Joe Rogan Experience #2503 - Eric Weinstein

1. 0:02 – 3:44

   Catching up: drinking, Shabbat wine, and settling into the studio

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music] Um, I was like, "There's only one way to do this. I have to just not drink for a while." So I took, like, eight months off, and then I had, like, a margarita at dinner once, so I was like, "Ooh, I miss this." And then I had a glass of wine here or there.

   2. EWEric Weinstein0:24

      I was wondering how that was gonna hold up.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:25

      Yeah. It was eight, about-

   4. EWEric Weinstein0:26

      But, yeah, but I... But you're, you're not ca- I know that you're not captured by it.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:30

      No, no, no.

   6. EWEric Weinstein0:30

      Neither am I, but like-

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:31

      It was nervous

   8. EWEric Weinstein0:31

      ... our religious observance requires it. Doesn't it?

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:34

      You require abstinence or drinking?

   10. EWEric Weinstein0:36

       No, we, no, we drink.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:37

       What, when do you have to drink?

   12. EWEric Weinstein0:39

       Shabbat, every... Come f- any Friday.

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:41

       How much do you drink on Shabbat?

   14. EWEric Weinstein0:43

       I probably have two and a half glasses of wine.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:45

       Is there, like, a number that you're supposed to hit-

   16. EWEric Weinstein0:47

       No, there's a communal cup that we-

   17. JRJoe Rogan0:48

       ... otherwise you're a bad boy? [laughs]

   18. EWEric Weinstein0:49

       What? Well, that, that's Purim.

   19. JRJoe Rogan0:51

       What is-

   20. EWEric Weinstein0:51

       We should get into Purim.

   21. JRJoe Rogan0:52

       We're getting into it.

   22. EWEric Weinstein0:53

       All right.

   23. JRJoe Rogan0:53

       Do we need glasses? You wanna have a drink?

   24. EWEric Weinstein0:56

       Uh, usually I re- we, you, you and I tend to go a while, so we usually do that at the end.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:00

       Well, let's, let's get some ice and some gla- Are we rolling already?

   26. SPSpeaker1:03

       I've been rolling, yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:04

       Okay.

   28. EWEric Weinstein1:04

       Oh, shit.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:05

       Let's get some... Tell Jeff to get us some ice and some glasses-

   30. EWEric Weinstein1:07

       I didn't know we were... Oh
2. 3:44 – 5:39

   UT Austin talk sparks a dark energy debate—and a Michio Kaku critique

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:44

      How was your, uh, your... What, what, what was it exactly? How would you describe it? A speech? Uh, a presentation?

   2. EWEric Weinstein3:51

      I gave a, a talk on dark energy, uh, to the, uh, Karch Group at the UTexas, UTexas Austin Physics Department.

   3. JRJoe Rogan3:58

      I, this is what I wanted to ask you about.

   4. EWEric Weinstein4:00

      Sure.

   5. JRJoe Rogan4:00

      Michio Kaku's been saying that he believes that dark energy is possibly something leaking in from another dimension. Is that... Look at that face. Look at that. [laughs] You gave a-

   6. EWEric Weinstein4:13

      Go, go on.

   7. JRJoe Rogan4:13

      You gave a little side eye.

   8. EWEric Weinstein4:15

      Go on.

   9. JRJoe Rogan4:15

      Well, let's see what he says. Jamie, see if you can find that, please. I think he said it was gravity leaking-

   10. EWEric Weinstein4:22

       Did you ever take ants from different colonies and put them together as a kid just to see what happens?

   11. JRJoe Rogan4:27

       Did I? No.

   12. EWEric Weinstein4:27

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan4:27

       I never did that.

   14. EWEric Weinstein4:28

       I did that.

   15. JRJoe Rogan4:29

       Oh, why? Just to watch them fight?

   16. EWEric Weinstein4:30

       Oh, yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan4:30

       Oh, you fucking psycho.

   18. EWEric Weinstein4:31

       Yeah, a little bit.

   19. JRJoe Rogan4:32

       No, I never did any of that.

   20. EWEric Weinstein4:34

       You were saying about Michio.

   21. JRJoe Rogan4:35

       Yeah, that he, uh, I, I just, I didn't even read it. I just saw it and went, "Oh, Jesus, I gotta talk to Eric about this." [laughs] Michio goes, "Just dark matter isn't matter at all. It's gravity leaking in from a parallel dimension." And this guy won't do mushrooms. Isn't that wild?

   22. EWEric Weinstein4:53

       Uh.

   23. JRJoe Rogan4:56

       What do you think about that?

   24. EWEric Weinstein4:56

       Do you remember when I was here, and I said, "Get Michio Kaku in here with me"?

   25. JRJoe Rogan5:01

       Yeah. What, what is it, what is it about... Well, clearly he's a brilliant guy.

   26. EWEric Weinstein5:05

       He, he is, and was, a brilliant guy. He's decided to do something else, and to be entirely honest, I don't love going after other named people. In, in general, my shtick is that I go hard after institutions. I'm a, a huge institutional supporter and their worst nightmare in the current world. Individuals, I don't like beefing with. I, I watch all of the energy, the beauty of life lost to beefing with people. Michio Kaku's doing a tremendous amount of damage to theoretical physics.

   27. JRJoe Rogan5:37

       How so?

3. 5:39 – 8:50

   “TOGIT”: how string theory became the ‘only game in town’ (and why that matters)

   1. EWEric Weinstein5:39

      Um, theoretical physics is, in my estimation, the most beautiful, most powerful, most economically potent thing you can do with your life, and we are the best. The United States is, in my opinion, the greatest nation in the history of the earth for theoretical physics because we are cowboys, we are irreverentWe are the, we are the people who invented the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the semiconductor. Um, this is what we do, and we've lost the ability to do it at an, at a level that I cannot believe happened during my watch, my lifetime. So from 1984 to the present, those 42 years have been the greatest intellectual implosion, I think, that I know of, where people just got dumber.

   2. JRJoe Rogan6:36

      And what do you think is the cause? I'm gonna disconnect-

   3. EWEric Weinstein6:38

      String theory

   4. JRJoe Rogan6:38

      ... this, uh, humidity.

   5. EWEric Weinstein6:40

      Quantum gravity.

   6. JRJoe Rogan6:41

      Quantum gravity did it?

   7. EWEric Weinstein6:42

      Yep. Mm-hmm. In 1984, there was a result, and it's called the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation. And the guy that I've talked to you about before in UFO context, the guy who is Louis Witten's son, Louis Witten, happy, happy birthday, turned 105, um, was the anti-gravity guy from the '50s. His son, Edward Witten, decided that the 1984 Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation meant that we should all, all the smartest people should pile into one narrow subspecialty, and that that was the future. And because he was so much smarter than all of us, people listened, and I didn't. And Michio Kaku is part of his wave. Almost all of the people that you've traditionally had on in physics have some connection to this. So you've had on, I don't know, probably Sean Carroll, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene. Nobody wanted to say what was happening, which is that we were, we were being unraveled and destroyed. Our ability to be the world's greatest theoretical physicists was being eroded year by year for 42 years.

