“We Are Being Manipulated On A Massive Scale” - Eric Weinstein (4K)

Chris Williamson 0:00 You just came back from your first holiday in quite a while.

Eric Weinstein 0:05 Well, my first holiday of, let's say, three weeks or more in quite a while.

Chris Williamson 0:10 How was that?

Eric Weinstein 0:11 Uh, astounding. Um, really, uh, very good to see what's going on in the rest of the world at this particular moment. Um, we had previously gone to India, uh, in the year to visit family. This was to go back to Turkey and to go to Portugal, but also to the Azores Islands. And, um, I can't tell you how meaningful it was for me to be back traveling.

Chris Williamson 0:39 Why?

Eric Weinstein 0:40 Well, (smacks lips) I mean, partially, it's reacqui- Y- you, when you have children, and children change your game for about two decades, you have to realize that that's a transient period. It felt like it was gonna go on forever. And so this was sort of trying to figure out what is it like to go from traveling in your 20s and 30s without kids to traveling with your kids at the last moment that you still have them at home, um, (smacks lips) and now you're gonna have the rest of your life without them again. But you can't go back to backpacking and doing certain s- other things that were easy for you. So you have to figure out how to rejoin your previous life that has been in progress without you actually-

Chris Williamson 1:17 Pending for a long time.

Eric Weinstein 1:18 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 1:19 A sabbatical from life, almost.

Eric Weinstein 1:20 The other thing is that, um, you forget about parts of yourself. Like I forgot that, that I spoke Turkish, not well-

Chris Williamson 1:28 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 1:29 ... but I spoke rudimentary Tarzan Turkish 30 years ago. And to be back in Istanbul and to suddenly have words and phrases and things come back, um, and be talking to cab drivers and, and just people in the street, seeing the change. Obviously, there's been an enormous amount of change in Turkey. Um, Portugal is fascinating, seeing certain things, uh, at the end of their lifecycle. We were at a synagogue in Bursa where the sort of the home of the Ottoman Empire, uh, where they were down to, like, their last 50 people, which is a common enough thing, uh, when we visit diaspora Jewish communities, sort of at the tail end with the embers still glowing hot, but no, no chance for a rebirth. And then in the Azores, um, I was not prepared for the level of beauty that we encountered. Uh, there is a level of beauty that I've only experienced two, maybe three times in my life, that sort of leaves you physically sick, like, ill. It's so beautiful that your, your body is the weak link. Like you, you might think that sugar is tasty, but if you were to eat a bag of sugar, you'd probably be sick to your stomach, and I would say this was, like, so much beauty that it was at an almost pathological level and more than, more than I think my family could really take in. We were just so moved.

Chris Williamson 2:57 I've heard you say before about how a lot of the time you don't realize the last time you're going to do a thing-

Eric Weinstein 3:03 Right. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 3:03 ... with a person. And a lot of friends, especially ones that are fathers, have told me the same thing. The last time that you'll bounce your daughter on your knee. You don't know when it's gonna happen, but it's gonna happen. There's also a really strange realization when you get deeper into adulthood and work out that probably by the age of 18 or 20, you've spent 97% or 98% of the time you're gonna spend with your parents, and all that you wanted for the last four years was to be away from them. And now all that you want is to have a little bit more time, and it's all gone and you squandered it while it was there.

Eric Weinstein 3:32 I'm on the ethnic program. We don't believe in this stuff. Um, my, my children don't become adults at the age of 18. I don't care about the laws of the United States or the state of California. I think we do family wrong in the States. Uh, you, you send them off to college and then you tell them, "Go follow your dream." And they bounce into some locality that you aren't in, and you don't get the benefit of these very strong families because the market has been so strong in the US for so long. And the market more or less took over all sorts of duties that were assigned to families historically. And so the reason that people always say, "Oh, your families are weak," was because our markets were strong, right? And so insurance and opportunity, all of these things that, um, could be, uh, handed over to the market were, and as a result, when we find out that the markets are not safe, we, we realize that we've abandoned the structures that we needed to retreat to, that our families are quite small, below replacement rate very often, and we don't live in the same place. And so, you know, I married a woman from India and I basically carry a lot of Eastern European norms. And so my feeling is that my children are my children forever, and I'm not letting go of them. And this idea that it's your life and you can do what you want is only true up to a point. Uh, you also have a continuity issue. And this is normal, by the way, and it may sound weird in an American context, but I think that the world recognizes that we're links in a chain and there's a certain amount that you get to do that's just yours because it's your life, but never go full Billy Joel.

