Joe Rogan Experience #1945 - Eric Weinstein

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. NANarrator0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) We're up.

   4. EWEric Weinstein0:13

      Hello, Eric.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      Good to see you, my friend.

   6. EWEric Weinstein0:15

      Hello, Joe.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      So, w- we should tell everybody, this podcast came about from... W- what time in the morning was it when I called you? (laughs)

   8. EWEric Weinstein0:23

      (laughs)

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:23

      It might've been one of them late night ones, wasn't it?

   10. EWEric Weinstein0:25

       All right, well, they all run together, but, um, it was a- you, you just-

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:28

       A late night freak-out UFO con- conversation. I was like, "Dude, we gotta do a podcast about this."

   12. EWEric Weinstein0:34

       (laughs)

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:34

       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...

   14. EWEric Weinstein0:47

       Well, I- I- I don't wanna talk about it because-

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:50

       (laughs)

   16. EWEric Weinstein0:50

       ... I got... (laughs) No, dude.

   17. JRJoe Rogan0:51

       (laughs)

   18. EWEric Weinstein0:51

       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.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:05

       Well, I should say then, I've gone back and forth.

   20. EWEric Weinstein1:07

       Yes, yeah, no, I- I've watched your-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:08

       I abandoned it for a long time until I watched the Bob Lazar documentary.

   22. EWEric Weinstein1:12

       Hmm.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:12

       When, uh, Jeremy Corbell made that Bob Lazar documentary, I was like, "God dammit, they got me back in again. They drew me back in again."

   24. EWEric Weinstein1:19

       I don't think... I don't know if there's ever, uh, footage of me saying the words "Bob Lazar."

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:24

       There it goes.

   26. EWEric Weinstein1:24

       There you go.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:25

       (laughs)

   28. EWEric Weinstein1:25

       I know. But, um...

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:28

       I would love to... I would love to facilitate that dinner-

   30. EWEric Weinstein1:31

       Oh, let's do-
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah. …

   1. EWEric Weinstein15:00

      the communication is the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves. We don't realize, uh, the semiconductor which created the logic gate, you know, just... We... All we did was scale it up and that now it's ChatGPT. (laughs)

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:13

      Yeah.

   3. EWEric Weinstein15:13

      Um, the number of things that have changed the world, whether it's the World Wide Web coming out of CERN, 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 of Philadelphia-

   4. JRJoe Rogan16:09

      Shout out to Aunt Judy.

   5. EWEric Weinstein16:10

      ... 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 got all these protons in the center, they're 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- a- a deal, but with no charge. So it doesn't understand that you're telling it, you know, "Go back. Danger."

   6. JRJoe Rogan16:54

      Hmm.

   7. EWEric Weinstein16:55

      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 and 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... Nobody knew what was gonna happen.

   8. JRJoe Rogan17:37

      Yeah.

   9. EWEric Weinstein17:37

      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 a 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, uh, 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 this forbidden knowledge. We were so scared that we behaved ourselves, and now we're not scared. We're like, "Slava Ukraini." (laughs) You know, just whatever. Um- "Yeah, we've got Putin, we're gonna back him into a corner." Uh- 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. With Joe Biden going to- Yes. ... Kiev and pledging his undying love to... And I'm gonna say this, which is very painful. I think Zelenskyy is a complete menace. Why do you think that? 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, w- 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, pr- preventivni udar, like, preventative strikes. I went, "Huh?" You know, this was a while, this was a while ago. And I thought, "Why is this person allowed to address Congress?" You have somebody who... A- an- and I wanna 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 Belorussia that went back and forth between Poland, Ukraine, M- Moldova-" Mm. "... you know, Lithuania." Because it's fluid, right? And so when we say, you know, "We, we, we respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine," if 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, uh, w- with a presumptive strike by a Russian missile." I'm thinking, "D- did I r- 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 (laughs) gonna correct me and say, "No, no, Eric, it's Lviv." It's like, no, these spit- 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-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? Have you, have you ever been to Ukraine? No. So, my family basically is scattered, you know, was scattered throughout the shtetls of Ukraine, and I've been over there in eight- '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 Zelenskyy 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- Yeah. ... makes us... Yeah. Yeah. I want that. Right. 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 c- 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 stand- you know, standoff, it's just Russian roulette with smaller and smaller numbers of empty chambers, and I- 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 you, 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. 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 (laughs) and forth and understand what you're doing. So I think, I think Zelenskyy, 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.