   8. JRJoe Rogan7:58

      And specifically, it w- the pursuit of string theory?

   9. EWEric Weinstein8:02

      It's not string theory i- itself that's the problem. String theory is harmless. It's just a bunch of equations, a bunch of ideas, and it's beautiful mathematics in many places. So, um, that's not an issue. The issue is the exclusion of everything else. And this goes under the name TOGIT, or the only game in town, T-O-G-I-T.

   10. JRJoe Rogan8:25

       Mm-hmm.

   11. EWEric Weinstein8:25

       And it's this idea that only we, the enlightened, can do theoretical physics, and the rest of you are just doing finger exercises, and you're too stupid to know it.

   12. JRJoe Rogan8:36

       So specifically, like, what is... What, what's isolationist about string theory? Like, what is it about this one particular theory that all this thought has been pushed into that?

4. 8:50 – 14:21

   Wheel of Fortune as physics: UV completion, courage, and the right to ‘solve the puzzle’

   1. EWEric Weinstein8:50

      The claim is that there's this thing called UV complete physics. And there's no way that we can have a discussion about that directly. If I could ask Jamie, could I impose upon you to call up on YouTube Wheel of Fortune, and then use I've got a good feeling about this. I can explain it to you.

   2. JRJoe Rogan9:14

      Wheel of Fortune, I've got a good feeling about this?

   3. EWEric Weinstein9:15

      I've got a good feeling about this.

   4. JRJoe Rogan9:17

      Okay. Is that an episode of Wheel of Fortune?

   5. EWEric Weinstein9:18

      It'll be over briefly. It's very, very quick.

   6. JRJoe Rogan9:21

      Okay.

   7. EWEric Weinstein9:21

      It's about a minute and a half or something. And the, the key point is it's a tight analogy for the problem faced in physics that anyone can understand. So I don't-- People think I try to make things complicated. I really try to make them understandable, but what I do is I talk about things... I don't know that you've ever had anyone talk about UV completeness on the Joe Rogan Experience.

   8. JRJoe Rogan9:40

      I don't believe so.

   9. EWEric Weinstein9:41

      Yeah. Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan9:42

       Is this it? Okay, put your headphones on.

   11. EWEric Weinstein9:43

       Yeah.

   12. SPSpeaker9:44

       Uh, well-

   13. JRJoe Rogan9:45

       Well, you're not gonna be able to hear it unless you have headphones on.

   14. EWEric Weinstein9:47

       I know it like the back of my hand.

   15. JRJoe Rogan9:49

       Ha. Wheel of Fortune.

   16. SPSpeaker9:53

       Uh, we need a phrase this time. [bell dings] That's the category for this puzzle, [bell dinging] and it is a prize puzzle. [cheering] Go ahead, Rick.

   17. SPSpeaker10:02

       Gladly. [wheel clicking] Come on. [claps]

   18. SPSpeaker10:11

       And what do we get here? 500.

   19. SPSpeaker10:13

       R.

   20. SPSpeaker10:15

       Well, you'd think [buzzer] there'd be an R in there somewhere, wouldn't you?

   21. EWEric Weinstein10:17

       Oh, Rick.

   22. JRJoe Rogan10:18

       Oh, man.

   23. SPSpeaker10:18

       So you called it. Kaitlin. [wheel clicking]

   24. SPSpeaker10:26

       L.

   25. SPSpeaker10:27

       Uh, one L. [bell dings] [clapping]

   26. SPSpeaker10:32

       Can she really solve?

   27. EWEric Weinstein10:32

       Hmm.

   28. SPSpeaker10:33

       What's that?

   29. SPSpeaker10:34

       Can I solve?

   30. SPSpeaker10:37

       Okay.
5. 14:21 – 24:20

   Off-the-books seminars: why Eric says physics departments hide his appearances

   1. EWEric Weinstein14:21

      So th-that's what the problem that we're facing is, is that we've got one group that got control of the gatekeeping who is very good at mathematics, extremely bad at physics, and they've redefined what physics is and what good science is, where they're the only ones who are guessing the puzzle. They can't guess the puzzle, and everyone else is like... Here's a crazy story from yesterday. I wasn't allowed to say that I gave a talk in the physics department, even though any n-normal person would say that that happened, and I wasn't allowed to do that when I visited a, uh, physics institution in Canada. I wasn't allowed to say that I was visiting for a week, nor was I allowed to say that I gave a seminar that lasted nine hours.

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:07

      But you just did.

   3. EWEric Weinstein15:08

      Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:09

      Are you a lawbreaker?

   5. EWEric Weinstein15:10

      I'm breaking the rules now because I've-

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:12

      Okay

   7. EWEric Weinstein15:12

      ... now I've had it. I agreed, I agreed to not do this, and I'm, and with these missing scientists, I've changed my mind. It, I'm not gonna deal with these people anymore, and whatever is going on with science and the suppression of different ideas, um, is terrifying. Right now we have a situation-- I, you know, I gave a talk at the University of Chicago. There's no record of it.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:42

      Who's asking you to do these talks, and who's asking you to not give a record? You don't have to name names, but like-

   9. EWEric Weinstein15:47

      Yeah. Particular people. I-i-in general, the funny part is that-

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:51

       Oh

   11. EWEric Weinstein15:51

       ... the people who ask me to give talks in the physics departments are the most courageous person in each department. So the problem is that the person that I-- You, you end up feeling resentful towards. How dare you tell me that I can't give this talk in this department officially?

   12. JRJoe Rogan16:07

       Hmm.

   13. EWEric Weinstein16:07

       Is the person who's arranging for your stay and is arranging for the, the room, and they are under the most pressure from the institutions.

   14. JRJoe Rogan16:16

       So the institution is forcing them to say, "You, you're allowed to do, give the talk-"

   15. EWEric Weinstein16:22

       Mm-hmm

   16. JRJoe Rogan16:22

       "... but you're not allowed to talk about it on social media. You're not allowed to-"

   17. EWEric Weinstein16:26

       Right

   18. JRJoe Rogan16:26

       "... advertise that you're doing it. You're not allowed to say that you're doing it."

   19. EWEric Weinstein16:29

       So in this case, in the case of, of UTexas physics department, I was allowed to say I'm speaking in the Karch Group Seminar. It's like a condom to make sure [chuckles] that the physics department doesn't get pregnant.

