerospace industry is fission, fusion, and matter-antimatter annihilation. Way beyond that. Um, I don't think we have a grasp of it. I haven't heard anybody that I've interviewed, uh, say that they have a grasp of it. And even as recently, uh, unfortunately, um, the one technical person who ended up becoming a senior VP decades later, uh, at the biggest of the aeros- legacy aerospace companies, uh, he was a materials scientist working on the crash retrieval program after, after getting his doctor- after earning his doctorate, and he got hired straight away to work on it for about, uh, roughly two decades. And then he-

00:20:16
Jesse Michels: Who is this? Who is that?

00:20:19
Eric W. Davis: I c- I'm not gonna-

00:20:19
Jesse Michels: Okay. Yeah, no worries. Yeah

00:20:20
Eric W. Davis: So, um, uh, so basically he was a materials scientist. We've had a lot of classified and unclassified discussions. And I brought these questions up. I asked his questions.

00:20:31
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

00:20:32
Eric W. Davis: And the, and the answer is, "No. You know, we, we didn't have theoretical physicists that we could put on this. We're strictly limited in the number of people on the BIGET list." The BIGET list is the list of people who have need to know and access to a particular classified program. And if you're not on that list, you don't get admitted.

00:20:49
Eric Weinstein: So this is a-

00:20:49
Eric W. Davis: You don't get invited

00:20:50
Eric Weinstein: ... this is an unacknowledged, waived, and BIGETed self, uh, special access program.

00:20:55
Eric W. Davis: It's, it's an acknowled- it's a waived, unacknowledged, special access program. Right.

00:20:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:20:59
Eric W. Davis: And so, uh, he, I said, "So where are your physicists? What are your theor- theoretical and applied physicists telling you?" He said, "Well, we don't have any. We never did. We only were allowed to keep it down to roughly a handful of people in the company to work on this."

00:21:12
Eric Weinstein: That's-

00:21:12
Eric W. Davis: "And that's it, and it's limited to engineering. Uh, there's no physics in it. They're just-"

00:21:15
Eric Weinstein: That doesn't make any sense.

00:21:17
Eric W. Davis: Say again?

00:21:19
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I'm just-

00:21:19
Eric W. Davis: I didn't hear you

00:21:19
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm just, I'm just trying to logically think about this.

00:21:21
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

00:21:22
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, it's, it's like saying, "We're having trouble performing, uh, Beethoven's Fifth, and we have the finest accountants, optometrists, boxers, uh, and cardio trainers." And you're like, "Well, what about violinists a-and violists and anybody playing the French horn?" And it's like, "Oh, well, we don't, we don't do that."

00:21:43
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

00:21:43
Eric Weinstein: So of course you're not going to play Beethoven's Fifth.

00:21:46
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

00:21:46
Eric Weinstein: I mean, because you can't engineer your way out of a science problem.

00:21:50
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Well, let me tell you, I think you've got a great point about talking about Manhat- the Manhattan Project. This s- this thing is not a Manhattan Project, and you know what the Manhattan Project was. We both do. We read the books. Um, it was multi-disci-- Uh, how many people? Thousands of people. Multidisciplinary people.

00:22:07
Eric Weinstein: So the white badges was the very small core, but the th- the whole thing was enormous.

00:22:11
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. You had industrial engineers, um, computational engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers-

00:22:17
Eric Weinstein: Multiple sites

00:22:18
Eric W. Davis: ... explosives experts-

00:22:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:22:20
Eric W. Davis: ... nuclear ex- nuclear physicists and nuclear engineers. You had everybody of, of all the STEM disciplines there. You had to have mathematicians. And, uh, they were involved with that program to build up the, the fuel design, characterization, and manufacture. But this program doesn't, these programs don't have that. They deliberately keep it divided up among different companies to maintain plausible deniability in case there's a leak, and they keep it very small for the re-reasoning-

00:22:47
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but it has to be centralized somewhere. The compartmentalized nature of Los Alamos and, uh, the Manhattan Project more broadly, um, was still overseen by a small group who had universal access.

00:22:59
Eric W. Davis: That's right. And also note that the Manhattan Project people had their families living with them too, in a closed city.

00:23:06
Eric Weinstein: That's right.

00:23:07
Eric W. Davis: That's right. So they don't have an equivalent for this in the crash retrieval program. Um, so th-there's discon- disjointed groups of people, small numbers of people. They're not allowed to know about the other people in the other groups-

00:23:21
Eric Weinstein: Okay, those are the, those are the people-

00:23:22
Eric W. Davis: ... and what they're doing

00:23:23
Eric Weinstein: ... those are the people who are in the stovepipe architecture.

00:23:26
Eric W. Davis: Right. And the central, um-

00:23:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:23:29
Eric W. Davis: ... the central portfolio owner is a three-letter intelligence agency. So that's who's, is centrally in charge. It was Leslie Grove in the United States. Was it the... Was Leslie the, uh, general of the, uh, Army Corps of Engineers, or was he in a different combat-

00:23:43
Eric Weinstein: I don't remember where he was-

00:23:44
Eric W. Davis: Okay

00:23:45
Eric Weinstein: ... seated, but then-

00:23:45
Eric W. Davis: But he was in charge-

00:23:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:23:46
Eric W. Davis: ... on behalf of the Army

00:23:47
Eric Weinstein: He was.

00:23:47
Eric W. Davis: He ran it. He was the military boss, and Oppenheimer was the civilian boss of the Manhattan Project.

00:23:53
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:23:53
Jesse Michels: Do, do you take, uh, David Grusch at face value that Dick Cheney was the last head honcho of this sort of program?

00:24:02
David Grusch: And there's not really a mob boss. The closest person we got that I was aware of was unfortunately now deceased Vice President Dick Cheney, Darth Vader himself. Not shocking that he was

00:24:14
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

00:24:15
David Grusch: ... involved in this. And essentially when he left in 2009, that was the last time that these activities really had central leadership.

00:24:22
Eric W. Davis: I never heard that before.

00:24:24
David Grusch: Okay.

00:24:24
Eric W. Davis: So that never came up in our c- in our, uh, classified and unclassified conversations. I'm not aware that Dick Cheney had any role.

00:24:31
Jack C: To speak to this three letter, the, the, the head, the head you cited, a three letter, in our discussion at Sol in San Francisco, you directly said CIA DS&T at one time, Glenn Gaffney, et cetera, so was the UFO program portfolio owner. So to Dr. Weinstein's question about technical rigor physicists, did you ever have the opportunity to, to ask anybody near the head of this apparatus why there wasn't a stronger motivation to have physicists on staff? I mean, from an early era, why was there not that prioritization?

00:25:04
Eric W. Davis: Well, I would love to talk to the head of the crash retrieval program during that era, but he refused to talk to us.

00:25:10
Jack C: I see. And that was, that was Glenn Gaffney?

00:25:12
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, Glenn Gaffney.

00:25:13
Jack C: Okay. Glenn Gaff- And who is Jim Ryder?

00:25:17
Lue Elizondo: AAWSAP was originally intended to skip out Bigelow Aerospace facilities in Las Vegas due to a UAP material divestment plan proposal to AAWSAP leadership by Lockheed Martin Space Systems Vice President Dr. James Ryder, now deceased.

00:25:39
Jack C: He's this Lockheed Martin Space Systems guy.

00:25:41
Eric W. Davis: He was the, um, uh, senior vice president of Lockheed Martin Space and Missiles company, which is also the, um, space systems company, and his dual hat job was director of the company's advanced technology center.

00:25:58
Jack C: Did he also work on UFO crash retrieval initiative?

00:26:01
Eric W. Davis: Well, I don't wanna say that, um, or confirm or deny that because of the consequence to his family. One of his, one of his daughters works there.

00:26:10
Jack C: Okay, got it.

00:26:11
Eric W. Davis: It could cause her issues, so.

00:26:12
Jack C: Okay.

00:26:13
Eric W. Davis: So I can't get into that particular detail.

00:26:15
Jack C: Okay. Yeah. No, no, no problem. Through your-

00:26:17
Eric W. Davis: Um-

00:26:17
Jack C: I'm so sorry.

00:26:18
Eric W. Davis: No, go for it.

00:26:18
Jack C: Through your investigations, like, did you ever encounter technical intelligence that you considered high credibility that seemed like it would have had to have come from direct communication with NHI, or did it all seem like it could have been through passive investigation?

00:26:33
Eric W. Davis: I couldn't get to that. Uh, there's two things I couldn't get into because I didn't have access, I didn't have the right clearances, and I wasn't allowed to. Let's, let's put it this way. There were people I was working with who knew who, who to contact, but they wouldn't give me the contact because they were not allowed to give out the name and op- organizational office or program, uh, that the individual worked at. And so they were not allowed to share that with me. So I couldn't get into the NHI issue. I couldn't get into the alien con- or NHI contact issue.

00:27:06
Jack C: The fact that Ryder, uh, essentially said, "We have no idea how this works," does that imply to you they never had direct... They, they never had the ability to ask questions of someone with full knowledge of the technology? Did, did you ever make that connection?

00:27:22
Eric W. Davis: No, I think Dave Grusch was able to make that connection. I couldn't.

00:27:25
Jack C: It, when, when you're on Age of Disclosure and you are saying sort of confidently that Roswell had, you know, a certain number of beings, one of the beings probably survived, is-

00:27:36
Eric W. Davis: That I don't know. You know, I-

00:27:37
Jack C: Okay

00:27:37
Eric W. Davis: ... that's a, that's a point of information I have never gotten in any of my official government interviews, uh, or even unofficial off the record interviews, um, is that any of these aliens ever lived. Uh, this is coming from a different a- avenue and, um, I don't recall Dave Grusch telling me that that was the case, but I, I won't dismiss it offhand. It's just that it, it's not a piece of data that ever came my way after 30 years.

00:28:04
Jack C: As part of your official investigations-

00:28:06
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

00:28:06
Jack C: ... uh, in AAWSAP, you were making sure that your sources were completely uncorrelated, right? They weren't speaking to each other-

00:28:14
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yeah

00:28:14
Jack C: ... giving closed doors.

00:28:14
Eric W. Davis: Well, they wouldn't, they wouldn't be able to because they were in compartmentalized programs. [laughs]

00:28:19
Jack C: Yeah.

00:28:19
Eric W. Davis: And we had, uh, compartmentalized clearances ourselves, so we could only talk to them at a certain level. And even, uh, we could not get special access program clearanced because the VP of Lockheed Martin, uh, there was a VP of TRW before it got bought out by Northrop Grumman.

00:28:38
Jack C: Mm.

00:28:39
Eric W. Davis: Um, these guys, uh, they may know about each other, but they're not read in on each other's programs because that's what compartmentalization meant. It meant that, uh, they may know about each other through the, through the portfolio owner, but they're not allowed to communicate because of that compartmentalization. And, um, uh, so where was I going? I think I lost my train of thought. I'm sorry.

00:29:02
Jack C: Well, well, tell, tell me about George H.W. Bush. Bush 41.

00:29:05
Eric W. Davis: Well, that's separate. That's separate.

00:29:06
Jack C: Yeah. To- totally separate. But, um, yeah, just wanted to ask you about your interactions with him because it seemed like from your accounting, he wasn't fully aware of the UFO crash retrieval program, but he became aware of it through some interesting means.

00:29:20
Eric W. Davis: Well, he became, uh, Gerald Ford's CIA director.

00:29:24
Jack C: Mm-hmm.

00:29:25
Eric W. Davis: So Gerald Ford became president, he nominated Bush, and Bush got confirmed, and he became the CIA director. So he goes into this for his first briefing as director of the CIA. The first thing that came out of this briefer's mouth was the Holloman landing in April 1960, Fort Holloman, uh, Air Force Base in New Mexico. So he started briefing Bush on that, and Bush said, "What are you talking about? I've never heard of this before."

00:29:48
Jack C: Describe what this is for the audience.

00:29:50
Eric W. Davis: So, uh, so to make a long story short, three craft, UAP craft, UFO craft came in. One of them landed not on the runway but on the tarmac close to a, um, a hangar. The other two took off and, uh, a gangway comes down, uh, extended down, and down comes a humanoid-looking, very tall, uh NHI being. Uh, he looked of Northern European descent. So he goes and meets with them, and they go into that hangar, and that hangar turns out to be the equivalent back in those days of a special access program hangar. It's all secured. They've got guards around it. That's the end of the story. So this film was made of it, and this story has circulated at various times. Uh, uh, the Defense Audio Visual Agency under the command of two, uh, retired generals. Uh, I think Jerry Miller was the name of one of them. I don't remember the name of the other. Jacques Vallee talks about them in his book, Revelations, I think it is. And, uh, he and Alan Hynek were invited to go to the DAVA and see that film, get access to the film and see it. So they got there, and apparently they were not allowed to see that video because the, one of those two generals said that they got intercepted or, um, uh, somebody got in the middle of that and, and convinced them not to allow Vallee and Hynek to see that film.

00:31:16
Jesse Michels: You do have this fact pattern over decades of, you know, this sort of luring in of various, you know, UFO researchers and presentation of passage material, which is, you know, um, material that might have some truth in it, but it, it's also sprinkled with falsities so that, you know, the re- the researchers can be discredited. So why now is there this line in the sand where we should trust that there is this real UFO legacy crash retrieval program going on?

00:31:45
Eric W. Davis: Uh, you know, I'm kind of thinking maybe it all began with, uh, Kelleher, Knapp, and Lakatsky's first book, uh, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon.

00:31:54
Jesse Michels: Mm.

00:31:54
Eric W. Davis: I think that started it off.

00:31:55
Jesse Michels: Mm.

00:31:56
Eric W. Davis: And then, uh, Lakatsky did his first book and then now second book last year, and I think he's got a third one coming out. And then Lue Elizondo's book came out. And so I think this is a crescendo of things that have come together in, uh, the right time, the right place, the right people, and that's why this is happening.

00:32:13
Jesse Michels: And if you're Stratton and you, you, you're hosting, because he was the guy who ran the UAPTF, the UAP task force.

00:32:19
Eric W. Davis: That's right.

00:32:20
Jesse Michels: And so-

00:32:20
Eric W. Davis: But he also was working, uh, with Jim Lakatsky on the AAWSAP. He was at DIA at the time.

00:32:27
Jesse Michels: So they have-

00:32:28
Eric W. Davis: I don't know if you knew that.

00:32:29
Jesse Michels: I didn't know that. That's interesting.

00:32:30
Eric W. Davis: He, he and Lakatsky-

00:32:31
Jesse Michels: Yeah

00:32:31
Eric W. Davis: ... are the ones that built the AAWSAP program together.

00:32:34
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

00:32:34
Eric W. Davis: So it wasn't just Jim Lakatsky alone. It was Jim and Jay and their support staff. There's, you know, the DIA and, and contractor staff that supported them. So Jay was involved with the AAWSAP from the very beginning.

00:32:47
Jesse Michels: And then, but, uh, then we, we talk about AAWSAP, AATIP, these sorts of programs that are, you know, very small dollar amounts, you know, vis-à-vis-

00:32:55
Eric W. Davis: $22 million, but Harry Reid-

00:32:57
Jesse Michels: The inflation-adjusted Manhattan Project. [laughs]

00:32:59
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, Harry Reid had an intention on turning into a, turning it into a Man- Manhattan Project. Uh, he was intend... This was, like, just to get it started. And then the subsequent fiscal years that would follow, he was intending this to go, like, maybe a decade with worth a billion dollars, maybe $2 billion worth of programmatics.

00:33:19
Jesse Michels: But you are simultaneously saying there is an underlying program that is a legacy reverse engineering program that is-

00:33:26
Eric W. Davis: That, yeah, that sup- this, this came after the fact. This-

00:33:28
Jesse Michels: That has, and that ha- that has to be-

00:33:29
Eric W. Davis: We were trying to get into the crash retrieval program. Our, our goal was to get after it and co-opt it-

00:33:36
Jesse Michels: Yeah

00:33:36
Eric W. Davis: ... into the AAWSAP so we could do what the goals of the AAWSAP wanted us to do, and I don't think that was necessarily to bring it out in the public domain. That was to keep it con- uh, uh, classified anyway.

00:33:48
Jesse Michels: Mm.

00:33:48
Eric W. Davis: But our job was to get access to it because we were not convinced that there was any progress made. And as a matter of fact, the senior VP at, at one of the aerospace corporations who I had years' worth of interviews with, uh, before and after he retired, um, confirmed that there was no success in the reverse engineering program after eight decades, and it just didn't go anywhere. They had minor success, like they understood the materials that craft were made from. They figured out how they were constructed, but we couldn't reproduce any of it. We had no techn- uh, um, we had no fabrication or manufacturing technology at the time of the crash retrieval programs when they were fully funded and fully act- uh, operating to figure that out. We could just use our SEM and, and transmission SEM microscopes and other advanced, uh, uh, s- uh, um, s- condensed matter state diagnostic tools and evaluate it, look at it, look at it down into the, into the, you know, almost nanoscale, and we could see how the materials were assembled, but we could not figure out how to reproduce that process.

00:34:54
Jesse Michels: If we have made no progress, why aren't we more open with the scientific community?

00:34:59
Eric W. Davis: Oh, well, that's the security aspect of it. I, I'm, I'm not involved with that policy aspect.

00:35:04
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

00:35:04
Eric W. Davis: And I don't have contact with the people that make the policy on that, so I can't answer that line of question.

00:35:09
Jesse Michels: But, but you, you are-

00:35:09
Eric W. Davis: But not that I don't want to. I just don't know the answer.

00:35:11
Jesse Michels: No, no, no, I get it. Yeah, and you're s- but you're saying confidently that there are billion-dollar budgets involved in the actual core UFO legacy.

00:35:19
Eric W. Davis: I don't know. I don't know that it's that much. It was on that order as from my interviews with TRW and Lockheed Martin people, um, uh, that that was the or- m- order of magnitude of the budget expenditures that were given, not on an annual basis, but it was more like maybe over a, um, a five to 10-year period. But then the budget would go up and down, just like NASA's budget would go up and down. So the budgets would go up, and they'd have, they'd be flush with money, get in, get a few more people in, get some better equipment in the lab, and then the budget gets cut, and they gotta go to bare minimum operation. People get laid off and whatever.

00:36:00
Jesse Michels: I wanted to ask you, you know, there's this sort of not even lore. There is a document called the "Wilson Davis Memo." You get asked about it all the time. It's, uh, kind of, um, apocryphal meeting that occurred between you and Admiral Thomas Wilson.

00:36:14
Eric W. Davis: It's like a gospel of UFO researchers.

00:36:15
Jesse Michels: [laughs] That's right. The-

00:36:16
Eric W. Davis: The lost gospel of the Bible.

00:36:18
Jesse Michels: You are famous for your meticulous note-taking and, um- Uh, uh, apparently this meeting took place in the EG&G parking lot, and it is this, you know, admiral who is head of, uh, J2 Joint Chiefs.

00:36:29
Eric W. Davis: No, he was retired at the time.

00:36:30
Jesse Michels: He was retired at the time. He was.

00:36:31
Eric W. Davis: He got called back into active duty for a short period of time because he had to close out a project at Area 51 that he was responsible for under his office at the DIA, uh, that he s- initiated. And, um, it was a complicated project. He, he couldn't tell me 'cause I didn't have that kind of level of access or anything like that. So he, he... all I know is he said, "I'm back because I've gotta go back up into that..." He, he wouldn't say Area 51. I knew what he was talking about. He was saying th- he used the word back in those days, the undeclared or unacknowledged facility near the Nevada test site.

00:37:05
Jesse Michels: Right.

00:37:05
Eric W. Davis: And he had to go back there because they need to close out a major project he initiated when he was active duty, uh, DIA director. And, um, and so he was willing to meet with me at the behest of two guys at the National Nuclear Security Agency that I personally knew. John Alexander and I knew them. Uh, we were all members of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. We were forming a Las Vegas chapter in 2002. So these guys were in Las Vegas because one of them is the director of intelligence at the NNSA site in, in Vegas, uh, in Nevada, and the other one was the director of counterintelligence, uh, at the N- NNSA site as well.

00:37:41
Jesse Michels: And so at least formerly, Wilson was supposed to have all military tech under his purview, under his scope, and he's expressing a lot of frustration to you, right? That he's just met with this private corporation.

00:37:53
Eric W. Davis: And this is back in '97.

00:37:54
Jesse Michels: This is in '97.

00:37:55
Eric W. Davis: When-- The summer of '97.

00:37:56
Jesse Michels: And he's saying, he's saying these p- there's this team of people, in the hundreds of people, and they have this tech- this d- uh, material that doesn't seem to be of human origin, and progress is sort of slow and cumbersome, but that he, for whatever reason, wasn't supervising or overseeing it even though he should have been.

00:38:15
Eric W. Davis: No, no. It, it's, it's that he-- They claim he didn't have need to know, and that's possible. Uh, their budget came from his. In other words, their f- their funding, I'm sorry, their funding came from his director's budget, the budget he gets as a director. This was DIA money that he wasn't aware of. He wasn't aware because this, this is a WUSAP. He hadn't been read in on it. And so when you deal with budget line items for these things, they're just innocuous budget codes that a comptroller general of the Defense Department or of the military services or of the US government understands how to read a budget code. And then a, a, a, a standard plain English description is deliberately meant to be vague, so you can't identify it. That way, if the budget document gets, gets captured by espionage assets from foreign nations, foreign adversaries, they won't understand what the hell it is. So all they're gonna see is something they don't, they may or may not even know how to interpret and some innocuous words. And this could be as, as innocuous as aerospace technology review or, uh, well, let's look at the AAWSAP, Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application program. It could be something similar to that or of that nature. You'll see something of that nature. It, it, it doesn't say UFO, alien, off world. You know, it doesn't give you any clear indication as to what it is. It's meant for that, for that reason, is to keep our enemies off the track to be able to figure out what we're spending our money on and where. Wilson didn't know that-

00:39:47
Jesse Michels: Yeah

00:39:47
Eric W. Davis: ... because he didn't have need to know, just like a president of the United States really doesn't have need to know about the crash retrieval program because mostly they have to know to ask about it. And when they ask, that's an order from him that somebody lower down needs to give him a briefing. But if he already doesn't know, he doesn't know to ask.

00:40:04
Jesse Michels: What happened when Jimmy Carter got briefed?

00:40:07
Eric W. Davis: Uh, I don't know what the aftermath is, but I know that Alonzo McDonald confirmed to several of us that, um, in our group during that era, the AAWSAP era, that, uh, he talked to the staff that attended that briefing. He talked to Carter, and it happened. He even sent us the June, uh, I don't remember the date in June, but I've got the document, but it's June 1990-- 1977. Uh, it was an economic meeting in the National Security Council meeting room. But then when it came time for this classified UAP or UFO program briefing, they moved it to the Oval Office.

00:40:45
Jesse Michels: Do you know what the nature of the meeting was?

00:40:47
Eric W. Davis: Well, that, what we popularly known as Project Aquarius. And so, uh, I know that Alonzo did not dispute that that was the code name. It might not have been, but it might have been. But he said this was it. This is the real deal. This really happened. And by the way, I got from, from the Carter Library the attendee list for that date, and it shows the name of the regular meeting for the economic something council because that's what Alonzo Mc- McDonald's job is at the White House. So, um-

00:41:17
Jesse Michels: Is that public information?

00:41:19
Eric W. Davis: So the names of the people that attended were there. The only thing is two names and organizations were redacted. Out of all the lists on two pages, only two got redacted.

00:41:27
Jesse Michels: Can you send me that?

00:41:28
Eric W. Davis: Say again?

00:41:29
Jesse Michels: Can you send me that with the redactions, obviously?

00:41:30
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I can send that.

00:41:31
Jesse Michels: That'd be amazing. [chuckles]

00:41:32
Eric W. Davis: Um, so basically, uh, Alonzo confirmed that it happened. He was then the principal staff director of the White House staff. I think that was the title back then.

00:41:44
Jesse Michels: Mm-hmm.

00:41:44
Eric W. Davis: Before that, he was Jimmy Carter's special representative for trade, I think, to the United Nations. So he had something like, uh, an ambassador or a, an ambassador level title.

00:41:56
Jesse Michels: Do you know anything that transpired in the meeting itself as far as what-

00:41:59
Eric W. Davis: Well, he talked to Carter and, and the, and the guys that are list- named on that list, and he asked them what went, what transpired. Carter told him, and the guys in, who attended told him.

00:42:08
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

00:42:09
Eric W. Davis: And they said, "We learned that the United States government has been in contact with aliens, UFO beings." Um-

00:42:16
Jesse Michels: Danny Sheehan says Carter's head was... Oh, so continue. Sorry.

00:42:20
Eric W. Davis: Well, what he does is when he's in a moment of stress or something that's really critical, um, Alonzo told us that Jimmy or Car- President Carter has a habit of putting his head down on his table like this and praying. This is how he prays on his desk Or at a table. At a briefing table. So that's what he was doing. He was just praying, and he was praying about the consequence of this information that he'd just now learned, uh, what its con- what its, what its, uh, consequence to American society is, and maybe to the United States government and our defense of our country against an unknown potential hostile, we don't know, force that we don't have the technology [laughs] to overwhelm.

00:43:01
Jesse Michels: Did he learn about w- Have we had treaties or agreements with any of these beings or-

00:43:06
Eric W. Davis: That I never heard about, no. That never came up.

00:43:08
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:43:09
Eric W. Davis: I, I don't recall. I've seen the Aquarius document. Alonzo said it was real. People have been saying for years that that was fabricated by Bill Moore, uh, and Rick Doty, and it turns out, no. Alonzo said those guys had nothing to do with anything. That document, uh ... And by the way, I don't think you can find that document on the internet unless you use the WayBack Machine all, now, nowadays.

00:43:30
Jesse Michels: Mm.