   10. JRJoe Rogan26:25

       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-

   11. EWEric Weinstein26:34

       Mm.

   12. JRJoe Rogan26:34

       First of all, there's, there's people that are in the army or in all the armed forces, they're, 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.

   13. EWEric Weinstein27:11

       They're not real.

   14. JRJoe Rogan27:12

       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. (exhales loudly) There are some fucking videos from-

   15. EWEric Weinstein27:25

       Yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan27:25

       ... this war. The, on, like in the woods, ground fighting.

   17. EWEric Weinstein27:29

       I've seen them.

   18. JRJoe Rogan27:30

       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.

   19. EWEric Weinstein27:46

       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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan27:57

       Right.

   21. EWEric Weinstein27:58

       And, you know, oh-

   22. JRJoe Rogan28:00

       Everything's fine.

   23. EWEric Weinstein28:01

       Oh, w- what's on Netflix?

   24. JRJoe Rogan28:03

       Yeah.

   25. EWEric Weinstein28:04

       Um, at least in the Cuban missile crisis, my father was driving across country. I said, "You knew it was the cri-" (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 Epsti- uh, uh, to whom did, did delaying traffic? "I don't know."

   26. JRJoe Rogan29:02

       "Yeah, well, can't find it. Sorry. Bye." Click.

   27. EWEric Weinstein29:05

       So this is what's causing, in part, our friends to go crazy.

   28. JRJoe Rogan29:09

       Mm.

   29. EWEric Weinstein29:10

       You know, uh, uh, several years ago, Sam Harris had good input. Jordan Harrison, uh, Jordan Peterson had good input. Brett 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 hetero- her- 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, "Oh, you're, you're 12 degrees off, you're three degrees off."

   30. JRJoe Rogan29:42

       Mm-hmm.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   I'm not sure I…

   1. EWEric Weinstein30:00

      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 di-... I don't think he understood the perspective.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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:46

      I'm not sure I understand what you were just saying there.

   3. EWEric Weinstein30:48

      Okay.

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:49

      The, this decision tree thing, that, that Sam, he's gonna blow up. Explain that?

   5. EWEric Weinstein30:54

      So let's imagine, for example, that I'm staying at a local hotel.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:57

      Okay.

   7. EWEric Weinstein30:58

      And you don't know whether I'm staying at the Hyatt or the Four Seasons.

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:01

      Okay.

   9. EWEric Weinstein31:01

      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.

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:31

       Right.

   11. EWEric Weinstein31:32

       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-

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:51

       It's a very good question.

   13. EWEric Weinstein31:52

       Right? Okay. So just every day you're being assaulted by completely unnecessary ambiguities.

   14. JRJoe Rogan32:00

       Mm-hmm.

   15. EWEric Weinstein32:00

       And, and you know, this is-

   16. JRJoe Rogan32:02

       But why, why then the Trump thing? Why his... Why would his derangement towards Trump-

   17. EWEric Weinstein32:09

       Well, because Trump-

   18. JRJoe Rogan32:10

       ... blow up in the circuits?

   19. EWEric Weinstein32:11

       Sam made one terrible call with Trump. He said that he was the, uh, evil Chauncey Gardiner, like a simpleton, like Mr. Magoo-

   20. JRJoe Rogan32:19

       Mm-hmm.

   21. EWEric Weinstein32:19

       ... just happens to wander into the Oval Office as the first gov, 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.

   22. JRJoe Rogan32:37

       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.

   23. EWEric Weinstein32:46

       Oh, I don't even-

   24. JRJoe Rogan32:46

       Like, uh, maybe use some bleach, clean it out. Remember that?

   25. EWEric Weinstein32:50

       Exactly.

   26. JRJoe Rogan32:50

       Use some... But meanwhile, one of the things that he said about using, uh, light.

   27. EWEric Weinstein32:56

       Right.

   28. JRJoe Rogan32:56

       Actually, they came up with a process of doing that. There 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 they were actually putting forth as being possible. So what he said, even though it sounded ridiculous-

   29. EWEric Weinstein33:12

       Right.

   30. JRJoe Rogan33:13

       ... like get light into their body.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   I know. (laughs) …

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

   2. EWEric Weinstein45:00

      I know. (laughs)

   3. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      other otherwise you're like, "Uh-oh."