   20. JRJoe Rogan16:39

       But isn't that really bizarre? Because University of Austin, Texas, was supposed to be a university that fixed all the bullshit that was wrong with other universities.

   21. EWEric Weinstein16:49

       Oh, it's much, much more insane than that. This was the home of Steven Weinberg, who moved from Harvard to Texas because the money, the oil money was used to buy brains. So Har-- Basically, Texas raided Harvard for people like John Tate in the math department, Steven Weinberg, who was the p-probably the greatest living, uh, theorist, and that was the continuation of the Bryce DeWitt group from North Carolina Chapel Hill that was set up to do anti-gravity by Agne Bains. So you're right next to an amazing physics department with a crazy history, um, that in fact touched anti-gravity. This is one of the, one of the tiny number of places that has a, a real legacy in that department, and I, I was speaking there on gravity, on dark energy. And, it-- Uh, look, I've been lying my whole life about my relationship with the physics world because of this pressure. They can't listen to me if I say I'm a physicist, so I say I'm an entertainer.

   22. JRJoe Rogan17:56

       [chuckles]

   23. EWEric Weinstein17:57

       Yeah. But then people say, "Well, why would you do that? Why would you say that you're an entertainer when you obviously are conversant in all this stuff?" And the answer is, "I don't wanna die. I don't wanna lose my ability to enter a physics department." So I, I take on this completely wrong personaAnd you know, I have the emails. W- "You're not giving a talk, you're having conversations in room 5308."

   24. JRJoe Rogan18:20

       It literally says you're not giving a talk?

   25. EWEric Weinstein18:21

       I could read what it is that they write to me, so-

   26. JRJoe Rogan18:24

       Why, but why, what is the benefit of this formal declaration or this formal designation of the way you're talking?

   27. EWEric Weinstein18:31

       So when I was at a physics institute in Canada, I w- I was told, "We're worried that you're going to use it to legitimize yourself."

   28. JRJoe Rogan18:39

       [laughs]

   29. EWEric Weinstein18:40

       It's like, I'm going to do that. Of course I'm going... I have a PhD from Harvard, you stupid f- I, I mean, like, y- you, you guys imagine I'm, I'm, I'm a podcast guest?

   30. JRJoe Rogan18:54

       This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Once you've got a great name for your business, you need a great domain, and Squarespace makes it easy to lock in a domain. You just search the name you want, buy it, and then you're ready to build. No hidden fees, no weird upsells. Go to squarespace.com/ROGAN for a free trial, and when you are ready to launch, use the code ROGAN to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Right, just a regular-
6. 24:20 – 28:38

   Physics as power: ‘boom, vroom, zoom’ and the case for serious gatekeeping

   1. EWEric Weinstein24:20

      world. So if you take physics, why, why do we care about physics so much more than really almost any other aspect of the sciences other than biology? I had to give a talk at the New York Deep Tech Week, shout out to those guys, and I, I put it on the slide as, uh, three things. There's boom, vroom, and zoom. Easy to remember. Boom is weapons. Physics will create weapons that you'll-- dwarf ev- everything else, with the possible exception of biologicals. Uh, zoom-- uh, vroom is energy, and the story of energy is basically the story of prosperity and control. Uh, if you look at wealth and the amount of fossil fuels burned, it's more or less like a one-to-one correlation as to which nations are rich and poor per capita. And zoom is everything else. It's propulsion, it's computation, it's communication, and those things, if you, if you take them together, um, more or less define the economy and the world order. Physics is the center of what makes us modern humans, and it became too dangerous in the 1950s. Even the '40s, you know, atomic weapons are extremely bad, but they're not hydrogen bombs. Um, somehow in November of '52, everything changed, and we became, we became too dangerous. The, the community of physicists is the most powerful group of people made into completely, uh, ineffectual humans.

   2. JRJoe Rogan26:02

      And do you think this is by design?

   3. EWEric Weinstein26:04

      Partially.

   4. JRJoe Rogan26:05

      And wh- wh- what was the purpose of it? By, by saying that you became-- that physicists became too dangerous, the ideas became too dangerous, w- is the idea that the weapons would become so immense and powerful that they had to do something to stop and curb that?

   5. EWEric Weinstein26:18

      Well, we didn't know how to control it, right? So in other words, for example, in the-- in 1940, we set up something called the Reference Committee, which I'm sure your listeners have never heard of, and the Reference Committee lived inside of the National Resource Council. Now, why was it important? Because chain reaction physics was so hot. Once the neutron was found, right? So think about neutrons as bullets. Um, they can go right into the middle of an atom because they're, they're not positively charged, so they're not gonna be repelled by the nucleus. And they can bust apart atoms that are base- barely being held together, and that's why you, you get bullets begetting bullets begetting bullets, and that's what a chain reaction is. The people who were doing that in the forty-- in the thirties suddenly found that when they mailed off a paper to a journal, if they weren't part of the secret group in Los Alamos, their, uh, paper got held up and sent back for revisions, and there was no money in it. We, we secretly set up this thing to shunt real research into the National Resource Council. I think this was or- organized by a guy named Breit, B-R-E-I-T, and that was the beginning of this whole peer review control back in those days.

   6. JRJoe Rogan27:34

      And this control, do you think is this ego-based? That the people who are the gatekeepers wanna remain in the position of-

   7. EWEric Weinstein27:41

      We all wanna survive, Joe. I mean, this is a real problem. So you and I can hate on the institutions all we want from the safety of the JRE, but what are you gonna do when it becomes really, really easy for people to commit, like, mass murder? If you think about all the really bad mass-- like the, the Vegas shooting that never really [chuckles] got sorted out. It's very hard to kill large numbers of people using things like bullets. If you wanna really kill a large number of people, you're gonna go to biologicals, and you're gonna go to nuclear. And what happens when that becomes easy? Like, maybe it's a lot easier to build these weapons than the way we currently do it. Right now, we're, we're, uh, bottlenecked on things like centrifuges. And by the way, who knows what the next innovation in physics is gonna bring? So I always say this thing about if you're not tracking everybody at my level, what are you doing as an intelligence service?

7. 28:38 – 36:56

   Missing scientists and ‘junkification’: separating real signals from narrative noise

   1. JRJoe Rogan28:38

      Is this part of your concern about the missing scientists?

   2. EWEric Weinstein28:41

      Yeah, of course.

   3. JRJoe Rogan28:42

      Yeah. So the missing scientist narrative, um, for people that aren't aware of it, I think they're up to 15 now, and a lot of people say that some of these connections are baseless and that some of 'em, th- it's just, they happen.

   4. EWEric Weinstein28:52

      We're not really up to 15.

   5. JRJoe Rogan28:53

      No. Okay. So what do you think we're actually up to?

   6. EWEric Weinstein28:55

      I don't know. Probably five or six.

