Joe Rogan Experience 1945 - Eric Weinstein (YouTube Content)

Joe Rogan Experience #1945 - Eric Weinstein
Information
Host(s)	Joe Rogan
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	04:06:49
Release Date	22 February 2023
Links
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Portal Blog	Read
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Joe Rogan Experience #1945 was an interview with Eric Weinstein by Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience.

Description

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, and managing director at Thiel Capital.

www.ericweinstein.org

Transcript

00:00:00
Joe Rogan: [upbeat music] Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music] And we're up.

00:00:13
Eric Weinstein: Hey.

00:00:14
Joe Rogan: Good to see you, my friend.

00:00:15
Eric Weinstein: Hello, Joe.

00:00:16
Joe Rogan: So we, we should tell everybody, this podcast came about from, what time in the morning was it when I called you? [laughs] It might've been one of them late night ones, wasn't it?

00:00:25
Eric Weinstein: I, well, they all run together, but, um, it was a-

00:00:28
Joe Rogan: Yeah, a late night freak out UFO con- conversation. I was like, "Dude, we gotta do a podcast about this."

00:00:34
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:00:34
Joe Rogan: Because it, out of all of my friends that actually can understand physics and explain it, you, you, you comprehend it at a very high level. So if, for things like this to be puzzling to you to the point where you actually wanna talk about it-

00:00:47
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I, I don't wanna talk about it because-

00:00:50
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

00:00:51
Eric Weinstein: ... I got, [laughs] dude, I got this one so wrong for years. I mean, there is no trace of me talking about UFOs, I think, before three years ago, because I can't stand the topic. Unlike the rest of you, this thing hits very differently for me.

00:01:05
Joe Rogan: Well, I should say then, I've gone back and forth.

00:01:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, no, I, I watched your s-

00:01:08
Joe Rogan: I abandoned it for a long time until I watched the Bob Lazar documentary.

00:01:12
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:01:12
Joe Rogan: When, uh, Jeremy Corbell made that Bob Lazar documentary, I was like, "Goddammit, they got me back in again. They drew me back in again."

00:01:19
Eric Weinstein: I don't think, I don't know if there's ever, uh, footage of me saying the words Bob Lazar.

00:01:24
Joe Rogan: There it goes.

00:01:24
Eric Weinstein: There you go.

00:01:25
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

00:01:25
Eric Weinstein: I know. But, um-

00:01:28
Joe Rogan: I would love to, I would love to facilitate that dinner.

00:01:31
Eric Weinstein: Oh, let's do-

00:01:32
Joe Rogan: You and Bob Lazar.

00:01:32
Eric Weinstein: I don't know why, you know, there's always this [laughs] question about is Bob Lazar a physicist? Was he trained at these places? And I, I have to imagine that that's an easily resolvable question, because you can tell whether somebody is a physicist pretty quickly.

00:01:48
Joe Rogan: I would lo- That's why I can't. It's like-

00:01:50
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:01:50
Joe Rogan: ... you know, you know what it's like? It's like fake black belts. There's a lot of fake black belts.

00:01:54
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:01:54
Joe Rogan: And if you're a real martial artist, you watch it and you go-

00:01:57
Eric Weinstein: Well-

00:01:57
Joe Rogan: ... "What the fuck is this guy doing? This is hilarious." But some people who don't have any understanding of martial arts-

00:02:03
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:02:03
Joe Rogan: ... go, "Oh my God, this guy's a death touch. He can just touch you behind the ear and you fall asleep." And people believe it.

00:02:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I, I, I thought he would just skip everything and go right to the five point exploding heart technique.

00:02:13
Joe Rogan: Yeah. So that is how I am when, you know-

00:02:16
Eric Weinstein: I, I got it

00:02:16
Joe Rogan: ... a physicist.

00:02:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure.

00:02:17
Joe Rogan: I'm like, "I don't know what you're say- I, I can't verify or deny." [laughs]

00:02:21
Eric Weinstein: Well-

00:02:22
Joe Rogan: So, but, but Bob Lazar is a very impressive person to talk to. And what's, and what's really impressive to me is that he's had the same exact story-

00:02:30
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:02:31
Joe Rogan: ... since the 1980s, and the new footage of these crafts that show them rotating 180 degrees before they take off is exactly how he described.

00:02:42
Eric Weinstein: So we, how do you wanna ease into this? We wa- Just 'cause-

00:02:45
Joe Rogan: Well, what got, what, what got you curious about it? If you had just decided that it was all horseshit-

00:02:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:02:50
Joe Rogan: ... like, what changed your perspective?

00:02:53
Eric Weinstein: Okay, this is a really weird and interesting question. I had a different puzzle that I've been working on for years, which has to do with physics, and is important to me in my work and what I, what I care about, which is there is this crazy history between around 1953 and 1973 with a, an explosion of activity that sometimes goes under the name of, uh, the Golden Age of General Relativity, where general relativity was sort of put in final form in the teens by Einstein, and, uh, um, also Marcel Grossman, who never gets the credit for the original papers, I think, in the, uh, on general relativity.

00:03:32
Joe Rogan: Isn't that always the case?

00:03:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but-

00:03:34
Joe Rogan: There's always, like, some guy behind the scenes that actually wrote for Shakespeare.

00:03:39
Eric Weinstein: I- Einstein is the genius, but he had a mathematical friend whose father saved Einstein, I think got him the patent job.

00:03:47
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:03:47
Eric Weinstein: So he, he's in the, and, and there's, like, a meeting called the Marcel Grossman meeting. So he's a shadowy figure on the edge of the Einstein legend. I don't think he deserves the credit Einstein did, but if you look at the first paper in general relativity, before Einstein says anything concrete, the, the first paper he says something vague, and that's 1913, and that's with Grossman. The next paper he says something wrong. He publishes the wrong equation. Then he corrects the equation, and it's incomplete because it doesn't have the cosmological constant. And I think it's four papers before he has the equation that now, uh, dominates our understanding of the cosmos and the large.

00:04:22
Joe Rogan: Interesting.

00:04:23
Eric Weinstein: And the, um, so then it goes silent, and effectively, the smart kids are all following Bohr, because Bohr, uh, and the quantum have so many open problems, whereas general relativity seems like a, pretty much a closed book, and that's until 1953. And something very bizarre happens in 1953, which we can get to, but then there's 20 years of explosion in general relativity, um, which, you know, you've had Roger Penrose, uh, on your program before, so he comes from that era, and Stephen Hawking was, uh, interior to that era. Um, Richard Feynman, of all people, uh, was very active and, um, gave lectures at Caltech. So my entry point was that when I was a young guy at the University of Pennsylvania, uh, when I'd come home to LA for break, uh, I'd go out to Caltech, and I would park in Feynman or Gell-Mann's parking spaces, which I just thought was the coolest thing in the world, that these people, these gods, had little, um, you know, stones with their names stenciled on it. So I would go park in Feynman's space, and I would go to the Caltech bookstore, and I found that there was something that was sold there that at the time I don't think was sold anywhere else, which was, like, The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, 1962 to '63, and they were effed up. They, it was like Feynman says, "I don't know how Einstein did his thing," but imagine that you didn't have the insight that this was all geometric based on a guy named Bernard Riemann's, uh, notion of what differential geometry is. The, sort of the smooth surface geometry of curvature. And Feynman says, "Let's just imagine this was an ordinary field theory. Am I, Richard Feynman, smart enough to figure out the geometry just proceeding as if I was a particle theorist?" And like, this is a very strange and interesting, wonderful thing to do, and these, these notes are fantastic. My question is, what happened between 1953 and 1973? Because the reason that, that I'm, um, in part really animated right now is that this month, February 1st of 2023, is the exact 50th-year anniversary of the stagnation in particle theory as measured by the movement from the standard model. So the standard model and general relativity are the two basic theories, the theory of the very small, the theory of the very large. They're incompatible on a certain level, but they're very similar looking at a different level. So this has been driving people crazy. And I say, you know, in 1973, uh, "Crocodile Rock" was the number one song, or Tie Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree. Imagine that song being at the top of the pops for 50 years with no respite.

00:07:10
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

00:07:10
Eric Weinstein: That's how press- that's how impressive this is, right?

00:07:13
Joe Rogan: That's a great comparison. That's a great comparison.

00:07:15
Eric Weinstein: Right. So just imagine the platform shoes and the-

00:07:18
Joe Rogan: Right

00:07:18
Eric Weinstein: ... feet going up above the-

00:07:18
Joe Rogan: So it doesn't make any sense.

00:07:19
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't make any sense. How did the world's smartest community stagnate this badly? This has happened once before in recent times between 1928 when Dirac came up with something called quantum electrodynamics, which is electrons and photons interacting, light and a little bit of matter. And for almost 20 years until 1947, we couldn't compute with this first quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics, otherwise known as QED. And suddenly in 1947, we held a conference at Shelter Island in the tip of, uh, Long Island, and they didn't invite the old people as much as they invited the young people coming after the success of the Manhattan Project. Now, the Manhattan Project gets remembered by us as a physics project, but it was really engineering because the theorists were unable to fight their way out of a paper bag, and so we gave them an engineering project, and they completely crushed it, right? And they gave us these atomic weapons. So we had a pretty good idea of who was smart, and people like Feynman were smart. So we held this, this weird, cheap conference at Shelter Island at the Ram's Head Inn, and Feynman figured out that, uh, along with a guy named Julian Schwinger and another guy named Tomonaga in Japan, that there was a stupid error, like a really boneheaded, you know, "I can't find my keys" for 20 years, and then you realize, "Oh, they're in my pocket." Um, so this thing had to do with the fact that there were two concepts of mass for the electron. And if you imagine that this was, that this table between us was ice, right? And I pushed this cup, that we would know about how much the mass of this cup was, um, based on how it responded to force. But what if I start putting friction? Now it's wood. It appears to be slightly more massive because it takes more force to drag a cup across wood than it does across ice because of the coefficient of friction. That number is the effective mass or the dressed mass, and we thought that that was the real mass, and we had those two numbers set equal, and when we realized [chuckles] that they weren't the same number, suddenly the theory yielded. So it was a 20-year stagnation that ended because there was a boneheaded mistake. So we have some-

00:09:33
Joe Rogan: Wow

00:09:33
Eric Weinstein: ... experience with this.

00:09:36
Joe Rogan: Is this stagnation, uh, more confusing to you because everything else has kind of moved along technologically, innovation?

00:09:47
Eric Weinstein: No, things mostly haven't moved.

00:09:49
Joe Rogan: Really?

00:09:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. We, we all have this sense of, "Oh my God, the dizzying pace of progress."

00:09:54
Joe Rogan: Right.

00:09:54
Eric Weinstein: And then I, I always said this, this problem this way, I say, "If you subtract the screens in our lives," so with our phones, the big flat screen TVs, all that stuff, and you, and you forget about style issues 'cause style changes. How do you know you're not in 1973? More or less, you know, we don't have George Jetson stuff everywhere.

00:10:13
Joe Rogan: Style would be a big one.

00:10:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, style would be. But in, just in terms of technolo- Like, the distance between 1950- '52, where we have the first thermonuclear device in the test known as Ivy Mike, and 1902, before we even have powered flight, is like 10,000 years.

00:10:28
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:10:28
Eric Weinstein: It's enormous.

00:10:29
Joe Rogan: Right.

00:10:30
Eric Weinstein: The difference between 1973 and 2023 is mostly due to computers. Computers and communication are the two really big expanding things.

00:10:40
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:10:41
Eric Weinstein: Now, I'm not saying you don't have quadcopters and you don't have-

00:10:43
Joe Rogan: Right. But because we interact with that primarily, we think of things as being far more advanced-

00:10:49
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:10:49
Joe Rogan: ... in, like on a broad scale.

00:10:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the issue. You know, the way I used to say it is it was between electrons and atoms. The world of atoms stagnated. The world of electrons, um, went crazy.

00:11:02
Joe Rogan: It's actually a very good point, too, in terms of one of the, one of the major, um, industries that has to improve every year is automobiles.

00:11:10
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:11:11
Joe Rogan: And the problem with that is they're so good. Like, if you get to like a Tesla level of performance, the idea that you're gonna get faster than that is fucking insane.

00:11:19
Eric Weinstein: You, you don't want to necessarily get faster.

00:11:21
Joe Rogan: You don't want to get that fast. The idea that you could just go to a store and buy a car that will go 0 to 60 in two seconds is fucking nuts, man.

00:11:30
Eric Weinstein: I know.

00:11:31
Joe Rogan: It's nuts. Well, it's my-

00:11:33
Eric Weinstein: It's most-

00:11:34
Joe Rogan: I used to have a-

00:11:34
Eric Weinstein: It's mostly a battery and a computer claiming-

00:11:36
Joe Rogan: Exactly

00:11:36
Eric Weinstein: ... to be a car, right?

00:11:36
Joe Rogan: That-

00:11:36
Eric Weinstein: Keep, keep going.

00:11:37
Joe Rogan: Exactly. What, what I was gonna say is they're all reliant on computers now.

00:11:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:11:41
Joe Rogan: Like, I really like old cars. I really like, like-

00:11:43
Eric Weinstein: Where you can tinker

00:11:44
Joe Rogan: ... old... Yeah. But it's also, I just like that there's a direct connection mechanically. You feel a mechanical connection to the gears and the steering. There's something about them that's very satisfying. Uh, they don't even have to be fast. They don't have to move fast. Like, driving around normally-

00:11:58
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:11:58
Joe Rogan: ... it's like driving a ride. It's very fun. Whereas with a Tesla, it's just you know that if you turn the wheel, it'll turn the, it'll turn the, the, uh, actual wheels that are on the road, but you don't feel them. You don't feel that thing. You're just turning a thing and a thing happens. You're not directly connected to it.

00:12:17
Eric Weinstein: It-

00:12:17
Joe Rogan: It's all computers.

00:12:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's like-

00:12:19
Joe Rogan: All the new compu- All of the new cars rely on computers.

00:12:21
Eric Weinstein: If you listen to John Mayer, for example, talking about what's wrong with modeling amplifiers, you know, you can get $100,000 worth of equipment in one of these little boxes- Um, but a tube amp is hard to replace because there's something special in analog technology of a different time, where you pass current through a pickup, and th- that magnet, you know, there's magic that happens between wood and magnets and, and, and steel.

00:12:46
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:12:46
Eric Weinstein: Right? All this kind of stuff. I appreciate an au- uh, a, an automatic transmission as a thing of beauty, but I'd rather drive a stick [laughs] still.

00:12:54
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:12:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:12:55
Joe Rogan: It's still ... You don't wanna drive one in traffic, but if it's just you enjoying driving, there's nothing like a stick shift. It, it ... This is where they lose this, they lose the focus with computers. It's like you're taking away one of the best things about driving, which is the enjoyment of driving, and you're replacing it with tenths of a second that no one's gonna notice, and you really shouldn't notice anyway because they're all ridiculously fast.

00:13:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But the, the, the, this train will not slow down.

00:13:24
Joe Rogan: Well, I get it, but people need to understand, just from a human perspective, you will enjoy driving a manual car more. If you have any life left in you-

00:13:34
Eric Weinstein: With tight suspension

00:13:36
Joe Rogan: [laughs] If you have any fucking spark left in you, when you're on a windy road, you wanna go, "Wha, wha." Even if you're not driving fast, it's so much more fun.

00:13:44
Eric Weinstein: If I'm not mistaken, the Rolls-Royce had to put sound back in because they'd subtracted [laughs] so much sound through their patented insulation systems-

00:13:52
Joe Rogan: That's a, that's some-

00:13:53
Eric Weinstein: That they, they-

00:13:53
Joe Rogan: BMW's done that as well.

00:13:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it's not safe.

00:13:56
Joe Rogan: It's gross.

00:13:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the, now you're like, "You're gonna simulate-"

00:13:59
Joe Rogan: It's gross.

00:14:00
Eric Weinstein: I know.

00:14:00
Joe Rogan: They're talking about doing that for Ferraris because they're gonna make a, an EV Ferrari. So if they made an electrical Ferrari, they're talking about making fake Ferrari noises-

00:14:09
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:14:09
Joe Rogan: ... which is just an atrocious thing to come out of Italy. Stop it.

00:14:15
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, w-

00:14:15
Joe Rogan: Just stop it.

00:14:16
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait.

00:14:16
Joe Rogan: What the fuck is w- you guys are all passion and, and wine and sound. A Ferrari's supposed to be, like, this high-revving brr, brr. There's something about that as it's happening that excites you.

00:14:29
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:14:29
Joe Rogan: It's, it's music, it's dance, it's love, it's brr, brr. It's real. You can't have fake-

00:14:37
Eric Weinstein: Have you had this with Elon?

00:14:38
Joe Rogan: ... Ferrari sounds. No.

00:14:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:14:40
Joe Rogan: No, but Elon's cars don't make any sound. I love it.

00:14:42
Eric Weinstein: I, well, I, I get terrified of it 'cause they sneak up behind me.

00:14:45
Joe Rogan: That's, that is an issue.

00:14:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:14:46
Joe Rogan: That is an issue.

00:14:47
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but so getting back to the whole UFO thing and the progress, we don't realize what percentage of life was determined by physics, right? So for example, Wi-Fi and all the communication is the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves. We don't realize th- uh, the semiconductor which created the logic gate, you know, just we, all we did was scale it up and then now it's ChatGPT. [laughs]

00:15:13
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:15:13
Eric Weinstein: Um, th- th- the number of things that have changed the world, whether it's the World Wide Web coming out of CERN, th- physics is really what has moved the dial, including molecular biology, founded by physicists more or less. So when you lose this community, you don't understand. Like, you think, "Okay, that's some egghead shit." It isn't. Physics is basically progress. Physics created the modern economy, and to have a 50-year stagnation, uh, particularly, and I, and I wanna draw a really important contrast, 1968 was the year we discovered the quark. So in every proton there are three valence quarks, two of them named up, one of them named down. In a neutron, it's two downs and one up, so that's how we ... Neutrons and protons are not fundamental. When we found the neutron, it was in 1932. So my aunt, Judy, shout-out to Aunt Judy in Philadelphia-

00:16:09
Joe Rogan: Shout-out to Aunt Judy

00:16:09
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, is older than the neutron. And the neutron doomed us as a species. Like, that one discovery more or less indicated that if we do not leave this world, we will die here in short order. Because if you throw a proton at a very heavy nucleus, it doesn't crash into the nucleus. You've got all these protons in the center that are all positively charged, and this one guy is coming in, you know, at high speed, and all these massive protons say, you know, like charges repel, and this thing just runs away like a scaredy-cat. A neutron is almost a proton. It's basically the same kind of a g- a, a deal, but with no charge. So it doesn't understand that you're telling it, you know, "Go back, danger."

00:16:54
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:16:55
Eric Weinstein: And it just screams in, and it can split these nuclei, releasing all of this energy, and then you get these chain reactions with the neutrons radiating out. So in 1932, we discover the neutron. I think it was by '38, this woman named Lise Meitner, uh, figures out the chain reaction. By '42, 10 years after the discovery of the neutron, Enrico Fermi, in something called Chicago Pile 1, CP-1, crazily does a controlled [laughs] chain reaction under the bleachers of the University of Chicago, shout-out to the University of Chicago stadium, which could have obliterated the city of Chicago if it had gone critical, right? I mean, if, if it had just run away. We don't e- nobody knew what was gonna happen.

00:17:37
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:17:37
Eric Weinstein: So we trusted the city of Chicago to Enrico Fermi's calculation. By '45, you get Trinity and the two bombs we drop on Japan. And then in 1952, game over, you have Ivy Mike and the first thermonuclear weapon based on the Teller-Ulam design, which uses the fission bomb just for foreplay as the detonator that causes the waves to go out, radiate out against the shell, and I think we still don't talk exactly how we do it, and then they bounce off, and they compress this rod and core, and then you get fusion rather than fission, and suddenly you're harnessing the power of the sun. And that's when you don't even worry about duck and cover because thermonuclear is such a, a leap above nuc- above fission devices, and that's such a leap above conventional that it takes 20 years for us to become God, right? And this power we can't control Um, we need to worry about physics because you never know when somebody's gonna discover a neutron. In other words, a high leverage object, just like the semiconductor was a high leverage object, the World Wide Web in the early '90s was the high leverage object. Anything that comes out of physics... Oh, and, you know, Francis Crick, physicist discovering the three-dimensional structure of DNA, and then the transfer, um, hypothesis of, uh, where you translate DNA into messenger RNA, which gets read in ribosomes. All of these things changed the world, and effectively gave us so much power that we don't know how to control it, and we were so scared, um, for 70 years, because it- it's six months between 1952 and '53 where we discover both the atom and the cell, and how they work in terms of, uh, this forbidden knowledge. We were so scared that we behaved ourselves, and now we're not scared. We're like, "Slava Ukraine." [laughs] You know, just whatever. Um, "Yeah, we've got Putin, we're gonna back him into a corner." Uh-

00:19:42
Joe Rogan: Yeah, we should probably say that this is actually, uh, the day that we're talking about this is the day that Putin just backed out of the nuclear treaty publicly, which is not good.

00:19:54
Eric Weinstein: With Joe Biden going to-

00:19:57
Joe Rogan: Yes

00:19:57
Eric Weinstein: ... Kyiv, and pledging his undying love to... And I'm gonna say this, and which is very painful. I think Zelensky is a complete menace.

00:20:08
Joe Rogan: Why do you think that?

00:20:09
Eric Weinstein: He's romantic. He's telegenic. He's brave. Uh, we can talk about whether he got set up in a coup, or, you know, who he really is, whether he was an actor, et cetera, et cetera. But at some point, I think I heard him... I had to go back to, like, the Russian and Ukrainian speeches [laughs] in order to try to... I don't speak much Russian, I don't speak any Ukrainian, but they're closely related languages. And he calls for, like, pre- превентивные удары, like preventative strikes. I'm like, "Huh?" You know, this is a while, this was a while ago. And I thought, "Why is this person allowed to address Congress?" You have somebody who... And, and I, and I want to be very clear about this. Um, I really find it disgusting what Vladimir Putin did, uh, invading Ukraine. But if you look historically at the killing and the borders of Eastern and Central Europe, they have gone back and forth like nobody's business. When you ask somebody like me, uh, an American Ashkenazi Jew, "Where did your family come from?" You always get the same weird response. It's like, "Oh, it was a part of Belarusia that went back and forth between Poland, Ukraine, M- Moldova-

00:21:25
Joe Rogan: Mm

00:21:25
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, Lithuania," because it's fluid, right? And so when we say, you know, "We, we, we respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine," we were fighting right now in Lviv, like the Ukrainians were fighting in Lviv, eight seconds by hypersonic missile from Article 5 territory since 1999 in Poland. And I realized how crazy we got. Um, I was in Providence, Rhode Island with my son, and I get this alert on my phone and it says, "Two people are dead in Poland, um, w- with a presumptive strike by a Russian missile." I'm thinking, "Did, did I read two Polish people dead in an Article 5 full NATO member since 1999 with a Russian missile?" 'Cause I knew we were fighting way too close to this border. Now, by the way, if I say Lviv, everyone's gonna [laughs] correct me and say, "No, no, Eric, it's Lviv." It's like, no, these ci- these cities all have multiple pronunciations. I, I always thought of Lviv was a Polish city, not a Ukrainian city. And ironically, I believe Lviv is the s- birthplace of Stanislaw Ulam, who came up with the Teller U- [laughs] Ulam thermonuclear design. So we're talking about some of the world's smartest people on some of the world's bloodiest, most disgusting, most beautiful land, you know? I... Have you, have you ever been to Ukraine?

00:22:52
Joe Rogan: No.

00:22:53
Eric Weinstein: So my family basically is scattered, you know, was scattered throughout the shtetls of Ukraine, and I've been over there in eight- in '89. We Americans do not understand Central and Eastern Europe, period, the end. And for us to be making these commitments and not understanding how Russians think, and how Ukrainians [laughs] think, and how Poles think, and how the fighting works, I don't think we know what we're doing. I think we're creating a doomsday machine, and I... The reason that we... You know, it's not like Zelensky isn't wronged by Putin. It's not like, um, he's not charismatic. He has one of the greatest Bruce Willis lines of all time. When we ask to evacuate him, he says, "I need ammunition, not a ride." You know? That thing-

00:23:43
Joe Rogan: Yeah

00:23:43
Eric Weinstein: ... makes us... Yeah.

00:23:45
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:23:45
Eric Weinstein: I want that.

00:23:46
Joe Rogan: Right.

00:23:46
Eric Weinstein: Then there's, like, house-to-house fighting the way all the World War II enthusiasts think. They, they tend not to think about Nagasaki [laughs] and Hiroshima. They like the, the tactical stuff with all the, you know, which bridge got cr- got taken out over which river, and how did we do this and that. So it's very romantic to people who are, like, World War II addicts. We do not realize how deep the trouble we're courting is, and I don't think we realize how dangerous it is. If we are going to, every time there's a border dispute, go to a thermonuclear stan- you know, standoff, it's just Russian roulette with smaller and smaller numbers of empty chambers. And I don't know what this is. I don't know whether we, we have 30 years to play this game, or three, or three months. But I learned that day last year in 2022 Um, nobody around me in Providence, Rhode Island was reacting. Everybody was just going about. It was like a normal day. It's like y- I'm, I'm increasingly, Joe, believing that I am sane and that the world is crazy. And normally I take that as a cue that maybe I need to get some sleep. No, I think we're actually just going crazy. I think that those of us who actually get how risky this is need to speak up, because it's not fun. The entire apparatus will tell you that you're soft on Putin and you're an appeasing Chamberlain, uh, wannabe, and it's like bullshit. Right now you don't realize, in 2004 we let Latvia and Lithuania into Ma- NATO membership, and I remember thinking at the time, "What the hell are we doing?" It's not like I don't understand that we wanna protect them, and it's not un- like I don't understand that you wanna say that they're independent nations, but these were former Soviet republics. And there's two ways of thinking about it. You can put on one set of glasses and say, "Well, these are nations that get to decide what they want, and who's to tell them what to do?" And then there's another thing called spheres of influence, where it's like that's the Russian sphere of influence. If you are not playing with both of these sets of lenses, you're not playing the game. And the number of people who just have one set of these glasses on, right? They're only seeing the infrared or they're only seeing the ultraviolet. It's like no, you, you need to oscillate back and forth and understand what you're doing. So I think, I think Zelensky, and I'm scared to say this because I know I'm gonna get just nothing but hate, we created a situation by pretending that we didn't understand the spheres of inc- influence glasses. We very well understand the sovereignty glasses, and we are now creating a doomsday machine that we do not understand, and the world is gonna go multipolar and we don't have the skill to play this game, period.

00:26:25
Joe Rogan: Do you think part of the problem is that we're... The, the amount of people that have actually gone to war in this country-

00:26:34
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:26:34
Joe Rogan: First of all, there's, there's people that are in the Army or in all the armed forces, they're v- they're volunteers. Everyone volunteers. There's no draft. There's no, um, national requirement to join the military like there is in Israel and like there is in South Korea and many other countries. We... The, the people that have experience with the war are the ones that are telling you, "This is dangerous." People like yourself are telling us, "This is dangerous," but to the rest of the world, to the rest of this country, there's a real problem with day-to-day existence, because day-to-day existence is tricky, and it, it gives you parameters which you exist in, but they're not real.

00:27:11
Eric Weinstein: They're not real.

00:27:12
Joe Rogan: They're not real. You... They're only real right now, and if you invite war, you now are like these videos that you can watch. I don't know if you're on Telegram. [sighs] There are some fucking videos from this-

00:27:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:27:25
Joe Rogan: ... war. D- on, like in the woods ground fighting.

00:27:29
Eric Weinstein: I've seen them.

00:27:30
Joe Rogan: Heavy, heavy shit, and I don't think people that show up every day at the same Starbucks and then get on the highway and go to their office and repeat every fucking day, I don't think they think of that as a real option in the world, but it is.

00:27:46
Eric Weinstein: Think, think of daily life as ketamine, okay? So you've got people walking around completely dissociated because everything in their daily environment tells them to pick up the dry cleaning.

00:27:57
Joe Rogan: Right.

00:27:58
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, oh-

00:28:00
Joe Rogan: Everything's fine

00:28:01
Eric Weinstein: ... oh, w- what's on Netflix?

00:28:03
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:28:04
Eric Weinstein: Um, at least in the Cuban Missile Crisis, my father was driving across country. I said, "You knew it was the Cu-" [laughs] He says, "Everybody knew it was the Cuban Missile Crisis." Every single town that he drove through, he would stop and the TV would be on. People were talking about it, right? We are in some world where... And, and I think that we have to just talk about the fact that the United States is attacking ordinary intelligent human beings by depriving them of any basic knowledge of what is actually going on. We don't know what happened with the origin of COVID. We have no idea about Epstein. We don't know what's going on with the vaccines. We don't understand the source of the inflation. We blinded ourselves from looking at the M1 monetary aggregate when the Fed pumped us full of cheap cash. We have no clue how to resolve, um, you know, something as dumb as the Epste- u- to whom did, did Ghislaine traffic? "I don't know."

00:29:02
Joe Rogan: Yeah. "Well, can't find it. Sorry, bye."

00:29:04
Eric Weinstein: So this is what's causing, in part, our friends to go crazy.

00:29:09
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:29:10
Eric Weinstein: You know, uh, uh, several years ago, Sam Harris had good input. Jordan Harrison, uh, uh, Jordan Peterson had good input. Bret Weinstein had good input. Most of them I don't think have figured out that they're starved for information, and that... And I'm gonna say something very heteroc- heterodox to the heterodoxy. The heterodoxy was never meant to take over for the orthodoxy. The orthodoxy was something that needed correction. The purpose of the heterodoxy is to say, "You're, you're 12 degrees off. You're three degrees off."

00:29:42
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

00:29:43
Eric Weinstein: What do you do when you're, like, 168 degrees off? And all... You know, like the fine-tuning that heterodoxy can do is not sufficient to correct the ship. And what we're being... What's happening to us, and I said this to Sam at a dinner with Dave Rubin right before Trump took over. I said, "Sam, if you don't take a different approach to Trump, he's gonna blow out your circuits." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, for every ambiguous thing that you can't resolve with Trump, um, raise two to that power." So if he puts three ambiguities, uh, in a series, you have two to the third possibilities of what could be true. That's eight. He can create a decision tree that explodes faster than you, Sam Harris, can think, right? There's no way you can get to s- two to the fourth possibilities on a decision tree. And Sam d- I don't think he understood the perspec- And so what happened was we were all swimming in this world where nobody could tell which end was up. Nobody can resolve anything. And I think a lot of this has to do-

00:30:46
Joe Rogan: Not sure I understand what you were just saying there.

00:30:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:30:49
Joe Rogan: The, this decision tree thing, that, that Sam, he was gonna bl- e- explain that?

00:30:54
Eric Weinstein: So let's imagine, for example, that I'm staying at a local hotel.

00:30:57
Joe Rogan: Okay.

00:30:58
Eric Weinstein: And you don't know whether I'm staying at the Hyatt or the Four Seasons.

00:31:01
Joe Rogan: Okay.