Chris Williamson 5:14 Yeah. Pan-generational housing is something, being in Austin, people getting ranches, starting even comm- you know, ten-family mini villages with a bunch of other people.

Eric Weinstein 5:23 This is normal.

Chris Williamson 5:23 Yeah. I- I- It's something that I'm seeing occur more and more. And, you know, in a atomized, like mass solipsism, mass individualism society, this doesn't sound like a bad redress.

Eric Weinstein 5:35 We got to the end of it. We got to the end of that dream, and it, it didn't, it didn't work.

Chris Williamson 5:42 You've been around a lot of very powerful, very rich people throughout your career.

Eric Weinstein 5:45 No, no, that's not true. Only relatively rec- only in the last decade and a half.

Chris Williamson 5:50 Thi- that's quite a while-

Eric Weinstein 5:51 All right, all right.

Chris Williamson 5:51 ... in many people's lives.

Eric Weinstein 5:52 All right.

Chris Williamson 5:53 What do you think that most normal people would be surprised to know about the powerful and the rich individuals' worldviews, the way that they hold themselves, what is and isn't true?

Eric Weinstein 6:09 ... they feel powerless. (laughs) That's one of the craziest things, is that very often you're at a table of people of immeasurable wealth, and they're talking about the rich or the hyper-connected. They don't see themselves in these terms.

Chris Williamson 6:30 Why?

Eric Weinstein 6:31 Uh, I think there's different kinds of rich, to be, to be honest. I think that if, for example, you got rich from arms, uh, from, let's say, uh, arms manufacturing, you've been entwined with government your whole life. Or if agriculture, something that's highly regulated that's, um... extraction, uh, oil and gas. Those people, I think, have always been close to power. A lot of the dream of tech, for example, was, "We don't need the government, we'll just build stuff in our garages, and if it's cool, th- it'll take care of itself, and therefore, we're minimally dependent on the traditional ecosystems." So, a lot of tech money felt disenfranchised. They didn't know how to play the game, and that was both to its credit, and, uh, a huge danger. But I- I think one of the things that I find very interesting is that when people are not rate-limited by money, they're rate-limited by all sorts of other things. Like they may- they may not want their number to d- to go down, so they go from six billion to four billion would be a huge blow, i- even though it doesn't seem to impact normal things. Um, another thing is, is that most of them have given up on the retail notion of reality.

Chris Williamson 7:52 What's that?

Eric Weinstein 7:53 Whatever mainstream media... You know, if- if you have a worldview that allows you to listen to National Public Radio, to- that, uh, then reads The Wall Street Journal and- and The Times and The New Yorker, whatever that point of view is, most of the very powerful rich people I know have- have checked out at a level, um, that is astounding. They don't believe that they can afford to depend on normal institutions.

Chris Williamson 8:22 How does that show up in their lives?

Eric Weinstein 8:24 Weird ways. Um, you know, th- they don't have a regular doctor, they have concierge medicine. Their fire policy comes with a private fire department that will fight for their home but won't necessarily fight for th- uh, homes next door unless it's justified.

Chris Williamson 8:38 I didn't know that that was a thing, okay?

Eric Weinstein 8:40 Yeah. Um, you know, uh, it's not until you travel with some of these people that you- y- you realize that there's a secret corridor in the airport or a way of getting onto the plane. There's just a l- there's a lot of infrastructure built for a very small number of people, and, um, for the most part, they can't figure out what to do with the money, and i- i- it's my belief. So, they... If you believe that the (laughs) world is headed towards an apocalypse, you're very unlikely to wanna contribute money, because that's the only fungible thing you have in an emergency. And so I think that a lot of the sort of apocalyptic thinking of- of very powerful people is very destructive, because they're- they're trying to figure out how to survive a mild apocalypse, like a six months of your... You know, "If I have six months of- of canned goods and I've got four ex-Navy SEALs u- on my property in a remote-"

Chris Williamson 9:39 With shock collars on. (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 9:40 "... in a remote location in Montana, can I- can I weather the storm with a few diesel generators?" So, if it's a very mild apocalypse, maybe they've got six months planned. Um, but a lot of... I think that there's a lot of thinking that, uh, you should husband your resources because you don't know what's coming, given that things are gonna have to collapse. And I think it's very sad, because those are the people who could shore up the system.

Chris Williamson 10:07 It's interesting to think about helplessness at the top end of the wealth distribution, given that a lot of people feel like they are restricted by their material possessions. But it seems like despite there being a lot of abundance, at least monetarily, uh, the scarcity mentality scales all the way up.