   7. JRJoe Rogan28:59

      But w-- I saw someone online did a breakdown of it, and essentially they were saying that the odds of this being a coincidence are off the charts, that the people that are all involved in very specific types of technological, technological research, s- different things that are top secret, that all of these people either wind up missing-

   8. EWEric Weinstein29:20

      There's a lot of murder in math and physics, first of all. People don't really appreciate that. Um, you know, the Unabomber was a famous PhD mathematician. Uh-

   9. JRJoe Rogan29:30

      He's a big story, though. There's a, there's a lot of great stories.

   10. EWEric Weinstein29:32

       Yeah, sure. There was a guy named Cantor who, uh, broke into David Rittenhouse Laboratories in the University of Pennsylvania, where I was an undergraduate, and shot up a seminar. Um, there was, uh, you know, this situation in Iowa where a relative of mine got a seat in the physics department, um, because somebody was killed by one of the graduate students. I think it became a movie, like Dark Matter. So th- there, there's an incredible amount of murder. Uh, the ball-peen hammer, uh, killing of, was it Carl Dulieu by, um, uh, Streliski at Stanford. So first of all, there's just a lot of death because mathematicians and physicists are somewhat close to unhinged, and it's, it's a really nasty-- There's a lot of nasty culture, and sometimes it becomes violent.

   11. JRJoe Rogan30:23

       Why do you think they're close to unhinged?

   12. EWEric Weinstein30:28

       You spend that much time in your head? I, I'm amazed that I'm as well-grounded as I am.

   13. JRJoe Rogan30:33

       [laughs]

   14. EWEric Weinstein30:34

       No, seriously. You're just way out in the stratosphere. I, I f- I completely forget who I am, where I am, that I'm even a human being. That y- when you're using your body as an instrument, as you, as you do, um, in combat sports and training, you become a different thing, you know? You know that archery thing where you have to-

   15. JRJoe Rogan30:52

       Mm-hmm

   16. EWEric Weinstein30:54

       ... twist your arm. A lot of people don't know that they can do that initially. Like just a small thing like that. Or you don't have-

   17. JRJoe Rogan30:59

       What are you, what are you talking about? Archery thing that you twist your arm?

   18. EWEric Weinstein31:02

       If you have an old style bow-

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:04

       Uh-huh

   20. EWEric Weinstein31:05

       ... y- y- you often get burned by the-

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:07

       Oh, that you have to twist your arm like that-

   22. EWEric Weinstein31:09

       Yeah, it's just like-

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:09

       ... so that you don't-

   24. EWEric Weinstein31:10

       Yeah

   25. JRJoe Rogan31:10

       ... so that you're not like this and get-

   26. EWEric Weinstein31:11

       Right

   27. JRJoe Rogan31:11

       ... hit.

   28. EWEric Weinstein31:12

       But, but you, you, you don't see-

   29. JRJoe Rogan31:13

       I see what you're saying

   30. EWEric Weinstein31:13

       ... see, but then you twisted your, your wrist. You keep-
8. 36:56 – 1:14:23

   From Van Halen to micro-genres: why rock faded, why country rose, and where dancing went

   1. JRJoe Rogan36:56

      Eddie Van Halen doesn't get the credit he deserves either.

   2. EWEric Weinstein36:59

      Oh, tell me. Talk to me.

   3. JRJoe Rogan37:00

      Well, it's just, Van Halen became Van Hagar, and it became a different kind of music. And I think a lot of the original hardcore fans left, but a lot... I think it got more popular with-

   4. EWEric Weinstein37:17

      Sure

   5. JRJoe Rogan37:18

      ... Sammy Hagar, but it was a different kind of music. And not that it's bad, but it's different. And then I think a lot of people just went, "Nah." But like, if you go like to, you know, some of the like big Van Halen with David... I think Van Halen with David Lee Roth in his prime was a literally a perfect band. It was phenomenal. That was, they were the shit when I was in high school. I mean, it was, everybody had Van Halen on their-

   6. EWEric Weinstein37:45

      I-

   7. JRJoe Rogan37:45

      ... notebooks. They made the VH.

   8. EWEric Weinstein37:47

      I remember it.

   9. JRJoe Rogan37:47

      They were awesome. And they were so good, and Van Hal- and Eddie specifically could shred so hard. And some of those classic riffs, I just don't think in the mainstream world, he got the credit that he deserves.

   10. EWEric Weinstein38:05

       I see it differently.

   11. JRJoe Rogan38:06

       Well, people mention Clapton, who of course is a, a great wizard. Always it's number one is Hendrix. Most people have Hendrix as number one, because he was so revolutionary.

   12. EWEric Weinstein38:15

       Well, nobody's gonna say Allan Holdsworth.

   13. JRJoe Rogan38:17

       Yeah, I don't know who he is.

   14. EWEric Weinstein38:17

       Exactly.

   15. JRJoe Rogan38:18

       Yeah.

   16. EWEric Weinstein38:19

       I mean, my, my, my point is, is that, um, David Lee Roth kept Eddie Van Halen from becoming Allan Holdsworth, and that's-

   17. JRJoe Rogan38:30

       Who is Allan Holdsworth?

   18. EWEric Weinstein38:32

       Oh, it's interesting. Allan Holdsworth, like, if you talk to your hot shit guitarist friends, they will very often, like, everybody will just pause and say, "Well, yeah, Al- that's Allan Holdsworth."

   19. JRJoe Rogan38:44

       Really?

   20. EWEric Weinstein38:44

       Yeah. And it's sort of like listening to a modem for normal human beings, right? Um, that's why it's just, just not popular. And so Eddie Van Halen was this-

   21. JRJoe Rogan38:55

       Who did he play with?

   22. EWEric Weinstein38:57

       I don't know, Allan Holdsworth.

   23. JRJoe Rogan38:58

       Just by himself?

   24. EWEric Weinstein38:59

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan38:59

       Okay.

   26. EWEric Weinstein39:00

       Can we just actually weirdly put Allan Holdsworth, just like, choose something with a-

   27. JRJoe Rogan39:04

       Yeah, yeah, we'll listen to some of his music.

   28. EWEric Weinstein39:05

       So-

   29. JRJoe Rogan39:05

       We might have... We'll edit it out of the episode, because otherwise we'll get dinged on YouTube.

   30. EWEric Weinstein39:08

       Okay. Well, I don't want you to... Okay. But like-
9. 1:14:23 – 1:18:34

   Comedians in physics departments: rebuilding the bridge between ‘two cultures’

   1. EWEric Weinstein1:14:23

      Dude, you should have seen the comedians in the physics department yesterday.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:14:27

      Oh. I've, I've-

   3. EWEric Weinstein1:14:27

      It was hysterically funny

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:14:28

      ... I bet, it must have been amazing.