00:31:01
Eric Weinstein: And you also can't figure out whether I'm leaving at 1:00 or at 2:00. And you don't know whether I'm going to be arriving by, um, a white Prius or a black, uh, Escalade. You now have too many possibilities as to, well what's the, the drive time for those two hotels is different. I don't know which car I'm looking for. There are eight possibilities now of what could actually be happening, 'cause those are all independent.

00:31:31
Joe Rogan: Right.

00:31:32
Eric Weinstein: When Trump created ambiguities or now the Biden group is creating ambiguities by not telling us what's actually going on, you don't know how serious this, uh, East Palestine, uh, Ohio spill is. Is this something that's gonna burn off pretty easily, or is this getting into the corn crop that's gonna be found in all processed food? I don't know. I don't know how much-

00:31:51
Joe Rogan: It's a very good question.

00:31:52
Eric Weinstein: Right. Okay. So just every day you're being assaulted by completely unnecessary ambiguities.

00:32:00
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:32:00
Eric Weinstein: And, and you know, th- this is-

00:32:02
Joe Rogan: But why, but why then the Trump thing? Why his, why would his derangement towards Trump-

00:32:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, because Trump-

00:32:10
Joe Rogan: ... blow all the circuits?

00:32:11
Eric Weinstein: Sam made one terrible call with Trump. He said that he was the, uh, e- evil Chauncey Gardiner, like a simpleton, like Mr. Magoo-

00:32:19
Joe Rogan: Mm

00:32:19
Eric Weinstein: ... just happens to wander into the Oval Office as the first go- first, first president with zero government experience, including the armed services. Bullshit. Trump may be a savant, but he was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. If you do not give that devil its due, you're toast.

00:32:37
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's silly to say that he's dumb 'cause he's different. He says some dumb stuff sometimes, but o- oftentimes he's talking off the top of his head.

00:32:46
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I don't even-

00:32:46
Joe Rogan: Like, uh, maybe use some bleach, clean it out. Remember that?

00:32:50
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Exactly.

00:32:50
Joe Rogan: Use some v- But meanwhile, one of the things that he said about using, uh, light-

00:32:56
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:32:56
Joe Rogan: ... actually, they came up with a process of doing that. That was an actual procedure that they would use where they use ultraviolet light inside a person's lungs and kill the COVID virus. This was like a, a concept that, that they were actually putting forth as being possible. So what he said, even though it sounded ridiculous-

00:33:12
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:33:13
Joe Rogan: ... like, get light into their body [laughs] it actually-

00:33:16
Eric Weinstein: I know

00:33:16
Joe Rogan: ... it actually was right.

00:33:18
Eric Weinstein: But that's the thing then. So then a bunch of people said, okay-

00:33:20
Joe Rogan: Right

00:33:20
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm gonna put a minus sign in front of Trump. Everything that he says is just wrong.

00:33:24
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:33:24
Eric Weinstein: Right? They say-

00:33:24
Joe Rogan: You can't do that

00:33:25
Eric Weinstein: ... well, they did this to Alex Jones.

00:33:26
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:33:26
Eric Weinstein: They did this to James O'Keefe, and they'll do it to you and me.

00:33:29
Joe Rogan: They def- they've definitely done it to me. They've def- definitely done it to you, too. It's a thing that people do. Look, just because someone... Look, I say dumb things all the time, constantly. My kids make fun of me.

00:33:39
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I never, I never do.

00:33:40
Joe Rogan: I am always saying dumb things, because I, I talk sometimes before I totally think.

00:33:44
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:33:44
Joe Rogan: But then I go, "Oh, wait a minute. That doesn't make sense." And then I'll correct it.

00:33:48
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:33:48
Joe Rogan: Like I'm, I'm trying not to be married to my thoughts. There's a real problem-

00:33:51
Eric Weinstein: You're, you're, you're great at this, by the way

00:33:52
Joe Rogan: ... well, there's a real problem. Well, because I'm, I recognize [laughs] my fucking shortcomings.

00:33:56
Eric Weinstein: Me too. Yeah.

00:33:57
Joe Rogan: You know, I k- I know that I, I am, I'm scattered, okay, 'cause I do a lot of different things, and I'm thinking about things that are totally unnecessary, like professional pool matches. Like I think about that all the time. Like, how did he get position on that six ball? It's crazy. And I'll th- I'll think about that when I'm driving my car. So like, I'm a scatterbrain in a lot of ways. So sometimes when I'm talking, I'm, uh, I'm there, but I'm not, like, fully formed in these thoughts. I'm tr- trying to talk 'em out in real time.

00:34:22
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:34:23
Joe Rogan: And you, you get clumsy with that. And when you concentrate on something, you get really good at it. And if you concentrate on something and try and improve on something, whether it's playing chess or whether it is business, you get really good at it. And in the meanwhile, you might not be good at interpersonal relationships. You might not be good at the way you communicate with people. You might not be good at y- but you have some weird thing that you're doing that seems to be successful, and you're p- you're putting all your energy into that. That's what he's doing. That's what he's always done. What he's always done is, like, these business deals and making money and putting a fucking giant hotel with his name on it. Whoa! Like, that's what he thinks about, and he's really good at that shit.

00:35:04
Eric Weinstein: He's strategic. And w- I would say he's tactical to the extreme.

00:35:06
Joe Rogan: Yeah. You can't say he's not smart. It's just like, he's, he's just not Sam Harris.

00:35:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:35:11
Joe Rogan: He's not capable of those kind of eloquent speeches and conversations off, off the cuff like that, which is a totally different s- skill.

00:35:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but if you looked at his tweets, for example, back in the day, [laughs] there was so much formula in those tweets. I, I started coming up with, like, a template. He had five different tweets.

00:35:27
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:35:28
Eric Weinstein: And Sam just would not let go of the idea that he's a dumb-dumb, and that was super expensive in the long run.

00:35:36
Joe Rogan: But I think it's because Sam knows that if you get in a debate with that guy, he could trounce him. Part of it is that-

00:35:43
Eric Weinstein: You think, you think-

00:35:43
Joe Rogan: Yes, it's-

00:35:44
Eric Weinstein: ... Sam could trounce him?

00:35:46
Joe Rogan: If, if they got in a debate about religion, [laughs] if they got in a debate about, about certain things that Sam is, like, uh, neuroscience, certain things that Sam is very educated in. He's, he's so good at debates. It's like being a black belt that's used to tapping people all the time, and then you see this guy that's l- he's winning debates against people because he's calling 'em, like, d- what does he call, Lyin' Ted, and he calls these, he, he gives people nicknames.

00:36:11
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:36:11
Joe Rogan: And, and I think if I was Sam and I was as good as debate, at, at debate as Sam is-

00:36:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:36:17
Joe Rogan: ... I would go, "I could fuck this guy up."

00:36:19
Eric Weinstein: Sam doesn't know what's coming to him, if that's true, because I mean, there was a guy named Max Blecher who was like-

00:36:23
Joe Rogan: I'm sorry, Sam, dragging you into this

00:36:25
Eric Weinstein: ... w- who was a, who was a-

00:36:26
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

00:36:26
Eric Weinstein: ... Los Angeles attorney who had a crazy idea. He said, "I'm gonna try really complex antitrust cases in front of juries." You're like, "The jury's not gonna be able to follow that."

00:36:36
Joe Rogan: Oh, wow.

00:36:36
Eric Weinstein: And he's like, "Exactly. I'm gonna speak simply."

00:36:39
Joe Rogan: Look, one way to win one of these arguments is just say, uh, you know, "The problem is the nuclear family," right? And every single Democrat will say [laughs]

00:36:49
Eric Weinstein: "You mean nuclear," and then you've lost.

00:36:53
Joe Rogan: Right.

00:36:53
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause when you correct somebody-

00:36:54
Joe Rogan: Right

00:36:54
Eric Weinstein: ... who's saying nuclear, or like, "Okay, it's nuclear, egghead," you lose.

00:36:59
Joe Rogan: But nuclear is a way to say it, too.

00:37:02
Eric Weinstein: It is now. So y- but this might-

00:37:04
Joe Rogan: That's how, that's how George W. Bush always said it, and everybody's like, "Hey, what the fu-" Dennis Miller had a bit about it [laughs].

00:37:09
Eric Weinstein: But it wins, right?

00:37:10
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:37:10
Eric Weinstein: So this is why-

00:37:11
Joe Rogan: Yeah

00:37:11
Eric Weinstein: ... if you sit down with one of these... Like, like if, if you and I are at the beach, right? And we've got the world's greatest beach volleyball team on one side, and the world's greatest sepaktakraw team on the other side, it's, it's a ball, it's a net, and it's three, three, three dudes, okay?

00:37:25
Joe Rogan: Okay.

00:37:25
Eric Weinstein: Who wins?

00:37:28
Joe Rogan: The people that are better?

00:37:29
Eric Weinstein: Nope.

00:37:30
Joe Rogan: Who?

00:37:30
Eric Weinstein: Depends who the ref is. If the ref thinks it's volleyball, then the volleyball team will win, and if it, if the ref thinks it's sepaktakraw, the sepaktakraw team wi-... It's the same-

00:37:39
Joe Rogan: I don't know what sepaktakraw is.

00:37:41
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it's like the most beautiful-

00:37:42
Joe Rogan: Do you know what that is?

00:37:43
Jamie Vernon: Yeah, yeah. We've done it.

00:37:44
Joe Rogan: What is it?

00:37:45
Jamie Vernon: It's similar to the thing with that ball that we have out there that, uh-

00:37:48
Joe Rogan: Oh, the one that David Duke gave us?

00:37:48
Eric Weinstein: You have like one of these rattan balls?

00:37:50
Jamie Vernon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:50
Joe Rogan: Oh, okay. That's, that's-

00:37:52
Eric Weinstein: It's like martial arts ballet in the air with the feet

00:37:55
Joe Rogan: Oh my God, that's amazing

00:37:55
Eric Weinstein: It's the, it's so, it's the best game ever. I don't know why we're not doing it.

00:37:58
Joe Rogan: It's amazing.

00:37:59
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:37:59
Joe Rogan: Well, we can't do it. Those guys are fucking-

00:38:01
Eric Weinstein: I destroyed my left ankle on this game when I was-

00:38:04
Joe Rogan: Oh, you can't be doing that. You can't do that.

00:38:06
Eric Weinstein: No, no, when I was a young man, I was courting my wife, I was gonna impress her in Indonesia, show, like, let, let an American take over. Okay, here we go.

00:38:11
Joe Rogan: Oh, these guys are, these guys are phenomenal.

00:38:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:38:14
Joe Rogan: Like, that is insane. I mean, that's like 100 Yair Rodriguez's out there. Yair Rodriguez is a, a UFC fighter who fights like that.

00:38:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I almost did it with boxing versus UFC, right? The, is the issue punching people in the face, or is the issue doing everything except for small joints and, and, and eye sockets?

00:38:30
Joe Rogan: That kind of thing, though, requires, like, a kind of dexterity that's very difficult to acquire. Like, that kind of dexterity with your legs, that's like a tae kwon do dexterity.

00:38:39
Eric Weinstein: 100%. The question is what are the rules? So in other words, if, if Sam Harris goes up against Donald Trump, I can tell you who's gonna win depending upon how we score.

00:38:49
Joe Rogan: Okay. What if, what if they have a conversat- instead of, like, having this, uh, this... Here's what I don't like about debates.

00:38:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:38:57
Joe Rogan: The, this, what's artificial is that one person gets to talk-

00:39:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:39:00
Joe Rogan: ... for X amount of time.

00:39:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:39:01
Joe Rogan: It seems silly to me. I don't mind someone being a, a, able to talk, but it has to be a conversation. Someone cannot dominate the conversation.

00:39:11
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00:39:11
Joe Rogan: Like you and I, if you and I had a disagreement and I just wouldn't let you talk, it's very frustrating. It sucks. It's not good for anybody.

00:39:17
Eric Weinstein: It's more likely to go the other way, I'm sorry. [laughs]

00:39:18
Joe Rogan: [laughs] It could happen that way. It could happen that way, but it doesn't matter. It's like, it's not fun.

00:39:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:39:23
Joe Rogan: And it's not, it's not fair, and like, if you're gonna have... It's like a fight. You can't... I can poke you in the eye, but you can't poke me in the eye? No, that's not fair.

00:39:31
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:39:31
Joe Rogan: It has to be fair. So if you're going to have a, an, and some would say, "Well, he's not capable of having a good faith conversation," but that's the only way to do it. The only way to do it is to have an open-ended timeframe-

00:39:42
Eric Weinstein: Uh-huh

00:39:43
Joe Rogan: ... where you could just, until this fucking thing is resolved-

00:39:46
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:39:46
Joe Rogan: ... or until we all give up, you guys can talk.

00:39:48
Eric Weinstein: Was Dick Fosbury fair?

00:39:50
Joe Rogan: Who's Dick Fosbury?

00:39:51
Eric Weinstein: The high jump guy from '68 in Mexico City.

00:39:54
Joe Rogan: I don't know. What happened?

00:39:56
Eric Weinstein: Oh, he figured out he, you had to go backwards over the bar rather than scissoring it.

00:40:00
Joe Rogan: Oh, he's the first guy to figure that out?

00:40:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:40:02
Joe Rogan: Oh, no kidding.

00:40:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:40:03
Joe Rogan: All right. That's a pretty fucking bold move, right?

00:40:06
Eric Weinstein: A bold move.

00:40:06
Joe Rogan: Like the other-

00:40:07
Eric Weinstein: Or like you enter a catamaran in the America's Cup 'cause you-

00:40:10
Joe Rogan: Did they have the same big pad?

00:40:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:40:12
Joe Rogan: So they had the same big pad before and they were just landing on it like that. Oh, wow, that's crazy.

00:40:17
Eric Weinstein: Right?

00:40:18
Joe Rogan: Whoa, that's insane. That's how they used to do it?

00:40:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:40:22
Joe Rogan: Whoa.

00:40:23
Eric Weinstein: Right? So zero day-

00:40:24
Jamie Vernon: That was before my time

00:40:24
Eric Weinstein: ... exploit, Dick-

00:40:25
Joe Rogan: Did you know this?

00:40:26
Jamie Vernon: Uh-

00:40:26
Joe Rogan: Did you know this?

00:40:27
Jamie Vernon: I-

00:40:27
Joe Rogan: I feel like I knew this, and I'm just remembering it

00:40:28
Jamie Vernon: ... I know about the Fosbury Jump 'cause I've heard of that, but I didn't, I didn't know how they did it before. I never looked.

00:40:32
Joe Rogan: No shit. That's incredible.

00:40:33
Eric Weinstein: See, it's, at the same Olympics, you have Bob Beamon jumping, like, what is it? Two feet [laughs] farther than any human's... Like, probably the greatest single athletic performance of the 20th century happens there.

00:40:42
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:40:42
Eric Weinstein: But zero day exploits are really interesting. Another one was the Bombay International Table Tennis Championship, and the weakest player on the Japanese team was a guy, I'm gonna get the name wrong here. Jamie, keep me honest. Hiroj- Hiroji Satoge. Uh, he shows up in Bombay, and he's, like, the worst player, and he, he's got this secret, uh, paddle case, and he unzips it, and he's got rubber glued to both sides of the sandpaper bat that everybody else is using.

00:41:13
Joe Rogan: Oh.

00:41:14
Eric Weinstein: And he dominates everybody. And you'd think because the rubber grips and spins, but I think it's actually that the, everyone was cued to the sound, and this deadened the sound-

00:41:24
Joe Rogan: Oh

00:41:25
Eric Weinstein: ... and suddenly nobody could play against him. And sudden... You know, so he's like Iron Man. [imitates punching]

00:41:29
Joe Rogan: Right, they're thinking. They have another thing that they're thinking about now, like, "Why does it sound like that?"

00:41:33
Eric Weinstein: And they don't even know that.

00:41:34
Joe Rogan: Oh.

00:41:36
Eric Weinstein: Right?

00:41:37
Joe Rogan: Interesting.

00:41:38
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Hi- Hiroji Satode's controversial-

00:41:40
Joe Rogan: Thick sponge bat that caused a revolution in table tennis. But also, wouldn't it slow the ball down because of the softness of it?

00:41:49
Eric Weinstein: I would imagine it would give you more control.

00:41:52
Joe Rogan: So that would change... It would, seems like it would do both of those things. May- may- maybe it would slow the ball down a little bit because it's got a little bit of smush to it, and I think that would almost be like a change-up in, um, like a pitching situation where someone's throwing a ball. You're expecting it to be 90 miles an hour, instead it's 60, and you're like, "Motherfucker." Like, you're just, you're, you're off, right? 'Cause you have to be so ready to go, and then da, da, da, da, da, da, and it's slower than it should be, so it's fucking with your computer.

00:42:17
Eric Weinstein: And I think, I think the Chinese came up with, uh, the loop in table tennis.

00:42:21
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:42:22
Eric Weinstein: I believe that in beach volleyball, the jumping serve where you, you go airborne and then you s- you hit-

00:42:29
Joe Rogan: Oh

00:42:29
Eric Weinstein: ... these, these discrete technical changes. Well, let's take the one with Steph Curry. Uh, I heard... I wish I could remember who this was. Somebody in your audience will know. There was a, an old-style top basketball player who was being interviewed. "What do you think of this guy, Steph Curry, and what's happening in the game?" And he said something, it was so beautiful, I can't tell you. Something to the effect of, "You know, I don't know what game that is." He said, "I used to play in the paint, and we were all, [laughs] you know, we're going at it, and you're elbowing and for- trying to get position. This guy's a million miles [laughs] away from the basket, and he's just nothing but net." He said, "That's not basketball to me." Like, he just didn't recognize what the thing had become.

00:43:12
Joe Rogan: Oh, that's so weird.

00:43:13
Eric Weinstein: And so I think the, these zero day exploits, and just taking it back to get to the n- to the UFOs, 'cause we have crazy stuff, the neutron is a zero day exploit. It's the Fosbury Flop of physics.

00:43:26
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:43:26
Eric Weinstein: Same for the semiconductor. And we have stagnated for so long that people in our government aren't watching people like me and saying, "What's going on, Eric? Anything new? Any- what are you working on?" Because anybody who comes up with a new thing can change the entire balance of power on planet Earth.

00:43:47
Joe Rogan: How far away are we from new things, and have new things been-

00:43:52
Eric Weinstein: You can't ask me that, 'cause I, I have a different view than every other person. I wanna get back to the u-

00:43:55
Joe Rogan: I'm gonna ask you.

00:43:56
Eric Weinstein: Let's do that at the end.

00:43:56
Joe Rogan: Don't tell me what I can ask you and not a- I'm, I'm asking you that, bro.

00:43:59
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Okay. [laughs]

00:44:00
Joe Rogan: [laughs] Keeps going. Keep going. We'll get back to me asking you that.

00:44:04
Eric Weinstein: But, yeah, you can ask me that at the end.

00:44:06
Joe Rogan: Okay.

00:44:06
Eric Weinstein: But I, I wanna do the stuff that's controversial, but is, like, everybody should have to agree to it.

00:44:10
Joe Rogan: Okay.

00:44:11
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:44:11
Joe Rogan: Let's go.

00:44:12
Eric Weinstein: So what I wanted to know was why, during the 1950s, did something happen that resulted in a 70-year stagnation in a field called quantum gravity? Quantum gravity is like a startup that cannot ship a product after 70 years, and it's still taken over in theoretical physics as sort of the prestige theory field.

00:44:38
Joe Rogan: And quantum gravity is, is there an application for this that they were attempting to achieve?

00:44:45
Eric Weinstein: Y- [sighs] No. It's not a p- it's not a precursor to technology so far as we know. But what happened was, you probably have some dim memory of something... By the way, these, uh, shooting stars in your ceiling are just-

00:44:58
Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah

00:44:58
Eric Weinstein: ... fucking amazing.

00:44:58
Joe Rogan: You gotta be warned.

00:45:00
Eric Weinstein: I know.

00:45:00
Joe Rogan: Otherwise, you're like, "Uh oh."

00:45:01
Eric Weinstein: Um, quantum gravity, uh, is the replacement of something, uh, for th- is the replacement for something that used to be known as the unified field. So Einstein wasn't chasing quantum gravity. He was chasing unified field theory. And unified field theory was much closer to what we would call classical physics, where you get quantum field theory by quantizing a classical theory. That fell out of favor, and around 1984, we gradually had unified field theory become sort of like a joke, old-timey expression for the future of physics, and we substituted quantum gravity for the merger of quantum theory, quantum field theory, quantum mechanics, and gravitational physics under general relativity. That program, that dog doesn't hunt, and it hasn't hunted for 70 years. So I wanted to trace this back. How is it that the field became convinced that something which clearly doesn't [laughs] seem to work, and has had all of the resources, all of the best minds at its disposal, it sucks up everything, and it, it just doesn't work. Why can't I question this? Where did this come from?

00:46:15
Joe Rogan: So to be specific-

00:46:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:46:18
Joe Rogan: ... like, how many people are working on this problem, and how many people have been working on this problem for 70 years without progress?

00:46:25
Eric Weinstein: I would say that the period between 1953 and '73, there are parallel things. Quantum gravity is not the mainstream at all, okay? So real physics is happening between '53 and '73 by anybody's u- understanding of it, okay?

00:46:39
Joe Rogan: Okay.

00:46:41
Eric Weinstein: Between 1973 and 1984, or 19, let's say '74 to '84, 'cause we'll group '73 with the, to '53, you have 10 years of super exciting guesses about the extension of our understanding, things called supersymmetry, grand unified theory, technicolor, uh, asymptotic safety. These are really responsible guesses, axions. Um, and, you know, somebody like Sean Carroll, uh, or Neil deGrasse Tyson might talk to you about these things when they come in here.

00:47:13
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:47:14
Eric Weinstein: In 1984, there is an earthquake called the anomaly cancellation, and a f- a failed theory of strong physics, the physics needed to glue two protons together in a helium nucleus, because they both hate each other th- because of electromagnetism and wanna separate, but something is binding them together like a family structure, right?

00:47:35
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:47:36
Eric Weinstein: That force, we initially tried to fix by thinking of it as strings. We'll put, like, elastic bands between things, and it'll pull things back together. That didn't work. But then we repurposed it and then said, "No, no, no. It's quantum gravity." And, uh, one single individual who is the most dominant mind on planet Earth at the moment, uh, effectively Voldemort, a person whose name we are a little bit afraid to invoke and, and cause wrath, said in 1984, "No, string theory is the way. This anomaly cancellation was unexpected, and it clearly points to the fact that we are, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to quantize the-"

00:48:13
Joe Rogan: Who's that person?

00:48:14
Eric Weinstein: Edward Witten.

00:48:16
Joe Rogan: And w- in p- physics circles-

00:48:19
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:48:19
Joe Rogan: ... you're not allowed to bring this guy up?

00:48:21
Eric Weinstein: Oh, we talk about him. Everybody talks about him, but to challenge him? Think about Agent Smith. Think about playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan in his prime. He's-

00:48:34
Joe Rogan: He's that good?

00:48:35
Eric Weinstein: Joe, I don't think... I, I'm dumb enough not to be intellectually afraid of anyone else on planet Earth at this point. I am terrified of this person.

00:48:44
Joe Rogan: Really?

00:48:46
Eric Weinstein: I've s- I, I've said he's the Michael Jordan of theoretical physics, if only Michael Jordan could play better basketball. I'm not kidding around, Joe.

00:48:56
Joe Rogan: Okay.

00:48:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:48:57
Joe Rogan: Wow.

00:48:58
Eric Weinstein: Right, this good, and has never made contact with the physical world. So it's, like, one of the greatest conundrums. So s- s- so let me get back to w- how crazy-

00:49:09
Joe Rogan: What do you mean by never made contact?

00:49:11
Eric Weinstein: No Nobel Prize, never predicted something that chur- turned out to be true, never pointed us to do an experiment that was then validated. So 100% of his efforts have been not making contact with physical reality. Oh, this is... I'm sorry. Like, you have people like Michio Kaku who are in the string theoretic school.

00:49:38
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

00:49:38
Eric Weinstein: Sean Carroll is very sympathetic to it.

00:49:40
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

00:49:41
Eric Weinstein: You need to understand this story. Uh, Jamie, if I dare, may I ask, can we pull up something with Edward Witten and Abdus Salam, uh, on YouTube, just to... Like, this person's voice, "Imagine a six-foot-four person who talks like this."

00:49:59
Joe Rogan: Interesting.

00:49:59
Eric Weinstein: And just, like, he could do a v- Vulcan mind meld and rearrange your mind into scrambled eggs within seconds. I know tenured professors who hid in their offices when he visited MIT because he walked on everybody... He knocked on everyone's door, and he has... You know how, uh, Warren Beatty had a pickup line that everyone knew? "What's new, pussycat?"

00:50:20
Joe Rogan: Is that what he said?

00:50:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that was Warren Beatty's pickup line.

00:50:22
Joe Rogan: It's all you needed when you were Warren Beatty.

00:50:23
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] That's true.

00:50:24
Joe Rogan: Try that shit if you work at 7-Eleven.

00:50:26
Eric Weinstein: Okay, this person.

00:50:26
Joe Rogan: Okay, let me hear.

00:50:27
Edward Witten: Pretty weird way for a theory to start. String theory started with a f- clever formula written down by Veneziano in an effort to satisfy not so well-motivated phenomenological ideas about strong interaction scattering. That was a way for a theory to start which was as strange as the way quantum mechanics started. And the way Einstein happened to have, uh, invented a theory in a particularly striking triumph of reason and intuition, but most other physical theories have had more complicated histories.

00:50:59
Eric Weinstein: You can tell how much is going on beyond this, but it's hard.

00:51:01
Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah.

00:51:01
Edward Witten: And it's hard to make theories about them.

00:51:02
Abdus Salam: You can't generalize at all of how a dimension will come. Anybody who makes statements like that is relying on his own experience.

00:51:11
Eric Weinstein: Now, that is Abdus Salam, Nobel Prize winner.

00:51:13
Abdus Salam: And I think this statement must be modified according to each situation. What would you say?

00:51:17
Dennis Sciama: Well, it still seems to me it's a question of whether you start with a mathematical scheme and then look for a physical interpretation, or start with a physical principle which you guess to be correct, and then on the one hand, try and prove it experimentally to be true, and on the other hand, uh, codify it into a mathematical form. I must admit, I've always been so, uh, admiring Einstein's procedure in general relativity of starting with a very simple physical remark based on the Galileo discovery that bodies of different mass fall at the same rate in the gravitational field of the Earth. He made a simple physical hypothesis why that should be true.

00:51:56
Eric Weinstein: But you, you have to understand... Y- you know that old Jim Croce song about Big Jim?

00:52:01
Joe Rogan: Yes.

00:52:02
Eric Weinstein: "When the bad folks all get together at night-"

00:52:03
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:52:03
Eric Weinstein: "... they all call Big Jim boss." If you ask any of us who are any good, "Who's the person who terrifies you the most?"

00:52:13
Joe Rogan: So are these guys debating him? Is this what's going on here?

00:52:15
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:52:17
Joe Rogan: Are they agreeing with him? Are they questioning him?

00:52:18
Eric Weinstein: They're having a friendly conversation.

00:52:20
Joe Rogan: Right. Should we let it go more?

00:52:21
Eric Weinstein: Uh, y- up to you, but I would, I would concentrate... The other people are very interesting.

00:52:26
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

00:52:26
Eric Weinstein: Top people. This person is a towering 17 stories above everybody else.

00:52:33
Joe Rogan: Let me hear him talk more because it seemed very fascinating watching the way he was talking about things. It almost seems like he wanted to run away and get back to his lab.

00:52:43
Edward Witten: Agree with you, except that I think it would have taken-

00:52:45
Abdus Salam: Well, longer

00:52:46
Edward Witten: ... decades rather than a few years.

00:52:47
Dennis Sciama: Longer, yes. [laughs]

00:52:47
Edward Witten: You see, R- Riemann almost did it.

00:52:49
Abdus Salam: Riemann almost-

00:52:50
Edward Witten: Riemann had the conception that gravity was based on curved spacetime, but what he lacked... Sorry, Riemann had the conception that gravity was based on curved space. He didn't conceive of curved spacetime because special relativity hadn't happened yet.

00:53:02
Abdus Salam: That's right. Exactly.

00:53:03
Edward Witten: So time and space hadn't been unified.

00:53:04
Abdus Salam: Exactly.

00:53:04
Edward Witten: But if Riemann had lived after special relativity-

00:53:07
Abdus Salam: He would have done it

00:53:07
Edward Witten: ... he might well have.

00:53:08
Abdus Salam: Sure.

00:53:08
Edward Witten: Very possibly.

00:53:08
Abdus Salam: Gauss made even the assumption, you remember. So I don't think it's a, it's such a cut-and-dried case, am I?

00:53:15
Edward Witten: Well, could I-

00:53:16
Abdus Salam: Let me give you one more example, if I may.

00:53:17
Edward Witten: Please.

00:53:18
Abdus Salam: Um-

00:53:19
Eric Weinstein: Find s- find some more Ed. So-

00:53:23
Joe Rogan: Should we wa- get a different video of him or is this-

00:53:25
Eric Weinstein: You, you could find a lecture of him that, where he's alone 'cause I just-

00:53:28
Joe Rogan: Let him yap a little bit.

00:53:30
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:53:33
Lewis Frumkes: You outside the field theory. A winner of the Fundamental Physics Prize, a $3 million prize recently established by Yuri Milner to-

00:53:41
Edward Witten: Matter equivalent of the electron, the positron.

00:53:44
Eric Weinstein: So this is him older.

00:53:44
Edward Witten: A particle like the electron, but with the opposite electric charge. So this was actually the discovery of antimatter. The most basic property of antimatter is that matter-antimatter pairs can be created and annihilated. In this picture, time is running horizontally, and what I'm sketching, the purple wiggly lines are meant to be photons. Physicists often, in drawing so-called Feynman diagrams, use wiggly lines to indicate photons. Here, two photons are annihilating into an electron-positron pair. So photons are as close to pure energy as it gets, and they can be converted to matter, that is, into antimatter-matter pairs.

00:54:25
Joe Rogan: Imagine dating this guy's daughter and you have to meet him.

00:54:28
Eric Weinstein: Uh-

00:54:28
Joe Rogan: You know, "Hi, sir. Nice to meet you."

00:54:31
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:54:31
Joe Rogan: [laughs] "What do you t- what do you do at work?" [laughs]

00:54:38
Eric Weinstein: I've tangled with him twice. I don't... Uh, I, I... Look, uh, two friends of mine are his graduate students. He's had two graduate students in mathematics. He's not even a mathematician. He's won the Fields Medal. He never won the Nobel Prize, but h- he's won the highest prize in all of mathematics as a sideline. He didn't even major in physics, majored in history at Brandeis. They're fried. Their brains, everybody who comes in contact with this person just never fully recovers.

00:55:09
Joe Rogan: Because he's that much smarter.

00:55:10
Eric Weinstein: We don't know what process he's running. I mean, imagine that you had, like, a machine to-- Imagine you had, like, ChatGPT in your ear. Right? [laughs]

00:55:20
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

00:55:20
Eric Weinstein: Nobody else did, and nobody-

00:55:21
Joe Rogan: Right

00:55:21
Eric Weinstein: ... knows how you're doing it.