00:43:30
Eric W. Davis: It used to be available, uh, as late as 2010 or '11, and then it's just gone. So, um, Alonzo read every word of the Aquarius briefing and he said, "Oh yeah, that's what these guys told me that they did." They, the guys at the, in the briefing got together afterwards, went to a motel, and they basically wrote down from memory, uh, what they recalled about the briefing, 'cause they each got briefing documents. When the briefing is orally given, they're reading through it. Then when the briefing's over, they gotta give the document back to the CIA guy at the door that gave them the documents 'cause they're gonna be destroyed.

00:44:06
Jesse Michels: Where, where's what they wrote down from memory? Where, where are those documents? [laughs]

00:44:10
Eric W. Davis: Well, those ... Well, that's the thing. Those are gone. Um-

00:44:12
Jesse Michels: Okay

00:44:12
Eric W. Davis: ... so I'll get to that. So, uh-

00:44:14
Jesse Michels: How do you know they're gone?

00:44:15
Eric W. Davis: The White House gets a copy.

00:44:16
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:44:16
Eric W. Davis: Permanent copy for their records.

00:44:18
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

00:44:18
Eric W. Davis: So that's in a really heavily classified part of the Carter Library, I believe, maybe. And then the, uh, CIA keeps a copy 'cause that's their program. Okay, so these guys had eight, uh, eight-by-14 inch, you know, legal pads, and they all meet up in a hotel, um, and they all start downpouring from memory what they think they re- what they recall of the briefing document. So they, they did a round robin. So everybody passes their document to the next guy, so forth and so on, all the way around. And so they're gonna cross-check what they remember against the other guys' notes. And they're gonna keep doing this until they fi- You know, they're gonna disagree on what was said on this little point, on this language and this terminology and whatnot. They're gonna keep doing that until they finally converge on a document that, that strongly resembles the briefing document that they all read. And they all agree on it, and they said, "Yeah, this is more close to what we read, and we collectively, you know, came to this convergent final version." So somebody typed that up on a, on a old-fashioned, uh, electrothermal, um, printer, and that's what you see in the photographs that Bill Moore took of that document.

00:45:35
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:45:35
Eric W. Davis: And it was said that the Senior Falcon... Senior Falcon was somebody else. I know his name, I just can't think of it, but it's in one of my, uh, one of my investigation-

00:45:45
Jesse Michels: Why do all these guys have bird names?

00:45:49
Eric W. Davis: I don't know. That's just the choice of an admiral at the DIA who came up with that.

00:45:52
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:45:53
Eric W. Davis: He, nothing to do with the Aviary. Aviary is more in the 1990s conspiracy era.

00:45:58
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:45:58
Eric W. Davis: Or maybe the late '80s even.

00:46:00
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:46:00
Eric W. Davis: Early as that. No, this is... Senior Falcon was a DIA, uh, officer who was sent to communicate with Jamie Shandera and Bill Moore.

00:46:10
Jesse Michels: Mm.

00:46:10
Eric W. Davis: He was the one that passed undeveloped 35-millimeter film of the so-called MJ 12 documents. These are the first generation documents that were created by James Jesus Angleton's chop shop, his s- his mole hunting document production factory. So that's the connection there, is that these documents came from the, uh, Defense Intelligence Agency. It was the, uh, Directorate of Human Intelligence Collection.

00:46:38
Jesse Michels: Mm.

00:46:39
Eric W. Davis: And Admiral, uh, E.A. Burkholder, Edward Burkholder, was the director. And Air Force Colonel Roy Jonkers was his chief of staff. So those documents came out of there. Well, this whole thing about the films, the, the undeveloped rolls of 35-millimeter film that would go to Bill Moore and Jamie Shandera, that was what that was about. Rick Doty was considered to be the Junior Falcon, but he was not a legitimate mediator of information from the DIA to Bill Moore. He was more coming out of AFOSI as a counterintelligence agent trying to throw him off the track.

00:47:17
Jesse Michels: Let's just keep it high level, I guess. So you have, you have Roswell in '47. You have Magenta before that in Italy, but then this, this craft crashes there and that gets transferred to US possession.

00:47:30
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

00:47:31
Jesse Michels: And then how many other crashes between the '30s and today?

00:47:36
Eric W. Davis: Um, I can't give you the official number because I know that number on a classified basis. I could say it's less than 40.

00:47:43
Jesse Michels: Okay, less than 40. I think Hal Puthoff said on "The Joe Rogan Experience" somewhere, like we have between 10 and 15 crash-

00:47:52
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Well-

00:47:52
Jesse Michels: Uh, crafts in our possession

00:47:53
Eric W. Davis: ... I don't think he said 15. I think he said more than 10, but that's still-

00:47:56
Jesse Michels: More than 10.

00:47:57
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

00:47:57
Jesse Michels: Okay. Got it.

00:47:57
Eric W. Davis: He said more than 10. I'll just say less than 40.

00:47:59
Jesse Michels: Would y-

00:48:00
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

00:48:00
Jesse Michels: More than 10.

00:48:00
Eric W. Davis: Would you describe the majority as wreckage or intact?

00:48:04
Jesse Michels: A mix.

00:48:06
Eric W. Davis: Uh, an e- an even-

00:48:07
Jesse Michels: It's a mix

00:48:07
Eric W. Davis: ... mix. Okay.

00:48:08
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

00:48:08
Eric W. Davis: Okay. And not all of them involve recovery of an, an HI bodies.

00:48:13
Jesse Michels: Dr. Davis, uh, what gives you confidence that we haven't made progress with any of this material?

00:48:20
Eric W. Davis: Uh, I can't speak of my confidence level after my senior VP source died, uh, because before then I'm highly confident because he was still connected in. Uh, he was, he was still on active duty work up until he got retired in the early 2010s. Then he's retired after that, so he's sharing with me the information that he had all the way up until he retired. And so I'm highly confident at 100% level that What he told me is right. And a, a matter of fact, he arranged for me to meet one of his coworkers on the crash retrieval program back in the '70s and '80s.

00:49:00
Jesse Michels: Did you meet them?

00:49:01
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yeah. It was a woman. I met her. Uh, we-- He, my source, his wife, uh, took me to her home, picked her up. We went into San Jose to have dinner at a German restaurant.

00:49:11
Jesse Michels: How many of those people, crash retrieval program people, have you met total?

00:49:15
Eric W. Davis: Let's see. Two... Okay, so I think it's five total.

00:49:20
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:49:20
Eric W. Davis: I think it's five total at that one, at that particular company.

00:49:23
Jesse Michels: How many have you met total in your life?

00:49:25
Eric W. Davis: It was just those two from that company and one from TRW.

00:49:29
Jesse Michels: Okay. Wow. [laughs]

00:49:30
Jack C: Did you meet many of the 40, uh, of Dave Grusch's firsthand witnesses?

00:49:35
Eric W. Davis: Say again?

00:49:35
Jack C: Did you meet many of the 40 of Dave Grusch's firsthand witnesses?

00:49:37
Eric W. Davis: I don't even know who they are, really. He never shared that with me.

00:49:40
Jack C: I see. Okay.

00:49:40
Eric W. Davis: I have a rough guess, but believe me, don't confuse that 40-

00:49:44
Jesse Michels: Yeah

00:49:45
Eric W. Davis: ... with the 40 core people on the task force, on the UAP task force. They're, they're not-

00:49:50
Jesse Michels: Totally different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:49:51
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. They're totally different. There's no overlap.

00:49:52
Jesse Michels: No. That, that, that makes... That would hope that there's no overlap. [chuckles]

00:49:55
Eric W. Davis: I think Dave was a-- Yeah, I don't think Dave was allowed to tell me the names of those people or their organizations and where they're located because that, that was es- WooSAP level.

00:50:02
Jesse Michels: Yeah. Final question-

00:50:03
Eric W. Davis: Then-

00:50:04
Jesse Michels: ... be-before I wanna get into the, the second section of this discussion, uh, where I want you to drive mostly. But, um, uh, how did Admiral Thomas Wilson react, uh, when you, when you met him in 1997? And, and why, I guess, why did people direct him to you? And then, uh, what transpired in the, in the meeting?

00:50:22
Eric W. Davis: Well, I can't get into that.

00:50:23
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:50:24
Eric W. Davis: We can't confirm or deny that we met for the security reasons.

00:50:27
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:50:27
Eric W. Davis: There are legal issues still involved that are active. So-

00:50:30
Jesse Michels: Okay

00:50:30
Eric W. Davis: ... um, uh, because I can't reveal that in public. That wasn't meant for public, uh, consumption, and that was released from Mitchell's estate.

00:50:39
Jesse Michels: Mm-hmm.

00:50:40
Eric W. Davis: And, um, that was supposed to be destroyed one year after Mitchell got a copy of it as a courtesy from, from who generated it. And, uh, unfortunate that his kids were sloppy and, um, and I guess Ed was sloppy in that he didn't give any instructions on what to do with that document if, if he should die. But he was supposed to destroy that as far as I understand. Um-

00:51:02
Jack C: I, I would be remiss if I didn't, I, uh, this can be cut if it's not okay to air. But, uh, during our discussion in San Francisco, you did, uh, confirm that you wrote the Wilson Davis notes by way of a conversation about-

00:51:14
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I, I can confirm they're real

00:51:15
Jack C: ... seeking legal, legal counsel.

00:51:16
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, they're real. They're legit. They're 100% accurate. Yeah.

00:51:19
Jack C: Okay. Thank you.

00:51:20
Eric W. Davis: But that's the typewritten version. Um, that, there's a handwritten version, but that's all I can say about it. Um, uh, so-

00:51:28
Jesse Michels: Have you, have you ever seen a UFO?

00:51:30
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yeah. My wife and I did in Tucson, Arizona, broad daylight, a boomerang-shaped craft below traffic pattern altitude. Uh, looked, uh, kind of like halfway boomer-boomerang, halfway heel, bootheel s-type shape, but it was close.

00:51:45
Jesse Michels: Have you ever seen a, a craft in a hangar?

00:51:48
Eric W. Davis: No.

00:51:48
Jesse Michels: Have you ever-

00:51:49
Eric W. Davis: I wish.

00:51:49
Jesse Michels: [laughs]

00:51:50
Eric W. Davis: I want to.

00:51:50
Jesse Michels: Have, have you ever seen any one-of-one material, so idiosyncratic, never seen before material?

00:51:55
Eric W. Davis: No. Mm-mm.

00:51:56
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:51:56
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, and the ARPS parts don't qualify.

00:51:58
Jesse Michels: Okay. Okay.

00:51:59
Eric W. Davis: We don't know what the provenance of that is. And Hal and I were involved in the, um, TTS, uh, meeting at the Pentagon conference room in August of 2024, where we read the full 90-page ORNL, ORNL. That's the office, um, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Uh, their 90-page materials analysis report on the ARPS parts. And there was nothing there. There was no there there. There's a little bit of angu-ambiguity because here's the ambiguity. The way that material was assembled is not consistent with what we were doing in the 1940s era when magnesium became a major to- uh, a major m-alloy of interest for the aerospace community. Um, and so, uh, that's the ambiguity. But the isotope ratios of the materials it contains are Earth. They're manufactured.

00:52:51
Jesse Michels: Part of what I love about you is you are a walking compendium of-

00:52:55
Eric W. Davis: [chuckles]

00:52:55
Jesse Michels: ... all these exotic, uh, you know, e-experiments, physics experiments. And whenever, you know, anybody gets, uh, some sort of anomalous result, uh, uh, you are a great evaluator of that. And you've written a, a book that I will, uh, I'll plug here called, uh, Frontiers of Propulsion Science, where you've comprehensively reviewed a lot of these sort of more exotic, you know, propellantless propulsion sort of, uh, you know, uh, modalities. Have you ever seen, uh, an exotic experimental result or an experimental result that's anomalous rather, that, um, you believe is, is real and replic- replicable and, and, and not-

00:53:32
Eric W. Davis: No, I wish I, I-

00:53:33
Jesse Michels: Okay

00:53:34
Eric W. Davis: ... did. I haven't.

00:53:35
Jesse Michels: Nothing that's ever, you know, breaks the sort of standard model or, you know, any- anything.

00:53:38
Eric W. Davis: No, certainly not. No.

00:53:39
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:53:40
Eric W. Davis: I just think that the standard model has done an outstanding job through the avenue of condensed matter theory to come up with some pretty exotic condensed matter states, which have been, uh, theore- pred- you know, theoretical curiosities decades ago. And now we've advanced our laboratory technology and condensed matter physics so well that they're discovered. They're being discovered right now. So they're really wonderful, wonderful exotic states. Insulator, topological insulators, metamaterials, uh, uh, all kinds of other stuff, uh, like Majorana particles that are supposed to be, uh, I think they're massless, aren't they, Eric?

00:54:15
Jack C: Well, if you have a-

00:54:16
Eric W. Davis: The Majorana particles

00:54:17
Jack C: ... if you have a, a Majorana mass mechanism different from a Dirac mecha- uh, mass mechanism, that's only possible if a particle is its own antiparticle.

00:54:26
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, that's right.

00:54:27
Jack C: Is that correct?

00:54:27
Eric W. Davis: That's right. But they, these are not free particles. These are quasiparticles.

00:54:32
Jack C: Okay.

00:54:32
Eric W. Davis: Because they are, uh, rep- they are, they're quasiparticles because they're created by the collective action of the electrons in the semiconductor or condensed matter system.

00:54:42
Jesse Michels: I wanna cede the floor, uh, to my former colleague, Eric Weinstein. Uh, y- I appreciate you indulging all my crazy UFO questions. Just wanted to kind of establish a ground truth around Eric Davis' past experience. Uh- One of my favorite comments on our last discussion with Hal Puthoff was, "Now I know what a dog feels like when it watches TV." [chuckles] And so if, uh, you know, this is not for the faint of mind, just so you're aware from, you know, for the audience.

00:55:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:55:10
Jesse Michels: Uh, this will be a really fun discussion, but I, you know, I wanna get into what we touched on, which is why are there no theoretical physicists on the program, and what do you think is going on? H-h-how do you think maybe what we're, we've talked about with the observables of UFOs might dovetail with some of your theories?

00:55:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, I, I don't even know how to begin this. I mean, the... Look, the first thing is, is that in general, I can produce too many explanations through a creative, sometimes undisciplined mind for a certain set of facts. And this is one of the only times, and perhaps the only time I've ever seen a situation where I cannot come up with a single theory of what's going on that explains all of the bizarre behavior in UFO/UAP land. Too many people who seem relatively reasonable with nearly eidetic memories, talking about particular names, dates. It is impossible to me that we have a theater company that has figured out how to, to create this space opera, and on the other hand, the lack of anything tangible, um, I don't believe in a, something this, this old, this long, this many events that we have absolutely nothing, uh, to go on. So let me just say from the beginning that this is the odd situation. One of the reasons nobody from my world wants to get involved with it is that, um, it just makes you look foolish from the per- point of view of a scientist.

00:56:43
Eric W. Davis: Well-

00:56:43
Eric Weinstein: Because every- everything's a-

00:56:45
Eric W. Davis: ... they can't get involved unless they're working on a contract-

00:56:47
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the sky is a-

00:56:48
Eric W. Davis: ... specifically for that. Then they get a clearance and they work on it.

00:56:50
Eric Weinstein: Sky, sky is a big place, and-

00:56:52
Eric W. Davis: Uh, I disagree

00:56:54
Eric Weinstein: ... you said that you've-

00:56:56
Eric W. Davis: One of the top government scientists, I can't think of his name, you would know who it is. Uh, gosh, he was a physicist, and I just... Hal Puthoff knew him, and, um, he had all, he had a lot of clearances into the Manhattan Project, the post-Manhattan Project, uh, a lot of other high technology projects throughout areas of the DoD. Um, uh, and, and so he was a academician, and he had clearances. A colleague of mine up at Baylor also has, uh, DoD clearance-

00:57:28
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, look-

00:57:28
Eric W. Davis: ... classifications, classifications, and he's working on classified stuff that you're not familiar with, you've never heard of. You won't get access to it. If you have a contract-

00:57:36
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait. What's... So-

00:57:36
Eric W. Davis: ... that requires a clearance, you will get access to something you don't know about in the public domain.

00:57:41
Eric Weinstein: I, I, okay. I, I understand that there's a lot of stuff that's classified. We have an entire system of national labs. There's no question about that.

00:57:48
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yeah.

00:57:49
Eric Weinstein: I'm talking, I'm talking about like at the level of ground truth, right? Our, our two primary theories are the standard model and general relativity. Both of them are relevant here as limitations on what we can understand of the world we see, and if somebody has access to theories beyond those two, uh, and they predicate manufacturing on it, and then we get the gifts of that manufacturing, just assuming that that story is correct, um, we should be seeing some very weird stuff that is not e-explicable, as if Newton was looking at Lorentz contraction. He would say, "What the heck is that?" And, um, so I'm, I'm just gonna begin with things that make me hugely uncomfortable, and again, it's not as a, a dig or s- it's like I just can't figure this out. So we toss off these humanoid aliens, like aliens that are tetrapods, literally tetrapod body, body plans. We have arachnids, we have insects, we have cephalopods. We have all sorts of intelligent life that doesn't follow a tetrapod body plan.

00:59:00
Eric W. Davis: Right.

00:59:01
Eric Weinstein: The odd of a humanoid evolving through convergent evolution somewhere else, of a humanoid i-i-is vanishingly small.

00:59:13
Eric W. Davis: But it's not zero.

00:59:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:59:16
Eric W. Davis: [chuckles]

00:59:17
Eric Weinstein: But it's preposterous.

00:59:18
Jesse Michels: But Occam's razor wouldn't be that these beings would be from elsewhere. They would be that they'd be derivative of humans.

00:59:24
Eric Weinstein: Or, or look, you, you-

00:59:26
Eric W. Davis: That's a possibility

00:59:26
Eric Weinstein: ... you can tell me some other story, like these things aren't even really the beings, that, that the real beings have constructed these things to interact with us, not to, not to make us uncomfortable. Okay, I understand that.

00:59:37
Jesse Michels: Do you believe that?

00:59:39
Eric Weinstein: That's possible.

00:59:40
Jesse Michels: Okay.

00:59:40
Eric Weinstein: All right. But any biologist hearing this story is just gonna [chuckles] have the same reaction. Like, tetrapods? This sounds like it came out of a, you know, a Buck Rogers thing where you had to... It was too hire- too, too hard to hire an actor to behave as if they had a completely different body plan. So all, all alien, aliens from the golden age of cinema or silent movies, whatever, were gonna be tetrapods if they were playing an alien. So that, first of all, really bugs me, is, is that I don't wanna hear about that with no mention of it is stunning that there are two eyes, a mouth, a head, it, and it walks the same way we do. I mean, even if you look at like a, I don't know, a camel's legs, you know, the, where we have a knee, it has an ankle or, you know, something like that.

01:00:32
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:00:33
Eric Weinstein: So, so that's, that's the first part, and that's just the biological. The next part is, um, I d- I was very interested looking through some of your physics papers. You seem to live in a world that I really honestly didn't know existed, so I learned something from that. It's sort of like national security physics.

01:00:58
Eric W. Davis: National security physics?

01:00:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. That's not like a real thing, but if I look at a lot of your papers, they're focused on- Bizarre f- how would I put it? Bizarre physics that accepts the standard model and general relativity as ground truth predicated on some sort of engineering desire to-

01:01:19
Eric W. Davis: No, I'm just looking at, uh, for my, per my book, uh, I was looking at the physics of what's possible with anti-gravity, gravitational wave propulsion or rockets.

01:01:29
Eric Weinstein: Within what? Within what framework?

01:01:31
Eric W. Davis: Say again. G-

01:01:32
Eric Weinstein: Within-

01:01:33
Eric W. Davis: GR

01:01:33
Eric Weinstein: ... GR.

01:01:33
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:01:34
Eric Weinstein: So GR with or without positivity constraints or how are you, how are you, um... Let's, let's slow it down. First of all, I don't understand. If these things are here from out of town, if they're not co-resident with us here on Earth, they're not here using the standard model and general relativity, I don't think. I mean, it's not impossible, but-

01:01:59
Eric W. Davis: But I'm not doing UFO physics. I'm doing propulsion physics for interstellar flight. This, uh, I'm not looking at this from a UFO perspective. I'm doing this as part of another part of my work.

01:02:07
Eric Weinstein: So maybe you can make this b- uh, uh, so you're, you're the phys-

01:02:10
Eric W. Davis: Warp drive, wormholes, things like that.

01:02:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:02:13
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:02:14
Eric Weinstein: Uh, honest-

01:02:14
Eric W. Davis: I'm not doing this because of UFOs. I'm just saying, "Hey, if this is valid to any degree and we could expect maybe or pray maybe that in the future we can engineer these things, this could be how UFOs move." Because we're trying to-

01:02:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:02:31
Eric W. Davis: ... develop this physics for exploitation as a technology for future interstellar-

01:02:35
Eric Weinstein: So this-

01:02:35
Eric W. Davis: ... manned interstellar missions.

01:02:36
Eric Weinstein: So this is hugely important for me just to understand the context. If I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong 'cause I don't wanna push anything that isn't true. I think what you're saying is assume a proof of concept that something can voyage at an interstellar level with intention.

01:02:54
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:02:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Assuming that one piece of information, attempt to figure out how that could be done as best you can with the tools we have.

01:03:06
Eric W. Davis: Yes.

01:03:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So then you and I completely polarize, I think, and again, I could be wrong, on one, one issue. I would not be wasting my time, a- again, that's judgmental. I would feel that I was wasting my time if I was trying to do this with GR, with general relativity.

01:03:26
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

01:03:26
Eric Weinstein: I might have an Alcubierre warp drive, but I'd think, "How much energy do I need to warp space in this particular way?" Right? Or, well, I could fall into a spinning black hole and, you know, maybe I could try to figure how this would be traversable and non-catastrophic. And I could imagine using all of the exotica of GR. Well, I'll just, I'll bet everything on time dilation, and it'll be really expensive to go there and, and home, but I can still get there-

01:03:56
Eric W. Davis: Yes

01:03:57
Eric Weinstein: ... using, uh, Lorentz, uh, conversion factors. None of that has any appeal to me. Clearly it's had great-

01:04:06
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

01:04:06
Eric Weinstein: ... a great appeal to you, which is fine. We're, w- we can pol- we can polarize on that. Surely you don't think... It's mu- isn't it much more plausible that if craft were true, and we accept that as our premise, that it's basically proof that GR isn't the last world, that general relativity is a constricting framework and that there's something beyond it that has general relativity as an effective theory and-

01:04:32
Eric W. Davis: I agree with that

01:04:33
Eric Weinstein: ... and they're using that.

01:04:34
Eric W. Davis: I agree with that.

01:04:35
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So that makes this mysterious, which is why are you using GR?

01:04:41
Eric W. Davis: Because that's the only tool I have that I know of from my graduate education and my research interest. And so I don't, I, I don't have the liberty to... I'm not a pure theoretical physicist. I'm more of like one foot theory, one foot applied.

01:04:56
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so let's, let's take that. If I had access to anything that seemingly was breaking GR, general relativity, I'd be dreaming about things related to general relativity, because we know that we don't like general relativity-

01:05:15
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

01:05:15
Eric Weinstein: ... at a deep level. It's got a terrible variable in it, which is called the metric.

01:05:19
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:05:20
Eric Weinstein: Where it's easy to fall into things that are not metrics from the space of metrics, things... It just doesn't behave well in terms of quantization. We know that we have got these two kinks in space time called the initial singularity, which we associate with the Big Bang, and the Schwarzschild or black hole singularity that we associate with collapsed stars.

01:05:40
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:05:41
Eric Weinstein: And I don't like GR. I mean, I love it from the point of view of, of Einstein having pulled it off, but it's 110 years past its sell-by date.

01:05:54
Eric W. Davis: Right.

01:05:54
Eric Weinstein: And why, why are you not tweaking it?

01:06:01
Eric W. Davis: I'm, don't have intuition on how I could tweak, tweak it.

01:06:06
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So-

01:06:06
Eric W. Davis: And I would rather somebody smarter than me do that. [laughs]

01:06:11
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:06:11
Eric W. Davis: I would like to have somebody who tweaks it and I could look at it and say, "Hey, it either does or does not predict a potential propulsion mode that could get us to where we wanna go across interstellar distances without the consequence of G over C to the fourth."

01:06:30
Eric Weinstein: So how do I interpret... There are a lot of people who are interested in gravity.

01:06:43
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:06:44
Eric Weinstein: And they're none of them on this program?

01:06:46
Eric W. Davis: S- say that again. Uh, other people are interested in gravity-

01:06:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, let, let me start from a different place. There is this 1971 Australian document that I became aware of where the Australian intelligence officer, Harry, do you remember his last name?

01:07:00
Eric W. Davis: Harry Turner, who was head of their nuclear division.

01:07:03
Eric Weinstein: Starts writing down, "Here's what we surmise about our friends, the Yanks, and their efforts in this area.

01:07:12
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

01:07:12
Eric Weinstein: And he names, I don't know, six universities, uh, and the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT, Purdue, Indiana. Um, I forget what, what the complete list is. And he names, like, Arnowitt, Desser-

01:07:26
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yes

01:07:27
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, Dyson, Oppenheimer, and it sounds like the Manhattan Project for gravity.

01:07:33
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

01:07:35
Eric Weinstein: And this is broadly consistent with this story that I've been, uh, I think I first did it on, on Rogan in episode 1945, which they gave me the Trinity date. I love that.

01:07:49
Eric W. Davis: [chuckles]

01:07:49
Eric Weinstein: Um, which is that we have this bizarre thing called the Golden Age of General Relativity.

01:07:55
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:07:56
Eric Weinstein: Which makes absolutely no sense. And it's a story about two people, uh, Agnew Bainson and Roger Babson, who appear to be in the language of the intel... And again, I'm not a guy who thinks he's seen a bunch of Jason Bourne movies so he can talk the lingo, but they appear to be what I've been told are cutouts. And they're both fitted with stories, it seems, about why they need to contribute in the an- to anti-gravity. And they find two physicists to work through, one named Bryce DeWitt. So Agnew Bainson and John Wheeler find Bryce DeWitt and set him up at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill at the Institute of Field Physics.