   5. EWEric Weinstein1:14:29

      Duncan-

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:14:30

      Duncan and Kurt together.

   7. EWEric Weinstein1:14:32

      Oh, my God.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:14:32

      First of all, together they are the fucking dynamic duo. They are such a good duo, 'cause they're both sarcastic, and they're, they're both, like-

   9. EWEric Weinstein1:14:39

      They were so well-behaved

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:14:42

       ... heavily engaged in satire

   11. EWEric Weinstein1:14:42

       ... as far as they could.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:14:43

       Yeah.

   13. EWEric Weinstein1:14:44

       But then, um, I don't know whether I can tell these stories anymore.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:14:48

       Tell these stories.

   15. EWEric Weinstein1:14:49

       No. Anyway.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:14:49

       Tell them. What happened? What did Kurt do? [laughs]

   17. EWEric Weinstein1:14:52

       So part of the-

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:14:54

       [laughs] Fuck, I love that guy. He's so awesome.

   19. EWEric Weinstein1:14:57

       So, so, some experimentalist-

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:14:59

       I, I love that he's a real person. Whenever I, he comes into the mothership green room-

   21. EWEric Weinstein1:15:02

       Yeah, yeah

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:15:02

       ... I'm like, "Yes. Give me a dose"

   23. EWEric Weinstein1:15:04

       Oh, he got real. He, he gave me some wild anti-Israel stuff, I think. I couldn't tell whether it was pro or anti. Um, he sh- so at the end, there was an experimentalist who was like, "Come to my, come to my parlor. I, I'll, I'll show you my, uh, etchings." No, no, no, cryogenic giant vacuum tubes from hell or whatever. So we all went down there, and so we're in the basement of the physics department, and you can tell the difference between the theory floor and the ex- like, the part where they actually do things. And these guys were just, you know, were effectively at 77 degrees before abs- uh, above absolute zero with, uh, conditions that only occur in deep space inside of this thing coated in, like, tin foil. And so these guys are just cracking jokes about growing weed and, and, uh- [laughs]

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:15:52

       [laughs]

   25. EWEric Weinstein1:15:52

       "What happens if you put hydroponic weed in that chain?"

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:15:54

       [laughs]

   27. EWEric Weinstein1:15:55

       But the other thing is, is that comedians are really, they're really intellectual nerds, and a lot of them, not all of them. And-

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:16:05

       Those two guys are.

   29. EWEric Weinstein1:16:05

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:16:05

       For sure.
10. 1:18:34 – 1:25:07

    Eric’s UFO pivot: from ‘nonsense’ to ‘SAPs are real’ and government outreach

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:18:34

       So you've turned a corner on this. Let's talk about that.

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:18:37

       Okay.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:18:37

       Because, uh, I saw you on Jesse Michel's show, and you were talking about how just a few years ago you thought that the entire narrative was complete nonsense.

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:18:46

       Probably five, six years ago by now.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:18:48

       And what changed?

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:18:50

       Um, there was no way to explain ... So Jesse was going on and on about it. I said, "Jesse, you're a smart guy," and you, you, you know, I, I often would call him the, the back alley scholar. So he knew a lot of stuff, um, that was sort of forbidden knowledge, andHe wouldn't be quiet about it. So I, I said, "Okay, I'm gonna disabuse you of the idea that you're actually into something." And I realized very quickly, at a minimum, there is a massive denied program, like usually called a special access program.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:19:33

       Mm-hmm.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:19:34

       One or more. There's no way to synchronize that number of people who've had experiences that are so similar, and there was a lot of stuff that I couldn't make sense of. And w- what attracted me in a certain sense, um, was I couldn't come up with any explanation. It's so rare. I usually have exactly the opposite problem, which is I come up with too many explanations. I can't come up with a single explanation that makes sense of what I now know. And a- also the fact that the government outreached to me and to Sam Harris and to Lex Fridman. And, you know, there was this thing where these guys who checked out, um, said, "There's gonna be a massive disclosure, and we need people to disseminate these things to the public, and you have a share of the, of the public who listens to you, and we need to get you informed so that you can help mediate the disclosure."

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:20:25

       So what prompted this change in narrative?

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:20:29

        What's going on behind the-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:20:31

        Yeah

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:20:31

        ... the government?

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:20:32

        Yeah.

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:20:32

        We don't know. We don't know... Look, we don't know what the thing or things is, are yet. Um, some of it is so, again, so low quality that it's embarrassing to be seen with it. So my colleagues who don't want to take this seriously, uh, use that. Like, "Okay, so you're, y- y- you're, you're now on the little green men train?" And I said, "No, I'm on the special access program train." There is, there's for sure special access program or s- programs that have UFO on the side of them that may or may not have aliens or craft or non-human intelligence in them. It may be that it's decoys. It may be... I don't know what it is. There's no way to deny that there's, like, a giant lump under the carpet.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:21:17

        And what, what prompted you to change your opinion and, and, and decide that there is some sort of a special access program?

    16. EWEric Weinstein1:21:26

        When I started coming in contact with totally sober people from reasonable walks of life who would say the craziest things to me, and a lot of them checked, and they didn't yet know each other.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:21:36

        Like, what kind of crazy things?

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:21:38

        Um, let me take somebody who's public. Brandon Fugal, for example, uh, was at a dinner where he started talking about being visited by a craft a few feet over the, his head that came over the mesa, and his head of security was catatonic standing in the back of a pickup truck, unable to move. And it was just way too specific, and a shared experience that multiple people had had, right? And so, you know, the, the joke, of course, is that, uh, the secrets of Skinwalker Ranch or, or, you know, whatever this-

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:22:17

        Right

    20. EWEric Weinstein1:22:18

        ... um, there's real stuff going on there, and there's nonsense BS that the History Channel has packaged to come up with a salacious series, and they're... one is funding the other. So I don't know what that is, but, like, the, some of these injuries are real. And, you know, talk-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:22:37

        Injuries?

    22. EWEric Weinstein1:22:37

        Yeah, like Gary Nolan talking about people reporting... You know, he... G- Gary Nolan told me this story that somebody had said that a ball of energy would come and enter the body and move around and then leave. And he said, "You know, the craziest thing is, is that when I inspected the tissue, there was a path of necrosis [laughs] that can't be explained," like something that shows up on imaging. And it's... Gary's a really smart, serious guy. I can check a lot of the things that he says scientifically. Why would he say something like that? I mean, I didn't see it myself, but, uh-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:23:22

        Well, he's also done some very strange work on material science-

    24. EWEric Weinstein1:23:27

        Right

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:23:28

        ... uh, where he's analyzed particles or little, little pieces of metal and alloys that have come from wreckages from the 1970s and '60s.