00:55:22
Joe Rogan: Right.

00:55:23
Eric Weinstein: Um, I wouldn't say that he's that way now. The younger version of him was much more unusual. He would just spontaneously laugh in the middle of a sentence for no reason. Um, it, it, it was just very clear that you weren't communicating with somebody who was with you in the room.

00:55:39
Joe Rogan: Whoa. Yeah, he seemed like the way he was, uh, sitting there l- grasping his hands, and he seemed, like, very uncomfortable just to be around all these people.

00:55:50
Eric Weinstein: I was at the University of Pennsylvania in, like, 1982 through '85, okay? And I went to a lecture that he gave, and he said things like, "Well, as every school child and quantum field theorist knows [laughs]," you know, just like spontaneously laughing for no reason, "um, the number of generations is tied to the index of an elliptic operator on a Calabi–Yau manifold." And the guy next to me says, "I've been a quantum field theorist for 40 years. I don't know any of this stuff."

00:56:24
Joe Rogan: Whoa.

00:56:25
Eric Weinstein: Right? So he came onto the scene and started telling us how everything was gonna fit together, and nobody had ever heard a story like this. Th- this is, by the way, lost, um, to history because we fictionalized what happened with string theory. This person was so far ahead that nobody wanted to contradict him. He said this was the way. You know, there are five string theories or whatever. There are six, four, I can't remember, and it's gonna be one of them, and in 10 years we'll have the whole thing wrapped up. And everybody who wanted to be on the winning team knew that they weren't gonna go up against this because they couldn't even figure out how he was doing what he was doing. And what was really going on was very different than people understood. Quantum field theory, which is now claimed by most physicists to be the most advanced theory we have, at the time was sort of a grab bag of different techniques, you know, just, like, not unified. He saw that this was effectively, um, a coherent whole th- and with help from a couple of other people who are often not as well acknowledged, one of which would be Michael Atiyah, uh, another of which would be Graham Segal, another of which would be Dan Quillen, and my good friend and postdoctoral advisor, Isadore Singer. So it was sort of a small cabal of people who figured out that quantum field theory was not only a coherent story, it didn't really have to do with physics at all. It was like calculus. You can use calculus to do physics. In fact, you can't do physics without it. But you can also use calculus to optimize inventory and make, you know, make your profits go up. And so as a result, quantum field theory was discovered not to be physical. It was a framework that you-- One physical input to that machine probably generates the world, but the machine itself isn't about physics. So this was the most romantic backfiring in the history of physics in a certain sense. These guys set out to say, "We are going to quantize gravity," in other words, quantize geometry, the geometry of Einstein and Riemann. And what happened was exactly the reverse. They gravitized the quantum. They geometrized the quantum. So it's been remarkably productive. The reason we can say how brilliant this person is is because he geometrized the quantum at a level that we didn't know was possible. On the other hand, he never made contact with physical reality the way he was expecting and promising to do. So he's both the most accomplished of us and the person who drove physics the most off of the road.

00:59:04
Joe Rogan: Mm.

00:59:04
Eric Weinstein: And if you attempt to give him his due, and you don't-- If you're not comfortable citing both of these things, you can't be an accurate historian. But he's still running around, and nobody wants to go up against him.

00:59:14
Joe Rogan: How old is he now?

00:59:16
Eric Weinstein: Uh, he was born in 1951, so he'll be turning 72, I think, later this year, if I'm not mistaken.

00:59:23
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

00:59:23
Eric Weinstein: And n- then we get to the really crazy part. Quantum gravity is really due to two families. One is a husband and wife team, and the other is father-son. The husband and wife team were named Bryce DeWitt, formerly, I think, Bryce Seligman, don't know why he changed his name, and his wife, Cecile DeWitt or Cecile DeWitt-Morette. And the father-son team was Louis Witten, who is still alive, now 101 years old, and Edward Witten. And then the really weird stuff happens. Um, and this is why I was, like, curious about UFOs and gravity and all this stuff. The actual genesis of these two families having this outsized impact on the future of theoretical physics comes from two different people who are almost never talked about. Matter, matter of fact, most physicists have no idea their names. One is named Agnew Bainson, and the other is named Roger Babson. And these two guys were deep into antigravity. So the world's greatest mind and greatest living theoretical physics mind is the son of the most prominent antigravity researcher, I swear, I kid you not, from the 1950s.

01:00:41
Joe Rogan: Whoa.

01:00:43
Eric Weinstein: Whoa. Now, there's an official story about this, and the official story that both the DeWitts tell and the Wittens tell is, "Oh, yeah, there were these crazy people. They were very embarrassing. They were always focused on antigravity. But we were clever enough to defraud them of their money to do real gravitational research. Ha ha ha."

01:01:08
Joe Rogan: They both said that? Both families?

01:01:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, they didn't use defraud

01:01:12
Joe Rogan: But that's kind of what they implied.

01:01:13
Eric Weinstein: That's correct, 'cause it's an embarrassment. And, and, and in order to understand this hugely productive period relative to the stagnation, the stagnation is incredibly high prestige. Like, most of the positions at the un- at the Institute for Advanced Study, the top physics department ostensibly in the world, right? You had a director named Ro- Robert Dykstraff, string theorist. You had Edward Witten, string theorist. Natty Seiberg, string theorist. Uh, Juan Maldacena, string theorist, and you had this guy, Nima Arkani-Hamed, who I hope you will have on this program, who's amazing, who is not a string theorist, but very string sympathetic. This thing dominated. It just took over, and this weird genesis of a high-prestige field that can't accomplish what it's set- setting out to accomplish is in contrast to this mixed period between 1953 and 1973, where you have the world's most prestigious physicists palling around with pseudoscience. UFO-type stuff, gravity shielding, all this stuff. So Babson is so crazy, I, I, you can't even believe this story is true. Um, but he claims that his sister drowned in a pond because even though she was a good swimmer, she couldn't overcome gravity. So gravity becomes his sworn enemy, and he's [laughs] gonna use his fortune that he's predicted from, uh, that he's gotten from predicting the crash of 1929 because of Newton's laws, what goes up must come down, so he gets out of the stock market six months early. Babson makes a, a fortune. He, Edison, and Clarence Birdseye of frozen food, you know, uh, fame, form this sort of little intellectual collective where they're gonna defeat gravity. So for example, just to-- Because people are gonna say, "Eric, this is all nonsense," and it isn't. Jamie, is it possible to pull up a stone monument at Tufts University to the antigravity that was done there? So put in Tufts stone antigravity. These, this guy littered universities all across the country with these monuments to prove that this antigravity stuff was actually taking place, uh, at American universities. And he established an essay contest. All right, so check this out. "This monument has been erected by the Gravity Research Foundation, Roger Babson, founder, to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is and how it works and how it may be controlled." This is about UFOs and the idea that we are going to harness the power of gravity, and we are going to get a supreme advantage, and these stones are, uh, littered around the country. Here's another one.

01:04:06
Joe Rogan: So this is not widely known that this research is being done.

01:04:09
Eric Weinstein: This is hugely embarrassing to us.

01:04:11
Joe Rogan: Hugely embarrassing because it hasn't yielded results?

01:04:14
Eric Weinstein: No, hugely embarrassing because it carries the stench of pseudoscience. See, when people don't like me coming on your program and saying things that nobody else in the world is saying, they call me a pseudoscientist or, "That's crackpot." And these words, like, you don't take them that serious. We had, we had this discussion before with, like, Tim Dillon saying something about me, uh, you know. "What has he ever done?" Academics play these games with each other where we try to push each other out of the ring like sumo wrestlers.

01:04:42
Joe Rogan: Right.

01:04:42
Eric Weinstein: And the way you push somebody out is you say, "Oh, that guy's a crackpot. He's a grifter."

01:04:46
Joe Rogan: Mm.

01:04:46
Eric Weinstein: "He's a pseudoscientist."

01:04:47
Joe Rogan: Right.

01:04:48
Eric Weinstein: "He's nutty. He's a nutter." Bullshit. This was the marriage of the ultimate nuttiness with the highest prestige physics we know how to do. And it-

01:05:00
Joe Rogan: Was this considered nuttiness in '64, though?

01:05:03
Eric Weinstein: This is the interesting question. In the middle of the 1950s, this is mainstream in newspapers, but for example, Bryce DeWitt-- So here's how the two stories cross, okay? You start off with Babson and Baneson.

01:05:18
Joe Rogan: Okay.

01:05:18
Eric Weinstein: They're, they're the money. Babson found something called the Gravity Research Foundation in New Boston, New Hampshire, and he gets the Glenn L. Martin Company, which is the precursor of Martin Marietta, precursor of Lockheed Martin. Do you know this stuff?

01:05:35
Joe Rogan: No.

01:05:35
Eric Weinstein: Okay. And he gets them to hire Louis Witten out of Johns Hopkins. Louis Witten is a respectable physicist who takes the position and forms something called the Research Institute for Advanced Study. Now, you've probably heard of Bell Labs-

01:05:52
Joe Rogan: Yeah

01:05:52
Eric Weinstein: ... or Xerox PARC.

01:05:53
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

01:05:53
Eric Weinstein: And you probably haven't heard of the Research Institute for Advanced Study.

01:05:57
Joe Rogan: No.

01:05:58
Eric Weinstein: Yet this has illustrious names associated with it. Uh, Solomon Lefschetz, the great topologist, uh, comes out of retirement to work on this antigravity, uh, inspired project. Um, Rudol- Rudolf Kalman of Kalman filtering. There's no shortage. Sheldon Glashow, who discovered spontaneous symmetry breaking, uh, under Julian Schwinger at Harvard, is attached to the Research Institute of Advanced Study. It has a, a campus in Baltimore, Maryland, that, uh, you know, I can tell you the address at some point. We pretend that it didn't happen and doesn't exist. But for example, if you were to look at Brown University, Brown University has something called the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, and the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics is the spin-out from the Research Institute of [laughs] Advanced Study of Solomon Lefschetz, the great topologist's work on nonlinear, you know, like chaos theoretic, uh, dynamical systems. So it's this marriage of utter madness and kookiness with top draw- drawer white shoe respectability. So this was my puzzle about UFOs. What was this antigravity thing between '53 and '73? And the reason it ends in 1973 is a guy named Mike Mansfield- Uh, I think a Montana, as a senator, passes something called the m- the Mansfield Amendment, which discontinues Army or d- Department of Defense military funding for blue sky research inside of our universities. And-

01:07:34
Joe Rogan: What is blue sky research?

01:07:36
Eric Weinstein: Hey, you're a young person, you're super smart, here's a pile of money. Don't even tell us, uh, what you're working on. We just believe in you. Go to it. This is what caused us to be the envy of the effing world, cowboy science. We were wild, okay? We had skirt-chasing, hard-drinking, uh, charismatic, brilliant human beings who answered to no one, and walked around with swagger with their shoulders back and their chests pu- puffed out. Because around Sputnik, we wanted the best of the best to go into science. Around 1973, we discontinue this. We start talking about Golden Fleece Awards. How did you waste the taxpayers' money, you know?

01:08:17
Joe Rogan: Mm.

01:08:17
Eric Weinstein: And we become incapable of equaling the performances. Like, we, we, we worship Ted Williams because nobody's turned in a Ted Williams-style performance in ages. Even Ed Witten can't do it. In any era before this, Ed Witten would've won a Nobel Prize. The guy six months older than he is, from 1951, is a guy named Frank Wilczek, who won the Nobel Prize, even ti- being a tiny bit young, uh, older than Ed Witten. Uh, you know, Frank is brilliant, but he's not Ed Witten-like. He got a Nobel Prize for, uh, something called asymptotic freedom in, um, in strong interactions. This newfound impotence, let's just call it impotence, it's like you turned the world's most v- vital people into castrati, and you did it by accounting for their dollars, making them, uh, you know, say how everything they did had a practical application, defending the purpose of blue sky research, uh, as if they were wasting taxpayer dollars. They've got ca- called, uh, you know, welfare queens in white lab coats. The whole thing is completely ridiculous. But we have been in the process of dismantling the world's most productive, powerful scientific enterprise from really 1965 or '73 till the present day, and the '65 date dates from Ghislaine Maxwell's father. Robert Maxwell is basically the son of a bitch who introduced peer review, which had only really been strong in the biomedical literature, into general science, because he figured out how to make a fortune hacking the universities. If you're a university, if you wanna have a complete library, you have to buy all the journals the papers appear in. So he said, "Great news. I'll jack up the prices and jack up the number of journals. I'll just explode the number of journals, and every university that doesn't want to be incomplete has to buy my product." So suddenly, there weren't enough good editors to edit all of these tiny micro journals, you know, Journal of Hyper-Specific Thing X. So peer review comes screaming in in 1965, uh, through his company, Maxwell's company, called, uh, Pergamon Press. Um, so Ghislaine Maxwell's father is, like, the first major attack on science, and then the Mansfield Amendment comes in. There's something called the Eylberg Amendment, 1973. In 1980, there's something called the Bayh-Dole Amendment. Then there's the Immigration Act of 1990, and we're just chipping away at the vitality of American cowboy science. So right now, if you go into a science department, the whole question is, "Well, what have you done for diversity, inclusion, and equity?" You know, let's agree that there's no lone geniuses in the world, as if we didn't have Einstein and von Neumann and Teller and all these people. Everything is communal. Everything is in the air, and it's like nobody wants to work in this environment, nobody good.

01:11:21
Joe Rogan: Mm.

01:11:22
Eric Weinstein: Right? So whatever it is, we have been devitalizing, certainly since 1973, for 50 years, but also really since 1965.

01:11:30
Joe Rogan: How do you turn that boat around, though?

01:11:32
Eric Weinstein: We're doing whatever we can. Like, i- if you're rich and you're smart and you're connected, if you're part of some secret program and you're watching this, please [laughs] reach out to The Joe Rogan Experience or Eric Weinstein to turn the ship around. But let's keep going, 'cause I wanna get to the UFOs again.

01:11:47
Joe Rogan: Okay.

01:11:49
Eric Weinstein: Um, so my question was, what is going on with anti-gravity, UFOs, the world's smartest human beings between 1953 and '73? Somebody help me out.

01:12:03
Joe Rogan: Mm.

01:12:04
Eric Weinstein: Why two families, the DeWitts and the Wittens? And let me give you the reason that I didn't wanna touch this subject. The reason I didn't wanna touch this subject has to do with something I learned from World War II. So you probably know, you know the code name for D-Day?

01:12:21
Joe Rogan: No.

01:12:21
Eric Weinstein: Operation Overlord.

01:12:23
Joe Rogan: Mm.

01:12:24
Eric Weinstein: There was a companion thing called Operation Bodyguard, and in particular, Operation Fortitude, which was inside of Operation Bodyguard, which was the, uh, planned invasion of Norway, which was never gonna happen. But we faked an entire invasion of Norway because we had a troop buildup in England that was going to be headed into a [laughs] very narrow place, and was gonna be outgunned by the Germans. So how do you get all of these people who have to fight, who have loose lips, probably going off and seeing prostitutes, who knows, not to blow, spill the beans on D-Day? Well, you create an entirely fake invasion of Norway. Is it possible to bring up Operation Fortitude just to see a map of this thing? So they faked radio chatter. They had inflatable tanks. I think there were army divisions that didn't exist.

01:13:15
Jamie Vernon: I'm just looking at something. Uh, it didn't call it what you called it, but, uh, it's the same stuff.

01:13:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?

01:13:20
Joe Rogan: Uh, I think this is the map you're talking about

01:13:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's, that's in-

01:13:23
Joe Rogan: Oh

01:13:23
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, that's northern France. Fortitude would be targeted-

01:13:26
Joe Rogan: I've seen the inflated tanks.

01:13:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, it's funny, right?

01:13:28
Joe Rogan: Didn't realize that was what it was regard to.

01:13:31
Eric Weinstein: So deception. And, and we talked about kayfabe before.

01:13:34
Joe Rogan: Yeah

01:13:34
Eric Weinstein: Like, I'm very focused on it. Um, what I really care about [laughs]

01:13:39
Joe Rogan: Look at that. That's hilarious. They had a bunch of inflatable tanks.

01:13:43
Eric Weinstein: So this entire deception, um, had to be parallel. O- Overlord wouldn't have worked without Fortitude. Now, if you assume that that's the basic paradigm, which is whenever we're gonna do something badass, we're also gonna do something fake, I thought the UFOs was the Operation Fortitude part of-

01:14:05
Joe Rogan: Mm

01:14:05
Eric Weinstein: ... something real. This is my bad. I screwed up. Eric failed, blah, blah, blah. Um-

01:14:11
Joe Rogan: So you thought l- like, at, at what point? Like, when the New York Times revealed they had talked-

01:14:18
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, before that

01:14:18
Joe Rogan: ... to people in the Pentagon? Before that.

01:14:20
Eric Weinstein: I thought, "Okay, you wanna develop the SR-71 Blackbird, you wanna develop the, the stealth bomber, you want a code, you want a cover program, so you're gonna come up with, like, UFOs." Somebody sees something in the air. "Dude, there was, like, a flying triangle."

01:14:35
Joe Rogan: Mm.

01:14:35
Eric Weinstein: "I swear to God. There was this thing that went so fast I couldn't even believe it." Well, one of them is a B- uh, B-2 bomber, and the other one is a SR-71 Blackbird. Duh.

01:14:46
Joe Rogan: Right.

01:14:46
Eric Weinstein: So why do I wanna get involved with Operation Fortitude? I'm, I'm a patriotic American. If we're gonna lie about stuff and we're doing it for a good purpose and it's not hurting anybody, I don't wanna get involved and say, "I'm so smart, I can figure it out." I don't wanna be anywhere near that.

01:15:00
Joe Rogan: Right.

01:15:01
Eric Weinstein: So that's what I assumed about UFOs, and I goofed.

01:15:05
Joe Rogan: So what do you think it is now?

01:15:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's the new question.

01:15:09
Joe Rogan: And what made you shift this perspective?

01:15:12
Eric Weinstein: So there was this weird thing that happened where we announced through The New York Times that this stuff may be more real than anyone cared to imagine. You know, and Jeremy Corbell was releasing these videos, and who was leaking them, I don't know, and The New York Times was authenticating and y- you know, you get all of this, again, tons of ambiguity, so everybody's decision tree blows out. Nobody can think straight. But I thought, "Oh, no. What if the old Feynman stories that I've been f- following are actually about something rather than about a deception?" So for example, Feynman has a story where he says, uh, "Hey, there was this guy who was giving physics lectures to aerospace engineers, and they didn't like him, so I had to go out to Buffalo." I thought, "Buffalo? That's Curtiss-Wright. You're going to Curtiss-Wright Aerospace." And he's got another one about, you know, uh, give me a dollar because somebody calls him up and says, "Give us the nuclear patents," um, to, like, uh, fission-driven planes and [laughs] crazy stuff. Um, Feynman is constantly telling us... The, the, he's got a story called It's Greek to Me where he shows up in North Carolina, can't remember, uh, whether he's supposed to go to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill or Greenville, and he has to figure it out, and he says, "Oh, uh, I'm late to the conference." There would be a bunch of people mumbling the words Jim U New, and the guy says, "Oh, it's Chapel Hill." And so he goes there. It's, "Ha ha." It's a cute story about how clever Feynman is, which they all are. But that was a conference sponsored by the Institute for Field Physics at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, sponsored by Agnew Bainson through Bryce DeWitt, who is the person who repurposed the Gravity Research Foundation essay, uh, which is only supposed to be about harnessing gravity, anti-gravity, anti-gravity devices like UFOs. And he said, "Well, if you really wanna get to anti-gravity, you have to do it through quantum gravity." Right? Now, he did that, and then a couple of people from the institute, it was Arnowitt and Deser, uh, entered and won this competition that had the stench about it 'cause it was, like, stigmatized. You're gonna enter a competition for anti-gravity devices? Ha ha ha. Oppenheimer says, "Wow, you guys won this by using the name of the Institute for Advanced Study. You give the money back right now. We're not gonna touch pseudoscience." The guys kept the money, and then the floodgates opened, and Penrose entered it, and Wilczek entered it. Everybody and their mother, Martin Perl entered this competition. Lots of Nobel laureates win it. This is this marriage of total bullshit and top-drawer physics that the rest of us are not allowed to participate. So if you want a weird model for how physics works, think about diplomatic immunity, but in science. You've got this group of people at the top who are allowed to engage in quackery. They can hang out at Esalen and smoke dope and take LSD and, and go into, uh, sensory deprivation tanks like, like Feynman. Um, they can ha- pal around with rich people who are, uh, talking about anti-gravity. But the rest of us have to stay in our lane. Well, that ends now. Now that I've been contacted by people saying, "Eric..." You know, Sam Harris and I were both contacted saying that there's a disclosure planned, and it's got, "There's big updates, and we need you to communicate this news to the world." And-

01:18:44
Joe Rogan: There's a disclosure about a specific technology.

01:18:48
Eric Weinstein: About something... I mean, more or less the way this works, it doesn't matter who you talk to, is like, "Something's huge. I can't talk to you about it because you don't have clearance. But we're gonna fly you out to Colorado Springs, and we're gonna show you some stuff, and you're never gonna be the same." Right? Like, "Okay. I'm on standby." Uh, my process, Joe, is that I'm very open-minded, but I have a very strong filter before I'll say, "Yeah, that's true. That's real."

01:19:16
Joe Rogan: Okay.

01:19:17
Eric Weinstein: That freaks people out. It's like, "Why are you even talking to these people?" Well, because I know the history, and you don't So I was open to this, Sam was open to this and it's Lucy and the football every goddamn week.

01:19:31
Joe Rogan: Mm.

01:19:31
Eric Weinstein: When am I, when am I headed out to Color- "Oh, well, you're gonna be met by a car and you're gonna be blindfolded and you won't know where you are." I was like, "Blah, blah, blah. Okay. This week? Next week? The week aft-" "Oh, no, no, something's come up on the Hill. Things are getting crazy. We're gonna be talking to some very big people. I can't talk to you right yet." So that's been my weird life now, a, a part of it, for like three years. I don't know how long.

01:19:54
Joe Rogan: For three years they've been telling you that they're gonna release this?

01:19:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, yeah. And, and it's always pushed out, right? So like m- it's, it's a manana program. Okay? It's always manana. And I'm not falling for it, but I'm telling you now that I, I have information. I can't tell you everything I know. I wish I could, but I, I'm a team player and if somebody says something in confidence, I'm not gonna reveal it on the Joe Rogan Experience. [laughs]

01:20:22
Joe Rogan: Okay.

01:20:22
Eric Weinstein: Um, but there's some things I can say that nobody else can say, which is I had a very weird reaction to this. I think Sam was initially interested and then they, they manana'd him three times and he said, "I'm out." Doesn't talk about it. I went a different route and I said, "Okay, you guys keep saying all this stuff is real. You keep saying you've got high quality data that you can't show anybody because it's all stovepipe." You hear this word over and over, stovepipe, meaning that each little group is isolated. Like Bob Lazar says-

01:20:52
Joe Rogan: Yeah

01:20:52
Eric Weinstein: ... "I, I was only allowed to see this little thing." So I say, "Okay. Am I right that you're telling me that these things are real?" "Yeah." And then, then I say, "And that nobody could do this that we know of?" They said, "That's right because they seem to dul- defy the laws of physics." You hear this phrase over and ag-

01:21:10
Joe Rogan: Yeah

01:21:11
Eric Weinstein: ... defy the laws of physics. I say, "Great. I need to talk to somebody who speaks physics. How do you know they defy physical law?" "Well, we can see that they do." I was like, "Okay. If they defy physical law, then there should be a physicist to tell me that they defy physical law who's seen the data. Maybe he can't release it to me, or she, but tell me somebody who speaks tensor analysis. S- tell me somebody who knows what the Dirac equation is." Like, a pretty low bar for a physicist. There is no one. And I don't quite mean no one, but do you know who Eric W. Davis is?

01:21:49
Joe Rogan: No.

01:21:50
Eric Weinstein: You ever heard of the Wilson Memo?

01:21:51
Joe Rogan: No.

01:21:53
Eric Weinstein: Okay. There's something called the Wilson Memo where there's a physicist who meets an, a general or an admiral, and the general or the admiral is trying to figure out, I think this is at EG&G, um, why is there some program that I'm not allowed to know about? I have the highest clearances. I have a need to know. They're like, "Sorry, we can't tell you." He's talking to somebody named Eric W. Davis. Eric W. Davis, so far as I can find, is the only person other than maybe Hal Puthoff who I've been able to talk to who speaks anything of these languages. This is not a particularly famous physicist. Hal Puthoff is an electrical engineer, I think a PhD in electrical engineering. Eric W. Davis says to me, I said, "Is, is there nobody out here who speaks physics? This doesn't make any sense." And he says, "Well, you, Hal, and I are the three most technical people on this." "Joe, I'm not even on this."

01:22:53
Joe Rogan: So you know as much about it as anyone and you're not even involved, and there's only two other people that know the science behind this?

01:23:00
Eric Weinstein: And, and, and like one of them is into remote viewing and-

01:23:03
Joe Rogan: Oh

01:23:05
Eric Weinstein: ... r- and, and was a Scientologist. Um, so I, I'm just... Imagine that you take your wife to the symphony, okay, and you're gonna see Beethoven's Seventh, and you look at the string section. The brass section's in place a- a- and the percussion is there, and you look at the string section and it's a bunch of certified public accountants. You know, like, "Where are the violins? Where are the violas?" Like, "Oh, oh, no. Actually, the, we, we have reporters for the AP. They're stringers." Like, that's not the same thing. "We have string theorists." That's not the same thing. I'm looking for vi- like, this is simple.

01:23:40
Joe Rogan: Right. Mm-hmm.

01:23:42
Eric Weinstein: I've been on this for three years and I can't find anybody who speaks this language, which now that is a huge clue. Imagine that you say that we've lost control of our airspace. We're being menaced, uh, s- threats to civilian avi- aviation, military aviation. They're seeing these things every day. They defy the physical laws and there are no physicists anywhere to be found. That smells like BS, or it smells like a pathological level of bureaucratic incompetence. And Marco Rubio and, and Kirsten Gillibrand, if you're out there, um, a- can you please find out why there are no technically competent people on an area, on an area of national security? And please don't mumble the words stovepipe or need to know or sources and methods. I mean, we had a Manhattan Project. We staffed it with physicists. You have a physics problem. If these things are here, Joe, they are here from so far out of town or they are co-mingling with us on Earth. I can't tell you which. There are some reports that these things come screaming in from behind our satellites that are trained at Earth along non-ballistic trajectories. I have no idea how to say this. I'm, I'm talking all the time to Avi Loeb, uh, with the Galileo Project, trying to help him out. He needs funding and he needs some ability to, you know, just if the government won't play ball, he's gonna put out his own sensors in places like Catalina Island, blanket the world, and he'll be able to say, "We, we're seeing these things," or, "We're not seeing these things." But right now we have a puzzle that our government won't release information to its own scientific community, and it reminds me of, you, you probably know Airplane!, the movie.

01:25:21
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

01:25:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's this point-

01:25:22
Joe Rogan: I speak Jive.

01:25:22
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Well, there's this point where they're trying to land this airplane with these people who aren't pilots, and he says, "Turn on the, turn on the landing strip lights." And it was Lloyd Bridges or somebody who says, "No, that's just what they'll be expecting." Like he's trying to sabotage the people who are trying to land the plane. Doesn't make any sense. We're sabotaging our own scientists.

01:25:42
Joe Rogan: Do you think this is because there's a level of secrecy that's attached to this technology, and they've compartmentalized themselves to death, and they've gotten themselves to a point where they don't know how to proceed further because they're preventing people from sharing information? Which is one of the most important things about science-

01:26:01
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:26:01
Joe Rogan: ... is that scientists get to share information and all work together to try to figure out what the problem is.

01:26:08
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:26:08
Joe Rogan: Is that a reasonable-

01:26:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, here comes the decision trees. Like I wish I could say, "Yeah, that's what I think it is."

01:26:15
Joe Rogan: Right, but it might not be.

01:26:16
Eric Weinstein: So one possibility is, let's be honest, if you are faking UFOs, the last people you want are the world's most brilliant physicists. You give them the data, they're gonna say-

01:26:29
Joe Rogan: Right

01:26:29
Eric Weinstein: ... "Oh, look [laughs] I see what you did. You put a couple of flashlights with lasers into the sky, and you can move them really quickly by the angle, and that creates the illusion that something is zipping through the world."

01:26:40
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

01:26:40
Eric Weinstein: Right? If you are faking UFOs, if you're faking a UFOgasm, the last thing you want is theoretical physicists on the case.

01:26:48
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

01:26:48
Eric Weinstein: So that would be one reason to clear them out. Another reason would be bureaucracy. You've got these rival groups, they're all starved for money. Nobody wants to invite somebody smarter than they are, so the problem with a B-level and C-level players is that they're looking for D and F players so that they're not threatened. That's another possibility. A different possibility is that we do have a Manhattan Project and we don't know about it. So for example, we have a Manhattan Project for decoding cryptographic messages, and it's called the National Security, uh, Agency, NSA. And it used to be called No Such Agency because we wanted to deny its existence, but now we know it's got a giant building. How do you know that it exists if nobody told you? Well, you'd look at the number of number theory PhDs and people who specialize in things like elliptic curves, and you would notice that a giant number of them after their PhDs disappear. And you track to see, well, where do those people live? Where do those names live? Oh, they live in Virginia. Okay. So you'd start to get an idea. Now, in the case of UFOs, if there was an anti-gravity project, which is-- I ha- it's like, it's painful for me to even say these words. Really what it would be is a post-Einsteinian physics project. If you had a post-Einsteinian physics project, you would want three subspecialties for sure. That would be differential geometry, which is the basis for, um, originally, uh, general relativity. In 1976, '75, two guys named C.N. Yang and Jim Simons, who, Jim Simons becomes the world's greatest hedge fund manager, um, figure out that quantum field theory is also based on geometry, but it's a different version of differential geometry. So that's one specialty that you would want. Second specialty that you would want would be particle theory or high energy physics, however you wanna say it. The third specialty you'd want is general relativity. So if you wanted to detect whether we had a secret Manhattan Project, but it wasn't identifiable by a building because we didn't announce its existence, you'd say, "Is there anything that eats those three specialties?" Unless you believe that there's a secret university system, because we have lists of everybody who gets produced with a PhD in these fields. If that was the case, the two places that you would have a secret place would be Austin, which is the successor to the Institute for Field Physics at the University of Texas Austin gravitational group, GR, general relativistic group, which has had John Whe- Archibald Wheeler, Steven Weinberg, Bryce DeWitt. This is a powerhouse of a place that you happen to live in, and you should have these people who are the, the successors to these people on, because most of these people have died. But the more spectacular place would be Sawtucket, Long Island. The State University [laughs] of New York at Stony Brook has an astounding collection of monster minds, and it's not highly regarded as a university. I mean, it's, it's, it's strong, but you would have no idea how strong this place is. It's got multiple Fields Medalists. It's got an institute called the Inst- uh, what is it? The Center for Geometry, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. C.N. Yang, who's arg- arguably the greatest living theoretical physicist, uh, is at this university. He's 101 years old, so he's, he's pretty much on his way out, but this is where he called home. And it's not advertised as the powerhouse that it is. So shout out to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. If I was gonna locate a Manhattan Project in plain sight, uh, and get US News and World to report this as a minor player in, uh, in research, that's where I'd go. But more importantly, and this is the really weird thing, and ag- again, I don't wanna spread this as a rumor, but I am saying this, if you wanted to imagine that there was, that the government wasn't incompetent and we actually had great people on this project, m- my friend and advisor, who's now died, Isidor Singer, once said to me, he said, "The world's greatest mathematics and physics department is Renaissance Technologies." I said, "What?" Didn't make any sense to me. It's great people, but it's a hedge fund. Okay, so you've got this weird thing where you've got three basic- Uh, institutions that are very closely intertwined. You've got Brookhaven National Laboratory, you've got S- State University of New York at Stony Brook, a mid-level university with an out of this world math and physics program, and you've got a hedge fund that makes more money than anybody can possibly imagine. Like, there's no ... There, there used to be four fortunes in hedge funds that didn't make any sense. Um, one was D.E. Shaw, one was Bernie Madoff, one was Jeff Epstein, and one was Renaissance Technologies.