Eric Weinstein 10:24 It really does, uh, particularly if you've been deprived early in your life. There's something that happens where y- you're nervous 'til your dying day that you're gonna die under an overpass, right? I'm not kidding. Um, one thing that I highly recommend, people never take me seriously, is a, uh, video game called a tower defense game of Plants versus Zombies. And Plants versus Zombies ends in a situation where you win all the things you can inside of the game, but somehow you still have the ability to continue to earn even though there's nothing left to purchase. And the reason that I find this fascinating is you get to watch your own psychology, which is, now that you've given yourself the ability to earn, you can't bring yourself to stop earning, even though earning has lost meaning. And so, if you can't get to that in real life, you can at least get to that inside of Plants versus Zombies (laughs) , and I highly recommend it, because you have to give yourself some idea of, "We have to cross finish lines as they come." If you decide, "Okay, when I get to $10 million, that's when I can afford to become a philanthropist," then you're gonna get there, and you're gonna realize, no, th- the goals are gonna m- you know, the goalposts are gonna move. So, think about how a waitress sees this. Waitresses do philanthropy almost from- from the beginning. They'll- they'll over-tip somebody who gives them good service, and they can't afford it. And, uh, you know, it's sort of, it's a poverty trap when you're at the very low end of the earning spectrum. But I- I think there's something to take from that, which is practice a little bit of philanthropy and a little bit of kicking your shoes up and not always deferring, um, taking- taking profit, in some sense, on your success. So, make sure that all throughout your life, you're treating yourself to some luxury, even when you can least afford it, and you're-... just exhibiting a little bit of goodness, even though you feel like y- y- y- you desperately need to build yourself up, because otherwise, you'll always push it out.

Chris Williamson 12:24 There's a Morgan Housel quote where he says, "The best way to win the game is to stop moving the goalposts." And he's wrote this great book called The Psychology of Money, and it's true that most people treat their goals... Their relationship to their goals is like the horizon, that for every step toward it they get-

Eric Weinstein 12:43 Right.

Chris Williamson 12:43 ... i- it then moves one step further away, which is probably more like the horizon on a spring or on a rubber band, that it gets a little bit closer and then it bonk, it snaps away

Chris Williamson 12:53 from you. And, um, I've been around a lot of people that have got chunks of wealth, and it's a rare thing to see someone who doesn't still have that scarcity mentality, despite the fact that they've acquired it.

Eric Weinstein 13:08 You need to keep the st- scarcity mentality. It's not a mistake. The problem is, is that you also need an abundance mentality, and then you need to selectively access them in different circumstances.

Chris Williamson 13:19 Talk to me about the tension between those two.

Eric Weinstein 13:21 Well, it's just this regulated expression idea that we keep trying to find settings where we don't h- You know, like, just let me set the air conditioner at 68, and then I'll be happy forever. In reality, more or less, you need contradictory facilities, and you need to know when to pull one in and let the other out. And, you know, this is the, the hard thing. Anybody with multiple children knows that, you know, with one kid, you're saying, "You cannot afford to take these risks. If you jump off something like that and you don't look below, think what you could do." The other kid needs the stuff, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

Chris Williamson 13:56 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 13:56 Come on. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 13:58 Yeah, I've heard, uh, I've heard your brother say, uh, that him and his wife's advice to the children was, "As long as you don't do anything to your eyes, uh, you can kind of take the risks that you want."

Eric Weinstein 14:10 Yes and no. I mean, there's teeth, there's throats. A- a- anything somebody who does combat s- sports knows has to be regularly-

Chris Williamson 14:16 Is gonna try and attack. Right.

Eric Weinstein 14:17 Right?

Chris Williamson 14:17 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 14:17 Small joints, whatever it is.

Chris Williamson 14:19 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 14:19 There are plenty of ways to, to get yourself into real trouble.

Chris Williamson 14:21 Yep.

Eric Weinstein 14:22 The key thing that you're trying to use childhoods for is to go through the mistakes that are n- not permanently disfiguring.

Chris Williamson 14:31 It's one of the importances of having fathers around, the, uh, importance of rough and tumble play.

Eric Weinstein 14:36 Right.

Chris Williamson 14:36 Uh, is facilitated almost exclusively by fathers.

Eric Weinstein 14:38 Hell, yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:39 And you learn the limits of your strength. You learn the limits of your body. You learn how high of a tree you can jump off and how high of a tree you can't jump off.