    26. EWEric Weinstein1:23:37

        Yeah, that I don't know the provenance. Like, he'll carry-

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:23:39

        Right

    28. EWEric Weinstein1:23:39

        ... around a little thing, and he'll show it to me, and he'll say, "You know, you know, there's no combination of, of, uh, of materials and alloys that, that this matches that we know how to produce." And I say, "Okay." It doesn't mean anything to me. Again, it's just, it's all... I, I have no pr- at this point, I have no primary, um, contact with anything anomalous. I just have all sorts of secondary stuff. And by the way, the thing that you saw with the Jesse Michaels in American Alchemy, um, boy, did that get a response inside the government, that particular episode.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:24:15

        How so?

    30. EWEric Weinstein1:24:16

        I had a lot of people who had stopped talking to me about UFOs who suddenly... You know, I had, like, eight calls immediately after it aired. "Hey, Eric, just thought I'd catch up with you." And I was like, "Oh, okay." There was a huge discussion inside. [laughs]
11. 1:25:07 – 1:26:40

    White Sands, El Paso airspace, and the theory that the US has ‘lost control’

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:25:07

       This is the one where the crafts hovered over the base, shut down the nuclear program. Is that it?

    2. EWEric Weinstein1:25:17

       I'm just gonna say what I can say that's fuzzed out that can't be traced to anybody.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:25:21

       Okay.

    4. EWEric Weinstein1:25:23

       Um-I was very upset with the s- shutdown of the El Paso airspace.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:25:30

       That was recently.

    6. EWEric Weinstein1:25:31

       Yeah. It was supposed to be, supposed to be we had a problem with cartel drones.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:25:35

       Right.

    8. EWEric Weinstein1:25:35

       I don't believe that. I think Texas is another name for New Mexico. I think El Paso's a name for White Sands. Can we get a map of the United States that can focus on White Sands and El Paso? [laughs] I, I think we have a problem that we've lost control of our airspace.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:25:55

       You think this was part of what happened in New Jersey as well?

    10. EWEric Weinstein1:26:01

        I can't say as much because what I know... No. What happened around New Jersey, I don't have from as many sources that I feel comfortable saying that this is fuzzed out. I can fuzz out the El Paso story. Nobody has told me that El Paso was shut down because of the problem at White Sands.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:26:21

        Okay.

    12. EWEric Weinstein1:26:23

        People have said things about New Jersey that is-

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:26:26

        All right.

    14. EWEric Weinstein1:26:27

        All right.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:26:28

        So there's El Paso.

    16. SPSpeaker1:26:29

        El Paso here, White Sands up, right above it.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:26:31

        How far away is that?

    18. EWEric Weinstein1:26:32

        Yeah.

    19. SPSpeaker1:26:32

        Uh...

    20. EWEric Weinstein1:26:32

        My guess is about an hour f-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:26:34

        By driving?

    22. SPSpeaker1:26:35

        Yeah, let's see. It's probably-

    23. EWEric Weinstein1:26:37

        Like

    24. SPSpeaker1:26:37

        ... 60, 70, 80 miles at most.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:26:39

        Okay.

12. 1:26:40 – 2:08:17

    Epstein reframed: ‘construct,’ science espionage, and the New Mexico lab adjacency

    1. EWEric Weinstein1:26:40

       So I don't know what's going on, but, uh, my, my guess is... So on Piers Morgan I said this thing, um, which is that New Mexico is the connector of the nuclear story, the Epstein story, and the UFO story. They're all gonna come together. Remember we're, we're only talking about the island?

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:27:11

       Mm-hmm.

    3. EWEric Weinstein1:27:15

       It... Somehow I think I was the first person to seize on this. There's this thing that isn't an interview, which is Steve Bannon trying to train Jeffrey Epstein how to respond to rehabilitate it, and if you can find this, this is-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:27:30

       I've seen it.

    5. EWEric Weinstein1:27:31

       Okay.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:27:31

       It's very weird.

    7. EWEric Weinstein1:27:33

       So he says, um, "You wanna know about why I got Zoro Ranch in New Mexico?" Can we play this clip? Can you find...

    8. SPSpeaker1:27:46

       Um.

    9. EWEric Weinstein1:27:46

       I think Jesse repackaged it after I pointed it out. But this is the story that... Like, somehow we- we're so hung up about sex. We're either angry about trafficking or we're getting off on the idea that all these rich people, um, are gonna get their comeuppance or... You know, we keep turning the Epstein story into something other than a scientific espionage story, which is one of its c- one of its facets.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:28:15

        It's one component.

    11. EWEric Weinstein1:28:16

        It's one component.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:28:17

        Right.

    13. EWEric Weinstein1:28:18

        Yeah, but we, but it doesn't excite us that this is a guy spying. Control of science, Joe, is not something that is officially a big issue, and it is a massive issue.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:28:32

        It's not publicly a big issue.

    15. EWEric Weinstein1:28:33

        That's correct, yeah.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:28:34

        And he clearly had a-

    17. SPSpeaker1:28:36

        So let's, let's back up

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:28:37

        ... big interest in science.

    19. SPSpeaker1:28:38

        So why did I buy a ranch in New Mexico in 1993? So that's gives you some sense, so I would've funded it in 1990. Uh, Los Alamos, which was the high energy lab up in, in New Mexico, was losing all its scientists. And Los Alamos-

    20. SPSpeaker1:28:56

        And Los Alamos w- was where Oppenheimer and where the, where the, uh, a lot of the b- uh, the nuclear weapons program, the bomb, the-

    21. SPSpeaker1:29:01

        That's where the Manhattan Project-

    22. SPSpeaker1:29:02

        Manhattan Project was-

    23. SPSpeaker1:29:03

        Yes, yes

    24. SPSpeaker1:29:03

        ... at La- Los Alamos, and you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that?

    25. SPSpeaker1:29:07

        Yes, because the scientists were going to b- They cut the funding for high energy physics, but the people who worked in Los Alamos would still be in the Santa Fe area.

    26. SPSpeaker1:29:17

        They cut that because the end of the c- This was the Cold War dividend, right?

    27. SPSpeaker1:29:21

        I don't remember exactly why. It was because, again, people thought there was, uh, uh, that physics and high energy physics really wasn't that important.

    28. SPSpeaker1:29:27

        Because that was about nuclear weapons.

    29. SPSpeaker1:29:29

        No, it was because they were trying to... They decided it was maybe not right. This was the same time that Murray Gell-Mann came up with the term quark, Q-U-A-R-K. He, he picked it out of a old poem, the word quark. But it was something, it was mysterious. So they were starting to understand in, in the '90s that the, in the, our world of, the physic world, there was things that were just unexplainable. F- They called it strange things. You gave it a name. You gave it some characteristics. You called it, it had charm, was one of the term. It had a charm. It had a flavor. It had a color. But nobody really kn- no one, Mr. Bannon, understood what it was, just like the financial system.