01:32:15
Joe Rogan: Whoa.

01:32:17
Eric Weinstein: And I guessed that Bernie Madoff was front- had a legitimate business and an illegitimate business, and he was front-running the legitimate business with his illegitimate business, so he was effectively stealing from his own clients in two separate divis- in, in one division. One, one was the theft, one was the dupes. I got that wrong. He was just running a Ponzi scheme, so shame on me. But I was giving talks about, you know, there's BlackRock, uh, and Blackstone as investment groups, and I was going around in the early 2000s talking about Black Arts Capital. And I would give talks on Black Arts Capital. We'd tell you what we're doing, but we'd have to kill you, and that was a reference to Madoff and Epstein because Epstein's fortune made no sense, right? Renaissance has existed in its medallion fund for decades, has turned in a performance never seen by anything else remotely, effectively just a money printing machine. No one knows how it works. I've met with Jim Simons one-on-one for three hours, and because his wife is an economist, my wife is an economist, I'm a differential geometer, he's a differential geometer, I gave him this entire theory that all of modern neoclassical economics is actually differential geometric. And he- three hours later, he's been chain-smoking, he smokes like a chimney, never wears socks, very eccentric guy, brilliant as the day is long, still alive, go get him for a j- a guest. Um, he says, "Wow, Eric, that's brilliant. If you knew what we were actually doing, you'd be very disappointed." [laughs]

01:33:56
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

01:33:56
Eric Weinstein: He said, "I never thought of this." Now, a little while later, I don't know if you know who Brian Keating is. He's a professor at UCSD. He's an experimentalist. Jim is basically his uncle, and he calls me out to Santa Barbara, and Jim is having dinner at his, uh, his brother's house. And what you guys don't know about Jim Simons is that with a guy named S.S. Chern, he came up with something called the Chern-Simons function or Chern-Simons functional, where if you differentiate this thing the way you differentiate the Einstein-Hilbert functional, you get an equation that looks very similar to the Einstein field equation for gravity, only it looks a lot more like particle theory. So I told Jim, I said, "I don't know if you know this or you don't know this, but I think you're sitting on top of a piece of the puzzle that supersedes general relativity." And on the spot he asked me whether I wanted to come out to the State University of Stone- uh, New York at Stony Brook for a year to work on this. We had like a very technical conversation. Jim Simons is potentially, I mean, beyond brilliant, but also has a claim on a part of what I believe is going to supersede general relativity by imitating the Einstein-Hilbert action from which the Einstein field equations are derived. This thing generates something which you would call the, the Chern-Simons equation. Ed Witten gets the Fields Medal for quantizing this thing that looks like gravity, but is actually sort of particle theoretic, and I, I, I can't get into it because we, we don't have the common language to do it. Um, this is huge stuff. What's going on at Stony Brook, what has happened is Stony Brook is ground zero for the explosion in mathematical physics that came through something called the Wu-Yang dictionary, where suddenly the quantum became as geometric as general relativity, then it got more geometric through something called geometric quantization. Then it got more geometric through something called geometric qu- uh, quantum field theory, or topological quantum field theory, or conformal quantum field theory. I don't know whether Satake is the locus. Uh, can you bring up the iconic wall, uh, picture of the iconic wall? This is like a religious artifact.

01:36:22
Joe Rogan: Let me pee.

01:36:23
Eric Weinstein: [coughs] Sure.

01:36:23
Joe Rogan: Hold, hold this right here. Let's, let's hold right here with this. We'll bring that up. We'll be right back. We're back. We're up. Okay, so Jamie, what was this thing that, uh, you were pulling up?

01:36:35
Jamie Vernon: We have a picture here of the iconic wall at Stony Brook. It's a little hard to see in the picture, so that is what is on it.

01:36:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so this is [laughs] like, uh, imagine ancient Egypt, Egyptian runes-

01:36:48
Joe Rogan: Mm

01:36:49
Eric Weinstein: ... and like the most crazy ... First of all, I would correct this thing in a million different ways, but you see the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, um, equation for the curvature tensor, Maxwell's equations in geometric form written out in differential form, um, equations for string theory. This thing, E8, uh, the 248 largest simple Lie group in the world, this is like almost a religious pilgrimage site. Um ...

01:37:20
Joe Rogan: What's wrong with that, that you would correct?

01:37:22
Eric Weinstein: You wanna put it up?

01:37:23
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

01:37:28
Eric Weinstein: Uh, DA* of FA at the bottom of the ellipse equals zero is only the vacuum equations. I would put in a term called J, um, the, uh- Above that you see dim curd D. This is the Atiyah-Singer, remember Is- Isadore Singer. Um, that thing should be expanded to something called the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer, uh, index theorem for manifolds with boundary. Above that, uh, you see the Dirac equation, iD slash minus M times psi equals zero. Um, actually, if I'm correct, it should be a hybrid between the Rarita-Schwinger and the Dirac equations based on a three complex tensored with a spinor. The-- Above that you have a non-relativistic equation, which is the Schrödinger equation, because there's only one derivative in terms of T, but there's that nabla, that triangle squared, which is different in terms of space, so you can't treat space and time asymmetrically. Above that you have the, uh, Einstein field equations, R mu nu minus one half R times g mu nu. There should be a cosmological constant in there, which is missing. Um, uh, to the right you have the E8 diagram, should be the Tits-Freudenthal magic square. So I don't know whether this is like a Straussian communication in the sense that if you're smart enough, you should know that there are tons of errors, limitations, and bad choices. Uh, I would not write out the Maxwell's... Above that you've got these nabla B, nabla E equals zero.

01:38:59
Joe Rogan: What's the other possibility in terms of these errors?

01:39:01
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Somebody h- hired somebody to do something impressionistic, and it got too far in the process, carving Indiana limestone before they figured out that you should really do this better.

01:39:10
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

01:39:11
Eric Weinstein: But it's, it, this is gorgeous, and it, it's the only place in the world... This is my language, Joe.

01:39:17
Joe Rogan: Right.

01:39:17
Eric Weinstein: This-- If you ask like, "What language does Eric speak and why does he act weird on, when he comes on my show?" This is my native language. And-

01:39:25
Joe Rogan: Beautiful piece

01:39:26
Eric Weinstein: I mean, beyond.

01:39:28
Joe Rogan: It's really wild.

01:39:29
Eric Weinstein: And, and it costs a fortune, and this is Jim Simons' money at work. And, um, you need to know Jim.

01:39:38
Joe Rogan: Okay.

01:39:39
Eric Weinstein: Um, I mean, so my question is, is there some-- Do we have a project? If it's not, if we're not doing something in Sawtucket, or we're not doing something at the University of Texas at Austin, I'm worried we're not doing something anywhere. I went to the Institute for Advanced Study to visit friend, acquaintance, Nima Arkani-Hamed, who I think very, very highly of. Um, he said some pretty wild things, and should be on the show. He's the most bizarre thing in that he's an unbelievable salesman showman who's pathologically honest in a weird way. So that's very unusual characteristics [laughs]. Um, he made the point, he said the Casimir effect is an example of negative energy, negative, like negative mass energy, where you take two plates that are so close together that quantum waves, many of the frequencies can't fit between these two plates. And so the pressure outside of them is not counterbalanced by pressure between them, so they get forced together when they're very, very close. And his point is, that's an example of actual negative mass, negative energy, where we pretend that that's not true. He says geckos actually use this when they climb up a wall. They use the Casimir effect. So it's real. Now, the question, can you harness it? This is always the, you know, you've got UFOs. People who try to think about how you could get physics to do these things focus on the Casimir effect, or they'll focus on negative energy solutions. Now, if you look at that 1957 conference at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, one of the most eminent mathematician physicists, guy who was first rankler at Cambridge, was a guy named, uh, Hermann Bondi, an Austrian, I think, mathematician. And his paper is about negative mass in general relativity. Now, I don't know if you've ever heard of this stuff.

01:41:32
Joe Rogan: No.

01:41:33
Eric Weinstein: If you have two masses, in general, they always attract each other gravitationally. But what if somehow you had a different kind of mass that was negative, just like you could have negative and positive charges? Well, weirdly, you change two things. You change the force law, F equals ma, and you change the gravitational law, G, uh, you know, F equals G, M, first mass times second mass over R squared. So when you change both of those, oddly, the negative mass is still attracted just the same way to the positive mass as if it, there was no difference. But the positive mass is always repelled. So you get this weird solution where the negative mass chases the positive mass, and they go off to like, you know, unbounded acceleration. So Bondi was thinking about why is it that we've got these artificial conditions in general relativity which we impose by hand. They're not the same beautiful marble that Einstein used for his field equations. But we throw some extra crappy stuff in called positivity conditions to stop general relativity from giving us madness. So Bondi started asking the question, "Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe what you think of as madness has meaning." And this is why this, this conference, which is a confluence of the two families, the Wittens and the Dewitts, with Feynman and Wheeler and all of these unbelievable characters in attendance, is this pivotal, strange experience, is that people are smoking the ganja on extending general relativity to places that it's never been extended. And the highbrow version of this doesn't work, and the lowbrow version of this doesn't work so far as we know. The lowbrow version is called pseudoscientific anti-gravity, gravity shielding, electrogravitics, gravito-dynamics. The highbrow version of this is called quantum gravity, and all the most respectable people are in it, and it doesn't work. And you can't say, "Why are we doing this if it doesn't work?" Why can't I say, "Ed Witten's great, but he made a terrible blunder"? David Gross should-- David Gross and Ed Witten should be in front of the community explaining, "Why did you take all the smartest people, all the resources, all the attention?" Michio Kaku, get Michio Kaku in here with me. Michio Kaku is out of control. Sean Carroll is covering up for this as well.

01:44:04
Joe Rogan: In what way?

01:44:05
Eric Weinstein: They are too kind. Brian Greene. Like, I had this interchange with Brian Greene where I said, "You know, w- w- we're not being honest about the failure of string theory." And Brian's like, "Oh, well, maybe we were a little bit exuberant," and I, I blurt out Institute for Arts and Ideas. I blurt out... That's like saying Milai. M- Milai, Milai was irrational exuberance. No. You put a lot of people's careers in the, in the shredder in order to have this quantum gravity experiment, which is like, you know, the people bowing and praying to this thing that doesn't work. The dog doesn't hunt, and anybody who questions it is a crackpot. I'm done with this, Joe. Like, you wanna come at me and say, "Eric doesn't know what he's talking about," I'm debating physicists. And I'll debate anybody, with the possible [chuckles] exception of Ed Witten, who still scares me, but I'll probably debate him, too. In open forum, we have got to purge the physics community of its quackery, and the quackery is coming from the high-prestige version of this. The high-prestige version of anti-gravity is called quantum gravity, and it just doesn't work. So to get back to the UFOs, why is this stuff important? One, I don't know, four years, five years ago, when I was doing this riff on the twin nuclei problem, I said, "We've gotta get off this planet." I said, "We now become gods but for the wisdom," and I just threw it off. And you said, "Focus on that. That's a great saying." Turned out to work. That came true. The COVID in your lungs probably came out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and we're lying about it. That is engineering the nucleus of the cell, the nucleic acids that we found the structure of and their function. Right now, we are screwing around with Vladimir Putin, with nukes, pretending that the sacred borders of Ukraine, which have been fluctuating for centuries, are somehow sacrosanct. And yes, it's terrible that he's invaded, and I do think that the border shouldn't move, but we really shouldn't have been antagonizing Russia by pretending that there's no concept of a sphere of influence because I'll tell you, when somebody puts nukes on our border with Mexico in Monterey or Baja, California, we're gonna be plenty upset. W- We now need to leave, and I tried to say that kind of a little bit light, tongue in cheek. Everything's accelerated. Think about our water having broken in the last three years. This is our womb. It's time to go. And in order to have any hope of getting off this planet, you can't leave it to Elon and chemical rockets. Can you imagine that Elon and I do not meet ever? It's like we know a million people in common. He knows that I'm focused on getting off this planet. He's got a chemical rocket company. He's exactly right about almost everything that he's saying up until he gets to the Moon and Mars, and, like, who cares? You're not gonna terraform the Moon and Mars in the next three years, or 30. The only way to really get off this planet is to leave the solar system because those are the only two rocks that are even halfway viable. And if you think about how far away everything is, we've got this thing that I call the Einstein moat. The nearest star, if we took a human traveling at the top speed a human has ever gone at, I think is 100,000 years away at that top speed. So you can fantasize about, "Oh, yeah, we just come up with huge ships, and people have multigenerational experience." Like, all of Jewish history is 5,000 years, and you're talking about 100,000 years? No way you're gonna do this on a ship, friend.

01:47:50
Joe Rogan: Imagine wars on a ship.

01:47:52
Eric Weinstein: Exactly. And then you have this next problem, which is, uh, "Oh, we're gonna use time dilation." "No, no, we're gonna use wormholes." It's like, "Yeah, and we're gonna bring nunchucks and throwing stars-"

01:48:02
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

01:48:02
Eric Weinstein: "... and we're gonna be, like, fucking awesome, dude."

01:48:04
Joe Rogan: [laughs] [claps]

01:48:06
Eric Weinstein: Right? So it's like all this sort of weird, edgy stuff inside. Here's what's really happening. We do not live in spacetime. This place is not in spacetime. There's a saying, "The map is not the territory." Spacetime is a map, but the territory is wherever we actually live. And spacetime has so many limitations on it that Newton never placed, so the longer we stay with no advancement in the general theory of relativity, the more we feel that we are p- imprisoned here. We're not going anywhere. It's all sci-fi. It's all garbage. It's, it's children talking about things that aren't true. Well, bullshit. Every time you fundamentally push physical theory, you better figure out whether you've got a new neutron or worse, or better. You're gonna get a lever. Now, my claim, and so everything I've said up until now has been idiosyncratic research, but you can check it online. None, none of this is something you can't check. I'm now gonna put on a different hat when you ask me about you, Eric, because people are gonna say, "Crank, crazy," whatever. I'll meet you on the field of battle. Cut the crap, people. I am a post-Einsteinian person. I have not been in a relativistic context for years, and the reason that you get to leave relativity is that you recover relativity from another theory. If you have a theory that includes relativity, you can say, "Okay, yeah, I know how to see relativity inside the theory, but I can also see other stuff beyond it." And so that's where I work, someplace called geometric unity, because the geometry underneath the standard model and the geometry underneath general relativity is two different geometries called Riemannian and Aris-Manin. I combined them. That was the point of it. In this thing, there's a very clear idea about how you would go about traveling great distances, and so I found that you still have this thing from the last time-

01:50:03
Joe Rogan: Yeah

01:50:03
Eric Weinstein: ... I was here two years ago. So this is a model of a spacetime metric And if you think about where these hair ties are on the two rulers, so this is the angle between-

01:50:14
Joe Rogan: For people just listening, there's an adjustable ruler with a, a sphere-

01:50:18
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:50:18
Joe Rogan: Or a circle rather.

01:50:19
Eric Weinstein: So two-

01:50:20
Joe Rogan: A disc

01:50:20
Eric Weinstein: ... two rulers coming out of a protractor, and you can change the angle of the ruler. So whatever I choose this to be is 90 degrees. If I do it like this, that's still 90 degrees, or this. That's what an Einsteinian metric is. This hair tie that I can move up and down is gonna be the time measurement, like a watch. Did you ever see when I gave w- Lex my watch?

01:50:39
Joe Rogan: No.

01:50:40
Eric Weinstein: Oh, so you gave Lex a watch, and I started talking about multiple time dimensions, so I gave him my Fitbit.

01:50:44
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

01:50:45
Eric Weinstein: Anyway, um, if you want to go a very long distance, one possibility is, is that you do something very energetically expensive, but the other possibility is grow the ruler to shrink the distance. If the rulers and protractors that Einstein used, and he chose one through his equation, are instead variables, and you have a- full access to them, if I wanted to go a very long distance, the first thing I'd do is grow the ruler to shrink the distance, then go the distance under that ruler, and then I'd shrink the ruler back. So when you talk about things like, "Oh, these things are behaving like nothing I've ever seen," well, there are a couple things that I'm worried about if these things are real. One is, does somebody else know how to grow rulers and shrink rulers and grow watches and shrink watches, speed them up, slow them down, in order to get in control of the thing that we thought was spacetime? The next issue is, are there multiple temporal dimensions? So Eric, your friend who's had too much coffee, believes that there are either six or four extra temporal dimensions, and whatever isn't temporal is spatial. So it's either four plus six or six plus four extra dimensions split between time and space. If that's true, try to imagine extra-dimensional engineers who have full access to something where there's no arrow of time. The only time there's an arrow of time is if time is one-dimensional. If time is two-dimensional, you have a whirlpool of time, which is either clockwise or counterclockwise. If it's three-dimensional, you have a right-hand rule of time, and there's a left-hand rule of time. These are called orientations. My belief is that we may be looking at something that has access to either four or six additional dimensions. And a- again, I'm reading this off of a page of equations and notes, and so you know what they mean in physical reality. In other words, if this thing on the page is true, holy shit. On the other hand, if it's just some ge- geometry, then you, you don't worry about it. You say, "Okay, well, extra dimensions. I can think in 17 or three or what, doesn't matter." It's not that hard to think in higher dimensions spatially for people who do what I do. Almost none of us can think in multiple temporal dimensions. There's one guy at, in Los Angeles at USC called Yitzak Bars, a Turkish Jew, who keeps talking about two-time physics, and I've spoken to him. But multiple temporal dimensions would be a decisive game changer in terms of changing everything that we know about the world.

01:53:33
Joe Rogan: And what would be the technology that someone could use to access that? 'Cause-

01:53:38
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:53:39
Joe Rogan: ... that's the big thing.

01:53:40
Eric Weinstein: I know.

01:53:40
Joe Rogan: Right?

01:53:40
Eric Weinstein: I know. I know. You think about it, you're, you and I are both old enough to remember cassette tapes and, uh, vinyl albums.

01:53:48
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

01:53:50
Eric Weinstein: On a cassette tape, you've played your favorite album all the way through, like Dark Side of the Moon, and you wanna play it again. You have to rewind through every song you just played, and you hear [imitates fast rewinding], right? But that doesn't happen on an album. Towards the end of the turntable time, you would just... The stylus would pick up, and it would skip over all the stuff that you didn't wanna hear again, and it would go back to some track that you did. Imagine you could do that with time. You didn't have to go back through time to go back in time. Do I even know what I mean? Not, not really. I'm sort of at the edge of where I can actually say things. But you see, all of physics proceeds from the time, from the assumption that time is one-dimensional, and we have this thing called deterministic propagation. So if you take quantum mechanics, there are really two rules. One is completely deterministic with no probability theory. You've got a system, you know its initial conditions, and you say, "If I know the laws of physics, I should be able to figure out where this is," you know. I take this lighter, and I throw it up, and I catch it, and it described a parabola. Okay. Initial condition, propagation, I measure it. It's completely determined by the point of release. In quantum mechanics, you have the second thing called quantum measurement, and that is this weird probabilistic thing that nobody understands. Everybody says, "If you, if you think you understand the quantum, you don't understand it. It's mind-blowing," blah, blah, blah. But the first part of it is where we're trying to fit gravity and when we quantize it. I don't think gravity goes in that slot. I think that what you do is you don't quantize gravity, you harmonize gravity. Gravity is the observer. We say, well, when you make an observation, well, who's doing the observation? Is Joe doing the observation? Is Jamie doing the observation? Who's doing this observation? Who has the right to use the second rule for collapsing the state vector with Schrödinger's cat and all the entanglement weirdness? Well, I think it's gravity. I think that part of the story is, is that gravity is the observer through something called a pullback operation. And when you realize that, you realize that you don't naively quantize gravity the way you quant- quantize e- everything else. In fact, gravity is the only field- Living on the successor to spacetime, if I'm correct. There are two spaces called X and Y. All the cool stuff in here, the, the electrons, the quarks that make up everything that you and I are, is living on Y except for the metric, the rulers and the protractors, which lives on X, which is how you keep gravity separate. And the unification is the unification of these two things in a structure called a bundle. Now, people will go over this, and I'm sure professors will say, "Well, this is what Eric was saying. Well, he's full of shit." No, no, he's actually making a point. This story about spacetime engineering where you don't use the Einstein field equations because you're using the successor theory rather than... In the Einstein theory, the entire planet was pulling on you when you needed to go pee. And your legs, I mean, you're obviously buff, you're fit, you just pulled [laughs] against an entire planet to get out of your chair and you won. That's how weak gravity is. That's how space and time is barely bent by all of Earth. Now, you're gonna tell me about an Alcubierre, uh, warp drive where, "Okay, no, here's what's going on. The ship is inside of this little bubble of warping." No, it isn't. If somebody's spacetime engineering and they can get here from very far away, they're not using general relativity in the standard model, my friends. They're using a successor theory, and we have become pussies. We are not going to look at successor theories because we've all learned the lesson that everybody who tries to bet against the standard model loses. Everybody who bets against general relativity loses. And this is that speech that Morpheus has to give. It's like, "I'm not gonna lie to you, Neo."

01:57:52
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

01:57:52
Eric Weinstein: "Everyone who's ever faced an agent, who stood his ground, you know, has died." It's like, okay, tough shit. Now it's time. Are, are we Americans? Are we scientists? Are we cowboys? Are, are... You know. Please tell me we're Travis Pastrana and, and not some sort of diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. How is it that we move forward? Well, we take the ultimate risk, and what do we do it with? Our credibility. Watch my Wikipedia entry as I try to do this.

01:58:21
Joe Rogan: But what do you think they're using in terms of a technology to achieve these results? And do you think that this is being examined and this is being researched here on Earth? Or do you think-

01:58:33
Eric Weinstein: I don't know

01:58:33
Joe Rogan: ... we are being visited?

01:58:35
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. But I know that if I were the federal government, if I was the Department of Energy, and if I were DARPA, and if I were any of these people, and somebody went on The Joe Rogan Experience with millions of viewers and listeners and started talking like this, I would call them up. One of the last times I went on, not the last time, but the time before that, the FBI called me immediately.

01:58:59
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

01:59:01
Eric Weinstein: You laugh.

01:59:02
Joe Rogan: It's hilarious.

01:59:03
Eric Weinstein: It's not that funny.

01:59:04
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

01:59:05
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:59:06
Joe Rogan: Not to you.

01:59:07
Eric Weinstein: I bet it was to the FBI. Well, they-

01:59:09
Joe Rogan: Watch Eric Watts trying to shit his pants

01:59:10
Eric Weinstein: ... Hey, Eric. Well, okay. Why don't you have the Department of Energy call me? I mean-

01:59:17
Joe Rogan: Well, what did they talk to you about?

01:59:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, we're concerned about some of the stuff you were saying. I think they thought I sounded revolutionary, like it's time for heads on pikes. Like, oh.

01:59:30
Joe Rogan: Oh. That. Oh, yeah.

01:59:32
Eric Weinstein: Right. 'Cause like Tulsi would put heads on pi- you know, because Tulsi is like, like Vlad the Impal- Impaler. She's gonna be going around with a, you know, chainsaw actually cutting people's heads off.

01:59:43
Joe Rogan: You should probably, you should phrase it differently.

01:59:45
Eric Weinstein: Oh, stop, Joe.

01:59:46
Joe Rogan: Heads on pikes is a little bit problematic.

01:59:48
Eric Weinstein: You say stuff all... Oh. You, you say in, in MMA, "That guy's a straight-up killer. He's an assassin."

01:59:54
Joe Rogan: Yes.

01:59:54
Eric Weinstein: You don't get a call from the FBI.

01:59:56
Joe Rogan: No, that's true. That's true. But that is actually a compliment-

02:00:00
Eric Weinstein: F-

02:00:00
Joe Rogan: ... if you use that for Aaron Blake field

02:00:02
Eric Weinstein: In any, in any event, I get occasionally called by somebody from inside. And what I think they're doing, first of all, one, we may be faking a UFO, uh, situation for reasons that I don't understand.

02:00:16
Joe Rogan: If we are faking a UFO situation, do you think that there is technology that's available to people in the United States that is beyond our current understanding of what's possible?

02:00:28
Eric Weinstein: 90% no.

02:00:30
Joe Rogan: 90% no. Wow.

02:00:32
Eric Weinstein: Because it's very har- it's very hard to imagine physicists continuing to work on nothing for their entire careers. The number of people who are gonna be retiring shortly, having never actually done physics as a physicist. We're talking about wasted lives. People are going to be very weird when they realize that they blew their entire career.

02:00:54
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

02:00:56
Eric Weinstein: And I believe I can say what many of these problems are, and if you wanna humiliate me at a leading university, just ask me to talk. You can put it on video. You don't realize how many things the standard model has subtly wrong when we explain it to people. It's not that the Lagrangian is wrong, not that the rules are wrong, but we say wrong stuff. We say like, "There are three generations that are only, of matter that are only distinguished by mass." In other words, there's three copies of this stuff here. This is like the wood version, and then there's the plastic version, and then there's the metal version. Y- There aren't three, there are two generations plus an extra imposter generation which looks like a generation. I mean, I can get into these things. And that should be a provocation if somebody says, "Let's call this guy up, have him out, and find, figure out what he's talking about." Doesn't matter. I don't think we're doing physics.

02:01:45
Joe Rogan: What do you think they're doing?

02:01:46
Eric Weinstein: I think we are playing paintball rather than going to war, and we're giving prizes for generals who command the, command the best paintball army, and then we're referencing everyone else who's actually trying to figure out how to fight to, "Well, have you submitted to the paintball competition?" It's like, "No, I don't wanna do paintball." I understand that it, it keeps your skills up. I understand that some of them are transferable. But I, I mean, like, you've been in street fights.

02:02:15
Joe Rogan: Not since I was a teenager.

02:02:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, well, I understand. Like, I haven't been for a long time. It's different than what you guys do in Brazilian jujitsu. There's lots of stuff you're not allowed to do. [laughs]

02:02:25
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:02:26
Eric Weinstein: Right. You get in a street fight, it's a completely different thing.

02:02:29
Joe Rogan: Sure.

02:02:30
Eric Weinstein: Um, what we're doing is not physics in the same sense.

02:02:35
Joe Rogan: So what they're doing is they're-

02:02:38
Eric Weinstein: We're doing safe stuff

02:02:39
Joe Rogan: ... exercising.

02:02:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, exactly.

02:02:40
Joe Rogan: They're exercising.

02:02:41
Eric Weinstein: And, and, and the exercises are keeping people limber, they're keeping people in a fighting mentality. It's not, it's not that Brazilian jujitsu has nothing to do with fighting. We've seen people use it in the street, for sure, right? But small joint manipulation is part of street fighting. Eye gouging is part of street fighting. Pulling a knife is part of street fighting. These things are not part of any reputable gym that you might go to. So I wanna do the thing that isn't paintball, and I didn't want to do it up until recently because the danger of unleashing a neutrina, a, a neutron on the world is so high. Now I realize I'm done with that. You guys are willing to play footsies with Putin? You're not gonna survive. You're not the responsible adults I thought you were. Like, uh, if, if I unleash a neutron and, and it leads to some sort of proliferation of deadly technology, it's on you. It's not on me. You're already taking risks that you shouldn't be taking.

02:03:40
Joe Rogan: So if you think 90% sure that this is not coming from here, you believe this because you don't think that the proper science in order to achieve these kind of results is being done by the people that you believe are capable of doing it?

02:03:57
Eric Weinstein: The, that is correct. I know that, for example, when I talk to Nima, um, or when I talk to Juan Maldacena, or when I've talked to Natty Seiberg, these people are absolutely brilliant, and they don't know the answer, unless they're the greatest actors I've ever seen.

02:04:11
Joe Rogan: So the most brilliant physicists are looking at these supposed videos. What is the best-

02:04:19
Eric Weinstein: No, no, I don't-

02:04:19
Joe Rogan: ... most compelling evid-

02:04:20
Eric Weinstein: No, no, sorry, that's the UFO stuff. They're-

02:04:21
Joe Rogan: What are you talking about then?

02:04:22
Eric Weinstein: Ah, they're not talking about things that can extend Einstein-

02:04:27
Joe Rogan: Right

02:04:27
Eric Weinstein: ... that they're my f- that therefore, to get back to your technology question-

02:04:31
Joe Rogan: Right

02:04:31
Eric Weinstein: ... might have engineering applications, because it's the engineering applications that are terrifying.

02:04:36
Joe Rogan: Right.

02:04:36
Eric Weinstein: Right? The discovery of the neutron was one thing. The Teller-Ulam design was its weaponization. So suddenly, you know, y- you can do the Tsar Bomb or, or, uh, Castle Bravo, these unbelievable explosions which... Like, the difference between, there are civ- there were Civil War veterans who saw action in the Civil War who lived to see Ivy Mike in the Pacific. So the Civil War was almost a thermonuclear war in terms of human scale. It's not, it's less than 100 years different. People have forgotten how terrifying, important, wonderful, jaw-dropping, and awesome physics is because it hasn't done anything that completely screws your mind. And-

02:05:23
Joe Rogan: Like Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

02:05:25
Eric Weinstein: Or Castle Bravo.

02:05:27
Joe Rogan: What's Castle Bravo?

02:05:28
Eric Weinstein: That was the test in the Pacific where we-

02:05:30
Joe Rogan: Oh

02:05:31
Eric Weinstein: ... thought it was gonna be, like-

02:05:32
Joe Rogan: Oh

02:05:32
Eric Weinstein: ... controlled and, like-

02:05:34
Joe Rogan: Yeah

02:05:34
Eric Weinstein: ... or, or what is it, Starfish, where we did an atmospheric explosion-

02:05:37
Joe Rogan: Yes

02:05:37
Eric Weinstein: ... over Hawaii-

02:05:38
Joe Rogan: Yes, yes

02:05:38
Eric Weinstein: ... and then the Russians, like, "Hold my beer"-

02:05:40
Joe Rogan: Yeah

02:05:40
Eric Weinstein: ... Nova Zemlya, phew.