01:08:36
Eric W. Davis: Right.

01:08:36
Eric Weinstein: And then the other one, Roger Babson, uh, out of New Boston, New Hampshire, uh, seems to be somehow linked up with a guy named Louis Witten, who's a gravitational physicist out of Johns Hopkins for his PhD, and found something that sounds like Bell Labs that nobody's ever heard of called the Research Institute of Advanced Study, or RIAS, and it has Sheldon Glashow within it, it has Rudolf Kallmann within it. It has Solomon Lefschetz, the topologist, comes out of retirement to work inside of the Martin, and we always talk about Lockheed, but we don't talk about Glen-

01:09:18
Eric W. Davis: The Martin

01:09:18
Eric Weinstein: ... Glenn L. Martin that became Martin Marietta that became Lockheed Martin. So it's the Martin that really matters and to-

01:09:24
Eric W. Davis: Hmm. Correct.

01:09:25
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:09:26
Eric W. Davis: And you and I have talked about that years past.

01:09:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:09:29
Eric W. Davis: And I've read the documents or the websites you've sent to me, and I'm already familiar with elements of that.

01:09:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:09:33
Eric W. Davis: Like that old newspaper clipping.

01:09:35
Eric Weinstein: All right. So we, we've got 18 talent. We've got Sheldon Glashow, Rudolf Kallmann, Solomon Lefschetz, d- uh, Desser, Arnowitt, Dyson. This, th-this begins to feel like, you know, the boys are back in town.

01:09:48
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. This is physics firepower.

01:09:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Right. And then the trail just seems to go cold in the beginning of the 1970s.

01:10:01
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

01:10:02
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:10:03
Eric W. Davis: And I could never reconcile that. I noticed that back in graduate school during the '80s, and I went to an APS meeting. That's the American Physical Society. So I went to Amer- an APS meeting with my dissertation supervisor, and I ran into-- They had, like, a booth for the APS, you know, all the books they sell, uh, the, the, the "Physics Today" magazine. Well, that was published by somebody else, actually. But, uh, they have all that for members, for membership services and benefits. And, uh, so they've got this advertising booth in the commercial s- p- exhibit part of the, uh, conference, and they had the APS historian. And I brought that up with the historian, like, what, 1984? And Bob Forward at, uh, was still at the Hughes Research Labs in Malibu. He's the one that motivated me to ask that question, because he had been looking at anti-gravity when he was at Hughes. And this is before he got his PhD in general relativity under Joseph Weber at, um, University of Maryland in the late '50s. And the APS historian had no answer for me as to where this disconnect between the... Yeah, where, where-- what happened to anti-gravity research? What happened to this golden age of GR? Uh, he said, he said something to the effect of similar to what you said. It disappeared in the '70s, but he never saw what happened. All of a sudden, roughly the early '80s, now we have superstring theory coming out.

01:11:39
Eric Weinstein: No. There's a, there's an interregnum. So we have this golden age of general relativity. Um, things culminate in the standard model '73, '74-

01:11:49
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:11:49
Eric Weinstein: ... in particle theory. There is a period where there are two great ideas in physics, supersymmetry and grand unification-

01:11:58
Eric W. Davis: Right

01:11:59
Eric Weinstein: ... which dominate during the '70s. Then there's a pre-string-like craze for something called N equals eight supergravity. And N equals eight supergravity-

01:12:10
Eric W. Davis: I've got a book on supergravity

01:12:10
Eric Weinstein: ... was the candidate theory. It's too unique to be wrong theory of everything. And then right up until 1984, where we get the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation, and Ed Witten, Louis Witten's son, directs the entire field, uh, to put its energies on one bet. And this is where the, the phrase the only game in town, which would be-

01:12:34
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, I remember that

01:12:35
Eric Weinstein: ... TOGIT, T-O-G-I-T, the only game in town. And TOGIT takes over physics, where if you say anything that isn't string during this period right after 1984, it's a bloodbath. And basically, Feynman is upset about it. Glashow is upset about it. Weinberg basically pleads no contest and says, "I, I'm voting with my feet. I'm gonna go do this cosmology at, in Texas." And v- years later, we get this very weird meeting about AI, not, not related to physics, between Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. And they're sat down and told, "Do not invest In AI startups. AI startups are not going to be allowed to be a thing. We're gonna have two or three a- AI companies, and we're gonna cocoon them as part, as part of the federal government.

01:13:28
Eric W. Davis: Huh.

01:13:29
Eric Weinstein: And Andreessen, uh, and Horowitz are sitting there, and Horowitz says, well, I think they say: "Well, how are you going to restrict this? You can't do it at the technology level because it's just math, and you can't classify math."

01:13:41
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:13:42
Marc Andreesen: So, so Ben basically said: "Look, it doesn't make sense because to regulate AI at the technology level, you're regulating math, and of course, we're not gonna do that. Like, that doesn't make any sense." And you'll recall that what they said was, "No, actually-

01:13:52
Eric W. Davis: We can classify math

01:13:53
Marc Andreesen: ... we can classify math." And literally, this was, this is verba- this is verbatim. This is, this is, uh, we, we did, we, we cla- we classified a whole entire areas of physics, uh, with, in the nuclear era and-

01:14:03
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

01:14:03
Marc Andreesen: ... and, and made, made, made them state secrets. Like of the-

01:14:06
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

01:14:06
Marc Andreesen: ... of the, of the, like, theoretical-

01:14:07
Eric W. Davis: Physics, yeah

01:14:08
Marc Andreesen: ... science of physics.

01:14:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Now, quantum gravity, if you look and you do a Google Ngram search, there is basically no hits on quantum gravity until around 1972, and it comes out of nowhere, and we're backfitted with a story where, um, I can get almost any physicist of today to repeat the phrase that, uh, quantum gravity is the holy grail of theoretical physics.

01:14:37
Eric W. Davis: That's right.

01:14:37
Eric Weinstein: It's a fictitious history. So-

01:14:39
Eric W. Davis: I remember that's when Fulling, Davies, um, Ford, and that group started publishing their papers on semi-classical quantum gravity.

01:14:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, but my, my point is, the physicists do not know their own history, just the way most academicians believe that peer review goes back to the founding of the Royal Society, and it's very clear that it comes from about 1965 to 1975.

01:15:06
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

01:15:07
Eric Weinstein: Um, so what we've done is we've erased institutional memory of the physicists' origin story from the physics community, and the, this issue of quantum gravity looks like a cock-blocking mechanism, that it basically binds to the receptor of a physicist's mind, and it causes them not to make progress. And so we're forty-two years into an unquestionable, um, feels like a mass psychosis.

01:15:37
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. We've had all these different approaches that never work to quantize gravity.

01:15:42
Eric Weinstein: Right. So you have, you have-

01:15:43
Eric W. Davis: They're all dead ends

01:15:43
Eric Weinstein: ... what appears to be a mass delusion. Not that it wouldn't be a good theory. I, I believe that gra- gravity has to be harmonized with the quantum.

01:15:49
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:15:49
Eric Weinstein: I'm not disputing the quantum.

01:15:52
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, there's no question.

01:15:52
Eric Weinstein: But the idea that Einstein must be beaten, uh, taken to the ground, and forced to submit to the quantum has not been productive.

01:16:01
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

01:16:02
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:16:02
Eric W. Davis: I agree

01:16:03
Eric Weinstein: ... okay. But after forty-two years of failure, you would imagine we would hold at least one, two, or ten conferences saying, "What do we have wrong? Why are we not trying to make progress?"

01:16:14
Eric W. Davis: And you don't see that.

01:16:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's the mirror to your thing that there are no physicists on the program. In other words, this is an effect that is so dumb, it, it is so pathologically stupid, so unfathomably wasteful. Why would you not question your own lack of progress? You know, in, in fact, Leonard Susskind, one of the fathers of modern string theory, was on a, a show of a sister podcast, Curt Jaimungal's-

01:16:42
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

01:16:42
Eric Weinstein: ... Theories of Everything. And I-- or maybe it was with Lawrence Krauss, and he says, "We have to go back to the beginning. We have to question absolutely. We've got this wrong. W- if, if we don't go back to the foundations..." I'm just thinking like, finally, it's breaking. He says, "The foundations," and he says, "of string theory." I say, oh, string theory has failed, so what we need to do is not question the string assumption, but we have to go back to the foundations of string theory and fix string theory? I mean, it's an infinite sequence. So one of the questions that I have is, is physics just... D- are we, are we not getting the obvious? Somebody figured out that physics is just too dangerous to do in a university setting.

01:17:28
Eric W. Davis: It seems that way to me. It seems that way to me.

01:17:33
Eric Weinstein: Because you see, now we're a joke.

01:17:35
Eric W. Davis: That's right.

01:17:37
Eric Weinstein: But in nineteen, I don't know, '79, '77, you had these two Streisand effect problems. You had a guy named John Aristotle Phillips, who was a junior at Princeton, who chose Freeman Dyson for his advisor for his junior thesis, and he said, "Look, I'm the Princeton mascot. I'm not really very good at physics. Can we use the fact that I'm not really good at physics to do something novel?" And Dyson said, "Like what?" And he said, "Well, I want to design an atomic weapon, and I want you to tell me whether my design would work using my limited understanding of physics." And Dyson said, "As long as I give you no information, I simply tell you whether it would work or not, and you do it all 100% on your own, you're on." So he submitted his junior thesis. Dyson took one look at it and said, "Yeah, this'll work." They removed page 20, uh, and I believe it is not found in the Princeton library with all of the other junior theses.

01:18:35
Eric W. Davis: Oh, really?

01:18:37
Eric Weinstein: You, you never heard this story? Dear God.

01:18:40
Eric W. Davis: I've not heard that story before. That's news.

01:18:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, that-

01:18:44
Eric W. Davis: That's very interesting. Very, very telling.

01:18:46
Eric Weinstein: John Aristotle Phillips is the guy who is at the center of that. There's another guy named Howard Morland who worked-

01:18:53
Eric W. Davis: I've heard that name

01:18:53
Eric Weinstein: ... who worked for the Progressive magazine, and he had the assignment: see if you can figure out, with no knowledge of physics, the Teller-Ulam design for the hydrogen bomb. And he did it, and he did it because all of the, um, information had been sharded and discarded and declassified. He basically put the pieces of the broken coffee cup back together by being meticulous. So it was a, an archeology and reassembly. It was a reverse engineering program from the, from the shredder of theoretical physics.

01:19:30
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, I agree with that. That sounds like it. Yeah.

01:19:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, that, that violates restricted data, which is this-

01:19:36
Eric W. Davis: It does

01:19:36
Eric Weinstein: ... bizarre doctrine that comes from the 50 f- 50-

01:19:40
Eric W. Davis: Four

01:19:40
Eric Weinstein: ... four and '46 Atomic Energy Acts. And the government wanted to use prior injunction against him because he had no right to free speech in this area. And I think what they found was we can't stop him because we declassified all the information he used. So that gave the government a huge problem, which is that it was creating a St- a Streisand effect and calling attention to the fact that there are no nuclear secrets. I mean, th-there are probably many, but the core ideas are not, are not the gating function.

01:20:15
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, that's right.

01:20:16
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Shortly after that, we get string theory, and we become kind of incapable, right? It's like the glass bead-

01:20:25
Eric W. Davis: Exactly

01:20:25
Eric Weinstein: ... game or something that amuses people at a very high level. Like we're turning the best physicists into chess players because nobody ever blew something up with a rook, right? And I guess my question to you is, are these two sides of the same coin? That we don't make progress beyond the standard model and general relativity, and we don't have any physicists on the U-UFO UAP claimed crash retrieval program.

01:20:52
Eric W. Davis: I've always thought that the answer is yes to that question.

01:20:57
Eric Weinstein: Do you have any interaction with the JASONs?

01:20:59
Eric W. Davis: No, never.

01:21:01
Eric Weinstein: You know who they are?

01:21:02
Eric W. Davis: They change. [chuckles] They're not always the same group. No, I've never met any of them. I know who th- and it-- When I-- At the time I knew who was in the JASONs, uh, I didn't know any of the people on the committee.

01:21:16
Eric Weinstein: Do you want to describe what they're supposed to be?

01:21:19
Eric W. Davis: They're supposed to solve problems that the DoD gives to them.

01:21:23
Eric Weinstein: And it's supposed to be-

01:21:23
Eric W. Davis: That's, that's the short of it

01:21:23
Eric Weinstein: ... comprised of high-level physicists, mathematicians-

01:21:26
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:21:27
Eric Weinstein: ... and the like.

01:21:27
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, engineers too. Yeah.

01:21:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:21:29
Eric W. Davis: So there's specific government problems, uh, problem, yeah, s- problems they need a solution for, so they give a contract to the JASONs to study a particular thread of problems over summer. These are academicians, so they're off from school for the summer, and they devote their time and energy to solving this problem, produce a report, turn it in, they collect the money, they're done.

01:21:52
Eric Weinstein: One of the things that I think is really interesting is that there are a tiny number of people at a very high level in theoretical, in the foundations of theoretical physics.

01:22:03
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

01:22:04
Eric Weinstein: And I think most people don't understand what some of these people are. If I, if I show you a violinist who's a, a soloist, there's no possibility you can convince yourself that that guy knows nothing or that anybody could do that, right? Like you see something that's so astounding, it... only a tiny few could do it. I believe that the same thing is true about theoretical physics and pure mathematics, that once you're in the game, you realize how, what a tiny number of people are at the highest level in this game, and it's just very vertical and it's, there's no mercy and-

01:22:42
Eric W. Davis: Oh, that's true.

01:22:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So here's-

01:22:44
Eric W. Davis: I've known that all the way since I was in middle school. I read enough of physics literature when I was a kid, I realized that.

01:22:51
Eric Weinstein: So here's my question. If I look at those people, there's so few in number, I could track all of them.

01:22:59
Eric W. Davis: Right.

01:22:59
Eric Weinstein: And you pretty much know, not exactly, but by their PhD, you have a 75% chance that you've identified deep talent.

01:23:09
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:23:09
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, one of the things I've said to Jesse is if you wanted to figure out that the NSA was there be- while it was still no such agency, you'd look at number theory PhDs, and you'd ask what zip codes do number theory PhDs live in when they don't get an academic job that's visible, and you find that they're clustered around Fort Meade.

01:23:30
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:23:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay, do the same thing for this. Imagine that what you need is you need general relativity, the differential geometry that goes underneath it, so let's call that Riemannian geometry.

01:23:42
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:23:42
Eric Weinstein: The standard model, the differential geometry that goes underneath that, we'll call Eriesmannian geometry, and w- modern geometric, uh, field theory, you know, TQFTs-

01:23:54
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:23:54
Eric Weinstein: ... conformal field theories a- on up. Shouldn't we be able to figure out if there is a program that's actually working on this, where it's located by virtue of the fact that there's almost nobody in this game and we, we can track their physical movements? In other words, we would have figured out that there was an awful lot of physics firepower at a boys school in, in New Mexico.

01:24:18
Eric W. Davis: That's very interesting. So like a little detective search.

01:24:23
Eric Weinstein: I mean, my point is, is that th-this is the bottleneck, and in the current vogue of saying, you know, the, the lone genius theory is wrong, um, then that, that wouldn't work. But the lone genius theory is clearly right. I mean, it's just obviously right. It's a, it's a psyop to say it isn't. So my, my claim is, I know a great deal of those people, like personally.

01:24:47
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

01:24:49
Eric Weinstein: I see no indication that they know about any such program, and the only exception I can find is that there's one black hole that you go into and you don't come out of called Renaissance Technologies that hires in these exact specialties. It's got a level of profitability that doesn't really make sense based on what I know about markets.

01:25:13
Eric W. Davis: Hmm. Yeah.

01:25:14
Eric Weinstein: And it's got a secure campus. It's right next to Brookhaven National Laboratory, and it has the resources of SUNY Stony Brook. And SUNY Stony Brook has A math and a physics presence that is far above its rating as a State University of New York campus even as a, even as a flagship.

01:25:37
Eric W. Davis: I wasn't aware of that. That's on, that's on, uh, in Long Island, correct?

01:25:41
Eric Weinstein: Correct. I mean, I think most people didn't realize that C.N. Yang was the world's greatest living theoretical physicist until very recently. I mean, he was, like, 104. But that's where he was. He was at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

01:25:57
Eric W. Davis: I didn't know that. Wow.

01:25:59
Eric Weinstein: Um, so my, my question is, can we figure out whether or not there's a grown-up effort? Because I don't think it's really easily possible to reverse engineer these things when your science is lagging. Like, GR isn't the problem. The standard model is the problem.

01:26:20
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I agree with that. Absolutely.

01:26:21
Eric Weinstein: And yet y- your papers-

01:26:23
Eric W. Davis: Well, my papers are separate from that. That's the whole point. It has nothing to do with U- UFOs. It has to do with Mark McCool's-

01:26:28
Eric Weinstein: No, but I can see-

01:26:29
Eric W. Davis: ... breakthrough propulsion physics program. I'm just contributing my knowledge-

01:26:32
Eric Weinstein: But no, those, those designs aren't gonna work.

01:26:36
Eric W. Davis: Well, I didn't know that then, but I'm at a point where I know that it's difficult-- Well, it's gonna be beyond difficult to engineer warp drives and wormholes-

01:26:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is what I'm-

01:26:46
Eric W. Davis: ... regardless of the-

01:26:46
Eric Weinstein: I'm very glad we're having this

01:26:48
Eric W. Davis: ... configuration you select.

01:26:49
Eric Weinstein: I took one look at this stuff and I just said, "Why is he d-- why is he wasting his time?" He, you know.

01:26:54
Eric W. Davis: It's, it's, it's, it's interest me. It's what I love [laughs]. And I haven't been able to figure out any way to jump off that track and get on a track to an alternative version that could lead to something as revolutionary as transmedium propulsion that UAP demonstrate.

01:27:12
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So-

01:27:13
Eric W. Davis: So at a bare minimum, bare minimum, it-- we would say GR and the standard model, but I already know that even at the bare minimum [chuckles] that's probably not even touching the truth.

01:27:24
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:27:24
Eric W. Davis: I think what's happening is, is I think the UAP craft are manipulating the, uh, the information domain because I think that there's a subquantum domain of information. Uh, people talk about Shannon. I'm talking about Fisher information that Roy Frieden at the University of Arizona, uh, did a lot of research for 25 years on, published two books through Cambridge University Press on Fisher information. Was able to use that to derive all of the major theories and principles of physics, including the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, from that being observed and the observer. So it's all based on the observer, which is a, quite a quantum pros-- uh, quantum statement. So it's, uh, I don't-- I'd have to dig it up out of my phone to be able to read to you the two key out terms of Fisher information from which physics derives. New Scientist did an article on it, which was just brilliant. It was in the-

01:28:19
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I'm, I'm not following exactly

01:28:20
Eric W. Davis: ... late, late '60s, but-

01:28:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, well-

01:28:22
Eric W. Davis: ... late '90s, sorry.

01:28:23
Eric Weinstein: So look, right now there's a vogue f-for if physics doesn't work, we can talk about quantum information and information theory because computers have money, and so it's a way for us to try to get money from people who know computers by making physics-

01:28:37
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:28:38
Eric Weinstein: ... like information is the, is the basic layer of the world. So I, I've watched that push for a change of variables, just like let's make black holes the new harmonic oscillator, the, the test object that we push everything onto. I, I really don't find that highly compelling. Like, we, we basically have quarks, leptons-

01:28:57
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:28:57
Eric Weinstein: ... force particles, H-Higgs. We have this arena called space-time. It's all a model. The model is extremely good, but we don't live there. We don't live in space-time.

01:29:09
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I know that.

01:29:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:29:10
Eric W. Davis: It's not lines, curves, points, and manifolds. It's, it's a physical space. You know?

01:29:15
Eric Weinstein: No, but it, it may be a manifold. I'm not saying that it isn't. I'm saying that you know because of the defects in, in these theories that you're looking at an effective theory, and you're trying to figure out what the parent theory is.

01:29:30
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

01:29:31
Eric Weinstein: Do you have any guesses about that?

01:29:33
Eric W. Davis: That's goes back to some ruminations I've had based on quantum entanglement, quantum, uh, uh, entanglement networks. People in Quantum Magazine had talked about the work they were doing on quantum entanglements and tensor networks, where they were able to show in a model how, uh, the Big Bang is actually a unfolding or an emerging of space-time and elementary particles and the interaction forces from entanglement networks. And, uh, I just don't know how long that has, has f-- how far that has gotten as a theoretical development. But I know that the initial stage of work that was done in the mid-2010s was pretty promising. I just haven't heard m-- haven't found any publications to show or inform me on where they've gotten with it.

01:30:20
Eric Weinstein: Let, let's talk about getting a craft across interstellar distances.

01:30:25
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:30:28
Eric Weinstein: You've got some kind of, and I, I wanna be clear that I think propulsion may even be misleading, but there's something like-

01:30:36
Eric W. Davis: Could be. Yeah

01:30:36
Eric Weinstein: ... is there, is there a method of conveyance? Let's, let's call it conveyance. Second of all, there's an energy requirement.

01:30:45
Eric W. Davis: Of course. And what I'm looking at, uh-

01:30:47
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:30:47
Eric W. Davis: I hate to interrupt you, but what I'm looking at is something that bypasses GR because GR is difficult to use.

01:30:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's talk, let's talk about that in one second.

01:30:55
Eric W. Davis: Where we can get around that whole energy requirement that shuts down the ability to engineer and build wormholes and, or warp drives. We, we gotta come up with something-

01:31:04
Eric Weinstein: You're, you're so grooved, Eric

01:31:05
Eric W. Davis: ... that gets out of that whole GR-

01:31:06
Eric Weinstein: You're, you're grooved towards this toolkit that's pushed in front of us, right? Like, entanglement is a real thing.

01:31:14
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:31:14
Eric Weinstein: But we talk about it, in my opinion, sometimes too much. I think another thing like that is black holes, wormholes. Again, real things, but at some level we don't know whether the black hole in the sky and the black hole in the model are the same black hole.

01:31:31
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:31:33
Eric Weinstein: All of these things that we can do lead nowhere, right? We've been around the traffic circle a million times, and by the third time you've seen the s- same 7-Eleven, you're starting to think something's wrong. Let's talk about GR as a problem. So in the standard equation in GR, we've got really three terms. We've got the Einstein curvature term, we've got the dark energy cosmological constant term-

01:32:00
Eric W. Davis: Lambda. Lambda G, yeah

01:32:02
Eric Weinstein: ... well, lambda times G mu-

01:32:03
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

01:32:03
Eric Weinstein: ... the metric G mu nu, and this constant times the stress energy tensor for everything else.

01:32:09
Eric W. Davis: Right, the coupling constant. Yep.

01:32:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. DESI in Arizona has, uh, thrown some cold water on the idea that lambda is a good model for dark energy because it appears that it's not constant.

01:32:25
Eric W. Davis: I've heard that. Yeah. I've seen some news about that coming out. Some-- Was it just theoretical or was there, uh, hints of it ex- from ob- observations?

01:32:34
Eric Weinstein: That's what I'm saying. The, uh, dark energy spectroscopic instrument, or DESI-

01:32:40
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, the DESI experiment

01:32:40
Eric Weinstein: ... seems to be recording-

01:32:41
Eric W. Davis: Right. It's showing that it's more, it's actually not-

01:32:43
Eric Weinstein: Variable

01:32:44
Eric W. Davis: ... yeah, it's time-dependent, so it's dynamical as opposed to static, being a constant energy-

01:32:49
Eric Weinstein: Which sounds like a VEV, a vacuum expectation-

01:32:52
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:32:52
Eric Weinstein: ... value, so that people always make this mistake, you know, "What is the temperature of the room?" And they say, "71 degrees." And you say, "Well, in which corner?" And then the person thinks, "Oh, well, I'm sure it varies between the, the, the floor and the ceiling-

01:33:06
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

01:33:06
Eric Weinstein: ... and where you are close to the window." And that idea that a thing is mostly constant but with fluctuations, um, is the promotion of a simple number like lambda to field content, something that can vary.

01:33:20
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:33:21
Eric Weinstein: Now, there's a thing called Lovelock's theorem.

01:33:25
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I'm familiar with that. He was a mathematician at the University of Arizona.

01:33:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:33:29
Eric W. Davis: Where I went to school, so I knew him.

01:33:31
Eric Weinstein: So tell me about Lovelock's theorem and variable, uh, dark energy.

01:33:37
Eric W. Davis: Oh, gosh. I d- can't even think of Lovelock's theorem, but I know what you're talking about. Why don't you go ahead and-

01:33:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, so the way I remember it, and again, this is-- I, I wasn't preparing to do this, but-

01:33:45
Eric W. Davis: 'Cause keep in mind, it's been 40 years since I had tensor calculus, uh, using Lovelock's manuscript for his-

01:33:52
Eric Weinstein: Would vodka help?

01:33:53
Eric W. Davis: ... second book. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] There you-- Yes.

01:33:58
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Um, I think what it says is that when it comes to geometry, there are only two tensors you can make that have this property of being divergence-free that are not dependent, uh, on anything else.

01:34:17
Eric W. Davis: Right.

01:34:17
Eric Weinstein: In other words, it's a two-dimensional space. And one of them is the Einstein curvature tensor, which is divergence-free by property of taking an automatic equation that has to s- that has to be satisfied, called the Bianchi identity-

01:34:31
Eric W. Davis: The Bianchi, yep

01:34:31
Eric Weinstein: ... and turning it into a different equation that says that the theory is not bothered by how you put coordinates on a system.

01:34:40
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

01:34:41
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:34:41
Eric W. Davis: That sounds familiar, yeah

01:34:43
Eric Weinstein: ... so that's, that's the idea of the R mu nu minus one half scalar times G mu nu. The Einstein curvature tensor is perpendicular to the space of transformations of coordinates.