   4. EWEric Weinstein45:01

      Um, quantum gravity, uh, is the replacement of something, uh, for th- it was a 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 or 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?

   5. JRJoe Rogan46:15

      So, uh, to be specific-

   6. EWEric Weinstein46:18

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan46:18

      ... like, how many people are working on this problem? And how many people have been working on this problem for 70 years without progress?

   8. EWEric Weinstein46:25

      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?

   9. JRJoe Rogan46:39

      Okay.

   10. EWEric Weinstein46:41

       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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan47:13

       Mm.

   12. EWEric Weinstein47:14

       In 1984, there's 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?

   13. JRJoe Rogan47:35

       Mm.

   14. EWEric Weinstein47:36

       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 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 theory."

   15. JRJoe Rogan48:13

       Who's that person?

   16. EWEric Weinstein48:14

       Edward Witten.

   17. JRJoe Rogan48:16

       And, wh- in physics circles you're not allowed to bring this guy up?

   18. EWEric Weinstein48:21

       Uh, 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.

   19. JRJoe Rogan48:34

       He's that good?

   20. EWEric Weinstein48:35

       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.

   21. JRJoe Rogan48:44

       Really?

   22. EWEric Weinstein48:46

       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.

   23. JRJoe Rogan48:56

       Okay.

   24. EWEric Weinstein48:57

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan48:57

       Wow.

   26. EWEric Weinstein48:58

       Right. This good. And has never made contact with the physical world. So it's like one of the greatest conundrums. So, so let me get back to how crazy-

   27. JRJoe Rogan49:09

       What do you mean by never made contact?

   28. EWEric Weinstein49:11

       No Nobel Prize, never predicted something that tur- turned out to be true, never pointed at us to do an experiment that was invalidated. So 100% of his efforts have been not making contact with physical reality.

   29. JRJoe Rogan49:32

       Wow.

   30. EWEric Weinstein49:32

       Oh, this is... I'm sorry, like you have people like Michio Kaku who are in the string theoretic school.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Whoa! …

   1. EWEric Weinstein1:00:00

      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 in Am- matter of fact, most physicists have no idea of their names. One is named Agnew Bainston, 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.

   2. GUGuest1:00:41

      Whoa!

   3. EWEric Weinstein1:00:43

      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 (laughs) them of their money to do real gravitational research. Ha ha ha."

   4. GUGuest1:01:08

      They both said that, both families?

   5. EWEric Weinstein1:01:10

      W- Well, they didn't use defraud.

   6. GUGuest1:01:12

      But that's kind of what they implied?

   7. EWEric Weinstein1:01:13

      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 uni- at the Institute for Advanced Study, the top physics department ostensibly in the world, right? You had a director named Rod- Robert Dijkgraaf, string theorist. You had Edward Witten, string theorist. Nati 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 is 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 se- setting out to accomplish is in contrast to this mixed period between 1953 and 1973, where you have the world's most prestigious physicists pal-ing around with pseudoscience, UFO type stuff, gravity shielding, all this stuff. So Babson is so crazy, uh, uh, 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 gonna use (laughs) his fortune that he's predicted from e- 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 Bird Eye 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 anti-gravity that was done there? So put in Tufts stone anti-gravity. These- this guy littered universities all across the country with these monuments to prove that this anti-gravity 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 with 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 gonna 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.

   8. GUGuest1:04:06

      So this is not widely known that this research is being done?

   9. EWEric Weinstein1:04:09

      This is hugely embarrassing to us.

   10. GUGuest1:04:11

       Hugely embarrassing because it hasn't yielded results?

   11. EWEric Weinstein1:04:14

       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 pseudo-scientist 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.

   12. GUGuest1:04:42

       Right.

   13. EWEric Weinstein1:04:42

       And the way you push somebody out is you say, "Oh, that guy's a crackpot. He's a grifter."

   14. GUGuest1:04:46

       Mm-hmm.

   15. EWEric Weinstein1:04:46

       "He's a pseudo-scientist."

   16. GUGuest1:04:47

       Right.

   17. EWEric Weinstein1:04:48

       "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-

   18. GUGuest1:05:00

       Was this considered nuttiness in '64 though?

   19. EWEric Weinstein1:05:03

       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 these two stories cross, okay? You start off with Babson and Bainson.

   20. GUGuest1:05:18

       Okay.

   21. EWEric Weinstein1:05:18

       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?

   22. GUGuest1:05:35

       No.