02:05:42
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:05:43
Eric Weinstein: You know, we, uh, remember, I'm the guy five years ago who was saying we need above ground nuclear tests because all you people have lost your fear. Like, yes, Eric is crazy, but he's correct.

02:05:56
Joe Rogan: What's this one? That's Castle Bravo.

02:05:59
Eric Weinstein: Oh, shit.

02:05:59
Joe Rogan: Oh my God.

02:06:02
Eric Weinstein: Right. Like-

02:06:03
Joe Rogan: So they detonated in that facility, and they expected it to be far smaller than it was?

02:06:08
Eric Weinstein: You know, they detonated in the Pacific.

02:06:10
Joe Rogan: Right, but it's right next to that facility that was in the video.

02:06:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:06:15
Joe Rogan: Was that, was that the facility that was initially film- Like, what-

02:06:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:06:19
Joe Rogan: What is this facility?

02:06:20
Eric Weinstein: That's it. Uh, was it E- E- Ina Walk, I forget, Atoll. So, like, we just-

02:06:27
Joe Rogan: It's crazy how long ago that was and how close it was to the Civil War, if you really put it in that context.

02:06:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, that, this is what I'm trying to say, is w- what I'm trying to tell you-

02:06:36
Joe Rogan: Look at that.

02:06:37
Eric Weinstein: You-

02:06:39
Joe Rogan: That's so insane.

02:06:40
Eric Weinstein: Have you done this in Oculus?

02:06:42
Joe Rogan: No, I have not.

02:06:43
Eric Weinstein: I highly recommend.

02:06:44
Joe Rogan: Oh, I couldn't.

02:06:44
Eric Weinstein: If they're not gonna let us do a nuke above ground so that we can save ourselves by fear-

02:06:49
Joe Rogan: Oh, look at that

02:06:52
Eric Weinstein: ... right? This is reli- th- this is religious stuff, Joe.

02:06:54
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it is religious stuff.

02:06:55
Eric Weinstein: Like, we are, we, we have announced... I- if somebody is listening to these tests that we did, my belief is very shortly before you get the ability to tra- traverse the cosmos, if that is possible, if that is possible, you let off a nuke, right? It's like-

02:07:15
Joe Rogan: Yeah

02:07:15
Eric Weinstein: ... it's like, y- you know, you, you've had kids. There's some stuff that happens right before they figure out how to break out of the crib.

02:07:22
Joe Rogan: You know, that's part of UFO folklore too.

02:07:25
Eric Weinstein: I know.

02:07:26
Joe Rogan: Fat Man and Little Boy, that's a big part of UFO- That once they dropped those, that's when all the UFOs started appearing.

02:07:33
Eric Weinstein: So the question is, is, uh, you know... The, the analogy I give, so I talked to Avi about the following thing. I am a fan of something I call the doubly scientific method. The usual scientific method makes a hidden assumption that it never voices, which is if we're gonna study orcas, we assume that we are smarter than orcas. Or if we're gonna study cephalopods, right, like an octopus, we think we're smarter. And what do we do? We disguise ourselves. We create artificial environments. We do all sorts of crazy things based on the fact that we're smarter than what we study, from everything from rocks to orcas. The doubly scientific method says, okay, assume that you're studying a rat in a maze, but you yourself are the rat in somebody else's maze. Now you have to look up the intelligence scale, not just down. And in the doubly scientific method, you have to assume that whatever is studying you is hiding from you the way you are hiding from your subjects. So if you see somebody in a duck blind, for example, and he's studying ducks, you understand that somebody may be hiding from you, and they might be able to use multiple dimensions of time. They might be able to cloak themselves and disguise themselves. Or for example, if you take microscopic UFOs, um, this gla- this cup has a radius of R and a circumference of two pi R. The disk that it spans is pi R squared in area. But if you look at this cup, it's much larger than pi R squared because we pushed it out.

02:09:05
Joe Rogan: Mm.

02:09:06
Eric Weinstein: You could have a sphere where if you could cheaply s- engineer spacetime, not through the Einstein field equations, but through the successor theory that recovers Einstein, you could have an entire stadium inside of a tennis ball, just the way this cup doesn't blow your mind until you realize that its area is much greater than pi R squared. You could-- Why look for a giant floating thing in the sky if you could bend space and time, and you could play with the rulers the way I'm saying? I would put this in a tiny little profile.

02:09:39
Joe Rogan: Whoa. So we're only looking at it in terms of our understanding of the distance between objects, planets, gravity. We're, we're, we're looking at that. All that stuff where if it didn't exist, if somehow or another we lived in some contained environment and we had no concept of space whatsoever-

02:09:59
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:09:59
Joe Rogan: ... and then we gained access to it, we would be unbelievably overwhelmed. If you-

02:10:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:10:04
Joe Rogan: ... lived in some sort of underground facility your entire life-

02:10:07
Eric Weinstein: Love this

02:10:08
Joe Rogan: ... and then one day you got a chance to go outside and see the Keck Observatory in, in Hawaii-

02:10:13
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:10:13
Joe Rogan: ... in, in a clear night with no moon, you would, you would be overwhelmed. You wouldn't be able to believe that the world was as big as it really was or that the universe was as big as it was.

02:10:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It's an impedance mismatch. If you watch meteor showers the way my family does, um, uh, it's, it's religious. It's, it's tr- it's transformational. It's transcendent.

02:10:36
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:10:36
Eric Weinstein: The problem, as you know from the default, uh, uh, default mode network, right, is that mostly what your brain is doing is not communicating information, but screening. Right? Your eyes, your fovea is precious 'cause that's the thing that can resolve at very high levels.

02:10:51
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:10:51
Eric Weinstein: But, like, I can barely see Jamie out of the corner of my eye because my peripheral vision can't be at the same level as my fovea. I'd be overwhelmed.

02:10:59
Joe Rogan: Right.

02:11:00
Eric Weinstein: So we're talking about tapping in to a picture of the world that we are not-- Our brain is not prepared for the idea that time is multidimensional. That was the whole point of giving Lex another watch. We don't have a way to think about, "I'll meet you at, uh, 5:15 and 12:30," according to two different scales of time. Or for example, time and space, if I'm correct, the fourteen-dimensional manifold that pr- has all the quantum going on on it is split probably seven and seven dimensions because we have six extra time dimensions and four extra space. Add, add six to one and f- and three to four, and you get seven. So space and time are interchangeable. There, there's a duality between them. All of this stuff is like, you know, okay, this w- how you hit on chicks in a bar. "Hey, let me tell you something about space and time you never thought about."

02:11:52
Joe Rogan: Oh my God.

02:11:53
Eric Weinstein: But-

02:11:53
Joe Rogan: Does that work? [laughs]

02:11:54
Eric Weinstein: What? Worked for me. [laughs] It's wh- it's why I'm not in better shape.

02:12:00
Joe Rogan: So do you think-- Now, when you were talking about these people that wa- that keep mañana-ing you and not giving you access to whatever they're talking about, do you think they're talking about some sort of an engineering solution to this type of technology, or do you-

02:12:17
Eric Weinstein: I haven't met anyone in striking distance in three years.

02:12:21
Joe Rogan: So how could they have something that you don't-- That's gonna change your way of looking-- Is it possible that you've missed something?

02:12:28
Eric Weinstein: I can just be wrong, first of all. Like, this is my, this is my life's work, right?

02:12:33
Joe Rogan: What's the way they phrased it to you?

02:12:35
Eric Weinstein: Which part? The-

02:12:36
Joe Rogan: The part about it changing the way you see the world.

02:12:39
Eric Weinstein: Oh. Eric, you know, like, uh, I'll, I'll complain about data, and like, "That's not the data we have. What, what we've been showing the public is downsampled, meaning it, it's c- it's fuzzier, it's low resolution." Um, like, "How clear is it?" "As clear as you want." "How clear are you that there's something to see?" "You can see it with your own eyes." There's no question.

02:13:04
Joe Rogan: See, if I was you, I'd just shut the fuck up and let them show me. I'd be like, "Let's go." [laughs]

02:13:08
Eric Weinstein: Under, I'm not under any NDA.

02:13:10
Joe Rogan: I know, but I'm saying I-

02:13:11
Eric Weinstein: But you want to know in a way that-

02:13:13
Joe Rogan: I wanna know.

02:13:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but I wanna know in a different-- Look, my life's work is a, is a theory. It's one theory. My entire life is really about one theory, okay? Like, I do this entertainment thing, and I talk to people and all this stuff. Bullshit. Really what I am is an academic who realized that you can't do academics inside of the university system and watch it dis- disintegrate into madness as we speak. I figured this out a long time ago. I wanna know whether this is right or wrong so much better, so much more than I wanna know whether UFOs exist. UFOs to me are an indication of whether I'm right or wrong. You see, it's data. It's an input to me.

02:13:52
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

02:13:53
Eric Weinstein: Because-

02:13:53
Joe Rogan: So if you're right, that means...

02:13:55
Eric Weinstein: If we have a future, it means we can leave not the planet, but the solar system. We can exp- The cosmos are traversable. If we can leave, anything else can visit. If you look at the entirety of the universe and you imagine this, that ultimately there are societies that destroy themselves because they get atomic weapons before they figure out how to leave- Some societies are smarter than that, and they'll be able to leave and, and colonize the cosmos. And for them not to be here would be madness. So if you've heard-

02:14:27
Joe Rogan: Of course

02:14:27
Eric Weinstein: ... my analogy, there is an island in the Andaman chain called North Sentinel Island.

02:14:34
Joe Rogan: I know it well.

02:14:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. North Sentinel Island is my model, potentially, of us. We are the North Sentineleses.

02:14:41
Joe Rogan: The 39 people that are direct descendants-

02:14:43
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:14:44
Joe Rogan: ... of people who left Africa 60,000 years ago.

02:14:46
Eric Weinstein: Y- right. Yeah.

02:14:47
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:14:47
Eric Weinstein: The th- we don't know if there's 39 or 300. They kill everybody who lands there, essentially.

02:14:53
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:14:53
Eric Weinstein: There's a story that we actually buggered them, an English person buggered them, which is why-

02:14:57
Joe Rogan: Yes

02:14:57
Eric Weinstein: ... they don't want anyone landing.

02:14:58
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:14:59
Eric Weinstein: There actually are some very weird videos where we throw them coconuts 'cause coconuts don't occur on their island, and we actually have non-hostile contact. But the most important part of it is India. They do not know that they are claimed by something called India, and they don't know that they have a Fermi problem because India won't let anyone land unless they break the law. So the great filter of North Sentinel Island is a model for why don't we see anybody? Why aren't we clear? Does India exist at some sort of UFO level? Now, this is the doubly scientific method. You can laugh at it, but then would you laugh at the North Sentineleses who are smart enough to say, "I wonder if there's another society that's screening everybody from landing here?" Now, what happens on North Sentinel Island if you're watching it and all these people with loin cloths or no loin cloths and spears and arrows and stupid stuff, suddenly you start hearing radio signals coming out of North Sentinel Island. You're like, "What?" Then you see a little mushroom cloud in the northeast of the island. Then you see little boats that start exploring around that seem to be propelled internally, and you're like, "Are they burning the leaves? Have they invented internal combust-" Some point with the mushroom cloud, India says, "Enough is enough. We cannot afford to let the North Sentineleses be treated as some sort of backwards people who don't have anything developed that scares us." We th- that, that's a mushroom cloud, man. That, that's time to go in.

02:16:24
Joe Rogan: Hmm. I see.

02:16:26
Eric Weinstein: Right? So my claim is, is that you're not used to the doubly scientific method because there's been no reason to have a doubly scientific method. Do you believe that the orcas are smarter? Well, possibly. There aren't that many species that are really smarter than us. Look at all the shit we do. There aren't many that are dumber than us either. But the, not my point. Those sorts of models are what distinguish people who are gonna get called crazy but aren't because it's an obvious point. You have to as- a- account for this possibility that there's something called India up in the skies that doesn't want anyone landing here-

02:16:59
Joe Rogan: Right

02:17:00
Eric Weinstein: ... who's monitoring what's going on, and they're not going to be infinitely patient if they exist. Now, if that's true and we can leave and we can't civilize ourselves and we bring this mad technology with us, this ability to destroy, I personally feel responsible in a way that my colleagues don't. They have these ideas like, "Oh, I'm a physicist. It's just fun. It's really interesting. It's a bunch of puzzles." My feeling is you doomed the human race and you don't feel responsible for building a lifeboat for saving us, for like, what kind of a sociopath are you? Uh, like I'm not even a physicist, Joe, and I feel responsible. And, and this gets back, you know, to s- to some weird stuff about-

02:17:49
Joe Rogan: But, so they're not thinking about that.

02:17:50
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:17:51
Joe Rogan: They're thinking about the equations they're working on. They're thinking about the puzzles they're trying to solve.

02:17:54
Eric Weinstein: "It's fun. I get to play. It's, you know, universe this and puzzle that." And it's just like please. It's not-

02:18:02
Joe Rogan: Do, do they not think of a way to leave-

02:18:06
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:18:06
Joe Rogan: ... the Earth 'cause they don't think it's a surmountable-

02:18:08
Eric Weinstein: Correct. They live in spacetime. They've crawled into the map, the prison built by Einstein, and they know that it's not right because w- th- there are these two singularities. There's this singularity at the beginning of time, which we call the Big Bang, assuming that time were one-dimensional, and it's part of something called the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime model. And there's another one at the bottom of the black hole called the Schwarzschild singularity. And the fact that space and time kink at these two points is an indication that we have something wrong to a mathematician or a physicist. It says your equations work pretty well right up and to the point where there's some error that you have that you don't understand, and you have a l- like a division by zero error. And if you could figure out your error, you don't know what sin you committed, but the way that you know you committed a sin is that you have a singularity. So they know that there's some successor theory, and they'll give lectures about spacetime is doomed and I'm gonna talk about noncommutative geometry, but these are all ways of avoiding the fact that you haven't done your homework for 50 years, okay? So like there's some class that you're supposed to show up to and you haven't been in a long time.

02:19:16
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

02:19:16
Eric Weinstein: You don't wanna show up and suddenly say, "What? What's going on?" Um, that's what's happening. Th- they are living inside of Einstein's model, so when you say something they'll say, "Well, that's impossible because you can't go faster than the speed of light." And it's like that's a spacetime concept. That's an Einsteinian concept. You're not thinking post-Einsteinian. You're not thinking about recovering Einstein or Einstein as what we would call an effective theory. You're thinking that you really live in spacetime, so you know what you can do, and then you fold your arms and say, "Well, that's impossible." It's like no, you have a limited map. You think that, you know, Greenland is the same size as North, as, uh, South America.

02:19:55
Joe Rogan: Okay. Then as far as its application, what could you imagine would be a way that someone could actually apply these laws and these theories?

02:20:09
Eric Weinstein: So imagine for the moment, again, this goes back to, let me put my, my Eric the science person doing his own theory, right? This is my thing that I tried to give you last time I was here. If we imagine that, uh, there are two spaces, and one of them is 14-dimensional, and one of them is four-dimensional, and gravity connects them, that is the metric, the gadget. Think of a phonograph. The record is like the 14-dimensional world. And are you a Doors fan?

02:20:45
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

02:20:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so you got Doors One, Break On Through To The Other Side is on the same side as, uh, Soul Kitchen. You don't hear Break On Through To The Other Side or Soul Kitchen simultaneously. They're both there on the record.

02:20:59
Joe Rogan: Right.

02:21:01
Eric Weinstein: The phonograph, imagine you're doing it on a Victrola somehow. You got a- you're retro. You're listening to that record in four dimensions, but it's a 14-dimensional record. So you and I are playing back a 14-dimensional quantum world, but we're only playing back slices of it, so the illusion is that we're having a four-dimensional conversation because the Victrola part, that, that phone, his master's voice, is the four-dimensional thing. And what's the stylus? It's the metric. It's gravity. The stylus is pulling off different data that is simultaneously existing. So it's like the record is the multiverse, but you don't think of it in these terms. You don't freak out and say, "Oh my God, I'm holding the multiverse," because Light My Fire is somewhat adjacent to Soul Kitchen. That is my structure. That's what I believe is true. And we're having the discussion as if it's only the phonograph, uh, the Victrola part.

02:22:01
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

02:22:03
Eric Weinstein: If you could then go to the record, you don't have to scratch your way back. You can do these weird moves where you can alight the stylus in different places and shrink things and grow things and change the angles and all this stuff, and you have engineering possibilities. Like, I'm-- I will say what I believe the internal properties of the particles that we have yet to find, the dark matter, if you will, are. I will tell you places that I believe the standard model is wrong, and I'm happy to go down on the ship and move on with my life if I'm wrong. But I can't-- I've been 40 years trying to have this conversation with a competent person, and every excuse under the sun is used to avoid talking about what I'm saying. And, and I'll, I'll say some stuff that ... When I-- 1987 around, I proposed a set of equations that were like the junior version of geometric unity. I was told that those equations were insufficiently nonlinear, that they involved spinners, and spinners have nothing to do with something called self-duality, that, um, I'd violated the spin statistics theorem, a whole bunch of things, and I was invited to leave Harvard, where they said, "You have to move out of Massachusetts. You cannot live in Massachusetts." And I said, "You don't have the right to tell me where I can live. [chuckles] That's not part of our agreement." Um, they said, "Well, if you want to continue in this department, you have to move out of Massachusetts." I only-

02:23:35
Joe Rogan: What, what was the reasoning behind that?

02:23:38
Eric Weinstein: They thought I was wrong and crazy. So-

02:23:41
Joe Rogan: But-

02:23:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, let, let me keep-

02:23:43
Joe Rogan: Okay.

02:23:45
Eric Weinstein: In 1994, Ed Witten is at a-- giving a lecture, uh, in the main seminar room in Building 2 in the MIT math department, where I am now a postdoc under a National Science Foundation fellowship. So I had gone through huge trouble, and I'd crawled back on top. And Ed Witten says the self-duality revolution, which is related to Jim Simon's work, which I was saying before, he says, "Theoretically, you don't have to deal with these super complicated equations anymore." And he doesn't say what replaces them. And a guy named, I think, Alan Knutson, who's now at Cornell, I think raises his hand like a punk, and he says, uh, "Do you want to tell us what equations we would use instead?" And Ed Witten writes down these two sets, these set of two equations. And I look at them, and I say, "Those are the equations that I proposed at Harvard in, like, five years ago," or what is it? Seven years ago. And I said, "Huh, that's really interesting. He's about to get told that they're insufficiently nonlinear, that they involve spinners, which can't possibly involve s-self-duality, and that he's violated spin statistics, and I'm looking forward to watching what happens when Ed Witten is told this." A couple weeks later, I'm at the MIT commissary with Is Singer and the math physics group, and a guy named András Senesh, Hungarian, brilliant guy, now in Geneva, I think, says, "Have you heard the news?" He comes by. I said, "What news?" He's like, "All of Donaldson theory and self-dual equations is falling." I was like, "What?" He's like, "They were using the wrong equations. Everything has become trivially easy." Um, can you bring up an article called Gauge Theory is Dead: Long Live Gauge Theory? So, like, I w- I didn't wanna tell these stories the last time I-- This is, like, super painful, but I'm done with this stuff. I'm just completely done with this. So, you see, there was this thing called the self-dual equations, which Isidor Singer brought to Michael Atiyah and Nigel Hitchin. Oh, the, the other one was, uh, if s- if spinners were involved, Nigel Hitchin would know, and he would have told us, which is bullshit. Keep going to the next page. The new gauge theory. You see those two equations, dA of phi equals zero? I had written psi rather than phi. Phi has to do with, uh, the spin of the field. But FA+ equals I-- I had written these things down in a slightly different form and had been effectively laughed out of Harvard for this. And it turns out that what was going on was, uh, Ed Witten had written these things down, and now all of these people were converted. And a lecture is given at Room 507 in the Harvard Math department on the fifth floor, across from the office of a guy named Raoul Bott, who is absolutely not my advisor, but the internet is determined to make him my advisor. It's making me really upset. Uh, [laughs] Raoul Bott is my hero, but he was not my advisor. He's a great man, and you shouldn't do that to him, and you shouldn't do that to me. So I go to this lecture, and the person giving it, who's really the closest thing to-- I had to an advisor, if it's not a guy named Dror Bar-Natan, is the brother of somebody you've had on your program. You've had Gary Taubes on your program. His brother is named Clifford Taubes. And Clifford Taubes had picked a fight with Princeton, and he had said, "You know, these guys at Princeton, we work our asses off to get these results in Donaldson theory. These equations are so hard, and then always after the fact, Princeton tells us what we're really doing. You know, thanks, guys." So it was a fight between Cambridge and Princeton. And now he's gotta eat crow, okay? So he's giving this lecture, and he titles it Witten's Magical Equations. This is the same guy who tells me that I can't live in Massachusetts in 1987. And he's going on, he's, like, saying, "This is the greatest day of my life. I was a, I was in prison. I was working at hard labor for 10 years. These equations make everything trivially easy." I am sitting in the back row of Room 507 picking my nose, and a guy in the front seat on the right-hand side is named David Kajdan, one of the most brilliant people on the planet, and he usually falls asleep during the lecture. He's like a Soviet Jew who got through the antisemitic system at Moscow State, like unbelievable mind. And he says, "Uh, excuse me, Cliff, uh, didn't we have a student at some point who told us to [laughs] to look at the spinor bundles and maybe these equations?" And Cliff goes white as a ghost, and I'm picking my nose, right nostril, and the entire room swivels and looks at me. And then I realize, like, everybody actually remembers what I was saying, and my thesis is on the spinor bundles, all this stuff. And I have this question: Do I tell them the whole theory? And I left mathematics at that moment. I just decided I can't trust you people. Cliff knows the answer. Cliff is supposed to say, "You know, Eric told me to look at that," and he won't do it. He's sitting there giving the credit not even to Seiberg and Witten, who are the two people who do these equations. He's giving the whole thing to Witten 'cause he's scared, 'cause he's apologizing. He's saying, "I screwed up. I doubted you, Princeton. Princeton was right. Harvard was wrong. New Jersey beats Massachusetts. Tough shit. That's the way it goes." But Massachusetts actually had an entrant in that game, and that was me. And then Isidor Singer writes somewhere in one of his papers, you know, "I learned about this years ago, uh, before, from, from Eric Weinstein in a paper with Kano and, uh, Baliu." So this was my trajectory. This is why I left mathematics in part, because I realized that there was just no honor. There was no way of making a name and, and like, people were just gonna give away my stuff. So when I, when I did this draft of GU, I said, "I'm an entertainer." People don't have any clue why. It's because I have copyright protection. If I release a work of entertainment, you can't just name it after yourself or your friend or whoever you're upset with, [laughs] you know-

02:30:10
Joe Rogan: Mm

02:30:11
Eric Weinstein: ... that might hurt you. It's like, that's mine. It's my work of entertainment. I own The Portal podcast. Tough shit. Now, all that is long in the past. I don't want the Seiberg-Witten equations, which is what they're now called. Natty Seiberg and I have worked this out years ago at a meeting in San Francisco. He got three million dollars. I forced him to give me a hug in front of the Institute [laughs] for Advanced Study. Call it even. This is so much bigger than this. Those things, the Seiberg-Witten equations, is the barest thumbnail of what's coming. And if we don't use this stuff, we're doomed here with Xi and Biden and Kamala and Trump and Putin and Zelenskyy and Khamenei and all of these idiots. We're not gonna make it. What I work on, where I've disappeared, "Where's The Portal? We deleted The Portal," you know, it's like, do you notice how everything that you love gets destroyed? Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris, even Lex Fridman. They go after Lex Fridman after I warn Lex they're gonna come for you because of his reading list and because they misportray him as if he's claiming to be an MIT professor, which he's never claimed in his life. They destroy all of us if we don't sing from the hymnal. This is so important to me because it's hope. If I'm wrong, then maybe we don't have a plan, a way off this planet. Maybe we don't have a way to the solar system, out of the solar system. That's bad news.

02:31:47
Joe Rogan: What would be the technology that would harness this?

02:31:51
Eric Weinstein: You would figure out how to do the stuff on the record rather than the phonograph, the Victrola. You would start to move the space-time metric. You would move along the directions of the metric, not using the Einstein field equations. So you would try to figure out, okay, if we're in flatland here, a four-dimensional slice of a 14-dimensional world, how do I go what we-- I have to say it in my own language, along the 10-dimensional normal bundle. In other words, 14 equals four dimensions we know plus 10 we don't. Call the 10 we don't the normal bundle. You'd start navigating in the normal bundle. You'd stop, you'd start, stop thinking about the sound coming out of the Victrola. You'd say that's three components. There's a stylus, there's a horn, and there's a record. And you'd engineer around that so that you had a really efficient way to go very far or to, to circle back in time without going back through time. So you'd try to figure out what can I do with the stylus? Where can I put the stylus on the record to get different-

02:32:52
Joe Rogan: And what technology would you employ to do that?

02:32:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, so first of all, we know about three families of matter. Like, this is made- everything you see around you is made of the first family of matter. It's all up quarks, down quarks, electrons, and you and I are being penetrated, as much as that's really distasteful, by neutrinos. That's the first family of matter, okay? Then there's a second family where the up and down quarks are replaced by charm and strange. The neutrino is replaced by the muon neutrino. The electron is replaced by the muon. And then there's a third one where the muon is replaced by the tau top, bottom, and tau neutrinos, okay? The- If I'm correct, there are two additional f- generations of matter that are not- or families of matter that are not generations. They don't have the same structure as the ones we already know. Some of them are something called spin three-halves, and some of them are exotic spin one-half matter. So first of all, if you have dark matter that you have no idea of, you can't do dark chemistry. But if you do have an idea, then you can guess at what dark chemistry would be, and you'll have dark light. Um, everything you see here is spun, uh, left-handed if it's matter and spun right-handed if it's antimatter. My claim is we are decoupled from matter that spins right and antimatter that spins left, but in a low gravitational environment, it's like my left and my hand, right hand don't know each other. So we have a, you know, you have the asymmetry of a hand, which is you say, "Oh, digits two and four look like each other. The middle finger is the, is the axis of symmetry, and unfortunately, the pinky and the thumb look wildly different, but let's fudge it and imagine that there's a symmetry." Suddenly, you realize neurologically you're disconnected, and it's thumb to thumb on a different hand you didn't know anything about.

02:34:45
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

02:34:45
Eric Weinstein: So my claim is I believe that this world that appears to have a left-handed or right-handed nature, like Cindy Crawford has a beauty mark, so you know whether a photo is of her or her mirror image.

02:34:55
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

02:34:57
Eric Weinstein: There's, like, another Cindy Crawford with the beauty mark on the other side. Sorry, I'm da-dating myself, people.

02:35:05
Joe Rogan: Okay.

02:35:05
Eric Weinstein: But that world would have engineering possibilities to do dark chemistry. We would have additional forces. Normally, we get additional forces through something called grand unification, where we use theories called SU (5) and Spin (10) or SO (10), and those are the wrong flavors of the right idea. The right flavor would be called Spin (6,4), and SU (5) would be replaced by SU (3,2). So there would be new unifications, new forces. It would produce new problems because when you put that comma s- you know, three comma two, you create something that is more space-timey than more par- than particle physics. So there's stuff we don't know how to deal with. But you see, there's nothing in the laws of physics that say the, the rules of the universe will conform to what particle theorists currently know how to handle. Nature seems to know things we don't know how to do, and the time has ended for us to tell nature, "You can't have this," or, "You must have that because we don't know how to handle you otherwise." Tough luck. It's the forces are different. The opportunities are different. Something called the Pati-Salam theory, uh, of grand unification is tied to the Einstein theory, and what I wanna do is to say, "Can I get people, lawyers, guns, and money to investigate this so that we can go traverse the cosmos?" I don't know how to do the engineering any more than the person who invented the neutron. Was it Chadwick or who's the one who found it? He wasn't Lise Meitner, who figured out the chain reaction, and she wasn't Enrico Fermi, who figured out how to do it experimentally. That wasn't Trinity, which was the Manhattan Project, and they weren't Teller and Ulam. So it's not on Eric to figure out how to do the engineering project. I need people.

02:36:52
Joe Rogan: W-What w- could you imagine would be involved in figuring out a way to harness that, like, and actually utilize it and actually go interdimensionally? Like-

02:37:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:37:05
Joe Rogan: ... what, what would you have to do? What kind of power would have to be generated? Like, what would be involved?

02:37:13
Eric Weinstein: So what wouldn't be involved is getting an entire planet to put a tiny dent in space-time because that's not gonna work. It would be a question of saying, "I know about more degrees of freedom. Are those degrees of freedom accessible?" And to, to give you an idea of what's involved, if you take a proton with two up quarks and a down quark, so put two Us and a D inside of a ball, you call it proton. You're tempted to say, "Okay, if those are hard little balls inside, I wanna pull one out." Doesn't work. The equations have something that used to be called infrared slavery, but we're not allowed to say the word slavery because of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I'm gonna say slavery 'cause I'm here. You cannot pull a quark out of a proton, so what looks like a degree of freedom is not accessible to you. In the equations, you see up quarks and down quarks. You don't see protons and neutrons, but the consequence of the edu- of the equations is protons and neutrons, right? So when you look at the equations, you can't tell is that accessible or inaccessible? To bring it back to the UFO point, the reason UFOs matter to me is if they're here, then these degrees of freedom are accessible, and if they're not here, then it's probably like protons being filled with up quarks and down quarks that we can't engineer. The consequences of quark structure inside of the atom industrially are zero. We've been at this since ni- you, you're born, when, '67?

02:38:41
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

02:38:42
Eric Weinstein: The year after you're born, we find quarks. We have zero industrial applications, right? That means you have to think about both possibilities. One, that these things are actionable if they're right. So first of all, Eric can be wrong, and I'm happy to be wrong if I'm wrong, or I can be right. If I'm right, then it splits into a second leg of the le- level of the decision tree. Maybe the new degrees of freedom are things we can play with at the engineering level, and maybe they're inaccessible just the way we can't play with up quarks and down quarks directly. If we can play with it, then we've got so many new toys, you have no idea. New forces, new matter, new possibilities to flit in and out between dark and light matter.

02:39:26
Joe Rogan: But from an engineering perspective-

02:39:28
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

02:39:28
Joe Rogan: ... how, how would you make any of this happen?