01:34:56
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. It's like, uh, what? The intrinsic curvature? It looks like intrinsic curvature, right?

01:35:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's, it's the r- Riemann curvature with the Weyl curvature thrown away and a trace reversal of this one piece of the-- You've got, uh, 10 components of Ricci curvature, and one component can be broken out and put a m- had a minus sign put in front of it.

01:35:16
Eric W. Davis: Right.

01:35:18
Eric Weinstein: That object has an automatic differential equation. The other one that has the same automatic differential equation is lambda times the metric. Because if you try to differentiate the metric, that's always going to be zero by virtue of the fact that a metric is constant in its own L- Levi-Civita connection.

01:35:37
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

01:35:37
Eric Weinstein: But by the product rule, if you put a lambda in front of it, then l- d- the derivative of lambda is zero times the metric plus lambda times the derivative of the metric, which is zero for that same reason.

01:35:50
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

01:35:51
Eric Weinstein: That-- Those are the only two simple tensors that have this property. So if you lose Lovelock's theorem-- Uh, sorry, if you have Lovelock's theorem and you lose the constancy of dark energy, you're starting to actually put general relativity in some peril.

01:36:07
Eric W. Davis: That's very interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Okay.

01:36:12
Eric Weinstein: Depends how you conceive of general relativity.

01:36:14
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:36:14
Eric Weinstein: But to continue with this, I don't believe that you can engineer these craft within general relativity or standard model in any way other than formally. So the Alcubierre warp drive is a formal solution to the problem because it, it leaves unaddressed how the weakest possible of all forces, gravity, could be employed at this completely different level-

01:36:47
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:36:47
Eric Weinstein: ... to, to, you know, sandwich spacetime on top of itself. I don't think the generation ships make any sense. Uh, 800 years-

01:36:58
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I agree with you.

01:36:59
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I don't b-believe that, um, the time dilation makes any sense. It's too expensive-

01:37:07
Eric W. Davis: Correct

01:37:07
Eric Weinstein: ... because everybody's dead when you get back.

01:37:10
Eric W. Davis: It's the "Planet of the Apes" scenario.

01:37:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I don't-

01:37:12
Eric W. Davis: [laughs]

01:37:13
Eric Weinstein: I don't, I don't believe in, in traversable black-

01:37:18
Eric W. Davis: Wormholes

01:37:18
Eric Weinstein: ... wormholes and black holes and, and all this kind of s-

01:37:20
Eric W. Davis: Well, black holes aren't traversable, but w- there are wormholes with no singularities and event horizons that are traversable-

01:37:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so the, the-

01:37:26
Eric W. Davis: ... in principle

01:37:26
Eric Weinstein: ... yes, but I've, I've also heard weirder stuff involving try- somebody trying to, uh, u- use the informati- black hole information paradox to get-

01:37:35
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I think that's just, uh- People have stretched an analogy too far, so

01:37:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, but my, my claim is there's a huge suite of not really that inventive ideas. In other words, we're gonna accept the science that we have as if we can't do better science, and then we're gonna come up with completely implausible ways of using it, and we're gonna say those are the leading candidates.

01:38:00
Jesse Michels: Dr. Davis, you should push back if you think traversable wormholes that biological material can go through is a, is a real feasible thing.

01:38:10
Eric W. Davis: You mean biological materials going through a wormhole?

01:38:12
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

01:38:13
Eric W. Davis: I don't see anything that prevents it.

01:38:15
Jesse Michels: Okay.

01:38:17
Eric Weinstein: So you're gonna create a wormhole on demand to get where you need to go?

01:38:23
Eric W. Davis: You should be able to. That's what my research showed. There's nothing that I would think that could stop you other than that G over C to the fourth power issue. You, you... That really gets inverted when you put it over to the curvature side of the equation.

01:38:41
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:38:41
Eric W. Davis: Then, then the properties of the matter, it's gonna be C to the fourth over G, so it's gonna be a gigantic number multiplying the curvature of space time that that matter source creates.

01:38:52
Eric Weinstein: So walk me through, how do I get to Alpha Centauri by engineering a traversable wormhole?

01:38:58
Eric W. Davis: Well, you're gonna create the mouth or the throat. Well, it-- That's a good point, because even Kip Thorne couldn't describe it. But the best idea is, and this is Thorne's idea, not mine, and I don't endorse it. Uh, you create a, a mouth right at your departure point in space, uh, and you're gonna need another spaceship to carry the throat to the destination point. And that's what Kip Thorne came w- came up with. I'm thinking when you're creating the throat, that's where all the physics occurs anyway. The, it's not at the mouth, the exit, entrance mouth. It's in the throat. So when you're creating that throat, that should automatically do the, the connection, the hyperspace tunnel connection between two points, two distant points, Earth and Sirius, or our s- star Sol and Sirius as examples, or Earth and Alpha Centauri, one of the planets over there. Um, I just know that it does not give you recipe for navigating, for being able to target your destination. There are no control, navigational control laws-

01:40:06
Jesse Michels: Yeah

01:40:06
Eric W. Davis: ... built into general relativity.

01:40:08
Jesse Michels: Okay.

01:40:08
Eric W. Davis: All you could do is build the wormhole, and you know you could do the studies of a geodesic that goes through it representing either a photon or a piece of matter, and you can represent that it, you know it's gonna come out the other side. But how you aim it and navigate to another star using it, that's not in general relativity. You can't pull that out of... You can't pull that information out unless there's more work that needs to be done that nobody has thought of doing.

01:40:33
Eric Weinstein: So again-

01:40:35
Eric W. Davis: But I think you can make a wormhole on demand if assuming you have the e- negative energy density available to shape it.

01:40:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. All... Not one of these proposals excites me. They're, they're, they're boring as sin. I'm sorry to say it. You're talking about people raised on sci-fi who want to be scientific, and by wanting to be scientific, they don't wanna go beyond the two frontier theories that we have, and they've also said, "I don't wanna be uncreative." So the idea is, how do we come up with a wildly implausible story based on stuff that is solid? And at least with some of the other crazy stuff, I have a feeling at least they're trying to do new physics so that the implausibility goes down but the speculative nature of the physics goes up. I think it would be much better to balance those two. Can we talk about one of these weird things? Have you looked at this extended electrodynamics that no one in my world has ever heard of?

01:41:41
Eric W. Davis: N- I've seen elements of it. I've seen a p- a paper here and there on that, on extended electrodynamics, yeah.

01:41:46
Eric Weinstein: What do you see that as being?

01:41:50
Eric W. Davis: I don't know what they're trying to get at with it. That's my conclusion.

01:41:54
Jesse Michels: Little-

01:41:54
Eric W. Davis: I don't know what they're trying to extend, where it's going.

01:41:56
Jesse Michels: A little context for the audience. This is, um, a term that gets thrown around constantly in UFO discussions. You have even going back to the '90s, Ben Rich saying there was some math in Maxwell's equations that was a little off. You know, [chuckles] that sort of thing s- is this recurring sort of theme. And then you have people now saying that it's a more faithful ad- adherence to the, you know, more expanded Maxwell equations versus the Heaviside kind of simplification of vector calculus that is extended electrodynamics. Other people say Heaviside is the update that makes the [chuckles] extended electrodynamics. Uh, no one seems to come up with some sort of Lagrangian. You've, uh, pointed out some real inconsistencies, uh, with the, you know, gauge invariance. And but I believe Hal Puthoff, who you have a long work history with and, you know, is your long colleague, he has some interesting work in extended electrodynamics, right?

01:42:50
Eric W. Davis: No, I never worked on it.

01:42:51
Jesse Michels: Oh, okay. Okay.

01:42:52
Eric W. Davis: I don't, I don't know that Hal has. Uh-

01:42:54
Jesse Michels: Okay

01:42:54
Eric W. Davis: ... the only extended electrodynamics I know of is the Lagrangian that you're gonna have for high-energy electromagnetic systems, and that would be the Born-Infeld Lagrangian, I believe it is. Is that correct?

01:43:04
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, y- you're going back to, to Yang-Mills theory and the abelian gauge.

01:43:08
Eric W. Davis: It's just the nonlinear version of Maxwell's equations that you're gonna get out of a Lagrangian that you can formulate, and it will reduce to Maxwell's equations in the low-energy regime. So extended, I don't know what they're extending. That's the thing. I've looked at these and I'm trying to figure out what's the extension.

01:43:22
Eric Weinstein: Here, here's one thing that I've seen. The Faraday tensor made up of the electric and magnetic-

01:43:30
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:43:30
Eric Weinstein: ... fields is naturally a degree two object. It's not naturally about vector fields. That only works if you Take a particular slice of space in space-time where you shouldn't do that, 'cause that br- breaks Lorentz invariance. And then you say, okay, in a three-dimensional world, every two tensor is dual to a three minus two tensor or a one tensor or a vector field, and then you plot out these lines in the E and B fields, uh, as if they're vector fields. It's naturally a degree two object. So Maxwell's equations reduce to two sets of equations, one of which is just true automatically when it's phrased geometrically. So if you take dA star, some operator based on A, the gauge pot- the, the, uh, gauge potential-

01:44:20
Jesse Michels: The vector potential

01:44:20
Eric Weinstein: ... or the connect- the connection. It's really the vector and scalar, the four potential.

01:44:24
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

01:44:26
Eric Weinstein: dA star, that is the adjoint of that derivative, which is itself a derivative, applied to the Faraday tensor, brings it down a degree from two to one.

01:44:35
Jesse Michels: Right.

01:44:36
Eric Weinstein: And you say that thing is equal to, to the current j, which is a degree one object.

01:44:42
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

01:44:43
Eric Weinstein: But dA of FA, which takes a degree two object one degree up to a degree three object, is guaranteed to be zero for the same thing that makes the Einstein, uh, tensor divergence-free. The Bianchi identity is an abstract guaranteed differential equation that comes out of the geometric construction of curvature. So you throw one of the, um, these two equations away because it's guaranteed by geometry. So-

01:45:16
Jesse Michels: The boundary, the boundary is zero

01:45:18
Eric Weinstein: ... in, in essence. So dA of FA equals zero represents two of the four Maxwell equations.

01:45:26
Jesse Michels: Correct.

01:45:26
Eric Weinstein: And you throw it away, and then you're left with the inhomogeneous ones, and that's just dA star of FA equals j.

01:45:32
Jesse Michels: Okay.

01:45:35
Eric Weinstein: One of the things I've seen in, in this world looks to me like dA star equals A. The idea is that the gauge potential is a degree one object, and so you take dA star of, of a degree two object, and that's set equal to a degree one object A. And that doesn't work to somebody who thinks in physics terms because on one side of the equation is what we would call a gauge-invariant object-

01:46:03
Jesse Michels: Correct

01:46:03
Eric Weinstein: ... something with symmetry, and on the other side, there's an object that picks up an affine shift, m- meaning it isn't gauge invariant.

01:46:12
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

01:46:12
Eric Weinstein: Or-

01:46:13
Jesse Michels: Okay. Yeah, I see what you're talking about.

01:46:15
Eric Weinstein: So you can't rotate both sides of the equation-

01:46:18
Jesse Michels: Correct

01:46:18
Eric Weinstein: ... in the same way at once, therefore it's not a legitimate equation even they're, though they're both degree one objects.

01:46:23
Jesse Michels: So is this what extended electrodynamics is attempting to address?

01:46:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don't know because to be entirely honest, the elec- extended-- Look, I have had to c- wrap my head around the fact that we have three bizarre groups of people trying to do physics, at least. There's a crackpot group which writes in red crayon, and they just don't, they're, they're nowhere close to the target. There's a professional community which has gone somewhat insane but still remembers how to do physics from first and second year graduate, uh, intro classes, even if they're researching toy models and they've never seen a, a quark or a lepton in their research in the last decade. And then there's this intermediate group, which I just didn't know existed, which I will call fringe physics. And fringe physics is, in general, people with sort of like a, an electrical engineering background. They know calculus. They, they know integrals. They're often technically quite good, and they get an idea that, you know, "Gravitation looks a lot like electromagnetism. I wonder if I can contribute something." But they don't have a sense of, like, all the things that can go wrong.

01:47:37
Jesse Michels: Yes. I think I know about that group.

01:47:39
Eric Weinstein: So, so they tinker, but sometimes a tinkerer can stumble on something. So, for example, you could easily imagine somebody s- stumbling on the Bohm, on the Aharonov-Bohm effect, which is one of these hidden features of the world. So our, our colleague Sabina Hossenfelder has a video not too long ago where she took something that I've only thought about and heard about as physics folklore. Said there's only three ways to hide new physics. It's kind of an interesting idea. The first way is that that can be so energetic that you can't afford to see it. So maybe there are particles out there where we can't create enough energy to get one of these particles to pop out of the vacuum.

01:48:20
Jesse Michels: That's awesome.

01:48:20
Eric Weinstein: Second thing is, is that something is so weakly coupled you can barely detect it. So there are lots of neutrinos everywhere-

01:48:27
Jesse Michels: Yes

01:48:27
Eric Weinstein: ... but they're so hard to get to interact with anything that you don't know that they're there. And then the third thing is the really interesting one for UFO land. Sometimes there's a configuration that you would never think to put things in, like, "Let's get the current up to this. We'll spin something around. We'll evacuate a tube. We'll put the following rare compounds that have these particular things, and maybe we'll s- see an effect that is normally hidden amplified to the point where it becomes, uh, absolutely clear." You know, like the Casimir effect, you needed to know that you had to put two plates very close together-

01:49:02
Jesse Michels: Mm-hmm

01:49:02
Eric Weinstein: ... for something to happen.

01:49:03
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

01:49:05
Eric Weinstein: So that's sort of what we're looking for. We're looking for-

01:49:08
Jesse Michels: Okay

01:49:08
Eric Weinstein: ... is there any new thing that we could do that doesn't require too much energy, that's not so weakly coupled that we can barely detect it, but that can be coaxed to show itself the way the Aharonov-Bohm effect could have been discovered by an experimenter passing a beam of electrons around an insu- insulated solenoid.

01:49:29
Jesse Michels: Solenoid. Yeah.

01:49:29
Eric Weinstein: And noticing, "Oh my God, it seems to be able to detect the current."

01:49:34
Jesse Michels: I believe in a podcast with Ana Brady Estevez, Hal Puthoff openly discussed, uh, this idea of extended electrodynamics and him even working with, uh, Josephson junctions And, uh, this idea of vector and scalar potential. So this idea of extended electrodynamics is that the, you know, Lorentz, uh, gauge is, you know, kind of arbitrarily set to zero, and the, uh, derivatives of the, you know, vector and scalar potentials, you know, uh, should not, you know, necessarily equal zero. And so theoretically, in terms of implications for the audience, instead of having this transverse Hertzian wave which is gonna, you know, propagate at one over R squared, you're gonna get electrons pairing off in all sorts of situations. You're gonna get this kind of rapid attenuation of the signal. Uh, you might have other sort of more exotic configurations of, you know, p- parallel like, you know, uh, uh, uh, wave propagation in a magnetic field or not even the existence of an electro- of an, you know, an E field or whatever with a, with a, an electromagnetic wave. And I believe Hal has openly discussed this with Ana Brady Estevez on this, you know, as former National F- Science Foundation director on her podcast.

01:50:42
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, I know. No, I did see the-

01:50:43
Jesse Michels: Okay

01:50:43
Eric W. Davis: ... video of that, so.

01:50:44
Jesse Michels: Okay, okay.

01:50:45
Eric W. Davis: I've never s- n- I never knew there was a video until I think, um, she mentioned it to me last year, so.

01:50:51
Jesse Michels: So you hear, you hear a lot of this stuff in UFO world like, you know, extended electrodynamics and then even possible experimental inroads towards that and do, do you know anything about that sort of thing or no? Okay. So-

01:51:04
Eric W. Davis: There are a couple of names that came out of that podcast, uh, Dr. Lewis de Charette and Dr., uh, Larry Forsley that would be of interest to Dr.-

01:51:11
Jesse Michels: And I know Larry.

01:51:13
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

01:51:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, so one of the things that, that comes out of my work is that we may have the gauge potential that you would put into such an equation wrong, and the thought is the following. Every gauge potential, every, every connection, um, has a disease when you gauge, uh, transform it, and this disease, uh, if the gauge transformation is called G, it would look like G inverse DG, where D attacks G, so you differentiate the transformation, and then you use the G inverse to pull it back to the origin of the league.

01:51:54
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

01:51:55
Eric Weinstein: That term has no reference to the, the connection or the gauge potential A. In other words, it's G inverse DG.

01:52:06
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:52:07
Eric Weinstein: But G inverse AG is perfectly, uh, gauge invariant if you put it into a Lagrangian.

01:52:13
Eric W. Davis: Mm.

01:52:13
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, there's the part that works beautifully, and there's the part that spoils the party. But the part that spoils the party has no dependence on A whatsoever.

01:52:24
Eric W. Davis: Uh-huh.

01:52:24
Eric Weinstein: So if you had two separate potentials, A and B, you'd get G inverse AG plus G inverse DG, and G inverse BG plus G inverse DG. So the diseases are the same. You take a difference between them, and the two diseases kill each other and go away, and you have two terms left over, G inverse AG and G inverse BG added together. So one possibility is that even though this community says a bunch of stuff that makes me very uncomfortable, is that you could have a tinkering community that is actually stumbling to things that everyone else is too sophisticated to look for, just the way when we thought it was the E and the B fields, nobody was looking for the holonomy effect, which is a classical effect that's discovered quantum mechanically.

01:53:21
Eric W. Davis: Right.

01:53:22
Eric Weinstein: So the embarrassment of finding the Aharonov–Bohm effect in the late '50s when we thought we knew everything there was to know about electromagnetism is the great- greatest proof we have that a theory that is supposedly completely picked over and com- and totally explored may have basic things that we have wrong about it well into our sophisticated old age.

01:53:49
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Uh, basically up until that point, nobody realized or even gave thought that the four vector potential was a physical field.

01:53:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, and it isn't in a certain sense. It's equ-- So I, I give this example that if you know a professional model, they're expected to, to have a set of things that are called Polaroids. They're just shots of that model in various standard poses so that somebody who wants to hire that model can say, "This is what this person looks like without makeup and without fancy clothes," right?

01:54:21
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

01:54:22
Eric Weinstein: Those different Polaroids are what we would call, uh, I don't know. They're sort of avatars of the same underlying human. And so if somebody says, "I wanna hire that person in three-quarter profile," you say, well, no, y- you hire the person. That's just the particular shot of the person. The electromagnetic potential is a, an equivalence class equivalent to give me all of the Polaroids to represent the one model.

01:54:50
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

01:54:51
Eric Weinstein: So the big problem comes out when you single out one Polaroid and you say, "No, no, that's the field." Because what that is is that's, that's a particular representation of that field, but they're all representations of the same underlying field.

01:55:05
Eric W. Davis: Okay. Yep.

01:55:06
Eric Weinstein: So that's the problem that needed to get solved.

01:55:08
Eric W. Davis: So we don't have anybody in academia that's pursuing extended electrodynamics?

01:55:14
Eric Weinstein: I don't know.

01:55:16
Jesse Michels: Uh, no, we do. Um, there's a guy named Lee Hively, uh, in Colorado Springs, and he has a, a colleague named Woodside, who I believe is in Australia. And then there's another guy, I think, uh, Strobel or Lobel or something. So there, there are a couple of-- There, there are a few of these guys, and they've written a paper about-

01:55:35
Eric W. Davis: Okay

01:55:35
Jesse Michels: ... extended electrodynamics.

01:55:37
Eric Weinstein: So another thing that really confuses me is I saw a bizarre, um, video from 1991, which Joe Rogan pointed me to, with this guy Bob Lazar seemingly talking nonsense.

01:55:52
Eric W. Davis: Yes.

01:55:53
Eric Weinstein: Do you recall what he says about The fact that you do this engineering with gravity wave A and gravity wave B

01:56:03
Eric W. Davis: He, no, not entirely. It's been so long. Uh, he doesn't know what he's talking about because he was a radiation health monitor for, uh-

01:56:11
Eric Weinstein: So, so-

01:56:11
Eric W. Davis: ... uh, Ki- Kimber M- Meyer Company, and they were a logistic service sup- uh, company servicing Los, Los Alamos National Lab in Area 51. He never had security clearances. He never graduated f- never, he dropped out of his first year of college, et cetera, et cetera. He's not a physicist.

01:56:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, I know that.

01:56:30
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:56:31
Eric Weinstein: I know. You, you-

01:56:31
Eric W. Davis: So I don't remember, but all I know is he, he claims e- uh, Element 115 created, uh, antimatter which somehow had something to do with creating gravitational waves in the, in the propulsion system of the UFO.

01:56:43
Eric Weinstein: Did you hear the Jeffrey Epstein tape with Steve Bannon?

01:56:47
Eric W. Davis: N- no.

01:56:48
Eric Weinstein: Jeffrey Epstein didn't know what he was talking about either.

01:56:50
Eric W. Davis: No, I, I'm not familiar with that.

01:56:51
Eric Weinstein: But you can tell that Jeffrey Epstein was talking to people who knew what they talk, what, what they were talking about, and he has this garbled version of this. Let's assume the same thing for Bob Lazar. Let's assume that he was janitorial staff and that he just happened to be in a sensitive location, and that he's saying something, because it sounds to me like total garbage, okay?

01:57:11
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, it, yeah.

01:57:12
Eric Weinstein: Okay. He says this thing, which is crazy. He says there's gravity wave A and gravity wave B, and you most likely think of gravity as, as gravity wave B. That's the long-range stuff with stars and planets. And he says, but gravity wave A is different, and you associate it with the strong nuclear force. So of course, like, I'm just, wa- I wanna th-

01:57:34
Eric W. Davis: Right

01:57:34
Eric Weinstein: ... throw up in my mouth, right?

01:57:37
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:57:37
Eric Weinstein: And he says this thing about QCD, quantum chromodynamics of the strong nu- nuclear force is, is what gravity wave A is all about. And so the idea is going to be that somehow if you could actually understand that what was going on in QCD had to do with gravity, you would understand that that's the source of strength with the ability to actually do something with space and time. So seems totally stupid, but let me just point out the following thing. There are only two Lagrangians or actions that I know of that give an Euler-Lagrange equation with the curvature appearing without a derivative in front of it. One of them is the Einstein-Hilbert action, which when differentiated gives you the Ricci curvature minus the scalar curvature over two times the metric. The other one is a thing called the Chern-Simons function.

01:58:35
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, it's been years since I've seen it.

01:58:35
Eric Weinstein: Chern-Simons action.

01:58:37
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:58:38
Eric Weinstein: The Chern-Simons action comes from something called the transgression of the Pontryagin class in the Chern-Weil representation.

01:58:46
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

01:58:48
Eric Weinstein: That is part of QCD. In other words, the normal Yang-Mills Lagrangian we would represent as F inner product F, norm square of F-

01:59:02
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, that's from-

01:59:02
Eric Weinstein: ... where F is the field string

01:59:04
Eric W. Davis: ... from the topology of, uh, uh, what is geometry and topology for physics, and I can't remember who the author of that book was, but I've seen that, though.

01:59:12
Eric Weinstein: But in only in dimension four you can form a different quantity, where you take F inner product star F-

01:59:22
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:59:22
Eric Weinstein: ... where star is the Hodge star or complementarity operator.

01:59:26
Eric W. Davis: Right.

01:59:26
Eric Weinstein: And that thing generates the Pontryagin class, which when transgressed gives you the Chern-Simons, which gives you the Lagrangian that is closest to general relativity.

01:59:38
Eric W. Davis: Interesting. Uh, I haven't seen that.

01:59:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, because nobody's talked about it ever.

01:59:42
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Okay. That's interesting.

01:59:44
Eric Weinstein: So this is the, I think this is the first time I'm, I've, I'm ever mentioning it in public. So the thought that I had is assume that Bob Lazar is an unreliable narrator, and that he was hanging around water coolers and he was hearing crazy stuff-

01:59:57
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

01:59:57
Eric Weinstein: ... and that it's a mix of bullshit and something. Is it possible, Eric, that what he's talking about is that the theta term from QCD is what he's calling stupidly gravity wave A, which no person I've ever heard of has ever used that terminology?

02:00:17
Eric W. Davis: I wouldn't think he'd be consciously aware of that. [laughs] I don't know if it's possible. It's too... I, I can't rely on anything he says because of his history.

02:00:28
Eric Weinstein: Well-

02:00:29
Jesse Michels: Dr. Davis, just to play devil's advocate with Bob Lazar, if you were saying there's this long-standing UFO legacy crash retrieval program, you have one guy who's come out publicly and has not changed his story since '89.

02:00:41
Eric W. Davis: Well, I don't know, but he-

02:00:43
Jesse Michels: We, we didn't really know too much about the existence of Area 51, definitely not S4.

02:00:47
Eric W. Davis: He's never been there.

02:00:49
Jesse Michels: But how would he know about, you know, Janet Airlines, a flight there?

02:00:52
Eric W. Davis: Well, he worked at Los Alamos, and he worked at the, uh, unclassified logistic support facility over on McCarran, uh, over on Sunset Boulevard next to, uh, not Sunset Boulevard, Sunset Drive next to McCarran Airport. There's a row of light industrial buildings along Sun, uh, Sunset Road.

02:01:09
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:01:09
Eric W. Davis: And, um, McCarran is right across the street. So Kimber, Kimber Meyer was there. EG&G Special Projects was, like, next door. So he didn't go because he didn't have clearances. His job was just a radiation health badge monitor. So y- people that get on the Janet flight to go to Area 51, he gives them their radiation badges.

02:01:29
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:01:29
Eric W. Davis: When they come home from work, they get off that Janet flight, they gotta give them back, give those badges back to him, and his job is to check those badges every day to make sure that they're working. That's it.

02:01:37
Jesse Michels: Okay, but he's not a theoretical physicist, but he does have engineering chops. Like, he runs currently United Nuclear. He literally put a jet engine on the tobacco Honda.