    30. SPSpeaker1:30:13

        And you wanted to investigate that?
13. 2:08:17 – 2:16:26

    Hidden projects in plain sight: Renaissance Technologies, Stony Brook, and Manhattan Project analogies

    1. JRJoe Rogan2:08:17

       I wanna bring you to one of the weirdest theories that you have.

    2. EWEric Weinstein2:08:19

       All right.

    3. JRJoe Rogan2:08:20

       Which is you talked about this very overly supported physics department in this upstate university, upstate New York university, that's attached to a hedge fund.

    4. EWEric Weinstein2:08:33

       SUNY Stony Brook's mathematics department and physics department.

    5. JRJoe Rogan2:08:38

       Yeah.

    6. EWEric Weinstein2:08:38

       Yeah.

    7. JRJoe Rogan2:08:39

       This is a weird one.

    8. EWEric Weinstein2:08:40

       All right.

    9. JRJoe Rogan2:08:40

       'Cause it's attached to a hedge fund that does Bernie Madoff type numbers.

    10. EWEric Weinstein2:08:44

        Bernie Madoff is a loser piker.

    11. JRJoe Rogan2:08:47

        [laughs]

    12. EWEric Weinstein2:08:50

        Joe, Bernie Madoff was regular, and that's why they called him the Jewish T-bill.

    13. JRJoe Rogan2:08:56

        T-bill?

    14. EWEric Weinstein2:08:56

        Yeah.

    15. JRJoe Rogan2:08:56

        What's a T-bill?

    16. EWEric Weinstein2:08:57

        A Treasury security that allowed you to just earn some very boring, very high rate of return where you were supposedly having your money at risk, but you essentially never lo- there were, like, almost no down months.

    17. JRJoe Rogan2:09:11

        Mm-hmm.

    18. EWEric Weinstein2:09:12

        Renaissance Technologies is like, "No, no, no. Hold my beer. We're just gonna make numbers like nobody's ever made in human history." There's nobody in second or third place relative to Renaissance Technology Me- Medallion Fund.

    19. JRJoe Rogan2:09:26

        And how is it connected to this university, and what do you think is going on up there?

    20. EWEric Weinstein2:09:34

        One, I don't know.

    21. JRJoe Rogan2:09:36

        But something weird.

    22. EWEric Weinstein2:09:38

        It's weird as hell. I, I know, I knew Jim Simons personally. Jim Simons is a genius, but a lot of other people are geniuses. I hate to say it, but y- you can't swing a cat in my world without hitting a genius. So he was, he was great, but he wasn't that much smarter than every other genius at that level. So I would say, you know, top 100 minds in mathematics and physics, clearly better than that. Jim started off working for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Unit. Um, supposedly quit out of outrage over Vietnam, becomes the super young chairman of the SUNY Stony Brook mathematics department, holds a lunch center seminar with a guy who will become the world's smartest living physicist, a guy named C.N. Yang, and they discover over lunch a connection between differential geometry, Jim's, uh, specialty, and C.N. Yang's, uh, specialty, which is the standard model. Jim then quits, forms a hedge fund long before it's cool with the father of another guest of yours on this program, Brian Keating, and the two of them both have medals, so they call it Medallion because they've won prizes. So what was his name? James Ax, not Keating. Uh, and the two of them start this thing, and it takes off at some level that nobody's ever seen numbers before. And then they institute this policy which is, "We're not gonna hire financial experts. We're only gonna hire [laughs] math physics people. So we're gonna hire geometers, we're gonna hire particle theorists, general relativists, and machine learning people." It's like, who, who came up with this story? Do you buy, do you buy this story? This is so strange because it, it sort of also mirrors a second story that was not associated with Brookhaven, which is the national lab near SUNY Stony Brook, but associated with Los Alamos, which is a story called The Prediction Company, except in that case, the name of the person isn't Jim Simons, it's Doyne Farmer, and The Prediction Company is the analog of Renaissance. So what you see is that once people have a pattern, it seems like these patterns repeat. So my point is, if you ask the question, "Do we have a Manhattan Project in the current era?" We don't know. You don't know, I don't know. But if we're allowed to speculate, the question would be where would it be located? So how would you find, for example, the existence of a boys school in rural New Mexico where all of these super smart people are holed up? That's a real puzzle. How would you figure out that Los Alamos was happening if that was your goal? Um, you'd look for indirect evidence. Can you, Jamie, can you call up an article called Forbidden City from 1944 by a guy named, unfortunately, Jack Raper, R-A-P-E-R?

    23. JRJoe Rogan2:13:13

        Jeez. Change your name, bro.

    24. EWEric Weinstein2:13:14

        I know, right. [laughs]

    25. JRJoe Rogan2:13:17

        Just call yourself Raper. Add a P or something.

    26. EWEric Weinstein2:13:20

        [laughs] So-

    27. JRJoe Rogan2:13:23

        Or a G before it maybe

    28. EWEric Weinstein2:13:24

        ... in, in 1944, the craziest thing in the... What?

    29. JRJoe Rogan2:13:27

        G, Graper?

    30. EWEric Weinstein2:13:27

        Graper, right, exactly. Um-
14. 2:16:26 – 2:27:17

    Post-Einstein propulsion: ‘jailbreaking spacetime’ with the ‘observerse’ concept

    1. EWEric Weinstein2:16:26

       Well, what are we not working on? In other words, how do you discover what we're actually up to is in part you listen for the holes. What do I work on? I work on the ability to get out of the solar system. That is my life's mission. I think Elon is a bit of a pussy. [laughs]

    2. JRJoe Rogan2:16:54

       Okay. How so?

    3. EWEric Weinstein2:16:55

       I don't know. He won't meet with me.

    4. JRJoe Rogan2:16:57

       Well-

    5. EWEric Weinstein2:16:58

       It's okay

    6. JRJoe Rogan2:16:58

       ... maybe because you call him a pussy.

    7. EWEric Weinstein2:16:59

       Yeah. No, but it-

    8. JRJoe Rogan2:17:01

       Maybe he's busy. Maybe he's trying to make chicks pregnant.

    9. EWEric Weinstein2:17:05

       No. [laughs]

    10. JRJoe Rogan2:17:07

        He beats them to me.

    11. EWEric Weinstein2:17:07

        It's something he does to, with recreation. Elon's a genius, and Elon is trying to replace scientists with Grok, and one of the things I, I was on an Indian podcast, uh, called, the guy's name is Beer Biceps guy, Ranveer. He, he's the Joe Rogan of India, and-

    12. JRJoe Rogan2:17:26

        What's his name?

    13. EWEric Weinstein2:17:27

        Uh, Ranveer Allahbadia. Can you find him?