02:39:31
Eric Weinstein: You would build something based on new plans that did something that nothing else could do. So to give an example, in the late '50s, we thought we knew electromagnetism cold. We'd been playing it with, with it since Maxwell's time, right? Two guys named Ehrenhaft and Bohm said, "Here's a crazy experiment. Take a tube that's perfectly insulated almost and run current through it, and then pass an electron beam from, like, a, a cathode ray tube and reflect it off mirrors and see when it comes back and interferes with itself, how it, how it interferes." If it's perfectly influen- uh, insulated, it shouldn't be able to tell whether there's current running through the center of the solenoid of that tube. Turns out when you turn on the tube and you run current through it, the electron beam can detect whether there's current running through it through magic. Technically, magic here means something called holonomy. We didn't know that the electromagnetic fields are not where electromagnetism really happens. It's something called the electromagnetic potential. It's a precursor that actually determines the universe. It determines the electromagnetic fields, but this weird thing where somehow the current inside a perfectly insulated tube is influencing the world outside of it was like, holy smokes. We, we've been living with this stuff for how long? We had no idea how it works. The way you do this is we, we'd get together with a bunch of people, and we'd say, "If Eric is correct or if somebody else is correct, and you started to play with this [coughs] extended model of both general relativity and the standard model, what are some experiments we could run that you think would have no actual content, just the way the Ehrenhaft-Bohm experiment looks like it's not gonna do anything?" Or the Casimir effect, or finding out that beta decay, radioactive decay, knows its left from its right. These are all hugely surprising discoveries. I don't know how to do that, and it's one of the reasons I keep talking to Brian Keating, who's an experimentalist, because what you see here in the studio is 100% theorists. You only invite theorists from physics. You don't ex- invite experimentalists. I don't know how to talk to the experimentalists, but that's why I go down to the University of California San Diego and play down there because I wanna talk to people who are like, "How do, how do we build this? You're the engineers. You're the, of, of physics. Tell me what, tell me what I'm saying in terms that we can build something and actually see if it has consequences."

02:42:11
Joe Rogan: And what could it be in terms of, like, building something?

02:42:15
Eric Weinstein: Imagine, for example, that you look at the equivalence principle, right? So the equivalence principle says that the inertial mass, how much mass something appears to have when it's moving, how resistant it is to force, that's the same according to Einstein as the gravitational force, right? It's gravitational mass. So gravitational mass equals inertial mass. There are, like, a whole bunch of different flavors of mass that happen to all be equal according to different principles. According to something called spontaneous symmetry breaking, mass is generated by the interaction with the Higgs field in general. It's not a number the way we thought it was coded into an equation. It's something we would call a vacuum expectation value through a Yukawa coupling. Never mind. It's that thing about the molasses causes the f- mass to feel heavier even though the mass of the cup hasn't changed because it's requiring more and more force to push. If what we have is a bunch of different kinds of mass, we might be able to break some of these things like the equivalence principle. We might be able to generate negative mass, which is not technically excluded but is incredibly hard to think about. We might be able to do things ... Right, the only way we keep mass always positive is by putting in artificial conditions. If you have a bigger theory, you start to realize how you would do these things naturally. So for example, we might be able to dial the mass of things differently by actually engineering the thing that we call the Higgs field. The Higgs field is the only thing that doesn't spin that is fundamental when we spin spacetime.

02:44:00
Joe Rogan: And they've detected the Higgs boson on a large, in the Large Hadron Collider, right?

02:44:05
Eric Weinstein: 100%.

02:44:06
Joe Rogan: Is this-

02:44:06
Eric Weinstein: 2012, I think.

02:44:08
Joe Rogan: So but this is an enormous collider, right? I mean, to be able to generate the Higgs, it had to go through how many kilometers? And it's a, an enormous-

02:44:21
Eric Weinstein: It's-

02:44:21
Joe Rogan: ... piece of equipment, right?

02:44:22
Eric Weinstein: Right. But that's in part because it's a stupid piece of equipment. What we're really doing is banging rocks together, except the rocks are called protons.

02:44:30
Joe Rogan: So you're thinking there could be an engineering solution where you could generate something like that but from a much smaller footprint.

02:44:39
Eric Weinstein: 100% that's a possibility because right now what we're doing is we're using electromagnetism only. The only force that we actually have engineering power over Is electromagnetism. Like when we do chemistry, so you fertilize your lawn, you're using electron orbitals based on electromagnetism between the proton and the electron in an atom or molecule. We don't know how to inter- interfere with the weak force or the, or the gravitational force. Both of those are so weak that they're impossible, and the strong force is crazily nuclear and super short-range. So we've got control of one out of four forces. I can tell you what I believe the additional forces are, but what I need is I need people who are closer to engineering, experiment, and standard theory. I mean, I'm not even a physicist, Joe, so I-

02:45:27
Joe Rogan: Right. What I'm c- what I'm curious about is like what caused this shift in you to think about UFOs-

02:45:34
Eric Weinstein: Oh

02:45:34
Joe Rogan: ... and UFO reports as being credible? Because w- we're talking-

02:45:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:45:39
Joe Rogan: ... theoretically and you're talking about your understanding of dimensions.

02:45:41
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause I thought it was not... I thought it was a smoke screen that we were using to do aerospace engineering projects. I thought it was like Operation-

02:45:49
Joe Rogan: Oh

02:45:49
Eric Weinstein: ... Fortitude or Oper- Operation Bodyguard.

02:45:52
Joe Rogan: Right.

02:45:52
Eric Weinstein: And so it's like, "Okay, please don't bother me with your sci-fi stories." It's space opera. You know, for the sa- same reason that I don't go into a Scientology center and spend all my time thinking about Xenu, I'm not gonna spend all my time worried about space opera.

02:46:05
Joe Rogan: And what changed?

02:46:08
Eric Weinstein: Meeting an enormous number of very sober, very grown-up people who seem to be changed, alter, and believe that this is real. I have met an enormous number of people now who had personal firsthand, like sober people, who've had crazy firsthand encounters. I don't understand how they're doing this as actors. Very often, it's unwanted. It ruins their lives. It's sad. You know, I ended up in San Marino, uh, at Lu Elizondo's invitation, and then Lu couldn't come, so I ended up [laughs] speaking in Lu's place at a UFO meeting. It was crazy. But I met so many people who were just like, "Eric, you know, let me explain my experience to you." And I'm just not prepared for these highly detailed stories that have so much similarity one to the next. You know, like the Skinwalker Ranch thing on, uh, the History Channel is look, looks incredibly junky, put out by Prometheus Entertainment. I know Brandon Fugal, the owner of the ranch, and I know Eric Bard. We keep talking via phone. Eric Bard is like almost the only other person who has some idea of what differential forms are, tensor analysis is. He's a sober, normal human being sitting out there on a ranch trying to figure out what the hell he's looking at. I don't think he's lying to me, and I don't think Brandon is lying to me. And then you hear their stories, like the, the Gary Nolan thing, I was completely unprepared. Have you dealt with Gary?

02:47:38
Joe Rogan: No. I watched him on Lex though.

02:47:41
Eric Weinstein: I think Gary told me a story where he's like dealing with a subject. He's a medical guy, and that's how he got involved with this. And, you know, somehow the medical pers- the medical person that he is is talking to a subject who says, "You know, I encountered a spinning disk in the sky or whatever, and a ball of light comes," and you're like, "Oh, brother, another one of these stories." And he's like, you know, "And the ball of light entered my body, and I was in pain, but I was, it was okay, and then it exited and whatever." And then Gary looks at the person, and there's a path of necrosis exactly where the person describes this thing [laughs] entering and exiting. Like, what? Are you, are you... Like, tell me what the level of conspiracy is here that would be necessary to get all of this indirect evidence. And this is the, the basic puzzle of UFOs. Zero responsible adult direct evidence in the public domain. Zero, so far as I can tell. More indirect evidence than you can possibly imagine with sober, normal people claiming things that I can't believe, firsthand stuff. And then, and then it gets weirder and worse from that. I would love to keep this just at metallic flying objects. But like, no, it, it's always gonna be like, no, they, they go under the water, and then, you know, the next level is like cattle mutilations. Like, oh, please don't bring in cattle mutilation. Oh yeah, the stapes, you know, the smallest bone in the body, the three bones that make mammals mammals, uh, you know, one of them seems to be frequently missing. And then, like Paul Hellyer and Haim Eshed and, uh, is it Ben Rich? Then there's this like crazy level where the former Canadian, Canadian Defense Minister believes that there's a galactic federation, the humans are in contact, and they... Is head of the Israeli sp- It's like, uh, enough. I can't handle it. I don't know what we're looking at, and I'd love to keep it at something sober, and I see zero direct evidence. And if we're gonna go on the direct evidence, Elon is right. It's bullshit. Tough luck. But I don't know how this amount of indirect evidence occurs because I don't think the government is capable of faking this. On the other hand, if we go by the indirect evidence, how is it that none of us have, like even the center of mass coordinates of this Tic Tac. You, you'll never hear me talking about the Tic Tac or the Zimbabwe kids or whatever. Why? Because since the mid-'70s, we've been able to do CGI in Star Wars that looks much more realistic than any video I've ever seen. So you, you can show me any video, and I don't care. It's just not interesting to me. We don't have center of mass coordinates for this Tic Tac that's claimed by the US government over the Nimitz? Please. Oh, because it's sensitive. We don't... Stop it. Shut up. Hush.

02:50:27
Joe Rogan: So is it they don't have it? They won't release it?

02:50:29
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. They claim it's not relea- it can't be released to the public.

02:50:33
Joe Rogan: Right.

02:50:34
Eric Weinstein: I'm like, "So downsample it. Derez it. It's not even our ship, people. You're claiming it's something you can't understand, and you have the 3D coordinates, and, and I can't play with it in a model on like Google Earth or SketchUp or something?" Go F yourselves. You're gonna stove pipe this need-to-know. I have a need to know. I'm trying to do science.

02:50:57
Joe Rogan: Is that the most compelling one to you, the Tic Tac?

02:51:01
Eric Weinstein: Take your pick. You-

02:51:01
Joe Rogan: It has the most, uh, the, the most qualified people watching it.

02:51:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But I don't, I don't wanna get involved with Go Fast or Gimbal or this or that or the Phoenix Lights or the Belgian... It's like, stop teasing me. Yeah. This is the Meredith Baker problem. When I was a 14-year-old guy, I thought Meredith Baker was the hottest thing in the world.

02:51:25
Joe Rogan: Oh, Meredith.

02:51:25
Eric Weinstein: And I wanted to go out with her. What?

02:51:27
Joe Rogan: That's a girl you knew?

02:51:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:51:28
Joe Rogan: Okay.

02:51:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And every time I asked her out, she's like, "I really wanna go out with you, but I really have to wash my hair," or-

02:51:35
Joe Rogan: Mm

02:51:35
Eric Weinstein: ... "I really have to hang out with my..." I was like, "This is not going very well." At some point, somebody pulls me aside and said, "Eric, you're Jewish. She's Mormon. Get the hint. She love- she, she likes you." But there was nothing gonna happen. Okay, I get it. This is Meredith Baker. You don't want, for some reason, to tell me what's actually going on. Then don't waste my time. Don't spend my credibility.

02:51:58
Joe Rogan: Do you think that they don't wanna release the information because they're still trying to digest it themselves, and they don't want it to get out publicly and get into the hands of China-

02:52:06
Eric Weinstein: I'm not smart enough to figure this out. I believe-

02:52:08
Joe Rogan: Well, wouldn't... If there was something that was beyond our understanding-

02:52:13
Eric Weinstein: You want, y- y- let me... Okay

02:52:14
Joe Rogan: ... would you want that data to be released?

02:52:17
Eric Weinstein: Can we have a glass of something so that I can hide behind the fact that I had a sip-

02:52:21
Joe Rogan: Okay

02:52:22
Eric Weinstein: ... of alcohol?

02:52:22
Joe Rogan: All right, I'm gonna take a leak again-

02:52:23
Eric Weinstein: All right

02:52:23
Joe Rogan: ... and we'll, uh, come back with ice and alcohol for Eric-

02:52:26
Eric Weinstein: Perfect

02:52:26
Joe Rogan: ... who apparently should drink.

02:52:27
Eric Weinstein: Thank you.

02:52:28
Joe Rogan: Cheers, sir.

02:52:29
Eric Weinstein: Cheers. [glasses clink]

02:52:30
Joe Rogan: All right, now you got your excuse.

02:52:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:52:34
Joe Rogan: Let's talk crazy.

02:52:35
Eric Weinstein: All right.

02:52:36
Joe Rogan: Oof, that's good.

02:52:37
Eric Weinstein: Um, yeah, it is good. Thank you.

02:52:42
Joe Rogan: Glenmorange.

02:52:44
Eric Weinstein: Morangy?

02:52:45
Joe Rogan: Is that how you say it?

02:52:45
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. How is it spelled? I thought it was Morangib. Yeah.

02:52:49
Joe Rogan: How you say it?

02:52:50
Eric Weinstein: Glenmore orangy.

02:52:51
Joe Rogan: Glenmore orangy?

02:52:52
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:52:53
Joe Rogan: I call, I call it Morangy, but I don't think that's how you say it either.

02:52:55
Eric Weinstein: We're eight... I think it's Morangy.

02:52:56
Joe Rogan: Glenmorangy. Uh, 18-year-old-

02:52:59
Eric Weinstein: I, I thought it was Glenmorangy. Um-

02:53:00
Joe Rogan: So where were we?

02:53:02
Eric Weinstein: You wanted to know what I think is really going on.

02:53:03
Joe Rogan: Yeah, what, what's really going on, man.

02:53:06
Eric Weinstein: Um, one possibility is we did a lot of bad stuff, and we cannot get out of the fact that if we release what it is that we actually know and what has been going on, there's gonna be a lot of consequence.

02:53:16
Joe Rogan: Bad stuff as in?

02:53:19
Eric Weinstein: In maybe people got killed. Maybe people were made crazy when they weren't crazy because they saw things. So if you think about, um... You ever met deconfliction?

02:53:31
Joe Rogan: Deconfliction.

02:53:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:53:32
Joe Rogan: No.

02:53:34
Eric Weinstein: If you have a blue-on-blue situation, that means that two official representatives of the US government are stumbling over each other. You've got local law enforcement, like the first scene of The Matrix, um, is-

02:53:48
Joe Rogan: Morangy?

02:53:48
Eric Weinstein: You suddenly got really fucking intimidating, Joe. Now I'm scared. Um-

02:53:54
Joe Rogan: Comes up.

02:53:54
Eric Weinstein: Just asking what it really is.

02:53:55
Joe Rogan: Comes up today's news.

02:53:56
Eric Weinstein: Oh, wow. Nicely done.

02:53:59
Joe Rogan: "US alerted Russia to Biden's Ukraine visit for deconfliction purposes." Wow.

02:54:05
Eric Weinstein: Jamie?

02:54:06
Joe Rogan: So, hey-

02:54:07
Eric Weinstein: For the win

02:54:07
Joe Rogan: ... don't blow up this city because Biden's gonna be there.

02:54:10
Eric Weinstein: And the, there are three systems that stop the first scene in The Matrix where the agents show up, and local law enforcement is like, "I think we can handle one little girl."

02:54:20
Joe Rogan: Right.

02:54:21
Eric Weinstein: "No, Lieutenant, your men are already dead." That's a deconfliction situation. And we have three things, I think, called Case Explorer, uh, RISS Safe, and, um, oh, God, Sa- Safety Net. And we don't know about these things because this is only for grownups in the government. So they have to, like, file what it is that they're doing, and then, "Oh, we've got an undercover agent who's posing as a [laughs] Colombian drug lord. Don't bust him 'cause we have got, like, 10 years invested in this thing." So I tried to use this system. I called up, I think, Case Explorer for South Florida and k- got into a half an hour... Ca- Case Explorer.

02:55:05
Joe Rogan: Okay.

02:55:05
Eric Weinstein: The one. Okay.

02:55:06
Joe Rogan: I wonder how you found that.

02:55:07
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Uh, try, um, RISS Safe.

02:55:12
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

02:55:13
Eric Weinstein: I think that's the one.

02:55:13
Joe Rogan: I don't wanna keep looking up all these websites.

02:55:15
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:55:15
Joe Rogan: Yeah, he's gonna get in trouble.

02:55:16
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:55:16
Joe Rogan: I'm gonna get flagged. But I'll do it, I'll do it.

02:55:18
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Um, so this is how they deconflict blue-on-blue. But you see, you and I are also blue. We're having a conversation, and we may be stumbling on something the government doesn't want us to know, which is what happened when COVID maybe spilled out. Yeah, you see?

02:55:35
Joe Rogan: "Officer safety event deconfliction system safeguarding law enforcement through information sharing."

02:55:40
Eric Weinstein: Right. So this is how they play keep away from the rest of us, where they tell each other what they're doing, and the rest of us can't know what's going on. Now, when you say blue on blue, there's a situation that I wanna give a name to because it doesn't have a name, which I'm gonna call baby on cobalt and cobalt on baby. Baby and cobalt are two forms of blue. Cobalt is government, and baby is, like, civilians, like you and me. What happens when a civilian stumbles on one of these operations? They're not allowed to use these systems. I, I called up the South Florida, I think, Case Explorer, had a half-an-hour conversation. They were telling me all sorts of stuff. And I said, "I'd like to hear about, uh, Jeffrey Epstein." Like, "Who's calling?" "I'm a private citizen." Uh, "This call will be terminated in five seconds." And then they ca- they hung up on me. So I realized, okay, ordinary human beings cannot use these systems. I think a lot of what's going on is that we keep tripping over government operations in the cobalt sector, but we're baby blue.

02:56:46
Joe Rogan: Okay.

02:56:46
Eric Weinstein: And they don't have any system for fi- figuring out how to get rid of a civilian [laughs] who stumbles on a, like, a drug smuggling operation.

02:56:53
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

02:56:54
Eric Weinstein: Like, okay, so Jeffrey Epstein trafficks your daughter. What do you do? If he's an intelligence asset, you don't know. You just want the creep away from your kid, so you file a complaint or whatever. Now you've got a situation where they don't know what to do because you've got a civilian and you've got some sort of super secret dark thing that isn't supposed to exist. My claim is that conspiracy theorist is basically b- uh, cobalt on baby. In other words, the government warning a private citizen, "Get away from that thing."

02:57:25
Joe Rogan: Okay.

02:57:26
Eric Weinstein: "We will start to destroy your reputation if you do not cease and desist." But there's no plan. So if you were the guy who figured out D-Day, you say, "Wow, these are... There's a huge, uh, increase in the inflatable balloons. I think that they might be tanks. There's no troops under that, uh, army designation," you'd be a threat to this incredible operation because you have free speech and nobody-

02:57:47
Joe Rogan: Right

02:57:47
Eric Weinstein: ... knows how to shut you up.

02:57:48
Joe Rogan: Right.

02:57:49
Eric Weinstein: So consider that none of us know the answer to, what does the government do when private citizens start to figure out statecraft narratives are bullshit? So for example, Jeff Sachs was called in to supervise the investigation into the origin of COVID at The Lancet, and he puts in place all of the people [chuckles] who are involved with this through D- uh, Peter Daszak. He later figures out, "Oh my God, I just put the foxes in charge of the henhouse."

02:58:17
Joe Rogan: Mm.

02:58:18
Eric Weinstein: And he blows the whistle. So what if we have, like a, um, since the 1970s, a 45-year-old workaround of the Biological Weapons Convention in Wuhan, we've created this thing called One Health and the EcoHealth Alliance we took over as a hippie charity. And if you ever take a look at the board of advisors of EcoHealth Alliance, it's wildly overpowered, including-

02:58:40
Joe Rogan: Right

02:58:40
Eric Weinstein: ... my old mentor, uh, who's the head of the Sloan Foundation, and the ex-head of the National Science Foundation. None of you guys look at the board of directors? Crazy. We keep tripping on these official statecraft narratives. That's why they won't let us question the Zelensky stuff. They won't let us question the origin of COVID. They won't let us question the vaccines. They won't let us question whether there are therapeutics. These are all cobalt on baby things. It's horse dewormer. What's wrong with you people? You're all lunatics. You're pa- you're pathological losers. Okay, I get it. You're just destroying my Wikipedia entry because I keep asking questions, because actually you need to have a timeout. You're out of control. I'm fine. But you're gonna turn this into pathologizing. When you pathologize people who've seen the truth, now you've got a real problem. You gaslit American citizens because you couldn't do your effing job? Really? That's interesting. Did you kill anyone? Did you do wet work? Did you do digital wet work? What did we just find out from the Twitter Files, right? How many times did I say, "I'm being throttled, I'm being manipulated"? Um, the government doesn't wanna take responsibility. We have this, what is it, GEC that's, uh, from the State Department. We have CISA inside of Department of Homeland Security. These people are creating fake conversations on Twitter. They're creating fake reports about the Hunter Biden laptop to influence the election. We didn't have a free and fair election. It had nothing to do with ballot stuffing or miscounting. So I believe that partially why we're not talking is that we've done so many bad things around UFOs that we don't wanna come clean.

03:00:13
Joe Rogan: Wow, that's interesting.

03:00:14
Eric Weinstein: Okay? So that's one thing. Two, if there's... Imagine that there's one enormous update coming, like your life is partially a lie. I think many of us have figured out that we originally believed that it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and now we're not quite so sure, right? I don't know. Do you know that it was Lee Harvey Oswald? W- well, uh, certainly the Warren report doesn't hold a lot of water with me anymore. A lot of us are going to have to deal with the fact that a lot of what we've been taught is crazy, is not crazy, like the fact that this v- virus seems to have come out of a lab where we were trying to figure out how to put a furin cl- [chuckles] cleavage site into a humanized coronavirus, and we're leaving in place the exact architecture that got us into this mess. W- without hearings? Without hearings? There's no way we would do this without hearings. So what we're seeing is we're seeing an explosion, a collision between social media-empowered humans who are smart trying to figure out the story, and the government stonewalling us so that we can't figure out our own lives. Like, what... Did my children get in- injected or infected with something that came out of your stupidity because Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak d- can't do their goddamn jobs? Maybe. Are we gonna have a tribunal about the fact that you infected planet Earth and you decreased human life expectancy by causing us to fight a different COVID envi- uh, you know, infection every year? Maybe. These are hugely consequential issues, and I believe that UFOs are in part hugely consequential issues for reasons that may have to do with the fact that this is of the fake version, right? It's not Overlord, it's bodyguard or fortitude like. I don't know. But we've certainly gaslit people, and I think we're not prepared to take responsibility for ruining the lives of ordinary Americans who are smart and honest because we couldn't do our jobs in the intelligence and defense communities.

03:02:06
Joe Rogan: What do you think is responsible for the shift in communication about this stuff now? Because in the past, no one would acknowledge it. No one would talk about it.

03:02:16
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:02:16
Joe Rogan: Now they're talking about it fairly openly, and they're discussing it. When I f- think about things like that, I go, "Well, there's the cynic in me that says, 'Oh, if they're saying this, then it's probably horseshit. They're probably covering up-"

03:02:27
Eric Weinstein: Right. Yeah

03:02:27
Joe Rogan: "... for some drones they've created.'"

03:02:29
Eric Weinstein: They are.

03:02:30
Joe Rogan: You think?

03:02:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, yes. In other words, the UFO phenomenon is multiple things. We know that it's a cover story for things like the stealth bomber. We also know that it's a cover s- that it's a cover story for our inability to take action against surveillance over flights of dirigibles and balloons. We also know that it's people misseeing things. Like, I've seen two UFOs recently that fooled other people, but I was able to figure out partially, one with the help of Mick West, who is my antagonist, but also we're sort of, we're frenemies kind of. Um, and the other one t- was like a Mylar balloon that looked like a spherical fireworks display off a- The coast between Malibu and Catalina

03:03:12
Joe Rogan: The way it was being reflected by the sunlight?

03:03:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. You know, the thing people don't understand about Mylar balloons is that at night, a Mylar balloon is a very confusing object to encounter-

03:03:20
Joe Rogan: Mm

03:03:20
Eric Weinstein: ... because all you're seeing is, like, randomly scattered light.

03:03:22
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:03:23
Eric Weinstein: And it's like, oh my God, you know, this is like the Phoenix lights. And I have-

03:03:26
Joe Rogan: No, that makes sense

03:03:26
Eric Weinstein: ... I, I have, like, video of people in line at a Thai restaurant saying, "Oh my God, I've never seen anything like this." And of course, I go across the street to investigate it, and it says happy birthday.

03:03:36
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:03:37
Eric Weinstein: So there's no question that it's a certain amount of people wanting to see things that aren't there.

03:03:42
Joe Rogan: Yes. That's a big attraction.

03:03:43
Eric Weinstein: Yep. Um, so this desire thing, you have to moderate your desire.

03:03:47
Joe Rogan: Yes.

03:03:48
Eric Weinstein: It's certainly a cover story. It's certainly, um, stuff we can't explain. But the claim really coming from inside the beast is we've seen stuff that is so clear that we know that there's something there. And Eric, we just can't show it to you. And by the way, the reason that it seems to be, uh, government restricted, first of all, it's very hard to take good video with a phone. I don't know if you've noticed this.

03:04:16
Joe Rogan: They're getting better at it.

03:04:18
Eric Weinstein: I found, like, I now spend my flights, I take the window seat, and I sit there with my camera glued, uh, to the window under, um, s- stop action. What is it? Is it called slow-mo, right?

03:04:32
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

03:04:32
Eric Weinstein: Or not slow-mo, the time lapse. The, I, I'm up in the sky for a long time. There's basically nothing up there. But-

03:04:39
Joe Rogan: So you're trying to find things-

03:04:40
Eric Weinstein: Oh-

03:04:40
Joe Rogan: ... on your phone?

03:04:41
Eric Weinstein: But in part, it's like-

03:04:42
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:04:43
Eric Weinstein: ... I do this thing where I take license plates, and every time I see a license plate with three letters like NSA or MIT, I, I take a picture of it. So I have a huge number of these things because I'm trying to train my brain, here's what random noise looks like. Like, in other words, it's not telling you to do something.

03:05:00
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:05:00
Eric Weinstein: It's not, if it says BTC, I shouldn't go out and buy a bunch of Bitcoin.

03:05:03
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:05:04
Eric Weinstein: Um, people don't realize that you have to train yourself because you're gonna see lots of patterns once you start looking for them. In, in finance, I, I used to build random number generators that had the correlation of the markets, and I would generate pictures. And the financial professors, professionals would say, "Oh, we've gotta buy, this is a classic head and shoulders pattern, and there's gonna break out at such and..." It's like, I generated this out of a simulator written in Python. Um, so people are just, they want to believe so much-

03:05:30
Joe Rogan: Yeah

03:05:30
Eric Weinstein: ... that they're gonna lie.

03:05:31
Joe Rogan: It's an issue.

03:05:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:05:32
Joe Rogan: It's an issue with Bigfoot. It's an issue with everything.

03:05:34
Eric Weinstein: It's an issue with all of us.

03:05:35
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:05:35
Eric Weinstein: It's an issue with me, too. I have desires, and I have to-

03:05:38
Joe Rogan: Oh

03:05:38
Eric Weinstein: ... keep my desires in check.

03:05:39
Joe Rogan: Yeah, everyone. I am horrible.

03:05:41
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:05:41
Joe Rogan: Horrible with, uh, the unknown. Horrible with UFOs. Horrible with-

03:05:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, you have to camp and decamp.

03:05:45
Joe Rogan: Yeah. Yep.

03:05:45
Eric Weinstein: And that's what, I think what you do is great, which is you sort of believe and then you say, [laughs] "But-"

03:05:50
Joe Rogan: I give up. I change.

03:05:52
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:05:52
Joe Rogan: I go back and forth.

03:05:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's what I do.

03:05:54
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:05:54
Eric Weinstein: Now, at the end of the day, once you've pulled out all the mundane things, the question is, is there a resi- residue left of things that actually are mind-blowing? I can't tell you until I actually see stuff that somebody's willing to say, "We captured this. It looks like this."

03:06:11
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:06:11
Eric Weinstein: But I can tell you that I am assured repeatedly by people who seem incredibly sober, who do not seem to be great actors, that they have seen amazing things. We have data that is as clear as you can imagine, and we can't release it. And then you have this question of, is there anyone smart who's trained in this [laughs] very small number of areas who's looked at this? Or are you just gonna, like, eyeball it and pretend that it violates physical law when you don't even know physical, you don't know physical law.

03:06:42
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:06:43
Eric Weinstein: So far as I know, Eric W. Davis is the top person who knows what a tensor is on this project. Are you, are you kidding me? Try to imagine that you're trying to do the Manhattan Project with, with, like, K-pop groups. It's that big of a difference. People will say, "Well, we have electrical engineers." Like, I don't care. I'm talking quantum field theories. I'm talking differential geometry, general relativity. And, and people are tired of, like, "You're an elitist. You're a snob." Oh, go fuck yourself. I shouldn't have said that. Please edit that out.

03:07:14
Joe Rogan: Oh, you said it soft.

03:07:15
Eric Weinstein: What?

03:07:15
Joe Rogan: You said it really soft.

03:07:16
Eric Weinstein: I know, I know.

03:07:17
Joe Rogan: It was very soft. Go fuck yourself.

03:07:18
Eric Weinstein: But it's just like... [laughs]

03:07:19
Joe Rogan: One of the kindest ever.

03:07:20
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:07:22
Joe Rogan: There was no anger in your voice.

03:07:23
Eric Weinstein: I'm, I'm trying to be an adult, but it's been three years. You've been wasting my time.

03:07:27
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:07:27
Eric Weinstein: Y- y- you say the word stove pipe as if it means something. Shut up and show us what you've got. We're your team.

03:07:33
Joe Rogan: So I like your theory that they're covering up for some stuff that is, I mean, if, if really people have been harmed and... I mean, th- this, one of the claims of, uh, back engineering these things that's always fascinated me is that there was, uh, B- Bob Lazar said there's a previous person who was working on the job. They died. They, they tried to do something, and there was some sort of an explosion, and it was limited into what... I think you and him together would be the greatest podcast of all time. Would you be interested in doing that?

03:08:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, it-

03:08:09
Joe Rogan: Because you'd be able to tell. Oh, yeah, we'll, we'll dose you up.

03:08:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but let me say something.

03:08:12
Joe Rogan: We'll give you what you want. What do you want, Adderall? You want mushrooms? We got-

03:08:15
Eric Weinstein: I want a v- I want a, a, a line of Sonoran Desert toad-

03:08:18
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:08:18
Eric Weinstein: ... that every time you answer a question wrong, you gotta lick the toad.

03:08:21
Joe Rogan: [laughs] But you would be able to tell whether or not it's nonsense.

03:08:25
Eric Weinstein: Uh, yes and no. I'm not the best person.

03:08:27
Joe Rogan: You'd be better at it than me.

03:08:28
Eric Weinstein: I'd be better than you.

03:08:29
Joe Rogan: For sure.

03:08:29
Eric Weinstein: For sure. But you wanna know, look, Sean Carroll and I-

03:08:32
Joe Rogan: No, no, no, no, no, no, no

03:08:32
Eric Weinstein: ... Sean Carroll and I don't get along.

03:08:34
Joe Rogan: You, you need to be here for this.

03:08:35
Eric Weinstein: All right.

03:08:36
Joe Rogan: You.

03:08:36
Eric Weinstein: I'll, I'll show up.

03:08:37
Joe Rogan: Specifically.

03:08:38
Eric Weinstein: I'll show up?

03:08:39
Joe Rogan: You gotta be ready, man. This is, [laughs] you and him together would be so fascinating. His story hasn't fucking changed-

03:08:48
Eric Weinstein: It's-

03:08:48
Joe Rogan: ... since 1989, man. It's, it's, if he's telling the truth, if he really was this propulsions expert from Los Alamos Labs who they brought in because they were kind of trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, and everything's compartmentalized, so no one can talk to anyone, so no real science can be done.