02:01:47
Eric W. Davis: Well, again, I, yeah, I know-

02:01:47
Jesse Michels: Guys, I, I-

02:01:48
Eric W. Davis: ... but that's just a tinkerer. He's a hobbyist. He's also been twice convicted of felonies, including, uh-

02:01:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, this isn't... Guys-

02:01:55
Eric W. Davis: He's a nutcase

02:01:55
Eric Weinstein: ... I have no interest in Bob Lazar the person. The key question is, if he was proximate to information that he garbled- Is it possible-

02:02:03
Eric W. Davis: Could it be, be possible that I just don't know that it's-

02:02:04
Eric Weinstein: ... to take the marbled message and associate QCD with two sectors, a Yang-Mills sector and a Pontryagin sector, and that the Chern-Weil representation of the Pontryagin sector inside of QCD with, associated with the theta term can lead to something which has Einstein-like properties, which is that the differentia-

02:02:24
Eric W. Davis: That would be remarkable.

02:02:25
Eric Weinstein: That would be remarkable. Right. So-

02:02:26
Eric W. Davis: That would be absolutely remarkable. The vacuum energy of QCD-

02:02:28
Eric Weinstein: Look, the, the thing that I'm-

02:02:28
Eric W. Davis: ... is stupendous

02:02:29
Eric Weinstein: So the, the thing that I'm-- So let's get into vacuum energy and zero point and what the source of energy is for all of these things. I'm very turned off by certain attempts to mine... Like if you look at the Heisenberg uncertainty relations-

02:02:45
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

02:02:46
Eric Weinstein: ... one of the great innovations in our time is that they've been associated to the symplectic form on phase space in ordinarily classical Hamiltonian dynamics.

02:02:58
Eric W. Davis: Right.

02:02:58
Eric Weinstein: In other words, you take the space of configurations of a mug on a table, then you add the momenta, so that doubles the space s- its size to get, go from configuration space to phase space.

02:03:12
Eric W. Davis: Correct.

02:03:12
Eric Weinstein: Position to position and momentum.

02:03:14
Eric W. Davis: Right.

02:03:15
Eric Weinstein: On that space, there's a guaranteed object called the symplectic form-

02:03:19
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

02:03:19
Eric Weinstein: ... that comes just out of the math. The big innovation was to say, you know, that thing is actually the, at the base of a different, different structure called a line bundle, and it's the curvature tensor for this line bundle with a connection whose sections form the Hilbert space in quant, in, in quantization.

02:03:40
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

02:03:40
Eric Weinstein: Effectively-

02:03:41
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

02:03:41
Eric Weinstein: ... in a certain sense, if people-

02:03:42
Eric W. Davis: Do you mean fiber bundle?

02:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, yeah. It's a line bundle. Exactly. That, that line bundle, its L2 section's properly taken, polarized, there's a whole rigmarole-

02:03:52
Eric W. Davis: Right

02:03:53
Eric Weinstein: ... sort of q- self-quantize the manifold. In other words-

02:03:57
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

02:03:57
Eric Weinstein: ... that the, the classical mechanics leads naturally to the quantum theory when you realize it's not an isolated degree two object, but a degree two object that comes as the curvature of something else that we had not thought to study. If you try to-- If that's the source of the Heisenberg uncertainty relations, that's a curvature you can't get rid of. So if you try to mine it, I don't really see how you extract, um, from something that can't be lessened. On the other hand, were you to try to tap into the dark energy, if that is in fact a VEV, a vacuum expectation value, rather than a hard constant, could that be used as a on-demand power source?

02:04:44
Eric W. Davis: Sure could be. I-

02:04:45
Eric Weinstein: You work on that at all?

02:04:47
Eric W. Davis: N- no, but I looked at people who've sent me their ruminations on that idea, and it looked pretty intelligent, but it wasn't very well developed, in my opinion. So I think that would be a great direction to go, and I like where you're going here.

02:05:02
Eric Weinstein: I'm just trying to be constructive.

02:05:03
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

02:05:03
Eric Weinstein: Let me, let me try another one on you.

02:05:04
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yeah, I like where you're going. I think you pointed out some stuff I'm not aware of, other than the dark energy aspect, which I'm already aware of, um, which need to be followed up on.

02:05:13
Eric Weinstein: Imagine for the moment that you embed what we currently call space time-

02:05:18
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm

02:05:19
Eric Weinstein: ... in its space of all pointwise Lorentzian metrics, so every way you could possibly have of measuring length and angle through a series of three rulers, one watch, and six protractors.

02:05:30
Eric W. Davis: Right.

02:05:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay? That's a 14-dimensional object that I work with on a daily basis that I call the observers. We don't have to get too far into this, but the point that I wanna make is the following: there are ways of traveling through time and sp- and space, and I wanna say also that time really should always be times, because the number of actual temporal dimensions we currently think is one, but it doesn't need to be one.

02:05:56
Eric W. Davis: I agree.

02:05:57
Eric Weinstein: Okay. We talk a lot about entanglement. We talk a lot about wormholes. We don't talk about pinch to zoom.

02:06:08
Eric W. Davis: We don't talk about what?

02:06:09
Eric Weinstein: Pinch to zoom. Imagine that you pointed at a star that you wanted to visit, and imagine that you could find some way of traveling in 10 transverse dimensions-

02:06:22
Eric W. Davis: Okay

02:06:22
Eric Weinstein: ... where what you're doing is growing the ruler in the direction between you and that star. Now, once the ruler says one foot, you need the energy to walk one foot-

02:06:36
Eric W. Davis: Right

02:06:37
Eric Weinstein: ... not the energy to walk four light-years.

02:06:39
Eric W. Davis: Right.

02:06:41
Eric Weinstein: And then you have to put the ruler back, so you have to shrink the ruler to grow the distance after you've grown the ruler to shrink the distance.

02:06:47
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

02:06:48
Eric Weinstein: So the idea is that this is something like pinch to zoom, which doesn't work on an ordinary table, but if this was a smart table, it would be a, a, a, well, it's called a multi-touch gesture. Have you thought about whether multi-touch gestures like p- pinch to zoom or another one that I call shear to tilt might be built into the object that we confuse for space-time?

02:07:10
Eric W. Davis: It sounds plausible. I like that. Um, I've seen hints of something like that in some books I've read back in the '90s, uh, very small hints of it, and, uh, I thought there was something to it that I just didn't follow up on. Um, yeah, I would say that makes sense. That makes sense to me that-- Yeah. That's very interesting idea.

02:07:36
Eric Weinstein: Do you think much about dark chemistry?

02:07:40
Eric W. Davis: About which?

02:07:41
Eric Weinstein: Dark chemistry.

02:07:42
Eric W. Davis: Dark chemistry? No.

02:07:43
Eric Weinstein: Like chemistry with dark matter.

02:07:45
Eric W. Davis: No, I don't. No.

02:07:49
Eric Weinstein: I see.

02:07:50
Eric W. Davis: I haven't seen anybody use that phrase before. Supposedly, dark matter doesn't interact with, uh, regular matter, uh, especially at the electromagnetic force level. So-

02:08:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's what we mean largely by dark, right? That it-

02:08:06
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, like 'cause you can't see it. The, the-- There's no luminosity involved No exchange of photons that we can visibly see and collect a spectrum for or from.

02:08:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, we have s- we, we sort of have three long-range carriers. We have light, we have gravity, and we have neutrinos-

02:08:21
Eric W. Davis: Right

02:08:22
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, that we know about. But l- let me ask you about a weird phrase that I keep hearing that I don't understand. I keep hearing about interdimensional beings, which causes me to wanna throw up in my mouth.

02:08:32
Eric W. Davis: People, uh, I think that's colloquial.

02:08:35
Eric Weinstein: Do you know what that, it's-

02:08:36
Eric W. Davis: Interdimensional means you're going between dimensions, so I don't understand the word interdimensional beings. I think it's really beings that could tran- transverse other dimensions or traverse other dimension. I don't think there's-

02:08:49
Eric Weinstein: Does it mean something technical that's being-

02:08:50
Eric W. Davis: ... such thing as a being that's interdimensional

02:08:52
Eric Weinstein: ... I, again, let's-

02:08:53
Eric W. Davis: We move through three spatial dimensions, so that makes us interdimensional already.

02:08:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But-

02:08:58
Eric W. Davis: And we move through time l- allegedly in one direction, so. [chuckles]

02:09:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, so, so David Grush, I believe, s- used this phrase in a hearing, and he talked about holography.

02:09:07
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Dave's not a physicist. That's the thing.

02:09:09
Eric Weinstein: I kn- I understand that. So what I'm trying to... Look, again, the point isn't to say whether somebody knows what they're talking about, but to say assume that somebody does, a- assume that the plumber comes to you and says, "Wow, I was just out at some crazy base, and I don't even know what these words mean, but here's what I heard." Right? So very often I'm just trying to s- I'm not, I don't care about-

02:09:31
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, I think he's heard that from his briefings given to, from the briefings given to him on the crash retrieval program. I just, you know, he can't tell me that level of information at the classified level 'cause I'm not cleared for it, so.

02:09:44
Eric Weinstein: Are you-

02:09:45
Eric W. Davis: He can verbally, on a superficial level, discuss it in the open, but I don't know what he, if he's... It sounds like he's gargling stuff at times, so.

02:09:55
Eric Weinstein: A- a- and if we had an adversary that was aware of multiple temporal dimensions where we're only a- aware of one.

02:10:03
Eric W. Davis: Right.

02:10:03
Eric Weinstein: So we have an arrow of time, and they would have-

02:10:05
Eric W. Davis: Multiple

02:10:06
Eric Weinstein: ... like a right-hand rule of time. It would be a... Have you thought much about the threat assessment as to what capabilities a, an advanced-

02:10:16
Eric W. Davis: No. Nobody does threat assessments like that, but I would say that is something worth, worth having a threat assessment done on.

02:10:25
Eric Weinstein: And have you, are you aware of reports that we are being, I wouldn't say menaced, but, uh-

02:10:37
Eric W. Davis: Monitored?

02:10:38
Eric Weinstein: ... made to know that we do not control our space?

02:10:41
Eric W. Davis: Yes.

02:10:42
Eric Weinstein: Do you find that highly credible?

02:10:44
Eric W. Davis: Yes.

02:10:45
Eric Weinstein: What percentage?

02:10:46
Eric W. Davis: 100, because it was definitive. It was def... That was told to me definitively, not speculatively. It was, "We know this to be true."

02:10:55
Eric Weinstein: So I've been told the same thing by multiple parties who are not related, all of whom seem like credible people, yet nobody seems to have direct first-hand-

02:11:06
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Even I can't get into that level. I mean, Harry Reid tried to get a special access program, and he failed because Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn denied it, and that was because Harry Reid did it the wrong way. He did it the wrong way, and that's why it got denied. If we did it the proper way, which I'm trained on in the security apparatus, uh, we would've been more successful, so he's-

02:11:30
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember Dick Feynman's book of stories, like "Surely You're Joking" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think"?

02:11:35
Eric W. Davis: Oh, yeah. It's been long time since I read-

02:11:38
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember a story called "Any Questions" in which he goes to Buffalo, New York, because as a physics professor at Cornell, he has to teach in an aerospace company?

02:11:50
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. Vaguely. I vaguely remember that.

02:11:51
Eric Weinstein: So he gets beat up or something in a, in a washroom or-

02:11:55
Eric W. Davis: Yep

02:11:56
Eric Weinstein: ... over a girl. I forget what. Do you have a sense what Richard Feynman was doing with all of this? Because he also has a, another weird story where he's got patents for sub- nuclear submarines, nuclear planes, nuclear shopping c- I don't know what. Uh, are, are aerospace companies something that we don't understand where people actually did basic p- physics research, not material science, not something that's plane or rocket or drone adjacent, but where people were doing actual frontier research in fundamental physics?

02:12:35
Eric W. Davis: No, they wouldn't do that.

02:12:36
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:12:36
Eric W. Davis: Not in that, not in that, uh, industry.

02:12:39
Eric Weinstein: So they wouldn't use it as a shell.

02:12:40
Eric W. Davis: No, they do applied physics research. They're, they're developing technical solutions to the government customer's request to, to s- answer the government customer's need for a solution to some problem. So it doesn't go to fundamental physics like, "Can, should we worry about these type of quarks versus those type of quarks?" No, no, no. They're looking at a physics that could be applied to the engineering of a technological solution for the government customer. That's what the aerospace industry does.

02:13:10
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I understand what it's supposed to do. What I'm trying to say is, is it a system of containers, and you can put anything in a container? I mean, in other words, you could imagine that if a container was secure, you could put a, a drug laundering, you know, money laundering drug operation inside of it, and we wouldn't think, "Oh, that's what you'd expect to find it."

02:13:30
Eric W. Davis: That's right. Yeah.

02:13:31
Eric Weinstein: That it's like something crawled into that shell. My question is, is it possible that theoretical physics was sort of relocated into aerospace companies? Because this is a personally-

02:13:45
Eric W. Davis: I wouldn't say no to that. That's possible. That's possible.

02:13:49
Jesse Michels: Uh, when we spoke to Hal Puthoff, he said, definitively he said, you know, um, "I don't, not sure about fundamental physics being tied up in aerospace corporations."

02:13:57
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

02:13:57
Jesse Michels: But he goes, "Topological physics, like probably." And he said it, it, it would seem to me that physics generally is held in these aerospace, uh, companies and, uh, you know, that was very, it made your sort of blood boil [chuckles] and as it should.

02:14:12
Eric W. Davis: Well, uh, I worked for the Aerospace Corporation for four and a half years.

02:14:14
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

02:14:14
Eric W. Davis: I was one of only A dozen or so physicists with PhDs in the company.

02:14:23
Eric Weinstein: In El Segundo?

02:14:23
Eric W. Davis: Out of 4,000 employees.

02:14:25
Eric Weinstein: Wh- which location?

02:14:27
Eric W. Davis: Uh, I was at Huntsville, Alabama.

02:14:29
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:14:30
Eric W. Davis: Because I was supporting this NASA space nuclear propulsion program office. So, uh, I was only one of maybe a dozen, maybe two. I don't think it was more than two, but definitely within two dozen PhD physicists in the whole country, in the whole company, and I'll have to tell you that not a single one of w- few of us were doing any physics. We were doing engineering work.

02:14:51
Eric Weinstein: And how many of you were trade in front, trained in frontier theory?

02:14:56
Eric W. Davis: Frontier theory? What do you mean?

02:14:58
Eric Weinstein: Standard Model and GR.

02:14:59
Eric W. Davis: Oh, I didn't know anyone.

02:15:00
Eric Weinstein: How, how far back from the front lines were you guys?

02:15:03
Eric W. Davis: I knew those guys, and none of them were. Some of them were trained in astrodynamics, so they know general relativity and Newtonian mechanics. Uh, I'm the only one I know of who's been trained on the Standard Model and GR. I don't, I didn't know any of those other guys that were-

02:15:18
Eric Weinstein: Eric

02:15:18
Eric W. Davis: There's one guy at Blue Origin-

02:15:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:15:21
Eric W. Davis: ... who went to my university, got his PhD in general relativity theory exactly-

02:15:24
Eric Weinstein: This is University of Arizona, Tucson?

02:15:26
Eric W. Davis: ... two years after I got my doctorate.

02:15:29
Eric Weinstein: Okay

02:15:29
Eric W. Davis: And he wor- and he's working as an engineer at Blue Origin.

02:15:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Last question. I can't wrap my head around this. If I was facing an incursion in my airspace claiming craft that defy the laws of physics, and I didn't have a single top physicist on my team, I would expect to be fired instantly.

02:15:51
Eric W. Davis: Oh, sure. But that's not how they think. They don't think in terms of that. They're thinking in terms of their bottom line, and their bottom line will not involve a theoretical physicist. They might have-

02:16:03
Eric Weinstein: But so, sorry. What? You have craft, the claim is you have-

02:16:08
Eric W. Davis: They're engineers. I know, they're engineers.

02:16:09
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but if you, uh, you-

02:16:10
Eric W. Davis: They're not thinking in terms of fundamental physics or something beyond the Standard Model or something beyond general relativity. They're thinking in terms of-

02:16:17
Eric Weinstein: How, how are they doing on this project-

02:16:18
Eric W. Davis: ... how do we take it apart?

02:16:19
Eric Weinstein: ... decades in, the supposed project? How are they doing on it? What's their level of success?

02:16:23
Eric W. Davis: Oh, all I know is as of my knowledge of it, they're failing.

02:16:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay, if you're failing at something-

02:16:27
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, they, they haven't succeeded

02:16:28
Eric Weinstein: ... that requires new physics, you say defy the laws of physics, we ha- we can't make progress, and we have no physicists.

02:16:34
Eric W. Davis: Correct. That's because they don't have-

02:16:34
Eric Weinstein: David, this can't... Uh, Eric, this can't, this can't add up. It's, it's a two-line proof. It defies the laws of physics. We haven't made progress. We have no physicists.

02:16:47
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

02:16:47
Eric Weinstein: If something defies the laws of physics, who do you call? I, I know you ask any of us, any of us, write down 15 names of who you'd call if you had a craft that defied the laws of physics.

02:17:00
Eric W. Davis: But see, the lowest-

02:17:00
Eric Weinstein: Wait a second

02:17:01
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

02:17:01
Eric Weinstein: 12 of those names, 10 of those names would be the same on everybody's list.

02:17:05
Eric W. Davis: Okay.

02:17:08
Jesse Michels: The, the, the final thing I would say is if Hal Puthoff was telling us that some physics is held, whether it's, even if it's just experimental physics, you have a bunch of people over the last 70 years, the foremost in my mind, Townsend Brown, and, you know, this, uh, Ning Li at University of Alabama Huntsville, saying that they're getting little weight reduction effects, gravitational shielding, something.

02:17:30
Eric W. Davis: But that's wrong. They didn't. They were, they were incompetent. There is no weight reduction.

02:17:34
Jesse Michels: So simultaneously Hal's thing of there being-

02:17:37
Eric W. Davis: Look at the two chapters in my book on-

02:17:39
Jesse Michels: Yeah

02:17:39
Eric W. Davis: ... the Townsend Brown effect.

02:17:41
Jesse Michels: But there's the lead electrostatic scientist from NASA at Cape Kennedy just left to start a private propellantless propulsion company, and he says it's derivative of Townsend Brown's effect.

02:17:51
Charles Buhler: Those older papers and that older subject matter, um, is probably valid for most of the point, for most, you know, it's unfair to say that it's not. However, without a theory back then to describe it, it was hard for them to miniaturize it, to optimize it, all of those things you wanna do to, to make it a useful force.

02:18:10
Jesse Michels: His name's Charles Buehler.

02:18:11
Eric W. Davis: He's talking junk science.

02:18:12
Jesse Michels: Even though he's the electrostatics guy?

02:18:14
Eric W. Davis: There's nothing there. Yeah.

02:18:14
Jesse Michels: And then the, the physics chair, um, who is the lead of Ning Li's department left to join her company, Larry Smalley.

02:18:21
Eric W. Davis: Yeah.

02:18:22
Jesse Michels: Okay.

02:18:22
Eric W. Davis: But she was wrong, and so was he.

02:18:24
Jesse Michels: Okay.

02:18:25
Eric W. Davis: Okay, and, and they made off with $400,000 in Army research lab money and didn't produce a producible for it. They didn't deliver anything for that money.

02:18:32
Jesse Michels: So, so the topological physics effects-

02:18:34
Eric W. Davis: Have you talked to Travis Taylor? He knew all, he knew Ning Li.

02:18:37
Jesse Michels: So, so the topological-

02:18:39
Eric W. Davis: She's a rotten, terrible physicist.

02:18:41
Jesse Michels: So the ph- so the physics that are held in private aerospace, we just have to sort of guess at, like we ha- there's, there's no sense of what any of this stuff is, but they're also not putting any theoretical physicists, you know, like Eric's colleagues, on any of this stuff. Like it ju-

02:18:56
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

02:18:56
Jesse Michels: ... just feels sort of-

02:18:57
Eric W. Davis: Here's the thing.

02:18:58
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

02:18:58
Eric W. Davis: The government is gonna tell the aerospace company, "We..." Okay, this is hypothet- hypothetical, but this is how it works according to my two industry sources.

02:19:08
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:19:09
Eric W. Davis: Okay, the government says, "Here's a craft. We wanna know how it works." The industry contractors say, "Okay," and they think in terms of engineering.

02:19:21
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:19:22
Eric W. Davis: We're gonna, we're not g- they're not gonna do fundamental physics. They're not. They might have experimental physics. It's not out of the realm to have an experimental physicist working there, but they're not theoretical guys. So they'll have to know some theory, but they're mostly experimental.

02:19:34
Eric Weinstein: But Eric, you've given no-

02:19:35
Eric W. Davis: Hang on, hang on. So, so they get the tasking that they've gotta take apart a craft, and they've gotta figure out how it's made and how it's worked. That's how it works. That's it. That's the tasking. So that leaves out any n- need for a theoretical physicist. They don't n- know that they would need that.

02:19:53
Jesse Michels: You would agree that that-

02:19:53
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait. That, that made absolutely zero sense.

02:19:57
Eric W. Davis: But that's how they operate.

02:19:58
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no, no.

02:19:59
Eric W. Davis: That's how they op-

02:19:59
Eric Weinstein: You said bec- but because of that, that's why they don't... No, you absolutely need a theoretical physicist if you're gonna take apart a device

02:20:07
Eric W. Davis: I don't disagree, but that's how they operate. That's what the program manager and the government says. So the program manager and the company's gonna say, "Okay, here's our solution to that problem. So here's our bid." They get a sole source contract. Uh, no, there's no bid. It's a sole source contract. So they get the sole source contract, and they've already laid out what the tasking is to be done on that contract. And the tasking is to be done, that needs to be done, is the engineering to take this thing apart piece by piece, reverse engineer it, put it back together again, and try to figure out if they can make it work or not, and understand how that happens. And, uh, that's all they do. They don't have tasking to hire a theoretical physicist to sit there and start thinking about the standard model, beyond the standard model or anything. They don't go there. They don't go there. These are engineering companies. They're not universities. And they don't even ha- aren't even allowed to talk to universities about this because of the compartmentalization is horrible.

02:21:06
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. I- if, if an iPhone fell into the, into the hands of a villager, uh, in some far-flung, uh, developing country, the odds of a cobbler or a carpenter figuring out how an iPhone worked is, is negligible.

02:21:24
Eric W. Davis: Exactly.

02:21:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay?

02:21:25
Eric W. Davis: Exactly.

02:21:26
Eric Weinstein: So the same thing is true on your engineering. I mean, look, the Manhattan Project was an engineering project. There was a deliverable. It was a device. The argument-

02:21:36
Eric W. Davis: But they had to have physicists

02:21:38
Eric Weinstein: ... for both projects.

02:21:39
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm.

02:21:40
Eric Weinstein: You're not giving me any understanding of why there were physicists in one and not the other. Wouldn't the same... Even if you had a wrong... Sorry.

02:21:48
Eric W. Davis: It, it just-

02:21:48
Eric Weinstein: It just doesn't make sense to Eric.

02:21:50
Eric W. Davis: That's just what all the evidence goes down to, um, comes down to, I should say. It's... I d- I haven't met a s... Well, I asked my sort, my senior VP said, "Oh, we didn't have any physicists." They had Bernie Haisch working in that company. He is a physicist. He's an astrophysicist. He was a Max Planck Institute fellow. He was a fellow of that company, and he did astrophysics work because that company built spacecraft for NASA.

02:22:16
Eric Weinstein: D- but an, uh, alternate hypothesis is that this is a dummy program masking something, and the last thing that you would want ever on such a program is a physicist because the physicist is gonna tear right through this thing and say, "There is no Biefeld-Brown effect here. Let me show you." You know?

02:22:36
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:22:36
Eric Weinstein: Or whatever. So my, my, my, my claim is that avoidance of physicists might be necessary to keep a dummy program going, just the way the presence of physicists was necessary to get a deliverable for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

02:22:54
Eric W. Davis: Interesting. Okay. I, I just on another note, the five people I knew of at that one legacy company-

02:23:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm

02:23:01
Eric W. Davis: ... two of whom I met with and dined with and met, and one of whom I met with routinely through the OSAP and after. Uh, so the woman was a mathematician, but she worked as, as a chief of security. There we go. The other one was a materials scientist, okay? And that's a for- that's a discipline in engineering. The other three were engineers. One of them was involved with the development of the F-117 fighter, and I don't know what the other guys' roles were.

02:23:31
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

02:23:31
Eric W. Davis: But they were all engineers. That's what they were described to me, and I said, "No physicists?" He said, "No, not really."

02:23:37
Jesse Michels: It's insane. Both of you guys, what do you hope for the next year or two of disclosure? I mean, I, I think it's clear that you think the, the brain-dead way in which this is run without theoretical physicists [chuckles] should change.

02:23:47
Eric Weinstein: I, I would like, I would like to meet adults on this project who are not grooved into thinking that we can just repeat things that never made any sense into the future as if they make sense. The idea that we are being visited, um, by crafts that dominate our airspace, that we cannot understand, do not know their origin, that defy the laws of physics, and we avoid the one specialty that could help us at all costs, and that this makes sense to anyone-

02:24:14
Eric W. Davis: Hey, no

02:24:14
Eric Weinstein: ... is a, is a fairy tale that should not be... I, I think that a mentally retarded golden retriever should not repeat this fairy tale.

02:24:22
Jesse Michels: [laughs] Doc- Doctor Davis, what, what, what do you hope for over the next few years?