    14. JRJoe Rogan2:17:30

        Shout out to Ranveer.

    15. EWEric Weinstein2:17:31

        Yeah. So Ranveer is a friend of mine in Versova, and I went on his podcast, and I, before SpaceX and X and, uh, xAI merged, I said, um, I said, "Look, I don't think SpaceX is Elon's space program. His space program is Grok." Elon doesn't trust scientists for good reason, 'cause they're weak. So he's building his own scientist from when, when we were strong. He's gonna have it read the corpus of physics done by competent physicists who actually care about the physical world so he doesn't have to deal with any of us. That's why he won't meet. It's not because he's not interested, not because he doesn't know. Um, I invited him to the talk as I did you yesterday. The goal is to get out of the solar system, and we're so far away from everything good that there's no way of doing it under relativity. So why are we not researching the only thing that can save us, which is diversification? We need to spread out to the largest number of habitable worlds possible.

    16. JRJoe Rogan2:18:42

        So this implies some sort of a new propulsion system.

    17. EWEric Weinstein2:18:45

        This implies new science.

    18. JRJoe Rogan2:18:47

        New science.

    19. EWEric Weinstein2:18:47

        Stop thinking technology.

    20. JRJoe Rogan2:18:48

        Okay.

    21. EWEric Weinstein2:18:48

        There's no way to... You can't engineer your way out of a science problem. You have to science your way out of it.

    22. JRJoe Rogan2:18:53

        And what would be that science?

    23. EWEric Weinstein2:18:55

        Post-Einstein, post-relativity. That's what I do.

    24. JRJoe Rogan2:18:59

        And how would that apply to us leaving the solar system?

    25. EWEric Weinstein2:19:02

        We don't live in spacetime. Spacetime has a speed limit.

    26. JRJoe Rogan2:19:07

        Explain that.

    27. EWEric Weinstein2:19:08

        If you can only go the speed of light at your best-

    28. JRJoe Rogan2:19:11

        Right

    29. EWEric Weinstein2:19:11

        ... and you can't even get anywhere close to that-

    30. JRJoe Rogan2:19:12

        Right
15. 2:27:17 – 2:53:31

    Assembling a rogue team, the Geometric Unity fight, and ending on billionaire ‘public intellectuals’

    1. EWEric Weinstein2:27:17

       'Cause I know, I know really smart people, Joe.

    2. JRJoe Rogan2:27:21

       Don't you need, like, insane amounts of money and a laboratory somewhere?

    3. EWEric Weinstein2:27:24

       You know what? It's funny. Like, Sam Altman is racing Dario Amodei is racing, uh, Elon Musk for super intelligence. So I ask myself, if you could have premium subscriptions to Groq, Gemini, xAI... Um, sorry. Uh, Groq, Gemini, Claude, all of them.

    4. JRJoe Rogan2:27:49

       Mm-hmm.

    5. EWEric Weinstein2:27:49

       Or you could have Edward Frenkel's home phone number, which would you choose? I'd choose Ed Frenkel's home phone number. So I get to call Ed Frenkel whenever I want to. That's smart. Look, there, there are people that you don't even know about who are just terrifyingly smart, who... Allow me to assemble that team. That's what, you know, I-

    6. JRJoe Rogan2:28:16

       Is that literally what you're trying to do?

    7. EWEric Weinstein2:28:18

       Oh, yeah.

    8. JRJoe Rogan2:28:19

       And how are you doing it?

    9. EWEric Weinstein2:28:21

       I don't know. I stayed with Ed, uh, for five days in Berkeley. I got him and, uh, another colleague who's also terrifying. Uh, I'm using Soviets, Joe. Ex-Soviets.

    10. JRJoe Rogan2:28:35

        Okay.

    11. EWEric Weinstein2:28:35

        'Cause those guys haven't, haven't lost the magic. And, uh, you know, I had Frenkel and a guy named Misha Kapranov come down for five days to kick the shit out of my theory. It was crazy.

    12. JRJoe Rogan2:28:50

        Okay.

    13. EWEric Weinstein2:28:50

        Absolutely crazy. We're drinking vodka at like 10:00 AM, having insane meals, and just working our asses off the way we're supposed to.

    14. JRJoe Rogan2:29:04

        How'd it go?

    15. EWEric Weinstein2:29:05

        Amazing.

    16. JRJoe Rogan2:29:07

        What'd they think about your theory?

    17. EWEric Weinstein2:29:09

        So far, all systems go, Joe.

    18. JRJoe Rogan2:29:12

        Okay. So-

    19. EWEric Weinstein2:29:15

        In, in other words, the story. Can, can we just pull up... I, I just wanna do this for, for my own reasons. Can we pull up the lead, the pinned tweet on my Twitter profile? Which, by the way, thank you for retweeting.

    20. JRJoe Rogan2:29:28

        No problem.

    21. EWEric Weinstein2:29:28

        Yeah. Love you.

    22. JRJoe Rogan2:29:30

        Love you too. What is it? Go to it real quick.

    23. EWEric Weinstein2:29:37

        So first of all, I wanna show off the header.

    24. JRJoe Rogan2:29:40

        Okay.

    25. EWEric Weinstein2:29:40

        Can we go up to the top of the header before we do that? Those two formulas, the bottom one says CFJ. C is Sean Carroll, the middle F is, uh, Fields, and J is Roman Jackiw, a professor at MIT. Sean Carroll's second most, um, cited paper is, has this as its action or Lagrangian. Right above that is my action or Lagrangian. And what you see, all those zeros, is things that Sean Carroll doesn't know how to handle, and that thing where you see a P, you see star parentheses P-

    26. JRJoe Rogan2:30:28

        Mm-hmm

    27. EWEric Weinstein2:30:28

        ... in the bottom line, not the bottom, second from the bottom, is Sean's relativity violating, uh, hack. Sean Carroll did not disclose that Geometric Unity is a direct competitor to his most cited work. So now if we can roll the clip, it'll make more sense as to what's going on. And let's blow that thing up full screen. Your misportrayal of the situation, uh, is nearly constant for reasons that completely elude me. Sean? The good news is I have read Eric's paper. Here it is. I actually have it here, right here. First thing you gotta do is make sure that your theory makes contact with modern physics as it is understood. If you have a new paper out, physicists are gonna look at it. They're gonna look for, you know, where's the Lagrangian? [upbeat music]

    28. JRJoe Rogan2:31:26

        So this is, for people that are just listening, this is showing that you have Lagrangians in your, these equations.

    29. EWEric Weinstein2:31:34

        It's showing Sean Carroll lying.

    30. JRJoe Rogan2:31:36

        Right. Did you- Where's the interactions? Did you-- The interactions are in there as well. But you ca- did you call him out on this on the show?

Episode duration: 2:53:32