03:09:03
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:09:03
Joe Rogan: And they're saying, "Tell me what you know. Like, let's w- figure this out." And he gets to it, and almost immediately, he's like, "This is nothing that we know how to do. This is nothing that we're making. This is something from some, it's something that's not even designed for a human form. It's-" Designed if a, if, if it's a physical vehicle-

03:09:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:09:22
Joe Rogan: ... it's designed for something much smaller than humans.

03:09:24
Eric Weinstein: I know nothing about Bob Lazar. I've seen something about element 115, which I-

03:09:29
Joe Rogan: Yes

03:09:29
Eric Weinstein: ... don't understand is like he predicted when, uh, well, yes, they're, they're indexed [laughs] by the number of protons. So I can predict that the, you know, the elements we have yet to discover are gonna be in the same numerical- [laughs]

03:09:42
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:09:42
Eric Weinstein: I don't get this. [laughs] Um-

03:09:44
Joe Rogan: That's interesting.

03:09:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but the, I think the claim is different. The claim is, is that this element must have some property, or that-

03:09:50
Joe Rogan: He's saying it's a stable version of this element, and that in wherever these beings are from-

03:09:56
Eric Weinstein: I see

03:09:56
Joe Rogan: ... they have access to a stable version of this element that we don't have access to here.

03:10:02
Eric Weinstein: So let me make an analogy. Gold, I don't know if you know this about gold, what we call gold is the single stable version of gold. There are a bunch of isotopes that are all radioactive that turn into other stuff.

03:10:17
Joe Rogan: Wow.

03:10:17
Eric Weinstein: So, like, if I have to pay you in gold, if I choose a gold that isn't the one that works-

03:10:23
Joe Rogan: Oh, no

03:10:24
Eric Weinstein: ... it's completely unstable. So-

03:10:25
Joe Rogan: You gave me unstable gold.

03:10:27
Eric Weinstein: I know. I gave you un-

03:10:27
Joe Rogan: What happens?

03:10:28
Eric Weinstein: Then it's, it's, you-

03:10:28
Joe Rogan: Do you die if you touch it?

03:10:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, y- you certainly, you'll certainly-

03:10:31
Joe Rogan: Not good

03:10:31
Eric Weinstein: ... get some radiation, but you'll also find that [laughs] there's much less gold every time you check on your amount.

03:10:37
Joe Rogan: My precious.

03:10:37
Eric Weinstein: Oh, wow.

03:10:38
Joe Rogan: Right?

03:10:39
Eric Weinstein: Whoa. But what I'm trying to get at is that, um, it may be a claim that there's an island of stability. Like with gold, there's one isotope that's stable.

03:10:47
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:10:48
Eric Weinstein: Um, I don't know anything about that. I'm not the guy for that, but I can, I can... Here's the thing, Joe. I can tell you what I know and what I don't know, and I could certainly probe him. The, the thing that I'm uncomfortable about, I don't know if you saw my interaction with Hal Puthoff.

03:11:02
Joe Rogan: No, I did not.

03:11:04
Eric Weinstein: So I interview Hal Puthoff, and we're talking about this stuff, and it goes to remote viewing. I'm like, "Oh, brother, we have to do remote viewing." No, but if you think about it, when you get, like, a FaceTime call from your wife who's on, traveling on business or something, or you're traveling on business, doesn't matter, that's remote viewing.

03:11:23
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

03:11:24
Eric Weinstein: So you don't realize it, but something completely mundane to you, like a video call, is a version of this insane-sounding thing.

03:11:34
Joe Rogan: It's just done through a device, much like a camera lens sees things-

03:11:39
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:11:40
Joe Rogan: ... much like your eyes see things. You're just doing it physically. It's doing it through a device.

03:11:44
Eric Weinstein: So-

03:11:44
Joe Rogan: You're doing it-

03:11:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So when you-

03:11:46
Joe Rogan: ... biologically

03:11:46
Eric Weinstein: ... hear Hal Puthoff say that he made money in the market, that he, and he [laughs] needed to raise money for a school, so instead of doing a bake sale, he did remote viewing in the market, I noticed one eyebrow just went up.

03:11:59
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:11:59
Eric Weinstein: Sean Connery style.

03:12:00
Joe Rogan: What do you think about that?

03:12:01
Eric Weinstein: Uh, we did not have a comfortable interaction.

03:12:04
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:12:04
Eric Weinstein: I was respectful, but I-

03:12:06
Joe Rogan: Is it-

03:12:06
Eric Weinstein: ... I certainly communicated that for a guy who's trying to prove that this stuff is real-

03:12:11
Joe Rogan: Yeah

03:12:11
Eric Weinstein: ... wouldn't you like to invite me to your private island if this stuff works, rather than making exactly $26,000 or whatever the target amount was?

03:12:20
Joe Rogan: Right. Why wouldn't you keep going with that?

03:12:22
Eric Weinstein: Right? It's like, he's like, "Well, I'm too busy." It's like, well, I understand being too busy to make money because I've certainly exhibited that behavior, but if making money is the best way of advertising that this stuff is real, why wouldn't you actually do it? So that was a very uncomfortable interaction that I had with Hal.

03:12:43
Joe Rogan: That doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't do it. You know, there could be this thought that, and this is, you know, what, what people would say about psychic ability as well, there could be that thought that some people feel that abusing that power or using the power for personal gain-

03:12:59
Eric Weinstein: I tot-

03:13:00
Joe Rogan: ... would somehow or another-

03:13:01
Eric Weinstein: Oh, believe-

03:13:01
Joe Rogan: ... diminish its effectiveness.

03:13:03
Eric Weinstein: I, I so much wanna make money from geometric unity, and I'm so-

03:13:07
Joe Rogan: But, you know, this-

03:13:07
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait

03:13:07
Joe Rogan: ... but it's not magic.

03:13:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, b- but there's something about not in my father's house. You don't wanna be the money changer in the temple.

03:13:16
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:13:16
Eric Weinstein: I'm happy to make money hand over fist, and I'm pro-capitalism. But, like, selling geometric unity makes me feel sort of sick to my stomach. And I think about it. I mean, I'm, I'm not so pure that I don't.

03:13:27
Joe Rogan: I see what you're saying.

03:13:28
Eric Weinstein: But what I'm trying to say is you're trying to do something that's supposed to bring people together, and you have a world in which we're losing all support for blue sky stuff.

03:13:36
Joe Rogan: Well-

03:13:37
Eric Weinstein: So I think what h- we, in Hal's case, I just felt sad that I, I threw a bunch of proto-shade that people as- uh, assembled into doubting. I think Hal was sincere, but I think what he was saying didn't make sense.

03:13:56
Joe Rogan: The remote viewing part of it.

03:13:57
Eric Weinstein: Yes. And so I felt bad about, like-

03:14:01
Joe Rogan: What if it's possible? What if it's just not possible most of the time?

03:14:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, for example, let's imagine you, he claims that p- they sent people to the bottom of the sea in submarines who were able to remote view. And so the water is acting as a screen-

03:14:16
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm

03:14:16
Eric Weinstein: ... where, like, light can't get to the bottom-

03:14:19
Joe Rogan: Okay

03:14:19
Eric Weinstein: ... of the Marianas Trench, for example.

03:14:21
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:14:21
Eric Weinstein: But neutrinos can. So if you imagine that there was some particle that could penetrate and be received, we have telescopes for photons, for gravitons, which is LIGO, and for neutrinos, which is, like, I don't know. Is that IceCube or POLAR-BEAR? So you could imagine that there's some field that can penetrate the oceans that could be received. I can come up with a sci-fi story.

03:14:45
Joe Rogan: Right. So you would imagine that these neutrinos are containing information-

03:14:50
Eric Weinstein: You could-

03:14:50
Joe Rogan: ... and that they're attached to everything all over the Earth.

03:14:52
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm not saying that that's what remote viewing is.

03:14:53
Joe Rogan: Right. I know what you're saying.

03:14:54
Eric Weinstein: But I'm saying-

03:14:54
Joe Rogan: Yeah

03:14:55
Eric Weinstein: ... if you wanted to say, "Eric, a gun is to your head. We, we believe in remote viewing. Tell me a fairy tale."

03:15:02
Joe Rogan: Right. Okay.

03:15:02
Eric Weinstein: I could come up with fairy tales.

03:15:03
Joe Rogan: Okay. And that could be one of them.

03:15:05
Eric Weinstein: Uh-huh. Yeah.

03:15:06
Joe Rogan: Do you think that it's possible that there are states of consciousness that can be achieved through some form of meditation or some form to, s- some- Form of training the mind to get into a very specific focus that would allow you to access information that is otherwise unavailable.

03:15:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:15:31
Joe Rogan: I don't, I don't have any experience in that. I haven't done it, right? So I would imagine it can't be done because I can't do it or haven't done it. But-

03:15:41
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:15:41
Joe Rogan: ... isn't it possible that there are states of mind that can be achieved through, whether it's holotropic breathing or whether it's meditation, there's states of mind that can, uh, that are measurably achievable, that are very different from the current consciousness-

03:15:58
Eric Weinstein: Brilliant

03:15:58
Joe Rogan: ... w- two people are just talking. Is it possible that there's a way that some people have of occasionally tapping in-

03:16:06
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:16:06
Joe Rogan: ... to information that's unavailable to you or I right now?

03:16:08
Eric Weinstein: So let's do a junior version and then get to your question.

03:16:11
Joe Rogan: Okay.

03:16:11
Eric Weinstein: The junior version is, is there a way that we can, like, look inside your body without opening your body up to figure out whether you have pancreatic cancer?

03:16:20
Joe Rogan: MRIs.

03:16:21
Eric Weinstein: Ah. So tomography and the radon transform. The point is, any sufficiently vol- uh, advanced mathematics or physics seems like deep black magic.

03:16:33
Joe Rogan: Yeah, indistinguishable from magic.

03:16:34
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.

03:16:35
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:16:35
Eric Weinstein: So it's an Arthur C. Clarke problem.

03:16:37
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:16:38
Eric Weinstein: Now, if you ask me, I'm very freaked out about this cattle mutilation because people I know swear by it, and they say, "This is absolute..." You know, "Come, come see the autopsies."

03:16:47
Joe Rogan: There's been some weird ones, for sure.

03:16:49
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

03:16:50
Joe Rogan: They're fascinating.

03:16:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:16:51
Joe Rogan: But, uh, I mean, if you're gonna come all the way here to fuck with our cows...

03:16:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, no. The issue is-

03:16:56
Joe Rogan: [laughs] They don't do it to people, is my point

03:17:00
Eric Weinstein: ... the stap- the stapes, yeah, but the point-

03:17:02
Joe Rogan: Isn't that weird?

03:17:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but the stapes, again, people think mammals are defined by, like, live birth and breasts and, and on.

03:17:11
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

03:17:11
Eric Weinstein: No. It's three bones in the ear, if I'm not mistaken. And-

03:17:15
Joe Rogan: Oh

03:17:15
Eric Weinstein: ... those three bones have to do with insectivore an- uh, ancestors who probably needed their ears detached from their jaws so they could hear high-pitched whining. That's a theory. We don't know if it's true.

03:17:27
Joe Rogan: Whoa.

03:17:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay? Now, those three little bones, that mean so much, um, what they do is they transmit sound through the tympanic membrane to the organ of Corti so that the cilia in this rolled-up hor- uh, seashell in your ear vibrate at particular frequencies. So when I- I'm talking to you and I say, "Joe, that's absolutely ridiculous," what we're, what I'm doing is I'm stimulating different hair follicles in your organ of Corti to vibrate at different times. Or if I go-

03:17:57
Joe Rogan: Oh

03:17:57
Eric Weinstein: ... "Wise men say-"

03:18:00
Joe Rogan: Right

03:18:00
Eric Weinstein: ... that's tone three halves frequencies above back to same tone. Those things are perceived as pitch. I could imagine something caring about the idea of, how do I communicate thoughts through the t- the tympanic membrane using the stapes? Does it sound exotic? Yes. Does it sound like bullshit? Absolutely. However, it's not outside of the realm using the s- the doubly scientific method, which is you imagine that there's intelligence on the other end of this thing, and it's gonna use every trick in the book, 'cause it's smarter than we are, to figure out how to communicate with us. Now, have I gone out into the desert? Have I prayed? Have I tried to get these things to talk to me? I have. Right? I'm an atheist, but these things have a religious effect on people. They view them as angels. They view them as transcendent beings. They think that Ezekiel, uh, the Book of Ezekiel is about this stuff. It's like, okay. It's only my self-respect. It's not [laughs] you know, I'm gonna run an experiment, because it's cheap. Why wouldn't I do that?

03:19:10
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:19:10
Eric Weinstein: And why wouldn't I do that heartfelt? Every Friday, Joe, you should come for our, to our family for Shabbat dinner. We pray. We may be atheist, but not on Friday night.

03:19:19
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:19:19
Eric Weinstein: Friday night we believe, right? And my claim is that there are plenty of opportunities using the doubly scientific method. If something is much smarter than us and is able to communicate these things, maybe it said to Hal, "Look, we can't interfere with you because we have a prime directive, but we can give you indirect hints." You know, I, what do I know? I don't know anything. Do I think it's likely? No. I think Hal is probably not correct, right? But is it impossible to communicate with somebody below the, the bottom of the sea? No, it's not impossible. Even using neutrinos it's not impossible. Does, is there any m- mechanism that implements it? None that I'm aware of. Do we listen for neutrino events? 100%. 1987A, the supernova, I believe that the photons and the neutrinos were screaming at us and arrived almost at the same time, because the neutrinos we now know have a tiny mass, so they wouldn't be of traveling at quite the speed of light.

03:20:15
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:20:15
Eric Weinstein: Um, now, the, the point is, let's imagine that we had Neil deGrasse Tyson on. He's not having any of this shit. He's, he's locked into, because he's not really a physicist in, in, at a practicing level, he has to worry about his respectability. He is 100% one of the most brilliant people at, at scientific exposition I've ever seen in my life. But he can't think. He's not ready to do great science, because great science has a, an element of irresponsibility to it.

03:20:48
Joe Rogan: Hmm.

03:20:49
Eric Weinstein: And what we don't understand, I think, about it is, is that when we decide that everybody has to do good science, it's like you doom yourself. Many of the greatest scientists of all time were borderline quacks. The belief, for example, that Watson and Crick had that DNA had to be a helix. I mean, I, Jim Watson's somebody I know, and I've, I dealt with for four days straight. The reason he beat Rosalind Franklin is that she couldn't spend one day not being a good scientist. She was a good scientist, and he admitted he was not. Okay? But he was convinced it had to be a helix. And from her perspective, it's like, oh, you wanna be Linus Pauling, who figured out the alpha helix in protein. So you're gonna take Linus' work, and you're gonna superimpose it on DNA and explain my Maltese cross. And it's not about male versus female. Absolutely, Jim Watson claims that if Rosalind Franklin had spent one afternoon thinking it was a helix, she would've gotten it before he did. That's an extremely generous, kind, feministic belief. She was a good scientist. He admits he was not a good scientist, but he was a great scientist, and that's the big difference. Great scientists engage in quackery. Kary Mullis taking LSD or getting stoned out of his mind, coming up with the polymerase chain reaction is an example of great science, right? Richard Feynman claiming that a particle takes every possible path it can simultaneously does not make sense, but it's great science. It's not good science.

03:22:25
Joe Rogan: So it's almost like guitar playing.

03:22:28
Eric Weinstein: Say more.

03:22:31
Joe Rogan: You can be very technically proficient, or you can figure out a way to do something someone hasn't done before, and do it in a way where you're, you're, you're crea- you're, you're using creativity and science together.

03:22:50
Eric Weinstein: Ah. Okay.

03:22:53
Joe Rogan: Does this make sense?

03:22:54
Eric Weinstein: If you look at, for example, Jeff Beck's version of Drown in My Own Tears with Jules Holmes-

03:23:02
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:23:03
Eric Weinstein: That is one of the greatest vocal performances I've ever heard. I cr- I, I pulled over to the side of the road and wept when I heard-

03:23:10
Joe Rogan: Mm

03:23:10
Eric Weinstein: ... that thing. 'Cause he died, and I was just like, "Yeah, whatever. Jeff Beck died. I know he's supposed to be the greatest with his, you know, blah, blah, blah." It's like, I have no time for f- for Jeff Beck

03:23:18
Joe Rogan: I got to drive him once.

03:23:20
Eric Weinstein: What?

03:23:20
Joe Rogan: When I was a, uh, limo driver.

03:23:21
Eric Weinstein: Hold up.

03:23:23
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:23:23
Eric Weinstein: Wait. Break from UFOs, Joe.

03:23:25
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:23:25
Eric Weinstein: You have to tell me your Jeff Beck story.

03:23:27
Joe Rogan: I was supposed to drive Stevie Ray Vaughan, but Stevie Ray Vaughan refused to take a limo. Stevie Ray Vaughan would always take cabs.

03:23:34
Eric Weinstein: Ah.

03:23:34
Joe Rogan: Isn't that wild? And I was a giant Stevie Ray Vaughan fan 'cause, uh, my boxing coach was a huge fan, and he was al- he would always play that song... Oh, God. There, there's a bunch of them, but is it Ireland? Is that... There's, he has this one song.

03:23:48
Eric Weinstein: Never heard of this.

03:23:49
Joe Rogan: Oh, my God. This guy, this, this guy used to hit the bag and play this one song by Stevie Ray Vaughan, and I can't remember what fucking song it was. But I became fascinated with Stevie Ray Vaughan because of my friend. And, uh, as I was driving limos, I had an opportunity to dr- I was like, "Oh, my God, I'm going to pick up Stevie Ray Vaughan. This is insane." But as you... He was with Jeff Beck. I'm like, "Yeah, that's pretty cool." So I drove Jeff Beck. But it was, to me-

03:24:12
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait

03:24:13
Joe Rogan: ... it was like, I'm an idiot.

03:24:14
Eric Weinstein: You, you-

03:24:14
Joe Rogan: I was an idiot

03:24:14
Eric Weinstein: ... can't lead over that.

03:24:15
Joe Rogan: I didn't know. Yeah. I, uh, I also got a chance to, uh, pick up Annie Lennox's security guy, who was this fascinating dude. I really loved talking to him.

03:24:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh.

03:24:24
Joe Rogan: He was a lot of fun. And so I got to see... I was, like, as close to you are as to Annie Lennox. And, uh, this was when the Eurythmics were huge. And she was in this restaurant, and I swear to God, dude, her voice was like a, like a-

03:24:39
Eric Weinstein: A du-

03:24:39
Joe Rogan: ... cable wire. When she would talk-

03:24:42
Eric Weinstein: Wow. Yeah

03:24:42
Joe Rogan: ... it would, it would almost like she had a nuclear voice. Like, even just her talking, you would g- you would, like-

03:24:49
Eric Weinstein: Oh

03:24:49
Joe Rogan: ... knowing how beautiful her voice was when she sang, you realize like, oh my God, she's like an athlete. Like, she's like an athlete talking.

03:24:55
Eric Weinstein: Would I lie to you

03:24:56
Joe Rogan: Just the way her voice was carrying in this conversation. I was like, "This is amazing. Her voice is incredible." And I was realizing like, oh, wow, wow, this is like a trained skill, like a ballerina with her vocal cords.

03:25:07
Eric Weinstein: I believe before it was trained, it was just a... I have the same feeling about Eva Cassidy and Annie Lennox, is just that these people gen- are not part of reality.

03:25:15
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:25:16
Eric Weinstein: And-

03:25:16
Joe Rogan: Well, is a gymnast a part of reality? I mean, they develop that ability. I mean, that, I think that's what it is. I think we're seeing the final product and we're not understanding that there's this long journey, and some people have more physical gifts than others, others do. But that's with gymnasts as well.

03:25:31
Eric Weinstein: I... Okay, you ever heard Eva Cassidy get sick and sing Stormy Monday, and something about the sickness causes her voice to do something that no voice has ever done?

03:25:41
Joe Rogan: No, no.

03:25:42
Eric Weinstein: Oh, dude. This is like heroin. Um-

03:25:44
Joe Rogan: Wow.

03:25:45
Eric Weinstein: Jeff Beck is more vocal than these people. This version of Drown in My Own Tears, which is a cover, Ray Charles did a cover version of it, and he figured out what the song was supposed... Okay.

03:25:57
Joe Rogan: Yeah. Hit me with it. [singing]

03:26:25
Eric Weinstein: Ugh.

03:26:47
Joe Rogan: What a bad motherfucker. What a bad motherfucker.

03:26:51
Eric Weinstein: By the way, I just wanna say something, uh, that you're not gonna want me to say, but fuck you. Uh, I was hanging out with his bass player, Tal Wilkenfeld, and she got COVID, and I heard that you sent a nurse with an IV, with all of this sort of stuff, to get Tal Wilkenfeld, this unbelievable bass player that just-

03:27:14
Joe Rogan: She's my friend.

03:27:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but she's like an, she's like a next level human being.

03:27:19
Joe Rogan: She is.

03:27:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:27:19
Joe Rogan: I love her. She's great.

03:27:20
Eric Weinstein: I know. But, like, you know- You take a lot of shit from stupid shit that you do. What a big heart you have, and nobody even knows what you do for people around you, and I just wanna say thank you. Okay, that was a-

03:27:34
Joe Rogan: That's very nice of you

03:27:35
Eric Weinstein: ... unauthorized thing.

03:27:36
Joe Rogan: That's very nice of you.

03:27:36
Eric Weinstein: I wanna get back to-

03:27:37
Joe Rogan: Thank you.

03:27:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay. The Jeff Beck thing-

03:27:39
Joe Rogan: There she is

03:27:39
Eric Weinstein: ... oh, my God, right? Like, she's 12 years old, and she's-

03:27:42
Joe Rogan: Let me hear some of this. [rock music] On stage somewhere here.

03:27:53
Eric Weinstein: This is Costa Rica.

03:27:55
Joe Rogan: Wow. I like how they have the little Indian rugs on stage. That's pretty dope.

03:28:05
Eric Weinstein: [singing] So it's Incubus with Mike Einziger and Brandon Boyd, and that was Costa Rica, where they were getting blown away, and then she couldn't even see properly because her [laughs] hair was getting blown into her eyes.

03:28:20
Joe Rogan: I met her at the store. She's friends with Tony Hinchcliffe. That's how I became friends with her.

03:28:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so, like, she doesn't wanna hang out with music people. She wants to hang out with scientists and, and, uh, comedians.

03:28:29
Joe Rogan: She loves hanging out with comics.

03:28:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:28:30
Joe Rogan: She hangs out with us all the time. She's cool as fuck.

03:28:32
Eric Weinstein: She's cool-

03:28:33
Joe Rogan: She can hang. She's really cool to talk to.

03:28:34
Eric Weinstein: But Incubus is also-

03:28:36
Joe Rogan: Interesting person

03:28:36
Eric Weinstein: ... is also... Like, they're really into science.

03:28:38
Joe Rogan: I know.

03:28:38
Eric Weinstein: They're the most down-to-earth rock stars.

03:28:41
Joe Rogan: That's awesome.

03:28:41
Eric Weinstein: Jeff Beck-

03:28:42
Joe Rogan: That's awesome

03:28:42
Eric Weinstein: ... so, y- you know, in terms of, um, vocal performance, I did not understand what this guy was able to do multi-dimensionally with that whammy bar and using the slide as a plectrum.

03:28:55
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:28:56
Eric Weinstein: This guy was developing techniques not to, not to flash you, not to Yngwie Malmsteen play a million mu- notes a second, but he was just like, "I'm gonna spend my entire life not becoming a rock star but becoming the ultimate technician because of the things I feel in my soul that I wanna share with you people."

03:29:12
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:29:13
Eric Weinstein: And I didn't get this. And the only right way I found Tall is that I thought, like, okay, I was always thinking I'd get around to Jeff Beck, and then he died, and it's like, okay, whatever. I'm too busy. And then I started feeling shitty about it, and I thought, "What happened to his bassist?" And I found out she followed me, and I was completely unprepared for, like, these people who are channeling the universe directly through music.

03:29:37
Joe Rogan: Yeah. S-

03:29:39
Eric Weinstein: Right?

03:29:39
Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's what it is, right? That's what it is. When, when someone like a Gary Clark Jr. plays guitar, there's, like, something-

03:29:45
Eric Weinstein: Who you introduced me to at the store-

03:29:47
Joe Rogan: Yeah

03:29:47
Eric Weinstein: ... when I'd never met him. You know, it's just like he-

03:29:51
Joe Rogan: What a fucking man

03:29:52
Eric Weinstein: ... well, music, science, and humor are my three things that I use to measure human intelligence. You can't use an IQ test to get up in the stratosphere. These are the three things that actually discriminate, humor, music, and science. The, like, in general, I sh- can assure you that when you order a sandwich at Subway, if you do so, you don't do it in any particularly special way. But let me just say this. I saw you work up this thing about, uh, professional wrestling is gay over many nights-

03:30:25
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:30:25
Eric Weinstein: ... because you kept inviting me to the store. And, you know, I, like, this whole controversy about y- you and Jews and money, it really hurt me because I've never seen anybody as non-bigoted as you. And I've hung out with you drunk, and this stuff would come out, and it's just, like, such bullshit, but I did have this f- like, envy, which is I wanna be the gays and get you to work up actually what's going on with Jews and money and take the William Tell shot, where you get past this sort of dime store stupid shit, and actually... Like, basically t- the thing about Jews and money is the Jews that had money survived, and the Jews that didn't have money died in the camps. And every diaspora community, whether it's the overseas Chinese or you have the Parsis in India or you have the Gujaratis in the east of Africa, the issue isn't money, Joe. It's liquidity. All of us diaspora communities have to have liquidity, or when things turn bad, we get screwed, right? And there is some routine. What I f- found about you and, and the gays and, and professional wrestling thing, you... Just for people who don't know, uh, j- I was sitting there at The Comedy Store, and Joe says, "I was watching professional wrestling, and it is so gay."

03:31:48
Joe Rogan: That is definitely not how I set it up.

03:31:50
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:31:50
Joe Rogan: Wait a second. At all.

03:31:52
Eric Weinstein: And the-

03:31:53
Joe Rogan: That's-

03:31:53
Eric Weinstein: ... audience-

03:31:53
Joe Rogan: That-

03:31:54
Eric Weinstein: ... freaks out.

03:31:54
Joe Rogan: That is-

03:31:55
Eric Weinstein: And it's like [gasps]

03:31:55
Joe Rogan: ... definitely not how it was set up.

03:31:56
Eric Weinstein: And then you turned around and looked at us, and you said, "Wait a minute. I didn't say it was bad. You did that."

03:32:04
Joe Rogan: Yeah.

03:32:04
Eric Weinstein: Right? And it was like this, oh, wait, wait, wait. What? He just turned all the negative energy in the room on us for our latent homophobia, and then it was like we all had it, and then we realized we had it. And then if I was sitting next to a gay guy and I started the evening homophobic, I guarantee you by the end of that act, act, which you figured out over multiple times that I saw, we were sitting there ready to hug each other. And I want you to do the same thing for us Jews. I want you-

03:32:33
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:32:33
Eric Weinstein: No. I want you to figure out your fucking money and Jewish thing and do for us what you did for the gays because that was a transformative experience. When I saw Chappelle take that shot on behalf of Kanye, I, I have to take a Kanye detour.

03:32:49
Joe Rogan: Okay.

03:32:51
Eric Weinstein: People do not understand what happened with Kanye, and I wanna talk about this from a Jewish perspective. Kanye in, what, 2018, for some reason, Ca- Candace Owens of all people was, like, my fan, and she called me up. She said, "I'm meeting with Kanye, and which is my dream. I want you to be there." I was like, "What? All right." I show up. Kanye is the most kind, creative, mentally ill, wonderful, generous person you could imagine.

03:33:21
Joe Rogan: That's a great way to put it.

03:33:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Kanye is like, "Can you come over tomorrow? Can you come out to Calabasas?" We're like hanging out, me and Kanye, as if this makes any effing sense. By the way, he's got an NDA that is the most ghetto lawyer thing I've ever seen. It's like, "If you say anything about this meeting, we'll take your child, we'll take your left testicle."

03:33:42
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:33:42
Eric Weinstein: "You will have nothing." I'm like, "I am not signing this." "Well, you're not meeting Kanye." I was like, "Fine. It's only Calabasas. I'll take an Uber home. F you." They're like, they call up Kanye like, "Don't let it... Don't make him sign it. Just come through." So I come through-

03:33:54
Joe Rogan: Oh, that's so funny

03:33:55
Eric Weinstein: ... and I'm like hanging out with Kanye, like geek and the, the rap god, and like he's got this videographer who's like filming everything. And I'm like, "I cannot deal with this person. Send him away." So he sends him away, and Kanye and I have this heart-to-heart. And let me tell you something, this is uncomfortable to say. I cannot imagine a kinder, more creative, more gentle, more loving, more inclusive person. He invites me on the spot to a, a listening party for his new tracks. And I say, "I have to get home to Pia and the kids." He's like, "Well, you, you don't understand. It's Kanye's album. I'm dropping it." And it's like, "I don't care. It's my wife [laughs] and my kids. I gotta get home." So he's like, "Okay, come to Wyoming." So he's inviting me to Wyoming with him.

03:34:39
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:34:39
Eric Weinstein: And I'm like, "Dude, I'm a math person. Cut it out." He's like, "Well, you have to come to Wyoming." All right. We start talking about the concept of slavery in Jewish and Black tradition. Now, part of the reason that Jews and Blacks have very high tension is because we have very similar experiences. We both have a, a, a really deep relationship to slavery. In our case, it's Passover. In their case, you know, it's, uh, the history we all know. And I say to Kanye, "There are three levels of slavery in, in Jewish thought. There's chattel slavery, where we're actually enslaved. Then there's cultural slavery, where we're a diaspora community in other people's lands. And then there's self-slavery, where we can't get past ourselves." And Kanye, and what, we're grooving and all this stuff, having this heart-to-heart. We're walking around Calabasas, and people are yelling out of car windows like, you know, "Kanye, we love you." And like every time they do it, I remember that there's a Crip alert. The Crips have, have issued an alert from Long Beach that if, if Kanye strays out of Calabasas, he's to be taken out.

03:35:39
Joe Rogan: What?

03:35:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:35:40
Joe Rogan: When was this?

03:35:41
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. Look up Crip alert and Kanye.

03:35:42
Joe Rogan: Jesus Christ.

03:35:43
Eric Weinstein: 2018. Okay. So Kanye's like, "Okay, there are three levels." We're, we're, we're vibing, blah, blah, blah, and I get this call from Kanye the next day, 'cause I'm not... [laughs] Yes, a Crip alert for Kanye West. Like, I'm just thinking, "I'm gonna be killed in a drive-by shooting because I can't get home to my wife because I'm hanging out with Kanye." It none, nothing makes sense in the world.

03:36:04
Joe Rogan: Wow.

03:36:04
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

03:36:05
Joe Rogan: Jesus Christ.