02:24:27
Eric W. Davis: Well, I'm, I'm actually, uh... What's the word? I'm s- Uh, I don't wanna say I'm, uh, in, uh... I'm looking for a negative term here, and, and it's... I'm, I'm not enthusiast... Well, it's not enthusiastic. That's not the word. I think the Presidential Emergency Action directives are so strict. They were instituted in the White House adminis- uh, in the Eisenhower White House administration. So Eisenhower in- instituted that, and that's been carried forward on many different topics, but specifically Jim Semivan and I know that they were instituted for this topic that we've been discussing. So I, I, uh, am not hope... I guess that's the word I'm looking for. I'm not hopeful that there will be meaningful disclosure, uh, because of the Presidential Emergency Action directives, and I'm also not hopeful because I don't think that this topic has risen to a level of urgency in the White House as the Epstein files have and w- the retribution that Trump wants to execute against his political enemies. Uh, those are, those are at the top. Uh, he's got his economic agenda. He's got his foreign policy agenda, tariffs and all that. Disclosure of UAPs at this level, it's just not rising to the top.

02:25:42
Jesse Michels: That's your prognosis, but your hope is that we get full transparency on this issue-

02:25:47
Eric W. Davis: Yeah

02:25:47
Jesse Michels: ... outside of national security trade secrets.

02:25:50
Eric W. Davis: I'm hoping that we get to the point. I'm hoping that he and I could get the keys to the door with Hal-

02:25:53
Jesse Michels: There you go

02:25:53
Eric W. Davis: ... and we can walk in, and we can talk to people and say, "Where the fuck are your physicists?"

02:25:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:25:57
Eric W. Davis: And, uh, or we can say we're going to volunteer our time, or you can pay us to, to work for you. Uh, I would love for both of us with Hal and some others to be able to go in and take a look at the hardware, see it ourselves. I've, I've, I've heard physical descriptions from Jim Lacatski, um, and-

02:26:15
Jesse Michels: Who said that he breached the hull and walked inside of a UFO.

02:26:18
Eric W. Davis: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

02:26:19
Jesse Michels: And you believe him?

02:26:20
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, because there's no reason not to.

02:26:22
Jesse Michels: You told us, because you were allowed to tell us, that our government has a UFO in its possession and has been able to access the inside of it, right?

02:26:31
Eric W. Davis: Yes. I mean, when you work with people like that, we know that we're not trained to lie and make up bullshit-

02:26:38
Jesse Michels: Yeah

02:26:38
Eric W. Davis: ... just for the sake of lying and making up bullshit. Uh, no, we are people with clearances. We are responsible people. Jim McCaskey was a, uh, missiles engineer, I believe he was. Uh, so, and there are other missiles engineers I knew who worked at the DIA back in the '80s and, no, back in, yeah, '80s, '90s, and 2000s until they retired. So there's a lot of engineers in the DIA, not too many physicists that I ever ran across. So anyway, it'd be nice. But s- so my point is, Jim McCaskey wouldn't say that just, just to pull it out of the air and throw people off. He's telling you the truth.

02:27:12
Jesse Michels: That was during his time at-

02:27:12
Eric W. Davis: This is exactly the truth, and this is exactly what he experienced working at the DIA. At some point, uh, I don't know whether this happened during the OSAP, because he certainly didn't tell us. All of us in the OSAP, Kelleher, Bigelow, Puthoff, Belie, myself, we never heard this come from McCaskey before.

02:27:30
Jesse Michels: He d- was this at Lockheed or w- when he stepped inside the craft?

02:27:33
Eric W. Davis: No, no, I don't know where it was. It's just that he said-

02:27:35
Jesse Michels: You don't know where he stepped inside the craft?

02:27:36
Eric W. Davis: Yeah, he nev- he didn't say in his book. I don't know if you read the book or not.

02:27:39
Jesse Michels: I haven't read the book.

02:27:39
Eric W. Davis: Okay. So he didn't say where he went into that craft or who had it.

02:27:43
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:27:44
Eric W. Davis: But I have a general idea based on conversations I've had with Jay Stratton. But the point being is that he was able to get it, touch it. I also know a four-star general from the Clinton administration who was able to go there, use his authority, his power, uh, to go see the program and get inside, talk to the program, uh, employees and leadership, touch the craft, look inside the craft. So that's two. And then there's Admiral Wilson who said, "I tried to get into the program. I met the program manager, the corporate security chief, the legal counsel, and, uh, the chief scientist, and they told me, after a lot of resistance and arguing, they finally said, 'This is what you're looking for. It is a crash retrieval, non-human intelligence, non-human technology, off world, but we can't let you in because you don't have a need to know beyond that.'" [chuckles]

02:28:33
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

02:28:33
Eric W. Davis: You know, it's like, oh, but that's how it works. I mean, that really does work that way. The head of the NRO doesn't know what the hell a lot of the stuff that's going on beneath him, 'cause they're WOSAP or SAPs or hidden SCIs. He, he doesn't have a need to know unless there's a reason that he has to, and then they have to brief him.

02:28:51
Jesse Michels: On that mind-blowing but also baffling note, uh, and I'm glad we ended in a sort of a, you know, collegial way. W- we share a mutual hope that we can, we can, you know, bash down the doors of this program.

02:29:02
Eric W. Davis: Yeah. No, no, and I love this guy's mind. I love the way he was going in the last hour or so.

02:29:06
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

02:29:06
Eric W. Davis: This is, uh, this has really opened my mind a lot more and my eyes on some things I wanna start looking at now. Thank you for that.

02:29:13
Jesse Michels: Thanks, Doc.

02:29:14
Eric W. Davis: Thank you, sir.

02:29:16
Jesse Michels: That was an interesting conversation.

02:29:18
Eric Weinstein: Wasn't it?

02:29:18
Jesse Michels: [chuckles] Yeah. What's your... I don't know. Do you have kind of a gestalt sense coming away from that as far as an update where you were before the conversation, uh, where you are now?

02:29:32
Eric Weinstein: So first of all, it's interesting to see somebody who believes in aliens and, and, and craft at some deep level and doesn't believe in going beyond the theories that are, uh, blessed with holy water by the physics community. And so, you know, I take general relativity and standard model quite seriously, but he takes it almost as a constraint. So I think one of the things I didn't understand is that the physics output is rec- seems almost recreational, and it seems like what is the closest you could get to science fiction using known science?

02:30:15
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:30:16
Eric Weinstein: Right?

02:30:17
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

02:30:17
Eric Weinstein: And the idea is that it's all extremely implausible, vague scenario. Like, if we could come up with huge amounts of matter and energy, then we could do this, uh, Alcubierre space-time solution or, um, you know, maybe we could engineer an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. You know, and, and like, again, I, I heard somebody say this thing about, um, maybe the black hole information paradox is a key that because it doesn't fully make sense, that that's where the technology is, and you should use quantum gravity as a guide. Maybe you go into a black hole and you somehow get shot out some, some, some place at a speed that you couldn't imagine otherwise. Whatever these things are, this is garbage. I hate to say it that way, but it's not that he's... He, he, he maybe he's doing the best that you can do, assuming general relativity and the standard model, trying to reproduce something that clearly goes beyond it if it exists at all. Another thing is, is that I was sort of surprised that he wasn't nearly as read in at a primary level, um, so that he's able to talk because he didn't actually make primary contact with this.

02:31:36
Jesse Michels: Well, that's the thing we were just commenting on off camera, which is like this funny dynamic of everybody seems to be circling around this program and nobody seems to be in the program. [chuckles] It's a little like the Epstein list or something.

02:31:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:31:50
Jesse Michels: Which is not at all... You know, we'll, we'll stop the analogy there. But it is this weird thing where it's like, you know, uh, no one, no one, no one's gone to the island, but like, you know, or, or, or not me rather, but everybody else has or whatever, and these are, everybody's demonic or whatever. And in, in this case, it's this weird thing where everybody's this Mr. Smith Goes to Washington character who stumbled into this in this sort of hapless way, uh, and they have no idea how the thing actually sort of functions and works, and that allows them to talk about it.

02:32:19
Eric Weinstein: Or even if There's a thing as described at all. I mean, I'm convinced that there's a thing.

02:32:26
Jesse Michels: Mm.

02:32:27
Eric Weinstein: And it has a boundary, and it has some structure, and there's some money in it, whatever. But I don't know that what's inside that container is what is indicated on its surface to the extent that anyone can even see the boundary.

02:32:44
Jesse Michels: Yeah. Well, that's a question is like, you know, does the tip of the iceberg look like... I- is it actually an iceberg? And are we looking at a tip of the iceberg where you can say, "Uh, we have a crash retrieval reverse engineering program," but that's actually some sort of intelligent sleight of hand, and in fact, the body, uh, or a structure that is underneath, you know, submerged in the water is obfuscated, and that changes everything.

02:33:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It's like you have a kelp forest which has a top which looks like an iceberg.

02:33:14
Jesse Michels: [laughing]

02:33:16
Eric Weinstein: You know, something like that. And so-

02:33:17
Jesse Michels: I was just trying to figure out the right analogy.

02:33:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, there, there isn't a good one.

02:33:20
Jesse Michels: There isn't a good one.

02:33:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:33:22
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

02:33:22
Jack C: And you have unreliable narrators to contend with as well, and you have unprepared ontologies to pr- contend with as well. So you have these voices giving you information. You are Eric Davis in this situation. You have these witnesses or these sources giving you information, but they are a filter unto themselves. They're an ontology filter, and they're a reliability filter. How much can you totally bank on what they're saying and use it to build a model for whatever is hiding in this boundary?

02:33:51
Eric Weinstein: So one of the questions that we, we were discussing is if you believe in the legacy program, and I think all three of us are in a position where we've talked to too many different people with different backgrounds that are talking about a something in common. And, you know, in my worst fear, it's the jackalope, where everybody sort of believes that jackalopes are real, um, because there's an industry around a myth. Um, but assuming this thing is real, because I can't imagine how you would fake it, what is real is a program with a boundary. So there's something where you're inside the program, and there's something where you're outside the program, and people have to go back in and out, unless you imagine that there's a secret facility which you enter once and you never leave, just physically. This means almost certainly this thing is hidden in plain sight. I don't mean to say that there may not be deep underground facilities on our bases. I don't mean to say that... But people have to go home.

02:34:58
Jesse Michels: Right.

02:34:59
Eric Weinstein: Right? And you have to have plumbers, and you have to have housekeeping staff. I don't understand how this thing exists.

02:35:16
Jesse Michels: Well, on that note, you attempted at some instantiation of at least the theoretical physics component of the whatever we're calling the, this UAP legacy program-

02:35:29
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:35:29
Jesse Michels: ... at Renaissance Technologies, and I thought it was interesting that, uh, in 2022, NASA had this, you know, UFO review panel.

02:35:39
Anchor: 16 researchers will spend the next nine months studying the UFOs. They will use unclassified data in their research and release a report to the public next year. Now, this follows the Pentagon's announcement in July that it would create an office to track reports of UAPs or UFOs.

02:35:57
Jesse Michels: And they were seeing, you know, if there's anything to all this stuff, and they were, they were looking into it in an official capacity. And the person overseeing that panel is this guy, David Spergel. Of course, Jim Simons started Renaissance Technologies, and Spergel was head of his foundation. So I find that to be very interesting overlap.

02:36:15
Eric Weinstein: So there's this concept in Washington of steady hands. And steady hands, I never really found all the different meanings for it, but one meaning for it was: Who can we trust when the pressure gets insanely high to do what we expect needs to be done, which may involve obfuscating, lying, evading, prettifying, all of the things that don't ha- to do with disclosure? The world of steady hands is often a very small world, so they reuse the sa... You'll notice that the same people in Washington, D.C. so- somehow show up on eight different issues. They're like... Because the government knows that they can trust that person in a crisis not to, not to buckle. They've sort of given their life for the team.

02:37:08
Jesse Michels: Would Fauci be sort of analogous?

02:37:11
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Right? The idea that you're going to stand up to Rand Paul in an open hearing, and you're not gonna call your, call for your mommy, and you're not gonna say, "Okay, I admit it. There was a whole thing, and we screwed up, and I feel terrible," whatever. And so maybe the idea is we're dealing with the steady hands phenomena.

02:37:33
Jesse Michels: Mm.

02:37:34
Eric Weinstein: That you need people to deny the obvious. You need people to spend credibility, and there are very few people who wanna do that job.

02:37:44
Jesse Michels: Mm. One other connection I was thinking of, speaking of, you know, the intersection between, uh, institutions that are well-respected that nobody can deny have power in the country, like the JASONs, which, uh, you know, they meet in Santa Barbara. It's the elite of the elite when it comes to, uh, military industrial complex, and specifically figuring out kind of... It's frontier physics, but it's also weaponization. Uh, uh, uh, you know, um, and so you have that committee that you brought up, and then you have the UFO world, which seems kind of more quacky on the face of it. And you have this guy, Ron Pandolfi, who seems to be a part of the JASON advisory committee, um, but also seems to show up in UFO world constantly. And so I think it's really interesting as a heuristic to look at the intersection between quacky UFO world and more institutional, undeniable military industrial complex.

02:38:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, that was why the, the golden age of general relativity was such an important, uh, thing to mine because that was the last major moment where the lunatic quacks and the super respectable people were seeing each other after hours for cocktails, right? And, you know, there's a different version of this maybe where, um, David Kaiser, I think, wrote this book, "How the Hippies Saved Physics," about what gets done at Esalen, you know, with entanglement and, uh, Bell inequalities and all that kind of stuff. So I think that there's this weird way in which the quack world and the respectable world are, are always intermingled, and we don't really admit to this. Uh, I've, I've called the passion for, let's say, string theoretic physics and other official, uh, mass delusions knarks, which is crank spelled backwards. A knark is a crank inside of the institutions who would be ridiculed for their belief structure, but for the fact that they are upholding the institution, right? And so we have a-- And, and by the way, the mass delusion isn't that string theory might be interesting. It's that 42 years in, you're still not seeing this, what do we have wrong? Does anyone else have an idea? There is no conference that brings together the critics and the proponents to try to get to ground truth.

02:40:22
Jesse Michels: Well, you have an idea about-- You know, you mentioned this in the interview. You said, you know, we have been beating Einstein to death trying to kind of quantize gravity. Uh, you have an idea about gauging gravity and how, you know, maybe we, we fell into the kind of quantum gravity cul-de-sac when we could have thought about gravity in this other context.

02:40:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, so this, this is a, it's a very strange point. Um, so I just turned 60 and-

02:40:51
Jesse Michels: Happy birthday.

02:40:51
Eric Weinstein: Thank you very much. What I have realized about myself is that I am the youngest person to see the transition between old style physics and the string physics in terms of the community. So I got to college in 1982. I started going to seminars essentially immediately, which was unusual, and I was 16 at the time, so that was my claim to saying that that's why I'm the youngest. Things change in '84, so there's really only '82, '83. And I happened by complete accident to be at the first lecture of Ed Witten on string theory at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, which I didn't know until very recently that, that my memory actually is because of I fell by accident into the beginning.

02:41:36
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:41:39
Eric Weinstein: They changed the entire culture of theoretical physics, and there's nothing they can do to hide it. If you go back to research articles before, uh, 1984, you see an entirely different culture of inquiry as to what are the problems of physics, what might we try to do to solve them. And quantum gravity was just thrust down everybody's throat as the Holy Grail from 1984 to '87 and by the time of '87, everybody had accepted this. So what you did is you retconned a story where nobody mentions the phrase quantum gravity until 1972. And you say, well, that's always been the Holy Grail ever since, uh, gravity in general relativity in 1915 and the quantum, let's say by 1928 when you have quantum electrodynamics, were both realized to have this kind of incompatibility. So if the incompatibility between the two is real, but it's not really quantum gravity, what is it? So what I said was most people don't realize that due to work of Jim Simons and C.N. Yang, which got written up as Wu Yang as if Simons was Wu, um, we know that underneath the standard model is a classical geometric structure, and we don't talk about the classical differential geometric nature of the standard model. Um, and that, that is the subject of the Wu Yang dictionary. So that unearthing of a geometric origin for the particles and fields that are not gravity, but all the, all the quantum fields, uh, is a very important clue. That, that geometry has a property which is that it is gauged, which means that you can keep yourself from being fooled, that many different versions... You know that problem with the elephant with the blind men going around and it's all one elephant, and the blind men aren't wandering around the elephant stupidly. They're just staying in one place. So a gauge orbit would be, let's get all of the information from all of these people and decide that it's one elephant, and they're just looking at it from different perspectives. So it's kind of a unity of knowledge thing. General relativity can't be gauged. Now, there's a lie that says, well, that it's a type of gauge theory because there's a different kind of symmetry which has nothing to do with gauging called, uh, general coordinate invariance or diffeomorphism invariance. So we, we make up a story to pretend that Einstein's theory can be gauged, and it can't. And so now you have this weird question: Why did Ed Witten tell us that the incompatibility between this The standard model in general relativity was that one was fully quantum and the other never quite grew up, and that we had to grow up general relativity.

02:44:38
Jesse Michels: Mm.

02:44:39
Eric Weinstein: So general relativity and the standard model have two separate attributes. Einstein could do two things that the standard model cannot. He-- These things are called contraction, where you take two indices on either side of a separating barrier called a tensor product, and you get them to mate, uh, and pair off. So he contracted the Riemannian curvature to get the Ricci curvature. He contracted that to get scalar curvature. He spun the scalar curvature around 180 degrees, plugged it back into the formula, and got rid of this vile curvature. Whatever that operation was, that was the central idea of general relativity. There is no ability to take the full curvature tensors that occur in the standard model and break them up into components. You can't do this contraction game. And the other thing Einstein had that the standard model didn't is that there's a central reference object called the Levi-Civita connection, and there's no analog for that as-- in the connections that give us photons and W and Z particles and gluons. So in the case of the standard model, you've got-- If, if my arm here is space-time, and this is the data of the particles, the data of the particles can move around without moving space-time. In general relativity, if you think about this as the XY plane, moving the X-axis affects the Y-axis. Okay? The incompatibility between the advantages of those two different pictures, gauge equivalence in the case of the standard model and contraction and a specified Levi-Civita connection, that difference gives two sets of advantages to two different theories. Now, my work, the reason it's called geometric unity, nobody ever asked that question really, is that I said: Are there any places where you get to use the advantages of both systems? And the answer turns out to be, well, certainly in general it won't work. But for some completely absurdly narrow class of theories, you get all the benefits of both systems. And then you check the particle table of the standard model, and you're exactly in that freak class.

02:46:55
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:46:57
Eric Weinstein: So, like, how, how can you not devote your life to that fact? I just don't even understand it. Um, so that thing is h-having to do with the fact that we didn't gauge gravity properly. And there's old work about this with Einstein and Cartan, with McDowell and Mansouri, with a bunch of other people who've had versions of this idea. But it all got blown away by quantum gravity.

02:47:25
Jesse Michels: Hmm. Do you think that was by design or emergent?

02:47:32
Eric Weinstein: It sounds insane to say by design, but let me give you something that is insane, although modern people won't see it as such. It is insane to spend 42 years under the spell of a group of people you call leaders who've stagnated a field. In general, you have to ask the question: Why is no one allowed to say, "What is going on with David Gross, Lenny Susskind, Edward Witten, Andy Strominger?" Why are these people still our leading physicists?

02:48:11
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:48:11
Eric Weinstein: I mean, this program failed. It's not the first failed program. We had a program associated with, um, with Reggie called the Reggie Calculus that was supposed to do great things and didn't work. There was a guy named Jeff Chew who had a bootstrap program and the S-matrix thing that didn't work. We've had lots of ideas that don't work, and it's part of the game, and it's not a question of these are, are bad people, but they, they failed scientifically. We can't say that. We can't say that we are slavishly devoted to making sure that we don't offend our leaders, and we're gonna insult everyone else, and literally we're just gonna professionally insult everyone who's been saying for 42 years, "This is not sensible." You saw what happened with Eric, is I sort of had to say, "You know, none of these ideas are remotely plausible that you're exploring." It wasn't personal. It wasn't mean. He sort of said, "Yeah, I know that now." But you can kind of tell at the beginning none of this is gonna work.

02:49:14
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:49:14
Eric Weinstein: And so both in string theory and in what he's doing, which is accepting that craft exists and are retrieved and can do miraculous things, and the constraints are he, he takes for himself, "I'm not gonna challenge the standard model or general relativity. What's the closest I can get to science fiction from known science fact?"

02:49:35
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:49:36
Eric Weinstein: And the answer is you're a million miles away, buddy. There's no-- You're not even cl- You're not in the right zip code.

02:49:41
Jesse Michels: Is your sense that there is a vital core that does have either geometric unity or some frameworks that are closer to ontological truth than general relativity in quantum field theory? You know.

02:49:56
Eric Weinstein: You can't ask me because my, my feeling is I wouldn't have spent the same 42 years on geometric unity-

02:50:01
Jesse Michels: Hmm

02:50:02
Eric Weinstein: ... if I wasn't f- pretty confident that this is-

02:50:06
Jesse Michels: Sure

02:50:06
Eric Weinstein: ... this is right. Right?

02:50:07
Jesse Michels: Okay. So, so then the question would be, do you think that somebody else or some other entity on the inside of all of this-- 'Cause what's interesting is you have a similar thing going on in UFO world as what seemed to go on with Epstein, where you have this bizarre telephone game of terms being-- [chuckles] You have, like, in UFO world, it's like extended electrodynamics and all these, like, weird frameworks that nobody knows how to define, and then you read those Epstein emails and he's like Boost your physics. He's like, you know, "Time is actually just a function of the vibration of cesium atoms." And he's infiltrating the math department at Harvard, and somehow has a lot of sway with these people, and is speaking like a person who was maybe told some real stuff.

02:50:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is, this is the thing-

02:50:58
Jesse Michels: Yeah

02:50:58
Eric Weinstein: ... it's very hard to convey because particularly academics and PhDs don't wanna be conned, like at all costs. My feeling is this is an extremely dumb way to go through life. Um, you're going to be conned for sure. Try to figure out who's saying something interesting by listening. And i- in my estimation, Epstein was saying interesting things to me that didn't originate from his mind.

02:51:29
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:51:30
Eric Weinstein: It's like they've hired an actor to play a hedge fund manager. I only met him once, uh, it was probably for about an hour or so. Um, but he was an absolutely terrifying person to encounter. It would be surprising to me if I was alone, in that I immediately had the suspicion that I was looking at somebody who had been constructed rather than something that had organically arisen within the financial community. It was like somebody who'd learned a phrase in a foreign language and he was repeating it as best he, he could. Like I don't, I don't think people really have a clear idea of how crazy that interview he gives to Bannon or the media training he was doing. He gets like eight things wrong in a row and people said, "Well, Eric, you were wrong. He clearly is a much better spoken, much more informed person than you."

02:52:19
Jesse Michels: [chuckles]

02:52:20
Eric Weinstein: So he founded the Santa Fe Institute in 1990 to '93 when it was founded in 1984 by other people.

02:52:28
Jesse Michels: So bizarre.

02:52:29
Eric Weinstein: Or this was around the time that Murray Gell-Mann was naming quarks from a poem when quarks were named many years earlier.

02:52:38
Jesse Michels: Says he was a good Wall Street trader because he had calculators. You know, we had Texas Instruments back then, [laughs] so like-

02:52:44
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So he-- So this is what I saw with like Bob Lazar, you know. Eric latched onto the fact that Lazar is lying. Okay, so fine, he's lying. It doesn't mean it's uninteresting.

02:52:56
Jesse Michels: Not only is it not uninteresting, but it's... I think it's simultaneously... It's a little strange to say, I know that there is a long-term legacy UFO reverse engineering program than the one guy that comes out, where I think a lot of his stuff checks, to be honest. And I think you can easily character assassinate the person by saying, you know, he was involved in XYZ, but a lot of his details check.

02:53:23
Eric Weinstein: Again, my, my point is assume that, assume that he's, uh, schizophrenic, assume that he's, uh, got delusions of grandeur. I, I don't know. I, I'd never had the thought before that the topological instanton sector of QCD based on the Pontryagin class could be transgressed to a Chern-Simons, and Chern-Simons is as close to Einstein-Hilbert. Um, and I only had that because I was just so sickened by what Lazar was saying, as if he's talking, "I'm gonna explain the world to you kids," and he starts talking garbage.

02:53:58
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

02:53:59
Eric Weinstein: Um-

02:53:59
Jack C: When, when did you hear that and, and have this idea about the theta sector and then look at it?

02:54:03
Eric Weinstein: It's an interesting question. Rog... Joe Rogan, who's, you know, a friend, wanted me to sit down with Bob Lazar. And, you know, I sat down with Terrence Howard, um, and I have a great deal of fun with Terrence, and Terrence and I get on, although sometimes he threatens me and I hate that. Um, but Terrence, you know, I, I was, I was praiseworthy in the one or two areas where Terrence was doing something really new, and in general I had to pour cold water on most everything else he said. And, you know, that's the price of being taken seriously by somebody like me. Uh, in the case of Bob Lazar, Joe once said, "Let's sit down." Now, I didn't... I wouldn't have done the Terrence episode if I didn't have something to say which Terrence f- which is positive, which is Terrence found one remarkable thing, at least. He just did. So with one remarkable thing, I'm willing to do it. Otherwise, it's a character assassination. I did not wanna sit down with Bob Lazar and do a character assassination. Just characterologically, I don't like going after human beings. I go after institutions.

02:55:07
Jesse Michels: Well, he would say he's not a... He would say these are frameworks that were given to him and he's out of theoretical physics.

02:55:10
Eric Weinstein: No, but he said, but he, but he said that he was at MIT, let's say, in the physics department.

02:55:14
Jesse Michels: Right.

02:55:14
Eric Weinstein: So immediately, the problem is, is that whenever you get to real academic physics, the world shrinks to a tiny number of people. And I don't think that the outside world either appreciates one of two things about frontier physics. One, it's a tiny world because it's so difficult. And two, how vertical it is in terms of human ability.

02:55:41
Jesse Michels: Did he say he was in the physics department, though? I don't think he-

02:55:43
Eric Weinstein: I think he-

02:55:45
Jesse Michels: I don't think so.

02:55:45
Eric Weinstein: I think Joe t- Joe, Joe told me.