   23. EWEric Weinstein1:05:35

       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 or Xerox PARC.

   24. GUGuest1:05:53

       Mm-hmm.

   25. EWEric Weinstein1:05:53

       And you probably haven't heard of the Research Institute for Advanced Study.

   26. GUGuest1:05:57

       No.

   27. EWEric Weinstein1:05:58

       Yet this has illustrious names associated with it. Uh, Solomon Lefschetz, the great topologist, uh, comes out of retirement to work on this anti-gravity, uh, inspired project. Um, Rudolph- Rudolph Kalman of Kalman filtering. There's no shortage... Sheldon Glashow, who discovers 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 Advanced Study (laughs) 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 anti-gravity thing between '53 and '73? And the reason it ends in 1973 is a guy named Mike Mansfield...... uh, I think in Montana as a senator, passes something called the- the Mansfield Amendment, which discontinues army... or D- Department of Defense military funding for blue sky research inside of our universities. And...

   28. GUGuest1:07:34

       What is blue sky research?

   29. EWEric Weinstein1:07:36

       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?

   30. GUGuest1:08:17

       Mm-hmm.
6. 1:15:00 – 1:23:40

   Right. …

   1. EWEric Weinstein1:15:00

      near that.

   2. GUGuest1:15:00

      Right.

   3. EWEric Weinstein1:15:01

      So that's what I assumed about UFOs, and I goofed.

   4. GUGuest1:15:05

      So what do you think it is now?

   5. EWEric Weinstein1:15:07

      Well, that's the new question.

   6. GUGuest1:15:09

      And what made you shift this perspective?

   7. EWEric Weinstein1:15:12

      So there was this weird thing that happened where we announced through The New York Times that the stuff may be more real than anyone cared to imagine. You know, when Jeremy Corbell was releasing these videos, and who was leaking them, I don't know. And The New York Times was authenticating, and, you know, you get all of this, again, tons of ambiguity, so everybody's decision tree blows out and 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 this 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 Curtis Wright. You're going to Curtis 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... Th- th- 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 at 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 'GMU Nu.' And the guy says, "Oh, it's Chapel Hill." So he goes there. So ha, 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 at 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, antigravity, antigravity devices like UFOs. And he said, "Well, if you really wanna get to antigravity, 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 Dessar, uh, entered and won this competition that had this stench about it 'cause it was, like, stigmatized. "You're gonna enter a competition for antigravity 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, 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 p- pal around with rich people who are talking about antigravity, 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-

   8. GUGuest1:18:44

      There's a disclosure about a specific technology.

   9. EWEric Weinstein1:18:48

      About something... I mean, more or less the way this works, doesn't matter who you talk to, is like, "Something is 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." Look, 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."

   10. GUGuest1:19:16

       Okay.

   11. EWEric Weinstein1:19:17

       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.

   12. GUGuest1:19:31

       Mm-hmm.

   13. EWEric Weinstein1:19:31

       Wh- when am I, when am I headed out to Colorado? "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 after?" "Oh, no, 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 p- a part of it, for, like, three years? I don't know how long.

   14. GUGuest1:19:54

       For three years, they've been telling you-

   15. EWEric Weinstein1:19:55

       Well-

   16. GUGuest1:19:55

       ... that they're gonna release this?

   17. EWEric Weinstein1:19:57

       Well, yeah, a- 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) .

   18. GUGuest1:20:22

       Okay.

   19. EWEric Weinstein1:20:22

       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. 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-

   20. GUGuest1:20:52

       Yeah.

   21. EWEric Weinstein1:20:52

       ... 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 they, then they say, "And that nobody could do this, that we know of?" They said, "That's right, because they seem to del- defy the laws of physics." You hear this phrase over and again-

   22. GUGuest1:21:10

       Yeah.

   23. EWEric Weinstein1:21:11

       ... 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." It's 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. Som- 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?

   24. GUGuest1:21:49

       No.

   25. EWEric Weinstein1:21:50

       You ever heard of the Wilson memo?

   26. GUGuest1:21:51

       No.

   27. EWEric Weinstein1:21:53

       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 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.

   28. GUGuest1:22:53

       So you know as much about it as anyone and you're not even involved, and there's only two other people-

   29. EWEric Weinstein1:22:58

       (laughs)

   30. GUGuest1:22:59

       ... that know the science behind this?

Episode duration: 4:06:49