Eric Weinstein 14:49 You also learn to lose. I mean, I really hate some of this winner talk, where basically people have no plan to lose, and then when they actually experience loss, they tend to (laughs) throw everything away to say, "I didn't lose!" You know? And it's very interesting.

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Chris Williamson 16:04 You met Jeffrey Epstein once.

Eric Weinstein 16:08 Yep.

Chris Williamson 16:09 Talk to me about what that's like coming face to face with somebody of that caliber.

Eric Weinstein 16:16 (laughs) Whatever that means. Um, well, one thing is that there is a physiological reaction that corresponds to this phrase that, you know, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Like, that's a real physiological feeling. I don't know whether the hair actually does that, but it's exactly what it feels like. You're meeting somebody who is unholy, and you know, one of the most interesting things is that he was beckoning into a world that didn't seem to exist but for him as the, as the door, as the doormat. I think that's one of the things that freaked out a lot of these rich people is, is that he, he felt rich in a movie sense, which is not something that you find among actually rich people.

Chris Williamson 17:10 What do you mean?

Eric Weinstein 17:13 Well, a lot of very wealthy people don't own an island. Islands are really tough to, to maintain. I'm obsessed with islands, and, you know, in general, I have to be obsessed with islands that have airports run by other people because, you know, they have populations on them. But every rich person starts to wonder, "Can I afford an... Can I afford an island, or how many jets?" And if you look at Jeffrey Epstein's wealth, it was beaten. It was like gold beaten into gold foil so that it could cover a vast area and leave the impression of a solid gold life. But it was really probably a, a mid nine-figure fortune that had been used to buy islands and planes, which is not what any nine-figure person is going to do.

Chris Williamson 18:06 So you had a...... felt sense and embodied sense of discomfort?

Eric Weinstein 18:13 Oh, hell yeah.

Chris Williamson 18:15 And where did that come from?

Eric Weinstein 18:17 Uh, uh, uh, well, the fact that he had a lipstick camera pointed at me from an art object that he laid a table that was preposterously long and thin with a tablecloth made of an American flag to make it look like a coffin so that I would spill my coffee on the flag of my own country. I mean, the fact that he looked like a mutant Ralph Lauren with this kind of lubricious quality, and he's talking all of this science and market stuff, and nothing adds up, and there's an heiress bouncing on his knee to get her boobs to jiggle, to see whether it can distrac- I mean, it's like one of these crazy scenes where nothing about it was normal. There was just no, there was no trace of a normal world.

Chris Williamson 19:04 That sounds like a script from a movie.

Eric Weinstein 19:06 Yeah, I mean, I think part of it, uh, John Travolta is like putting a gun to your head and forcing you to drink and break a code in a minute. Yeah, like that part of it. And then there was some sort of like, you know, uh, "Remember that, that story The Most Dangerous Game where a man invites you to his island so he can hunt you?" You know, i- this was scary, and it was, it was meant to be scary.

Chris Williamson 19:33 Sounds menacing.

Eric Weinstein 19:34 Well, I think his product was silence. People think that his product was sex or finance, but it was silence, (laughs) I'm pretty sure.

Chris Williamson 19:42 How'd you... What's that mean?

Eric Weinstein 19:43 If you're scary enou- uh, look, rich people can get sex, but they can't necessarily get people to shut up afterwards. So my take on it, and my take on it instantly was this is not an actual human. This is a construct of someone's. Someone has created a fake human being called Jeffrey Epstein, who's a mysterious currency trading financier with crazy rules so that no one would ever invest with him. And I think that was to keep people from seeking his investment services. I mean, he, you know, (laughs) he's labeled disgraced financier, but nobody has a record of trading with him. He was sitting there, and he comes into the meeting, and he says, you know, "Well, Eric, I was just doing some currency trading." And I, I thought about that scene that you sometimes see and is a meme with Steve Buscemi with a skateboard over his shoulder saying-

Chris Williamson 20:45 Hello, fellow kids. Teenagers. Yeah, "Hello, fellow financial traders."

Eric Weinstein 20:49 Exactly. (laughs) So I'm thinking, "You don't really look like a rich guy who trades in markets."

Chris Williamson 20:59 The thing that's intere- that I'm finding myself intrigued by here is, it takes a moderate amount of cognitive horsepower to be able to piece together this theater that you sat down at...

Eric Weinstein 21:15 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:18 ... deployed in a nefarious, malicious, manipulative way.

Eric Weinstein 21:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 21:24 But it's smart.