03:36:06
Eric Weinstein: Now, I get this call from Kanye. He's like, "Oh, Eric, I can't tell you how amazing this all is. I was just at TMZ and, um, I was explaining the theory about slavery and how this whole thing works and Jews and Passover, and I was explaining how much I love Hitler." I'm like, "What did you say?" He said, "I was explaining how much I love Hitler." It's like, "Huh? I missed a meeting, a memo, something?" And I realize, okay, Kanye is focused on the spiritual Sunday thing. And I realize what this is, is Jesus. Jesus loves everybody. No matter how horrible you are, Jesus loves you. Okay? And Kanye is thinking, "What would Jesus do?" And I'm realizing, like I'm thinking at top speed. Like he's talking to- about Hitler at TMZ, whatever. I said, "Kanye, I want you to listen to me." He's like, "Yeah." I said, "I want you to run to TMZ. They don't wanna destroy you, I guarantee it, because you're a long-term property that matters, and there's no reason that they would wanna destroy you. And I want you to beg them not to release what you said. Don't, don't question me, just do it." So he runs to TMZ, and they don't release this thing, and I guarantee you that they have the videotape. So when you hear that the Jews... And I love Dave Chappelle, but this thing he did on Saturday Night Live was not right. Okay? Yes, Jews are so fucking traumatized that we are super sensitive to anything that makes it possible for people to tell jokes.

03:37:51
Joe Rogan: Can I stop you for a second there?

03:37:52
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

03:37:53
Joe Rogan: He has to do that. That's his job.

03:37:57
Eric Weinstein: He-

03:37:57
Joe Rogan: His job is to make fun of something that's in the zeitgeist.

03:38:01
Eric Weinstein: I hear you.

03:38:02
Joe Rogan: That is in the zeitgeist.

03:38:03
Eric Weinstein: I knew you were gonna say this.

03:38:04
Joe Rogan: The fact that Kanye West is being accused of this anti-Semitism and Dave Chappelle is hosting Saturday Night Live.

03:38:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:38:14
Joe Rogan: He's got this fake letter, and he goes, "And that, Kanye West, is how you buy some time." That shit was fucking hilarious.

03:38:22
Eric Weinstein: Was it?

03:38:22
Joe Rogan: There's nothing not right about that.

03:38:23
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.

03:38:23
Joe Rogan: That was fucking hilarious.

03:38:24
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, sorry, Joe. I'm gonna go toe-to-toe with you on this one.

03:38:27
Joe Rogan: You don't think that was funny?

03:38:28
Eric Weinstein: Oh, not only was it funny, Dave Chappelle is a fucking William Tell-level artist. He took his bow at an incredible-

03:38:36
Joe Rogan: Agreed

03:38:36
Eric Weinstein: ... distance-

03:38:37
Joe Rogan: Agreed

03:38:37
Eric Weinstein: ... and hit an apple off of somebody's head.

03:38:39
Joe Rogan: So what is wrong with that?

03:38:40
Eric Weinstein: Ah. The issue is that it opens up this issue for people who are not at Dave Chappelle's level. Okay, so you made a joke about pizzas-

03:38:51
Joe Rogan: Mm

03:38:52
Eric Weinstein: ... Italians-

03:38:53
Joe Rogan: So you have to-

03:38:54
Eric Weinstein: Let me tell you a pizza-

03:38:54
Joe Rogan: ... cater your joke to-

03:38:55
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no

03:38:56
Joe Rogan: ... the dumbest people that are listening?

03:38:57
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That your problem, Joe, to be honest with you, is that you and Dave Chappelle are held by such high re- in such high regard by me, and I, I completely defended you 100%, "This man has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, 100%."

03:39:14
Joe Rogan: Well, thank you.

03:39:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay. You, no, you don't need me.

03:39:17
Joe Rogan: Appreciate you.

03:39:17
Eric Weinstein: There's nothing p-

03:39:18
Joe Rogan: I do love you

03:39:19
Eric Weinstein: ... love you, love you t-

03:39:19
Joe Rogan: I love you.

03:39:21
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Here's to some bullshit.

03:39:24
Joe Rogan: [glasses clink]

03:39:24
Eric Weinstein: Love you too. No, you don't need to defend me because there's no, there's not a trace of it in you.

03:39:30
Joe Rogan: So him saying-

03:39:30
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait

03:39:31
Joe Rogan: ... but him saying that-

03:39:32
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait. I'll do it.

03:39:32
Joe Rogan: Okay, please.

03:39:33
Eric Weinstein: I'll do it. Okay. I view you guys as the marksmen- You're the surgeons, you're the fucking neurosurgeons who can get between two neurons and cut the bad one and leave the good one. That is, to me... I know that you guys think it's about mockery, it's about having fun, blah, blah, blah. I've been through the comedy mill. There is an aspect to Carlin's comedy, for example, or, um, Richard Pryor's or Lenny Bruce's, that is timeless and immortal because it-- comedy is so much more than getting a belly laugh. It's at a different level. I expect you guys to work, k- to keep... I want you to keep workshopping that thing till it finds its actual highest level. I'll tell you the, the joke about pizzas, money, and Jews, right? I used to go to the Harvard School in Los Angeles, which was the top most exclusive, uh, Episcopalian school in LA, and I was sandwiched between these two beautiful, uh, muscular Aryan men, and they would make the following joke: "Hey, Eric, what's the difference between pizzas and Jews? A pizza doesn't scream when you put it in an oven." Right? There is so-

03:40:54
Joe Rogan: That's a terrible joke.

03:40:55
Eric Weinstein: It's a terrible joke, and I lived it every fucking day. Okay? What is welling up right now on Twitter with Elon purchasing this is a huge amount of antisemitism, and what we need as a country, as you and I both know, and we've both been in the same fight, is we need a massive coming together. We need to laugh together, we need to break bread together, we need to marry each other and have babies so that we're [chuckles] effectively indistinguishable from each other eventually. We need love, and partially what the function of humor is is to facilitate that. This is how Jon Stewart reported the news. "Hey, I'm the fake news," but he was actually reporting what?

03:41:33
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:41:33
Eric Weinstein: The real news.

03:41:34
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:41:34
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

03:41:35
Joe Rogan: Okay.

03:41:35
Eric Weinstein: It is my reverence for Dave Chappelle which says that he fell, he fell short of his mark. He took the shot and he hit the apple. He didn't hit the kid. But he made it look like everybody could do that, and now we've got an enormous number of antisemites who are foc-focused on this thing, right? I was on your show years ago and we asked this question about Jews in physics, and I made a joke of it. You said like, "Why are there so many Jews in physics?" And I said, "Oh, I guess we're lucky at physics." I'm done with that too. We have l- taken this language about underrepresentation into our, into our souls through this diversity, equity, inclusion, and if you ask about underrepresentation, you have to ask about over-representation. And you know who's over-represented? Jews, and now we're calling it the Jewish question. Why are there so many fucking Jews? Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews. Because we're fucking great at physics-

03:42:26
Joe Rogan: [laughs]

03:42:26
Eric Weinstein: ... and we're great at comedy. And I'll tell you something. You wanna get rich? I know that you're rich and you're a comic. But in general, is comedy a good way to get, make money? No, it's a terrible way to make money. And how many people are there in it? Like, Jews everywhere. We've got Jews who are poor, Jews who are rich, this and that. Jews are basically humans turned up to 11. We're on all extremes. We're more criminal than other people. We're less criminal than other people. We are in such danger at the moment because everything is breaking down, and when you can't figure out what's causing you a problem, people are always going to blame, blame diaspora communities. They're gonna blame overseas Chinese, they're gonna blame Gujaratis, they're gonna blame Parsis, they're gonna blame Jews.

03:43:06
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:43:07
Eric Weinstein: And we are vulnerable right now. And the, the issue wasn't that Chappelle was great. Do we have anyone better than Chappelle? He's a genius. Straight up gangster genius. Amazing. What we're looking for is routines that elevate us beyond what Dave Chappelle turned in. I'm not claiming that Chappelle didn't make a hilarious routine. I'm claiming something different. I'm claiming that right now we need to heal. We need to-

03:43:35
Joe Rogan: You don't think his humor helps us heal?

03:43:37
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I believe-

03:43:38
Joe Rogan: You don't think that that was funny, and that that... First of all, no one laughing at that is laughing because they're antisemitic, right?

03:43:44
Eric Weinstein: No, no. People are-

03:43:44
Joe Rogan: They're laughing at it just 'cause it's a brilliant thing. It's funny. He's, he's poking at the bear in the room-

03:43:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:43:50
Joe Rogan: ... that Kanye West fucked up-

03:43:52
Eric Weinstein: Okay

03:43:53
Joe Rogan: ... and he's like, "And this-"

03:43:53
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember, do you remember Owen Benj-

03:43:55
Joe Rogan: "... is how you buy some time."

03:43:55
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember Owen Benjamin?

03:43:56
Joe Rogan: Sure.

03:43:56
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I think Owen Benjamin is brilliant. He did so many great routines, really insightful, incredibly clever, made me laugh, and he went down a bad path at some point, and I'm sad about it because I think he's a genius. I think the best of Owen Benjamin is fantastic.

03:44:15
Joe Rogan: What do you think causes people to go down bad paths?

03:44:17
Eric Weinstein: Because they don't know what's controlling them. They don't know what's going wrong. I'll tell you what the J- the Jewish strategy straight up is. We over contribute, we over succeed, we over contribute. You wanna know who built America as a superpower? It's Edward Teller, it's Stanislaw Ulam, it's Robert Oppenheimer. When you allow Jews into your country, we pay more taxes, we do more philanthropy, we make tons of fucking money. We do some criminal shit that's stupid. We've exploited people, which is unfair. It's a complicated equation, but that's our equation for survival. On balance, we over contribute, over succeed, and we love you. You know? We wanna be strong. We're loyal. And right now, people are scared that there's something that is denaturing our entire society, Joe, right? We're not ourselves, we're not strong, we're not confident, we can't be masculine, we can't have children. Who... We, we, we, we, we're tiptoeing around trans, and the suspicion for who is keeping us from having a normal interaction is always gonna be Jews. You wanna know why I'm all over-

03:45:20
Joe Rogan: Really?

03:45:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. You wanna know why I'm all over the Epstein thing? Because maybe it is Israel. And if it is Israel, it's not Israel. It's like a tiny department inside of the Mossad, and maybe it's our own intelligence services, but I'll be God damned if it isn't a Jew who isn't gonna be pushing this. Now, I've been invited to South America, for example, by a very prominent dual national between the United States and Israel. He's like, "Why don't you come down to my ranch, Eric?" Where we, uh, we have fun with the s- uh, with Sendero Luminoso, like The Shining Path. It's like-

03:45:54
Joe Rogan: What does that mean?

03:45:55
Eric Weinstein: I'm being intimidated, Joe. I'm being threatened because obviously Jeffrey Epstein looks a lot like Eli Cohen, the super spy of Israel who held orgies in his Damascus apartment, right? Now, I don't know, Jeffrey Epstein may be a US intelligence product, it may be a joint product, it may be an Israeli pro- I don't know. But I can tell you this, it's not the Jews who are behind Jeffrey Epstein, and I will be God damned if I won't be pushing that because I'm gonna stand up for l- 12-year-old girls, whoever they are. This is an immoral human being. I've been on this since the beginning. It's not fair. So we do do this thing where in some sense you have to understand how, how traumatized we are as a people. When I hear we aren't oppressed because we're, we, we drive fancy cars, it's like my first cousin once removed died on the train out of Kyiv when the Germans invaded, froze to death. My cousin is a Mengele twin who forgave Mengele, which is what Kanye was trying to do. He was trying to say, "I'm Jesus. I can tell that Hitler deserved love and deserved admiration." And it's like, well, look up Eva Kor, right? You have this tiny [laughs] tiny Jewish person, this is my cousin, who forgave Mengele. If there's anybody worse than Hitler, it might be Mengele, right? Kanye was in the wrong scene. He wasn't equal to the thing he was taking on. It wasn't his to forgive Hitler and to celebrate Hitler. He's not Jesus. But I feel terrible about what happened to Kanye, and I'll tell you one of the reasons I feel terrible about it, because all of us were enjoying Kanye's mental illness. His genius comes straight out of his mental illness, and we loved him because he was so unfiltered, so real. And so when I see Rihanna holding him up, my feeling is, no, it's not for you to hold him up. I tried to save Kanye. I didn't even say anything about it, right? And Kanye, I think, turned on me, he stopped returning my phone calls because he felt manipulated. But the fact of the matter was I wanted Kanye to persist, and I didn't want his comment about I love Hitler and TMZ to take him out because I thought he was a force for good. So yes, there may be Jews that are exploiting him financially, but there are also Jews who are trying to save him, a- as I believe Lex tried to do a million times.

03:48:19
Joe Rogan: Yes.

03:48:20
Eric Weinstein: And it's like, "Hey, we love each other. We're f- ultimately, we're all family." And the, the thing that I want, uh, out of humor is I want our best comedians to be a level or two above where they already are. So that was my complaint about, about Dave Chappelle. It wasn't that Dave Chappelle wasn't funny. He's funny as hell. It's like I thought beyond that, you should have done a routine that brought us all 100% together, and what you did was is that you did a routine because you tried to get it at this level. Uh, my opinion of Dave Chappelle is that he's way up here.

03:48:57
Joe Rogan: Let me, uh, explain how a monologue works.

03:49:01
Eric Weinstein: Please.

03:49:02
Joe Rogan: Um, there's a big difference between a monologue and a stand-up set. If Dave was gonna do a stand-up set on that-

03:49:09
Eric Weinstein: Okay

03:49:10
Joe Rogan: ... he would work that at multiple different clubs a night, and he would do it over months.

03:49:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:49:20
Joe Rogan: It would be something that he would experiment one way, he would add things to it, he would, he would subtract the shit that he didn't like anymore.

03:49:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:49:31
Joe Rogan: It takes time. It takes time.

03:49:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's what you invited me to see.

03:49:35
Joe Rogan: This is a thing... Yes.

03:49:36
Eric Weinstein: Right?

03:49:36
Joe Rogan: Well, you've seen it, so you-

03:49:38
Eric Weinstein: You, you would-

03:49:38
Joe Rogan: ... you understand how it goes

03:49:39
Eric Weinstein: ... you showed it to me.

03:49:40
Joe Rogan: Yeah. But you saw it in actual practice.

03:49:42
Eric Weinstein: On 100%.

03:49:44
Joe Rogan: And-

03:49:44
Eric Weinstein: And I, I gotta tell you how much more I value watching you as an intellect, which you often run away from. "I'm just a comedian." I watched you look at the crowd as feedback and change your act, and change your act, and change your act until w- it just sang.

03:49:59
Joe Rogan: Well, thank you. But you're tr- well, while you're doing that, you're just tr- you're trying to find the beats. It's a rare art form where you're practicing it in front of people. And the difference between a monologue, which Dave has to prepare for in a very short amount of time, versus a set, like if you want him to have a very complex and nuanced take on a subject, it's gonna take time. It'll take a little time to figure out. And, uh, I mean, I can only speak for myself, but my process is months.

03:50:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:50:29
Joe Rogan: Like, I, I have some bits, and then they, they start off great, and then they die, and then they come back, and then they fucking get, get better. And some bits, they... I have to abandon them. They just, they're not working. They're not growing. Whatever it is.

03:50:42
Eric Weinstein: Got it.

03:50:42
Joe Rogan: And you don't know until you try it in front of an audience, and I try it a bunch of different ways. And sometimes I try it and I'm like, "Oh my God. [laughs] What the fuck have I got myself into?" And I have to pull myself out of the bush, but it's because there's this experimental aspect to doing live stand-up in front of these crowds. And after a while, when listening to us talk on podcasts, a lot of, uh, fans now know. Most people don't, though. Most people have no idea what's going on, which is good-

03:51:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:51:07
Joe Rogan: ... because you just want them to have fun. So, but there's a thing going on where you're trying to sculpt it. If he wanted to take that subject and advance it-

03:51:17
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:51:17
Joe Rogan: ... to the, like, this Dave Chappelle, you know, coral belt in jujitsu level, 'cause that's what he is, like, he would figure out a way to do it, and he would have it in a way that wouldn't be objectionable to.

03:51:28
Eric Weinstein: And, and I-

03:51:28
Joe Rogan: And I don't, I don't, I didn't find it objectionable. I thought it was a hilarious take on something that was current. It was in the news. It was a thing. He was just mocking the fact that Kanye was being attacked.

03:51:38
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:51:38
Joe Rogan: He was wa- not diminishing it in any way. He was making light out of... It, there was a target, he hit it. It, it, that's how it is. Like, that's, and that's-

03:51:46
Eric Weinstein: I appreciate what you're saying, and my response to this, and this is what I say to my fellow Jews, I say, "Look, I don't want more... I don't want less Joe Rogan or less Dave Chappelle." I trust these people. I want more. I want to go to the uncomfortable place so that we can all actually open it up, just like if you were doing MD- MDMA-assisted therapy, right?

03:52:07
Joe Rogan: Mm. Yeah.

03:52:08
Eric Weinstein: The idea is if you don't actually touch the thing that's uncomfortable, which is like, "Why are Jews so fucking successful? Why do they have so much money?"

03:52:14
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:52:14
Eric Weinstein: "Why are they in control of this..." It's like I wanna go through that, and I trust you guys, both of you. Uh, and there are probably a few other people that I trust to do it, but it's not many. And the point being, which is that when other people were, like, quick to say, you know, "This is antisemitic, this is uncomfortable, this is this," I had a different response, which is... And, and I think you're teaching me it's not the monologue that you want, you want the routine that is workshopped and perfected.

03:52:40
Joe Rogan: Yeah, the, the routine takes a long time.

03:52:43
Eric Weinstein: Maybe I didn't have that, but I will say the following: I believe that ultimately, and I don't wanna make it the job of the comedian, but ultimately that is what it is, is teach us how to live with each other and love each other when we have these deep suspicions of each other, right? Because we do have these deep suspicions, and right now everything that our government is doing, which is holding back more and more and more information-

03:53:07
Joe Rogan: Mm

03:53:07
Eric Weinstein: ... makes us suspicious. "Well, who's really behind this? What's really going on?"

03:53:10
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:53:10
Eric Weinstein: Right? And that's, this is a rep- recipe for another Holocaust, because if you're asking, "Well, who's really behind this?" I guarantee you one of the answers is always, "It's those guys." We are counting on you, and I just want you to know that and how much love we have, and it's why it's a, it's, it's not an obligation to stand up for you when you come under fire. Like, the whole N-word thing, it's like I posted one picture with my arm around you, like, "Any questions?" You know. You guys are essential. It's not, it's not just that it's fun to go out and have... 'Cause it is fun, but the point is Jon Stewart was doing a real job reporting the news when nobody could report the news. And in a large, large measure, comedy or MDMA, something [laughs] like that is necessary for us to examine our bullshit.

03:54:03
Joe Rogan: Mm.

03:54:04
Eric Weinstein: And it's not a task for you because if I say that to you, you're like, "Dude, you're, you're loading too much onto... I, I know how comedians think."

03:54:11
Joe Rogan: No, it's not that. It's that you really only wanna take on subjects that you find fascinating in that moment. Like, when you write out ideas, it, it, it has to be genuine. It has to be a thing where you're trying-

03:54:29
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:54:29
Joe Rogan: ... to work something through.

03:54:29
Eric Weinstein: It can't be an assignment.

03:54:31
Joe Rogan: Yeah. I don't understand a lot of antisemitism, and I don't understand a lot of racism.

03:54:38
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:54:38
Joe Rogan: I don't understand it. It doesn't make sense to me.

03:54:40
Eric Weinstein: Because it's not natural to you.

03:54:41
Joe Rogan: It seems foolish. It's al- but it's also there's too many fascinating people-

03:54:45
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:54:45
Joe Rogan: ... from all walks of life.

03:54:46
Eric Weinstein: Everyone.

03:54:46
Joe Rogan: The idea that you would categorize people by what geography they're from or what color their skin is, that to me seems so ridiculous and so stupid that I don't entertain it.

03:54:57
Eric Weinstein: I know.

03:54:57
Joe Rogan: It doesn't, it's not a thing that-

03:54:58
Eric Weinstein: That's what I said

03:54:59
Joe Rogan: ... bounces around in my head. So to, even to workshop it and defend it, to me, it's like, oh my God, there's so many more interesting things about people. What's interesting to me about people is the individual human being's take and the accumulation of all of our takes together when we try to work through this thing. Well, what is this thing that we're experiencing together?

03:55:18
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:55:18
Joe Rogan: What is this? What is culture? What is the learned history of all the human beings that have ever lived before us? Like, what is the purpose of our existence here? What is the, the g- the, the actual m- sm- uh, size of the cosmos that we're existing in? Like, all of these different things. It's finite nature of our existence. What is good about community and love and friendship?

03:55:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:55:40
Joe Rogan: What is good about all those things? All those things are interesting to me. But when it gets to, like, sexual orientation-

03:55:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:55:46
Joe Rogan: ... or color, it's like, who cares? I don't care.

03:55:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is what I said about it.

03:55:49
Joe Rogan: We're just humans.

03:55:51
Eric Weinstein: I said there's no... I don't, I didn't wanna defend it on any particular thing. My point was I've never seen any bigotry at all because of this radical love. Sorry for saying, but, like, I know that you love all walks of life. A- and you don't need anyone to say that, so I was almost embarrassed to say it. But, like, to me, um, we're in an emergency situation, whether you can feel it or not. Like, if you look at... There's a guy named, uh, what is it? Oh, he's figured out Leather Apron Club, which is both the name for the Junto that Benjamin Franklin established, which is something that we revere, and Leather Apron was the name for Jack the Ripper. So it's very clever-

03:56:33
Joe Rogan: Oh, Jesus

03:56:33
Eric Weinstein: ... Martin Bailey, right? But he, like, he tracks, like, how many Jewish people does Joe Rogan have on his program, you know? And it's i- incredibly important that all of us who are in a position to do this, who don't have to necessarily worry about, like, our next paycheck at a company, help everyone come together. Because right now our government isn't helping c- us come together. We're all sort of vaguely suspicious of each other, and nobody wants the assignment, in my opinion, of, like, doing work.

03:57:09
Joe Rogan: It's also a very dumb distraction. To be distracted by our differences is so foolish. It's just so unnecessary. Like, our, our differences are what empowers us because if it wasn't for all the different cultures that exist in the United States-

03:57:22
Eric Weinstein: Oh, man

03:57:22
Joe Rogan: ... it's one of the reasons why it's so fascinating here, is because this is a country of immigrants. You know, with me, it's my grandparents, and, you know, with other people, they're direct descendants or, or, or, or they've come over here from somewhere else. Everyone here is from somewhere else, and we're all interacting with each other, and look at what's been created here. Look at the amount of-

03:57:44
Eric Weinstein: And we've succeeded for the most part after a tremendous number of missteps.

03:57:48
Joe Rogan: Yes.

03:57:49
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so partially what you and I are both animated by, which is like, look, we're not even done with the work, but look how far we've come and look at what a shining example this is to everyone else, and this is, like- I wish I could communicate, Joe, how much fear I have right now as a Jewish person on Twitter with the well of hatred that I feel coming up which has been suppressed. And you wanna know what I want? I want the anti-Semites to speak up. I wanna hear them. I want them to have free speech. You have two choices in a society like this. You can either try to control what people think and what they say, or you can have a cultural penalty for saying something that is horrible. And I want us to have free speech w- with a cultural penalty for these things, as opposed to having to regulate what you can and cannot say. And this issue, like, I don't know, is it Daryl Davies? You know, like, these incredibly comm- commendable, courageous people who wade right into the belly of the beast and bring love. You know, this was the thing that I wanted for Kanye. He was trying to say something else. I don't want him destroyed. I don't want him to continue to destroy himself, where he's hanging out with Milo and Nick Fuentes and all this nonsense. He was trying to say, "Jesus told us to love each other," right? And he was fucking up the message.

03:59:17
Joe Rogan: Right.

03:59:18
Eric Weinstein: And the issue is, I don't want a Jewish-Black rift in the middle of America.

03:59:26
Joe Rogan: Well, you don't want any rifts.

03:59:27
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:59:27
Joe Rogan: Right? Not just Jewish, but any rifts at all. And if we take it to your, your, the thing that you were talking about-

03:59:33
Eric Weinstein: Sure

03:59:34
Joe Rogan: ... in, in the beginning, with the fear of what's going on right now with Russia and Ukraine, in the absence of this idea that we're supposed to be opposed to other people-

03:59:46
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:59:46
Joe Rogan: ... the, people that we don't even fucking know-

03:59:48
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:59:48
Joe Rogan: ... like, why would there be any conflict at all-

03:59:51
Eric Weinstein: Oh, thank you

03:59:52
Joe Rogan: ... between Russia and Ukraine? Why would there be any conflict at all between us and them?

03:59:54
Eric Weinstein: Because they're so close. They're almost the same thing.

03:59:57
Joe Rogan: Right. Well, what is going on? Someone is controlling people-

03:59:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, exactly

04:00:00
Joe Rogan: ... to get people to do things for resources

04:00:00
Eric Weinstein: There's a game that we don't understand.

04:00:02
Joe Rogan: Right.

04:00:02
Eric Weinstein: And it, and, and you know, this is one of the-

04:00:03
Joe Rogan: And you're a part of it whether you like it or not.

04:00:05
Eric Weinstein: And not only-

04:00:05
Joe Rogan: And that's what's fucked

04:00:06
Eric Weinstein: ... not only that-

04:00:06
Joe Rogan: And it's being run by psychos

04:00:07
Eric Weinstein: ... and I can tell you, I have so much Ukrainian trauma because my family ran away from, like, pogroms, right? Do I support Ukraine? 100%, because they were invaded by Russia. Hello. Do I support this to, at the level that I want World War III to happen? No.

04:00:25
Joe Rogan: No one should want that.

04:00:26
Eric Weinstein: No one should want that.

04:00:27
Joe Rogan: And-

04:00:27
Eric Weinstein: And so you're trying to have this complicated thing which is like, look, there's serious shit in our past, but you're being hurt by a power, but we partially antagonized the power. I'm trying to pull all these-

04:00:38
Joe Rogan: And there's a lot of money involved.

04:00:40
Eric Weinstein: Oh my God, and not only that-

04:00:41
Joe Rogan: There's a lot of money involved in this

04:00:43
Eric Weinstein: ... and this is the thing, well, this is the thing where I didn't understand with Sam. It's like he says, "There's nothing you can tell me about Hunter Biden." It's like, Burisma? There is money that flows through Ukraine because it is a place where there are chemical labs and biological labs, and there's b- buckshee and payment and all this kind of stuff, and my feeling is we're not allowed to know. We're not allowed to pull it apart. We're just supposed to say, you know, "Slum-"

04:01:07
Joe Rogan: It's on the other side of the ideological fence. You're not even allowed to examine it.

04:01:10
Eric Weinstein: Right, and my feeling is, look-

04:01:11
Joe Rogan: It's crazy

04:01:11
Eric Weinstein: ... this is my chil- I'm on this planet. You're gonna potentially create a nuclear holocaust over something where you're getting paid in a way that I'm not. And if we don't fundamentally figure out how to love each other, and to coexist, and to celebrate each other... And this is another thing about, like, I'll tell you a Jewish thing. We have this one story we repeat every year in the Passover story, which is our name for Egypt is Mitzrayim, and Mitzrayim means the narrow places, and it's literally, like, the birth canal. It's the second birth of the Jewish people. And r- right now, all of Earth is Mitzrayim. This is the womb. And you say, like, you know, somebody, not you, but, like, somebody says, "Well, the Jews consider themselves the chosen people." Do you know why we're chosen? We view ourselves as chosen not because, like, we're the best or that, because we're responsible. We believe that we are responsible for this planet, and we unleashed, we Jews, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, both Jews, unleashed the power of the sun on the planet, which is dooming us to a very bad end. And I believe that we are chosen in the sense that it is our responsibility, not our privilege, not our this, not our that, not that we're on top, but it's our responsibility to shepherd the birth of the human race into an interstellar species. And, like, does that sound far-reaching? Does that sound crazy? 100%, to my ears, that sounds nuts, but ultimately, in my opinion, we feel responsible not for ourselves, not to save ourselves, but for the entire planet. And I hope that other cultures feel the same responsibility, that they feel chosen in the same way. But right now, if you wanna ask me, I forgo all sorts of financial opportunity because I feel like we unleashed holy hell on Earth that may be a civilization-ending thing. And what are we gonna do about it? If we are open, we, we have to realize that what we unleashed to take care of Hitler and Nazism and the, and the, and the barbarity of, of Japan, like the Rape of Nanking, we now have to deal with for all time. And this is, like, really important to us. We need to shepherd civilization to safety. And if you think about the Passover story, it's a tremendous question. Why repeat this one story that seems bizarre? Like, you're sl- enslaved in Egypt. You follow some crazy leader. You go through the Red Sea. You wander around [chuckles] the desert for 40 years, and you find the Promised Land. This is the story of where we are exactly at this minute. It's not, like, an old-fashioned, stupid fairy tale. It's like you've been telling this story every year for a reason, because the people who waited for the bread to rise, that's why we, we eat unleavened bread, died. And the people who understood early, okay, this sounds completely crazy, but you're going to have to make a break for it through the Red Sea, wander around in pain before you actually get to safety. That is the story of right now. And to bring it back to the UFOs, my feeling about this is I'm largely on this program right now not to promote a book. I don't have a Patreon yet. Maybe one day. Who knows? There's nothing I'm promoting other than the fact that right now we are in so much mortal danger as a human species. Think about everything that you love, whether it's Drown in My Own Tears or Bach's B Minor Mass or the works of Shakespeare.

04:04:45
Joe Rogan: It's all going to be.

04:04:46
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:04:46
Joe Rogan: Gone forever.

04:04:48
Eric Weinstein: And

04:04:49
Joe Rogan: Back to the Stone Age.

04:04:50
Eric Weinstein: I refuse. And this is what I've had such a hard time. It's like, well, Eric, you're so arrogant. You're so, you're insane. You're crazy. It's like, no, I know what time it is. And I love you. And I love all you people. We're getting out of here and we're going to do it. And we're not going to embrace any of this kind of stupid division. It's now time. It's like, this is Shackleton's story. Shackleton stepped up when any normal human being would say, look, take whatever resources you have and have a good time because you're done. It's like, no, you know, we're down. It's the ninth inning. This is a bad situation. This is the time that legends are made. And we're sitting around worried about like, can I get the Tesla with gull wing doors? It's like, fuck that shit. Now is the time for legends. And whether you know that this is the time or not, we have to come together. And that's one of the reasons that like, that I wanted you to understand how much I appreciated what you've done for underprivileged groups, people who are hurting. People don't really understand how big your heart is because you hide it. And that's one of the things I wanted for the Jewish people and I wanted from you, which is like more Chappelle, more Joe Rogan, more humor, more love. Let's get through this thing. Let's stop blaming each other.

04:06:12
Joe Rogan: Let's stop blaming each other and let's go pee again and wrap this up. We're at like four hours. Dude, we've been rambling. You've been rambling. You've been saying some brilliant things though. And I appreciate you very much and I appreciate you coming on here always. And I don't think we got any closer to understanding what the fuck UFOs are, but I understand more of it. Thank you, my friend.

04:06:32
Eric Weinstein: Amen, brother.

04:06:32
Joe Rogan: Appreciate you very much.

04:06:33
Eric Weinstein: Appreciate you.

04:06:34
Joe Rogan: Goodbye, everybody.