02:55:47
Jack C: There's a statement somewhere where he said he had physics at MIT and Caltech. Going back to the early '90s, that was part of the early-

02:55:54
Jesse Michels: I think it was just MIT, but I think my read on it is that MIT is university, uh, affiliated research center, UARC, and they do spooky shit. And-

02:56:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, Draper-

02:56:09
Jesse Michels: Mm-hmm

02:56:09
Eric Weinstein: ... for example, and Lincoln Labs-

02:56:11
Jack C: Right. MIT and Lincoln Labs

02:56:12
Eric Weinstein: ... yeah, are, are different sorts of entities.

02:56:15
Jesse Michels: Exactly.

02:56:16
Eric Weinstein: You know, so the, the issue is, are you s- are you at, at MIT or are you really at Draper or Lincoln?

02:56:22
Jack C: Yeah. If you're talking to somebody from MIT and Lincoln Labs, you're not talking to MIT faculty. This is interesting.

02:56:27
Jesse Michels: Uh, I, I don't know, but my sense is he was put there to work on, um, something defense related.

02:56:39
Eric Weinstein: Ag- again-

02:56:41
Jesse Michels: So like more like functional, not high level theoretical, but-

02:56:46
Eric Weinstein: So you ask, y-you're asking me the question: how did I come to think about this thing from Bob Lazar?

02:56:51
Jack C: Yeah, when did gravity A start sounding like-

02:56:53
Eric Weinstein: So in order, in order for me to sit down with Bob Lazar, according to my own rules for I don't hunt human beings in general unless they hunt me or unless it, unless there's no other option. I don't-- I hunt institutions that are failing. I don't hunt people. I just don't like, I don't like the ethos. So in order for me to come on with Bob Lazar, I would have to find one thing credible in what he's saying. So I went over it and I tried to say, "Is there any way of making this make sense?" And originally I couldn't do it. I couldn't figure out this gravity wave A, gra-gravity wave B, because he and I would get into it and it would be a very short, brutal, you know... It, it would be Asgreen versus Musvidal, and I don't want to do that. Um, and then I found that, and that was the thing that was gonna allow me to sit down with Bob Lazar is-

02:57:44
Jack C: Hmm

02:57:44
Eric Weinstein: ... you, you could be saying something.

02:57:46
Jack C: Problem is, I don't think he'd be able to hang with [chuckles] that idea that you present.

02:57:49
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but it, but it's a, it's a formal possibility.

02:57:52
Jack C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also don't think he would try as an author of the material, to your point. He would convey, "These are frameworks provided to me elsewhere." He wouldn't try to take technical ownership of gravity A and gravity B.

02:58:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, the other thing is-

02:58:05
Jack C: Yeah

02:58:06
Eric Weinstein: ... is that I would say that even mathematicians and physicists really get this wrong, and the person who didn't get it wrong, bizarrely, was Jeff Epstein, which means that he's talking to somebody. In general, we, we, we do a bad job of counting the degree of a differential equation. So if differential equations are how we tell how the world develops, the t- standard way of figuring out the degree of a differential equation is saying, "Take the fields that are in it and count the maximal number of derivatives that are taken of those fields before you get to the equations." And that would say that the Einstein field equations are second order and the Maxwell's equations are second order. There's a different thing you can do, which is you can say, "Okay, in fundamental force law, first spot the curvature tensor and then tell me how many derivatives I take of the curvature tensor." In that case, those are no longer the same. Einstein's theory would be zeroth order in that way of writing it, and Yang-Mills' theory would be first order because you take one degree in Yang, uh, one differential in Yang-Mills theory. You take zero difference. You just do linear algebra to the curvature tensor in, in general relativity. So I don't think most people realize the extent to which the Chern-Simons and Einstein-Hilbert are basically playing very similar roles in the two theories. One of them is Riemannian, one of them is Eriesse-Manian. And the key features, they're, they're both second-- they're both zeroth order in the curvature when you take the Euler-Lagrange equation, which is very hard to do. That thing, that, that property means that there's a very strong tie which is m-more broadly accepted between Chern-Simons, which currently lives only in dimension three in, in its most strict sense, and Einstein-Hilbert, which can live in any dimension. So, you know, look, there's a hope. I just don't think that most people think about, uh, geometric physics in this way.

03:00:19
Jack C: Well, interesting connection. Chern-Simons is named after who and who?

03:00:26
Eric Weinstein: SS Chern and Jim Simons.

03:00:28
Jack C: And Jim Simons. And that, that takes us back possibly to Renaissance technologies who h-what has the largest concentration of differential geometers in the US.

03:00:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's-- So look, I, I more or less accused Jim Simons of this shortly before he died. Um, and I told him, and I mean, it was very collegial and very positive, but I said, "You do realize that you have the closest Lagrangian to Einstein-Hilbert. We don't usually talk about Simons versus Einstein."

03:00:59
Jack C: What did he say?

03:01:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, then we have this completely bizarre interchange. So he, he wants me to tell him more. So I explain that essentially in dimension three, your object, which is actually a transgression misinterpreted as an action or a Lagrangian, has the closest thing to the characteristics of the Einstein-Hilbert action, which is the integral of the scalar curvature integrated over the space-time manifold. And I said, "In dimension three, you don't have any Weyl curvature to get rid of the way Einstein had to get rid of the Weyl curvature and, and discard it as he filleted the rest of the Riemann curvature tensor. And you, you, you don't have the gauge, um, uh, benefit o-of your action, you Chern-Simons, in the Einsteinian case. But otherwise, they're extraordinarily similar. Di-did you know that they're both inside of a parent theory? And the parent theory combines Einstein-Hilbert and Chern-Simons and new stuff, and that's what geometric unity does. Geometric unity gauges gravity effectively and gives you contraction. So you're both contracting and gauging, which you're not supposed to be able to do under most circumstances." And I said, "You're going to have a role in life that is much closer to Albert Einstein's when this is all done. Not that, not that you're making an Einsteinian discovery, but the thing that will replace Einstein will also explain the work that you did." And he said, "This is unbelievably fascinating. You have to come to S- State University of Stony Brook to the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and spend a year and teach us this."

03:02:58
Jack C: Whoa.

03:02:58
Eric Weinstein: So I said, "Okay. Um, I'm moved, but I'd, I, I would like nothing better." I said, "You're just gonna have to understand that I have a family and I have a son who's finishing his last year of, of high school, so I'm gonna need a little bit of help with the heavy lifting of relocating the family for a summer-- for a, for a year at a time when we can't afford a lot of tumult." And he looked at me and he said, "Okay. Well, do you have any idea where you'd get the money?"

03:03:33
Jack C: [chuckles] Isn't he worth $20 billion plus, what, at that time?

03:03:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Yes.

03:03:41
Jack C: That's crazy.

03:03:42
Eric Weinstein: And I, I, I looked at him. I couldn't parse it.

03:03:51
Jack C: So-

03:03:51
Eric Weinstein: It, it just doesn't add up.

03:03:53
Jack C: It's so strange. Did you, uh, uh, I mean, you just didn't wanna grovel at that point and you kind of like-

03:03:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm not going to grovel.

03:03:59
Jack C: Yeah. And that, that's so crazy. Did you get the vibe that he was gener- genuinely hearing about this technical detail for the first time?

03:04:07
Eric Weinstein: This is the first of two meetings that sound like this. The first time I had a meeting with him, I spent three hours, um, with him going over gauge theory of modern economics. Now, he happens to be married to an economist. He obviously works in the markets. And gauge theory, just so it's not thought to be intimidating or, or too cool for school, is really just differential calculus done correctly. And unfortunately, we call it gauge theory and we only teach people who are very high up in pure mathematics or theoretical physics. Nobody else learns gauge theory. We should teach gauge theory in high school. It's just, it's an indispensable way of looking at the world, and it's just differential calculus done right. So in economic theory, there was a thing called the marginal revolution, which Tyler Cowen bor- borrowed for the name of his blog, and that was the penetration of the differential calculus into economics. So what, what I did, uh, together with Pia Malaney was to show that modern neoclassical economics is a self-evident gauge theory at multiple levels. And that was not taken well by the Harvard economics department, particularly by one man named Dale Jorgenson, who was the chairman of the department, and basically went nuts trying to make sure that my wife was unemployable. And the reason that he did that is that he was tasked by Senators, uh, Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan with pretending there was a 1.1% overstatement in the, uh, consumer price index to transfer a trillion dollars because all tax receipts and all Social Security payments are indexed. So tax brackets and y- you can raise taxes and slash benefits both at the same time by making a technical adjustment in inflation. You'll notice that many of us are experiencing inflation that's not fully reflected in our statistics. So there was a crime going on, which the Boskin Commission was committing against the American people by putting in a 1.1% overstatement in the CPI by hand at the same moment that Malaney and myself were showing the economics as a gauge theory, and there's a completely different way of looking at this. And Jorgenson didn't want any competition. So anyway, I talked to Jim. Jim said, "Look, this is amazing. Uh, I've never thought about this, but you're right about bundle theory and derivatives and projection operators." I said, "Well, you have to l- have to ask a question. Y- your returns are so off the chart. You have to have some explanation for why you're able to do this much of a better job." And I said, "Are you, are you using this? Your wife is an economist, you're a differential geometer. You're in the same situation I am. Did you get here first?" And he took a drag on his cigarette. It was a very long pause, and he said, "Eric, if you knew how we actually made money, you'd be so disappointed."

03:07:32
Jack C: What do you think he meant by that?

03:07:35
Eric Weinstein: You can imagine. I have no idea, but there's certainly... Look, uh, so far as I know, I'm the first person, because I come from a math physics background, to say, "I'm not really positive that this thing is just a hedge fund."

03:07:49
Jack C: Hmm.

03:07:50
Eric Weinstein: The returns are too impressive. You know, they're like North Korean returns, and then the dear leader, you know, ascended to the mountaintop and wrote the seven most beautiful symphonies before descending on a winged unicorn. It's like in the early 2000s, I didn't believe the following four funds: Bernie Madoff, Renaissance Technologies, D.E. Shaw, and Jeff Epstein.

03:08:15
Jack C: Why D.E. Shaw?

03:08:17
Eric Weinstein: It was a strange thing that I knew people who worked there. They were so highly compartmentalized that they basically had the sense of they had no idea how the whole thing worked.

03:08:27
Jack C: Hmm.

03:08:28
Eric Weinstein: And so it had... As you know, there is a very strange property of government secrecy, which is the only thing people really trust is compartmentalization and stovepiping. The general belief is, is that people will always talk and you have to have the people sharded with enough granularity that nobody can put together what's actually going on.

03:08:50
Jack C: Do you think-- Because

03:08:52
Jesse Michels: I mean, Brookhaven National Labs is the site of Cosmotron, which is the largest particle accelerator in the US. It is. Do you know that?

03:09:01
Eric Weinstein: No, I didn't.

03:09:01
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

03:09:02
Eric Weinstein: I thought Fermilab would've been.

03:09:03
Jesse Michels: No, it's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so they, they're doing, you know, they have a particle accelerator that's, you know, pretty powerful up there. They have Stony Brook, which, you know, uh, is definitely punching above its weight class when it comes to physics, uh, which has some interesting also-

03:09:18
Eric Weinstein: Particularly mathematics

03:09:20
Jesse Michels: ... particularly mathematics. Also some interesting architecture up there as well, [chuckles] that you've noted. Uh, and then you have this fund which seems to get 30% year over year no matter what, you know, up years, down years. You know, it's just always sort of, you know, performing at the same clip. And, uh, I guess my question would be: do you think this was sort of a slush fund for secret science?

03:09:46
Eric Weinstein: I think it's not irresponsible. Look, y-y-you know my thing about responsible conspiracy theorizing, which is that you go back in the history of actual conspiracies and you say y-your new thought about a conspiracy should be within a standard deviation or two of something that's known to exist. So if you take Los Alamos as a good example, you have a protected campus and compound. You have top math physics talent. You have duplicitous filings. For example, they didn't want people to know that plutonium and uranium were the two main radioactive elements that they were focused on, so that I believe Harold Urey may have been sent to promote others. They didn't want people realizing that it was as easy as it, as it turned out to be. So there was a lot of disinformation scientifically, because you had to explain why you have all of this focus on chain reactions and then suddenly interest just stops. Okay? So my claim is that if you believe that Los Alamos exists, and if you believe that the Rad Lab exists, the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, and you believe a bunch of these things, it is not hard... Oh, and you, and you believe like dummy companies and shell companies like Southern Air Transport or Air America, you know. Um, that's not the problem. Th-the secret squirrels in Washington, D.C. don't want smart Americans turning this into a parlor game. So they've decided that, okay, we're gonna spread one idea, which is that everybody who speculates ag- about the secret world is a loser. There's only one reason to speculate about the secret world, is that you're fucking stupid.

03:11:44
Jesse Michels: Mm.

03:11:45
Eric Weinstein: Right? And I really despise this.

03:11:49
Jesse Michels: Mm.

03:11:49
Eric Weinstein: So what I said was entirely responsible. Uh, if you were trying to call the National Security Agency no such agency back in the day, that would be bad, because I would say, "Tell me where number theorists go who don't get academic jobs, and let's map the, uh, the zip codes. Oh, look, there's this little cluster." I mean, I don't know, Maryland or Delaware or wherever it is, you know. And you'd find Fort Meade. Okay, well, there's a cluster in Renaissance Technologies. [chuckles]

03:12:21
Jesse Michels: Yes.

03:12:21
Eric Weinstein: You know? So are you actually... I'm not telling you what's in it or not. I'm telling you if, if somebody told me tomorrow there is a Manhattan 3.0 and it's about gravity and UAPs and post-Einsteinian engineering, where is its brain trust? With 95% confidence, I would tell you it's Renaissance Technologies. On the other hand, if you asked, "Is there such a program?" I don't know that, I don't know that my confidence would be so high. If there is a secret program-

03:12:57
Jesse Michels: Yeah

03:12:57
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm pretty sure it's Renaissance Technologies.

03:12:59
Jesse Michels: Some percentage times 95% or something-

03:13:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's the thing

03:13:02
Jesse Michels: ... would be the, the likelihood, yeah.

03:13:03
Eric Weinstein: It, it might be... It, it, it might well not be, but, you know, if you asked me, um, "Hey, tell me what are F-Feynman, Bethe, uh, John von Neumann doing at a boarding school, or at a boys school in, in the New Mexico, uh, wilderness?" I'd say that's a really strange place to find those guys. [chuckles]

03:13:26
Jesse Michels: Yeah. It's an odd concentration of-

03:13:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:13:28
Jesse Michels: ... the country's top physicists.

03:13:30
Eric Weinstein: Oh, well, th-they're investing in secondary education for young men because they have self-image issues. Oh, okay.

03:13:37
Jesse Michels: [chuckles] Exactly. Well, you also... You know, you've noted that... Uh, or this isn't even something you've noted. This is something, you know, in the age of disclosure or... And by the way, this movie came out and you have DNI level people. You have James Clapper, you have Brennan-

03:13:55
Eric Weinstein: But, but wait, wait, wait one second.

03:13:56
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

03:13:56
Eric Weinstein: I just want to say this thing.

03:13:57
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

03:13:57
Eric Weinstein: I don't want to speculate against Renaissance Technologies if they're just really good traders. In other words, I'm not trying to bring darkness to their door. But if we're gonna play this cat and mouse game about what's true and what's real, and, and, and I'll just get very, very pointed about it, do not mess with your expert class. Right? The current strategy of dealing with the expert class who's not read in to whatever this is, is to just pretend that we're all incapable thinkers, that we've got some personal problem that we're working at. I want to terminate that program with extreme prejudice. You do not go after your expert class because you were dumb enough not to read them in, and then they figured out something of what you were doing Yeah, I don't know, I don't know the specifics, but I'm not, I'm not stupid

03:14:58
Jesse Michels: Well, the other issue with the way things have gone, if we take Eric Davis at face value on there being no physicists in this vital secret core program-

03:15:08
Eric Weinstein: How did you react to that, Jesse? Let me turn it around

03:15:10
Jesse Michels: [chuckles] I-- It's crazy. I mean, it's, it's, um, it's outrageous. It's, uh... If that is the case, it's, uh, it's extremely irresponsible, and it's not being run well at all. It makes no sense. Why would you be operating within a boundary that has been set... Historically, you have, you know, every century or two centuries, you have an overturning of our physical model of reality. And if you're telling me that you are getting slag disks, you know, whatever it is, material that you are saying, you know, with 100% confidence is not ours because it's been atomically bonded or has isotope ratios with heavy elements or any of the stuff that we're hearing before Congress, a lot of these guys saying, and then you are saying, "But we're operating within the bounds of the constraints that we've set on ourselves in this century."

03:16:08
Eric Weinstein: No meco de senso.

03:16:09
Jesse Michels: It makes no sense. It's absurd.

03:16:11
Jack C: I'm following my contract. It's like, that's just nonsense.

03:16:14
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. And, and everybody repeats this as if, as if they're... I mean, it's li- it's like if you gave the excuse, "Well, no, because it's, it's Wednesday every week," and everybody said that, you, you sort of get inured to it, but then you realize, yes, there's a Wednesday of every week. That had nothing to do with anyth- You have to be highly disagreeable to basically say, "You know, Eric, what you just said, no, no, no offense, makes no sense at all."

03:16:40
Jesse Michels: And what's so weird about it is I'm cynical. I think, I think national security runs the day on all this stuff.

03:16:46
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

03:16:46
Jesse Michels: And so once something makes sense from a national security standpoint, it just happens.

03:16:50
Jack C: Yeah.

03:16:51
Jesse Michels: And so if this were this grave national security issue where you think you might be able to do anything with any of this material, obviously you'd put your best and brightest on it. Obviously, the stove piping of it would be an immediate, urgent issue that you would figure out.

03:17:10
Eric Weinstein: Or you'd put the best and the brightest on top of the stove pipe system, which is what we did at Los Alamos.

03:17:15
Jesse Michels: Sure.

03:17:15
Eric Weinstein: The white badges. Look, man, we have cowboys still.

03:17:22
Jack C: Stir-chasing physics.

03:17:24
Eric Weinstein: You're tr- You, you, yeah. You're, you're castrating the people who can do this work.

03:17:31
Jesse Michels: Well, that's, that's the other, you know, thing which I think is even worse than the program being dysfunctional, is you have this narrative of, in UFO world, of, you know, restricted data and all this stuff getting relegated to, you know, your Lockheeds and Northrops and aerospace contractors, because if they retrieve a thing, it's born secret under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and this is, you know, it's sort of DOE jurisdiction, right? Then you end up with, uh, you know, 1980s, 1990s world where, you know, not only is that the... You know, whatever program is going on there seems to be sort of, uh, inert and neutered and not particularly impressive, all, all the stuff we're talking about right now. But you end up in a world where DOE security is so lax that Epstein can move to, you know, Zorro Ranch-

03:18:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, but nobody-

03:18:33
Jesse Michels: ... with the explicit intent of being near retired Los Alamos physicists so he can gain knowledge.

03:18:39
Eric Weinstein: You saw that clip I broke out.

03:18:41
Jesse Michels: It's insane.

03:18:41
Eric Weinstein: I broke it out for a reason. Nobody around me... They're going right through that clip.

03:18:47
Jeffrey Epstein: So why did I buy a ranch in New Mexico, 1993? So that's gives you some sense. So I would have funded it in 1990. Uh, Los Alamos, which was the high energy lab up in, in New Mexico, was losing all its scientists. There were-

03:19:04
Steve Bannon: And Los Alamos, it was where Oppenheimer and where the, where the, a lot of the, the nuclear weapons program, the bomb, the original bomb-

03:19:10
Jeffrey Epstein: That's where the Manhattan Project.

03:19:11
Steve Bannon: Manhattan Project was-

03:19:12
Jeffrey Epstein: Yes. Yes

03:19:12
Steve Bannon: ... at La, Los Alamos, and you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that?

03:19:16
Jeffrey Epstein: Yes, because the scientists were going to be... They cut the funding for high energy physics.

03:19:22
Eric Weinstein: Look, I'm just gonna be more forthcoming. I have had a thankless job of saying the string theorists are horrible, get them more money. People wonder, like, that doesn't make any sense. And now I'm gonna spell it out because Epstein said the thing that I was trying to... I was trying to be Straussian about it and sort of speak so that it's not evident. He was listening. At the end of the Cold War, you fucked over your physicists. Who, who, who thought this up? How dumb are you? How dumb are, is the United States of America? I just don't grasp it. On October 30th, 1993, President Clinton signed into law the death blow to the superconducting super collider. You have all of these deadly ninjas running around. Tell me something. Who were the first people the Israelis killed in Iran when they went in?

03:20:20
Jesse Michels: Nuclear scientists?

03:20:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, physicists.

03:20:23
Jack C: The Iranian Leon Ledermans.

03:20:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Now, I was not happy about that. You know, my feeling is don't shoot us, we're the piano players. But the Israelis made a decision that the first thing you do is kill your scientists. The thing here is, if you look at the scientists, they look like a joke. They're playing around with toy models, lying about all the progress they're making. And my claim is, is that until you pay these people, until you stop making them afraid, until you st- until you remove your hands from around their throats with their grants and their respectability, you're not gonna get any physics So the alternate interpretation of this, and I hate to say it, is, is that so- somebody soft sunsetted the world's most vital intellectual community, which is frontier theoretical physicists. And basically these people are now kind of almost buffoonish. The Ex- Epstein thing is a giant tangle.

03:21:23
Jesse Michels: Mm.

03:21:24
Eric Weinstein: And, and I'm just gonna say more because I said it before these last, this last tranche. Epstein was running many different programs. It wasn't even Epstein probably running it. So call the name of the organization or the project or whatever you wanna call it Jeffrey Epstein, but that does not mean that it was Jeffrey Epstein.

03:21:45
Jesse Michels: He was not a policymaker.

03:21:47
Eric Weinstein: I don't know who he was. And, and one of the things about responsible conspiracy theorizing is, is that you don't constantly answer the question, "Well, if not X, then what? Y?" No. I don't know. Get used to I don't know. There's a lot of I don't know in this story. I don't think he was running the Jeffrey Epstein special access project or whatever it was. If it was in the US government, it would be a special access pro-

03:22:14
Jesse Michels: Clearly.

03:22:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Somebody was running that thing. They hired the wrong actor 'cause he wasn't that great of a front end. Many different things were going through it at the same time. So that plane of his is not the Lolita Express, it's his... it's the plane that belonged to the project, and it ferried different people for different purposes. And that island is not pedophile island. That island may have had a tremendous amount of pedophilia and horrific things going on, but it's simply a container for whatever was going on through this project. So now you have the question about to what extent were the scientists implicated? To what extent was Jeffrey Epstein doing one thing, saying he was doing another? So le- let me, um... The Department of Energy has counterintelligence phys- uh, assets a- and directives. You're not supposed to let a super rich guy with no ostensible means of achieving his fortune buy an enormous ranch a stone's throw from Los Alamos with the intention of talking to high energy and weapons physicists at the end of the Cold War as they lose their funding. Who blew this? And, and who blew the fact that in the entire released information, this is the first thing I, I found, you know? I was looking for this, which is the guy set up listening posts. He had another listening post called One Brattle Square. He-

03:23:56
Jesse Michels: Where was that?

03:23:58
Eric Weinstein: It's in, in, uh, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. So le- let me explain... Let me spell this out for the kids at home. The analog of Los Alamos is the Harvard math department. The analog of nuclear and theoretical physics and high energy physics is number theory. The benefits of knowing about this, in New Mexico it's weapons. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, it might be cryptography. In New Mexico, you work with Murray Gell-Mann. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, you work with Martin Nowak. Your base of operations in New Mexico is called Zorro Ranch. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's called Office 610 at One Brattle Square. I have no idea what we just did. But whoever is supposed to be smart enough to protect our crown jewels has to recognize that just because the, the thinking is, is that he was gonna make a, a baby manufacturing facility at Zorro Ranch and that he was doing evolutionary dynamics at Harv... I see no reason to think that those aren't cover stories.

03:25:35
Jesse Michels: Well, what you just articulated, I think only a specific milieu of people could even strategize for... Like clearly Epstein himself wasn't making that calculation.

03:25:48
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. Listen to what Bannon asked Epstein.

03:25:50
Jesse Michels: Mm.

03:25:51
Eric Weinstein: He said, "So wait a minute. You bought this ranch, uh, a- and you founded the Santa Fe Institute?" "Yeah, around '90, '93." "Okay, who founded the Santa Fe Institute?" "Not Jeffrey Epstein." "What year was it founded?" "1984?" Then he says Murray Gell-Mann at the time that he founded, that Jeffrey Epstein founded the Santa Fe Institute, founded, funded, I'm not sure. Uh, he did give money, but, uh, he, he's not behind the Santa Fe Institute. Says Murray Gell-Mann was working out the word for quarks around then. Quarks were named much, much earlier. He has no idea what he's talking about.

03:26:36
Jesse Michels: Right. So there's some telephone game at play.

03:26:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And then he says, you know, "Quarks had a certain... They had color, they had flavor, they had a charm." He says, "Nobody knows what these things mean." Okay. Yes. Uh, SU3 flavor was a failed scheme, uh, for lumping the up, down, and strange quarks into a multiplet in complex three-dimensional space. Uh, charm and s- and strange, uh, are the names of second generation, um- Quarks. QCD, we very well understand what a lot of it means because in part it has this property of asymptotic, uh, free-freedom, so that it becomes a free theory. It's one of the... It's the only theory we have that's physical that extrapolates all the way to the Planck level. This guy had no idea what he's talking about. He didn't have an idea what he was talking about in currency trading, so-

03:27:35
Jesse Michels: And, and yet he knew to infiltrate Harvard's math department. Some-

03:27:40
Eric Weinstein: Or somebody did

03:27:40
Jesse Michels: ... somebody-- That's what I'm saying.

03:27:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:27:42
Jesse Michels: Somebody behind him knew that c-clearly, because what you just articulated about particle theory and number theory and those two places being the-

03:27:50
Eric Weinstein: But nobody's thinking number theory because it's, the emphasis is on the program on evolutionary dynamics. Martin Nowak doesn't know anything about number theory. My claim is, is that who, who started the program in evolutionary dynamics is a different guy named Dick Gross, who's a number theorist.

03:28:11
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

03:28:13
Eric Weinstein: And Harvard references an imaginative proposal by Benedict Gross and Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, so his initial contact was a number theorist. How interesting.

03:28:26
Jesse Michels: So strange.

03:28:27
Eric Weinstein: And then he's, you know, he's funding Joi Ito and this, uh, you know, Bitcoin initiative. Well, that's about crypto. I, I'm just saying... Look, I don't know what happened, but... I hate saying it this way. Are there no smart people? Like, 100 of my friends in mathematics and physics should be on this thing, and they've, they've got everyone scared that to utter the words that are obvious to any one of us... Like, why, why were all of these super smart people hanging on Jeffrey Epstein's every word?

03:29:11
Jesse Michels: So weird.

03:29:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, it's not weird. Have you ever noticed how interesting astrology becomes when it's explained to you by a, a woman in a really low cut dress? Right? Suddenly it's like, "Virgo? I never knew that. Wow. Oh, ma- retrograde. That makes everything make sense." When, when rich people are around, it has much the same effect. People blow smoke up rich people's backsides all the time. They just... "That is so insightful." That's what all these people were doing. We're, we're all starved for funding because the Vannevar Bush arrangement has been welched upon. And so you've got all of these starving ninjas who have skills that are pretty advanced and dangerous fawning over this crazy guy because he's got an island and a jet.

03:30:09
Jesse Michels: Where do you think, uh... Moving on to higher ground. Where do you think all this UFO stuff goes? Because you have more official disclosures at a very high level going on tha-than ever. You have rumors of Trump saying things. You hear smatterings of people, at least peripheral to the admin, pretty interested in the issue. Donald Trump Jr. interviewed Ross Coulthart last year, you know, who's a UFO investigator journalist.

03:30:43
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember how Trump wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein files?

03:30:48
Jesse Michels: Yep.

03:30:50
Eric Weinstein: You could forgive me for wondering what happened to that zeal.

03:30:55
Jesse Michels: Do you think the same thing will apply to secret physics, UFOs-

03:30:58
Eric Weinstein: This is what people don't understand about Washington, D.C. You have all sorts of people who don't understand what Washington, D.C. is or how it works, who outside of the Beltway form beliefs about what they're going to do once they get to Washington, and they change almost instantly.

03:31:18
Jesse Michels: Well, [chuckles] it's like the drain the swamp guy, turns out, met his wife through Epstein. You know, it's this thing where I think in that world everyone got tagged, and so maybe this is the same thing that goes on with the UFO stuff. I don't know. But, like-

03:31:39
Eric Weinstein: There's something that will cause-

03:31:41
Jesse Michels: It, it, it's-

03:31:41
Eric Weinstein: ... you not to want to reveal things.

03:31:43
Jesse Michels: Right. Like it somehow Trump gets implicated in the UFO thing in some weird way or I don't know.

03:31:49
Jack C: Or it's insanely lucrative to control instead of to disclose.

03:31:53
Jesse Michels: Sure. It could be that. Yeah.

03:31:54
Eric Weinstein: Or maybe the idea is that whatever this information is... A-assume it's the cover story for a weapons system that is easy to create and completely dangerous. Like, I, I keep giving the example of a thing that doesn't exist, and the thing that doesn't exist is a, is an energy beam that can be focused on the opposite side of the planet at any particular latitude and longitude that you give it. So you point a, a, a mythological gun into the ground in a particular direction. You calculate the effect of the Earth on the w- on, on the beam that you... And then you vaporize it. So you have somebody's cell phone coordinates. Suddenly that person is no more.

03:32:41
Jesse Michels: This is like a scalar weapon in the ufology-

03:32:44
Eric Weinstein: I'm not gonna talk-

03:32:45
Jesse Michels: I don't know about it

03:32:45
Eric Weinstein: ... garbage stuff. I'm just to say, imagine that this existed, right? So y-you know that you can transmit energy and hurt something, and you know that you can transmit neutrinos through an entire planet and, and they'll go through. You just don't know how to recombine neutrinos on the other side, right? So, you know, it, it's theoretically... And I don't want to get into it. Just trying to say, imagine you have some imagination. You say, "If I can have a beam of neutrinos, because I could direct a charged particle, and then I get a decay, and that gives me the momentum in this particular direction. Now, can I refocus the neutrinos and get them to convert on the other side at a partic-particular pl- Is there any way to induce that?" That's a theoretical idea. I don't see any way of doing it. But what if you had such a weapon and it was easy? Now you'd say, "Okay, are you telling me that everyone on Earth can build their own and just point it and vaporize stuff?" Right? That'd be terrifying. What if you could unhook the, uh, the true vacuum of the, of the Higgs field and, and get some kind of vacuum decay? Like, we don't know whether hidden in physics are powers so vast that anybody who sees what could happen keeps their mouth shut. We just don't know. Now, the one thing that I believe, and again, you, you guys don't have to, to believe it, but I believe that if geometric unity is as rich as I say it is, doesn't even have to be correct, just has to be rich, it is inconceivable to me that there is no interest in it from the very people who funded my education. Office of Naval Research funded my graduate education, and the National Science Foundation found it-- uh, funded my post-doctoral position. And I believe I was put on a Department of Energy grant, which is very unusual for a mathematician because Isidor Singer had one. None of those people have any interest whatsoever in what I'm saying, which is fascinating, because even if it's wrong, I wouldn't take the chance. It's a studied level of disinterest that doesn't really add up. Like, I can tell you lots of people whose theories are almost certainly wrong. If I were the government, I would want to keep tabs on every last one of the competent people. Doesn't matter whether they're wrong. They're just dangerous. What, what if they're right?

03:35:22
Jesse Michels: Do you have a mental model on why this stuff is coming out more now, post-2017, this New York Times article?

03:35:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, things are breaking. There was a regime that is breaking. Like, I was thinking about posting an interview between Brian Greene and Ed Witten that was done recently without editorial, just to indicate how crazy the level of string theorist madness is because it's... You know, there's this phrase in Latin, res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself. I don't have to throw potshots at it. Th-the claim that, you know, string theory is about to figure it all out is a joke in and of itself. So if-- imagine that that was the cock-blocking mechanism to keep people from doing, you know, dangerous physics work, as per Andreessen and Horowitz. It's expiring. And I think that a lot of things are happening right now because the old order that was set up to manage all this is two generations, three generations out from the architects. We had these genius administrators like Vannevar Bush, and they set up these structures, and the structures worked pretty well, but then they didn't pass the knowledge of what the structures were and how all these tacit understandings and cryptic arrangements worked, so that the modern people who've inherited the structures basically don't even understand what they're for. You know, I talked to the provost of a UC university, ma-major research university. He had no idea how the laws had been changed to secretly benefit universities for doing particular kinds of work. So very often what happens is, is that the architects die, and they, they leave a zombie. We seem to be in a zombie era.

03:37:21
Jesse Michels: It's a little cargo cult, and then you probably have people at the top freaking out, saying we need to get in front of this and actually reorganize as, uh, our multipolar nuclear world gets more and more hot.

03:37:37
Eric Weinstein: But how, how strange that you can't talk to your own top people.

03:37:42
Jesse Michels: Yeah, it's weird.

03:37:42
Jack C: And as it pertains to legacy program, the people at the top panicking might also be disappearing, such that awareness of the problem could be dying.

03:37:52
Jesse Michels: Well, I'm explaining modern UFO disclosure through this idea of, you know, national security, that we would, we would actually try to get this stuff out. But yeah, it is this weird cloak and dagger, tongue in cheek sort of, like it's not, uh, overt at all. It's still like... Like even, you know, you, you mentioned this sort of, you know, theoretical directed energy weapon where you could take anybody out remotely in this perfectly precise way across the world. I don't know if you caught this part of "The Age of Disclosure." Eric Davis says in 1989, we should have brought this up with him, 1989, uh, the Soviets, uh, engaged in a UFO crash retrieval where they were able to derive a directed energy weapon from this particular craft. And th-that's a fascinating claim, right? Like I, I don't know what to make of that. You know, how do, how do you know that, A? B, so you are saying some of this stuff is functional and it works its way into weapons that we now know, you know, the Department of War are scaling up publicly. Uh, and so like this whole idea that we haven't made any progress is actually kind of bogus, but it's being used in these extremely dystopian ways.

03:39:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but l-let me just ask. How do we reconcile the fact that all three of us have talked to so many people which can't all be lying about what they're saying? It's just I see no world in which that's possible. And nobody has any firsthand ... incontrovertible stuff that would make this a, a done deal. It, it does weirdly feel like the Epstein thing. You know? How is it that there is

03:39:40
Jesse Michels: Either a lot of people are implicated that are publicly appearing around this topic who are talking about it, and they're implicated but they don't wanna say they're implicated, or the tip of the iceberg doesn't look like the rest of the iceberg and, uh, intentional vagueness is being used with words like crash retrieval and biologics. And I don't err on that side of things given how, just how high up the people are saying this stuff, how overwhelming, uh, the circumstantial evidence seems to be.

03:40:08
Eric Weinstein: It's overwhelming.

03:40:09
Jesse Michels: It's overwhelming. But you have to think probabilistically, and I, you know, I always try to, you know, put a healthy check on people who are hardcore in the UFO world who are sure about discrete, you know, org charts in the reverse engineering program. Like, how can you be sure of anything, you know? I think you have to think probabilistically about all this stuff.

03:40:30
Jack C: This is not the most imaginative solution, but another alternative to reconcile that fact is that some of them are lying, and they are firsthand.

03:40:37
Jesse Michels: Well, that's what I was just saying. Yeah.

03:40:38
Jack C: Because that's the red line maybe.

03:40:39
Jesse Michels: I think there might be-

03:40:40
Eric Weinstein: Should we try telling stories that are, like, more than one-

03:40:43
Jesse Michels: Uh-huh

03:40:44
Eric Weinstein: ... about what could be going on so that we don't-

03:40:47
Jesse Michels: Yeah. Yeah, let's do it

03:40:47
Eric Weinstein: ... so that we don't get committed to one?

03:40:49
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

03:40:50
Jack C: Excellent idea.

03:40:50
Jesse Michels: So I think the taking everything at face value story is that there is this decades-long UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. It probably existed prior to 1933, but it became formally instantiated in the '33 Magenta crash in Italy. This is all hypothetical. In the Magenta crash in Italy, and then that was transferred to the US under FDR. You had Roswell in '47. You had Trinity in '48. You have these sort of sequential, uh, uh, nuclear re- related UFO crashes. You have the Office of Global Access under the CIA in the early 2000s under Doug Wolf doing rapid response, you know, retrievals all over the world. Um, and this kind of convoluted org chart structure where, uh, the Lockheeds and Northrups are the tip of the, you know, kind of the fingertips, and, uh, you know, uh, CIA, uh, you know, um, um, science and technology and, and DOE and, uh, uh, um, you know, DOD are kind of at the top. And so y- y- you could, you could have that entire narrative and just take that at face value. I think another possibility would be something like, uh, aerial phenomena show up around nuclear weapons and energy grids, and that is this clear pattern. It's global. It's ubiquitous. It's exists in the US, but it also exists totally outside the US. Um, those aerial phenomena also seem to be provoked by weird high energy physics experiments. So, uh, lasers, high energy lasers, um, you know, high voltage experimentation, uh, particle accelerators, things of that nature seem to attract this weird aerial phenomena. We don't really know what the aerial phenomena is. We actually have, uh, some prosaic, you know, human terrestrial physics breakthroughs that have led to novel propulsion modalities from some of these kind of s- you know, topological physics anomalies that we figured out mid-century, and we actually do have propulsion based on them. So we have, you know, real craft that seem like they f- they fly like UFOs, but we're running this tech protection thing by intentionally conflating this aerial phenomena that is very, you know, bizarre and worthy of scientific inquiry, but we just don't understand. We are conflating that with just this, you know, kind of more exotic, black, um, you know, uh, uh, not reverse engineering program but, uh, uh, craft program that is, that is human craft. So that would be number two. And then number three is, like, Mick West territory or something [chuckles] where it's like, you know, there is no aerial phenomena around nuclear sites. You know, there are no anomalies there. All of the topological physics, you know, Byfield, Brown, Ning Lee stuff is all BS. Uh, you know, all, you know, conventional physics models, you know, are going to run the world for forever. And, um, you know, this is all a psyop. Like, it's literally all, like, you know, this crazy sort of, you know, government lunacy thing. I don't know. Would you guys say there's an option four or five that you'd like to add?

03:44:10
Jack C: You go.

03:44:10
Eric Weinstein: Hard to say. So one possibility is let's imagine, let's imagine that the atomic weapons were not developed during war but during peacetime inside of a national lab. There'd be a question about should we reveal that this is possible, right? There would be a huge debate as to how to, how to do work on this thing, um, and whether we should reveal it to the world or should reserve it as a zero day exploit.

03:44:50
Jesse Michels: So that would be option four?

03:44:51
Eric Weinstein: I guess, in your taxonomy.

03:44:53
Jesse Michels: [laughs]

03:44:55
Eric Weinstein: Um-

03:44:55
Jack C: Is that option agnostic of where the technology came from?

03:44:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, so imagine, for example, that the government figured out something in physics that isn't the whole thing, but it's powerful enough to do one or two things that haven't been done before, and we're, we wanted that in reserve. You can imagine that the entire system would say, "Would you please stop digging? We wanna keep the zero day exploit. It's a matter of national security. Don't make us reveal this."

03:45:25
Jesse Michels: That thing, though, would need to be neatly adjacent to UFO crash retrievals. They would need to intersect-

03:45:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I don't wanna talk about crash retrievals until I've been to one

03:45:35
Jesse Michels: But you know what I'm saying

03:45:36
Eric Weinstein: No, I don't know what a crash retrieval is.

03:45:39
Jesse Michels: W- what I'm saying is if that's being used as passage material for some other secret weapons program, the two probably need to surface level lookalike somewhat for that to be an effective cover.

03:45:51
Eric Weinstein: So that's, that's the thing, right? Like... So you remember when we attacked Iran, we sent one squadron of B-2 bombers in one direction, one another. That was my principle, an example of whenever we do something cool, we do something fake. So, invasion of the, Operation Overlord and, and D-Day and the beaches of Normandy was cool, and Operation Bodyguard and Fortitude were fake 'cause we never actually invaded Norway, as we said we were gonna do. Um, this could be the fake program to something super cool.

03:46:31
Jesse Michels: Sure.

03:46:32
Eric Weinstein: And another aspect of this, if we're gonna just talk about crazy, stupid theories, is there's a strategy with, I think, like malarial mosquitoes or where you release a bunch of sterilized males into the world, and sterilized males effectively mate with the females but leave no offspring, and it's a way of controlling mosquitoes. One possibility is that one of the reasons we kicked all of the Americans out of our physics programs and science programs is that we wanted to sterilize the world so that it didn't catch up to us what we'd already done. It's a crazy idea, but why else should you be, you know, having 27% of your PhDs granted to Chinese nationals in sensitive areas? It just doesn't make any sense. So one possibility is that we use string theory to sterilize India, let's say. There are lots of Indian string theorists, and they're not making any progress, and they're extremely arrogant about string theory. You know, these are crazy ideas. Uh, another possibility, as somebody once said to me, uh, as somebody said to me relatively recently, "You know, Eric, you don't need to rely on the government. You can just go up and look for yourself." The keep idea being that you just need to get adjacent to sensitive places, and you'll see these things everywhere.

03:47:59
Jesse Michels: Mm.

03:48:01
Eric Weinstein: Like, this isn't that big of a deal. They're always there.

03:48:04
Jesse Michels: Well, that's what I always find so frustrating is for the, you know, the Mick West option, the Mick West scenario, the super skeptic thing. It... You spend, like, a few days on this, or literally, like, you probably walk around one of these sites or something. You go to the bar near one of them. Something's going on. The amount of smoke without fire is insane.

03:48:28
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. The, the question is when you see smoke at this level, the question is what is the nature of the fire?

03:48:33
Jesse Michels: That's right.

03:48:33
Eric Weinstein: There are different fires.

03:48:34
Jesse Michels: But there is a fire.

03:48:34
Eric Weinstein: Or there's a smoke machine.

03:48:36
Jesse Michels: Or there's a smoke machine. [chuckles]

03:48:37
Eric Weinstein: Right, right. Like, in other words-

03:48:39
Jesse Michels: Or there's a really good spoofing technology that we're all not aware of or something.

03:48:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, exactly.

03:48:44
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

03:48:44
Eric Weinstein: And so, and so, you know, my feeling, unfortunately, is that the UFO world is so polluted that I just don't wanna deal with it at all.

03:48:53
Jesse Michels: Sure.

03:48:54
Eric Weinstein: Um... Look, I believe we can leave, and if you believe you can leave, you have to imagine that you're being visited. So it makes sense for me that I'm being visited. I can't understand why they keep interacting with governments, and nobody can get good footage, and we don't have more. But on the other hand, I would have to say that the Epstein story was pretty contained.

03:49:33
Jesse Michels: And you were seen as a little kind of crazy if you created a worldview out of the Epstein... Like the, the, uh, the, the Pizzagate people seemed ridiculous-

03:49:44
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:49:44
Jesse Michels: ... four or five years ago.

03:49:44
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. They didn't. Pizzagate looked to me like an amalgam, something real, something fake. Like, for example, the particular pizza parlor and the guy who shot up the roof and all that, you know, w- was perfect. You... Don't be like the guy who brings a gun into a pizza parlor and shoots the roof thinking that he's tracking pedophiles. Also, what does it really mean, pedophile? Like, do, do we even think about this? Is there such a clamoring to do horrible things to children and that these people are natural leaders of the world?

03:50:26
Jesse Michels: Well, now we're getting into weird territory because not only was, uh, pedophilia, which alone is just disgusting, discussed in the context of Epstein, but, like, weird, like, conditioning rituals and things to, like, dissociate.

03:50:45
Eric Weinstein: This isn't weird at all. This is normal. You see, it used to be that, uh, homosexuality could play the role of pedophilia, that two gay guys would be so terrified of their, having their secret revealed that they'd be willing to do almost anything to avoid that revelation.

03:51:16
Jesse Michels: It's a stain that can be used, weaponized.

03:51:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I would say utilized.

03:51:21
Jesse Michels: Yeah.

03:51:22
Eric Weinstein: Like hazing rituals, it's easy to see them as brutal, but that's not the function they serve. It's like people don't understand what the mob is. The mob is a contract enforcement service for enterprises that cannot use the courts. It's not violent because it's recreationally violent, and it's not violent because these people love violence. The idea is you have to enforce a drug contract or a loan sharking contract, you know, or, or a gambling... Some- somebody has to pay up.

03:51:52
Jesse Michels: So the notion would be pedophilia was used as an enforcement system.

03:51:57
Eric Weinstein: Pedophilia is trust.

03:51:58
Jesse Michels: Right.

03:52:00
Eric Weinstein: And that, nobody wants to say that, but that's what I think it is.

03:52:02
Jesse Michels: You force people in that circle to commit these crimes, and then you-

03:52:06
Eric Weinstein: How do I know, how do I know I can trust person A? It's always a question. Do we come from the same ethnic group?

03:52:13
Jesse Michels: That's not trust. That's black- that's low trust.

03:52:16
Eric Weinstein: No.

03:52:16
Jesse Michels: It's blackmail.

03:52:17
Eric Weinstein: No. It's consequence. It's shared consequence.

03:52:23
Jesse Michels: Right.

03:52:23
Eric Weinstein: And the key point is shared consequence is a resource, and ritual and all of these things are used to direct that resource. What you're seeing in the Epstein world is a high trust network.

03:52:38
Jesse Michels: I think it's... Yeah, I was... I guess it's an enforcement netw- It's like a, you know, made man mafia system-

03:52:42
Eric Weinstein: Correct

03:52:43
Jesse Michels: ... that sort of thing.

03:52:44
Eric Weinstein: But-

03:52:44
Jesse Michels: There's an email from the girlfriend that alleges that he got in deeper than he meant to, he was told to do this, he didn't really mean any of it. It, it just came out in the latest tranche, and it speaks to this notion of an enforcement campaign, an enforcement infrastructure.

03:53:00
Eric Weinstein: But my, my claim is, is that in general, most of us are unfamiliar with how effective silent systems work. If you think about the Valachi papers and, you know, how the, the mob lost Omerta and the innovation of the RICO acts and all that kind of stuff, that was about... I think that the rule was is that you killed every informant up to second cousins.

03:53:28
Jesse Michels: Ooh, Jesus Christ.

03:53:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, like completely over the top and insane.

03:53:33
Jesse Michels: Fuck.

03:53:34
Eric Weinstein: But that's how it worked. And what was the, what was the way that these people referred to each other? As men of honor. Honor is the proxy system. Of course, I'm gonna honor you, and you're gonna honor me because it's too dangerous. It's too dangerous to con- contemplate anything else. My guess is, is that right now there's no one that can be hung out to dry because the first person who gets hung out to dry... You saw Bill Clinton saying, "Of course, I'd love to t- talk to Congress. Bring them on."

03:54:02
Jesse Michels: It's crazy.

03:54:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, why is that? I don't think he wants to talk to Congress. What I think he wants to do is to say, "If you make me the fall guy, think about, think about what you're saying."

03:54:13
Jesse Michels: Hmm. It's a little shot across the bow.

03:54:15
Eric Weinstein: I think it, it, it-

03:54:16
Jesse Michels: He's got a lot to say

03:54:17
Eric Weinstein: ... that Trump's, Trump's dump of these documents was three million shots across the bow.

03:54:22
Jesse Michels: Yeah, I think so too. Also, we should note, this was probably the sanitized version of these documents.

03:54:31
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. This isn't even the sanitized version of these documents. They've also set up the idea of, okay, well, these three million are the last you are getting ever, but the other... No, the other three million. So then what do you, what is everybody gonna do? They're gonna chant, "We want the other three million." "Okay. Okay, fine. Fine. We'll give you the last of them." And you just fell into the trap.

03:54:49
Jesse Michels: Mm.

03:54:50
Eric Weinstein: Who said there were six million documents?

03:54:53
Jesse Michels: Right.

03:54:54
Eric Weinstein: Tell me something. If this guy ran a hedge fund that was a multi-billion dollar currency trading hedge fund, how many documents does a hedge fund throw off just due to compliance?

03:55:07
Jesse Michels: Right.

03:55:09
Eric Weinstein: Nobody's making any sense at all. Uh, y- what you're seeing is a bunch of deeply grooved people not thinking for themselves, and they're, they're happy to repeat the heterodox version of the script that they're handed. But it's not the heterodox who are writing that.

03:55:29
Jesse Michels: It's really crazy. Well, [laughs] I'm officially demoralized and depressed. [laughs]

03:55:36
Eric Weinstein: Don't do that, Jesse.

03:55:37
Jesse Michels: No. Well, I, I appreciate... I mean, sometimes, you know, the, the truth sucks, and, uh, you're a very incisive thinker, and you have a way of elucidating, uh, things. Sometimes they're dark r- truths and realities, uh, that others don't. So I, I, I really appreciate your brain and, um...

03:55:55
Eric Weinstein: But l- can we just finish it positively?

03:55:57
Jesse Michels: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. How do we do that?

03:55:58
Eric Weinstein: Well, if you don't mind, imagine-

03:56:01
Jesse Michels: Hmm

03:56:01
Eric Weinstein: ... that we throw off this UFO yoke.

03:56:04
Jesse Michels: Hmm.

03:56:05
Eric Weinstein: And imagine that we just pushed on one, one particular place, which is Eric Davis saying, "We have things that defy the, the laws of physics and no physicists." Imagine that the UFO community got really smart instead of doing what it always does and said, "We're gonna push on this one thing." How can you be threatened by craft that do not obey the laws of physics and make sure that the one type of person who could possibly help with this is to be found nowhere on the scene?

03:56:37
Jesse Michels: [laughs]

03:56:38
Eric Weinstein: Right? So the opportunity is, is that if Tulsi Gabbard or J.D. Vance or any one of these people sees this and says, "I could change that tomorrow. I could snap my fingers and get an allocation of several million dollars, and I could get a few theoretical physicists," would change absolutely everything because one of the top theories has to be that the reason you can't have a theoretical physicist on this is that there are no craft that defy the laws of physics.

03:57:11
Jesse Michels: I hope they put that to the test because Eric Davis is actually on record as part of James Fox's last movie saying, "If you give me blanket immunity, I will say everything I know." And so I, I, I hope that they are able to just, you know, dress these people down nicely, but-

03:57:29
Eric Weinstein: But we could, we could in a b- in a, in a better world that we're not that far from push to have the one group of people who could crack this case for us, the detectives of our choice, inserted. They were trained on our dollars. They're supported on our dollars. We have an arrangement with them. It's basically like not calling Delta Force when you've got a hostage rescue situation.

03:57:52
Jesse Michels: Can I up the ante?

03:57:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:57:54
Jesse Michels: An interdisciplinary symposium where maybe the physicists are at the top, they're hanging out, but you also might have some other people-

03:58:03
Eric Weinstein: Don't bring in the mushrooms and the consciousness.

03:58:05
Jesse Michels: [laughs]

03:58:05
Eric Weinstein: Let's just do theoretical physics, physics-

03:58:08
Jesse Michels: Uh

03:58:08
Eric Weinstein: ... and leave the rest for Burning Man.

03:58:10
Jesse Michels: [laughs] Fair enough. Well, to be continued. That's its whole other debate we can have or whatever, but I agree with the Burning Man issue. Okay. Well, thank you, Eric. This was awesome. Jack, appreciate you. It's a lot of fun. I think this is gonna be a historic episode.

03:58:27
Eric Weinstein: Thanks, gents.

03:58:28
Jesse Michels: All right. Cool. [outro music]