Eric Weinstein 21:27 Wh- what do you mean it's smart? Say more.

Chris Williamson 21:28 It's, it's not something that could be done by a simple mind.

Eric Weinstein 21:34 Do you think he did it?

Chris Williamson 21:35 Oh, he has a team of manipulators?

Eric Weinstein 21:38 No, when I say I think he was a construct, I literally mean that. I think he was constructed, like fitted with a story.

Chris Williamson 21:46 Oh, so you think he was a plant?

Eric Weinstein 21:49 No, I think he was a construct.

Chris Williamson 21:50 What's that? Are y- Okay, you're gonna have to dig into it.

Eric Weinstein 21:52 I think Jeffrey Epstein, super genius financier, was not a thing that existed. Where did the money come from? You're gonna mumble Lex Wex- Wester? Okay, so that's what you mumbled. But then, you know, there's this missing fortune of Robert Maxwell and this fortune of Jeffrey Epstein that we don't, can't explain. Are those the same fortune? Now it's like a conservation (laughs) of, uh, of money principle that if you have a fortune that's missing and you have a fortune that can't be explained and they're connected by Ghislaine Maxwell, I don't know. I, why is it that no... Hedge funds ha- What is it? They file form, I forget if it's 13F, there's certain forms that you have to file. Um, nobody's ever asked for these things. Well, who's his prime broker? Where, has somebody gone over the prime brokerage? Uh, his, what are his trades? He, he would have to move the market if he was, you know, doing a yard of euros or Swiss francs or who knows what, as like a billion, um, that would move the market. So there's no way you can fake retroactively a hedge fund of immeasurable size that trades currencies. I, I don't think he was a currency trader. He told me he was a currency trader.

Chris Williamson 23:16 So when you say a construct, who constructs? Who's the builder?

Eric Weinstein 23:20 I don't know. I would s- imagine some version of the intelligence community. You know, sometimes somebody's cover gets blown. Um, we have, we have a very famous unfortunate story of Eli Cohen with, uh, the Mossad, where Eli Cohen was an Egyptian Jew who was fitted with a backstory that he was an Argentinian playboy, uh, who'd made a fortune in Argentina, but was Arabic in origin. And then he moves to Damascus, and he takes out an apartment where he holds orgies and, um, becomes the best friend of Hafez al-Assad, right? And so that's an example of a story we know. We know how the intelligence communities of the world create people who don't really exist.

Chris Williamson 24:11 ... construction of- I know that this is just a one, uh, time thing here that you got to see, but the construction of the coffin-looking American flag, the spilling of the coffee, this weird power play thing that's going on-

Eric Weinstein 24:28 Right.

Chris Williamson 24:28 ... that seems... Now that you say that, uh, it wasn't him even pulling his own strings perhaps, it makes a lot more sense. But even that- that degree of sophistication, I learned this from, uh, Daniel Schmactenberger. We sat down and he spent some time with particularly powerful people.

Eric Weinstein 24:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:47 And he told me this really harrowing story of somebody who has both the desire and the means to treat themselves like an apex predator against their own kind, and they said so. They o- broke the fourth wall about this-

Eric Weinstein 25:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 25:03 ... and said, "Apex predators don't care about the prey," but they saw their own kind as prey. And I asked Daniel, "How does it feel to sit opposite somebody who isn't rate-limited by the resources, who can-

Eric Weinstein 25:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 25:16 ... not only dream to have this plus, uh, have the motivation or lack of virtue or integrity to go ahead and consider doing it, and then has the capacity, the assets to be able to enact it?"

Eric Weinstein 25:29 Sure.

Chris Williamson 25:30 And it's reminding me, it's giving me the same something. It feels like, it feels like it's up on the top of my head. It's giving me some sort of a sense like that.

Eric Weinstein 25:42 This was intended to be terrifying. It wasn't an accident. It was intended to be as fascinating as it could possibly be, which it was, and terrifying at the same time, and it achieved both- it achieved both objectives. I mean, I was given an opportunity to meet him again. I didn't- didn't know what to do. I mean, th- the other thing that I just found really weird is that he knew about my research, and it turned out that he was connected to my graduate department at Harvard. So he wa- he had a connection to the Harvard Math Department, unbeknownst to me. I don't know when that began. I know two of the professors he was connected through. But th- this is some unholy story. It has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. It has to do with whatever this thing was. We tripped over a thing. We- we tripped over a structure. We named the structure Jeffrey Epstein.

Chris Williamson 26:51 It must be very unfortunate in some regards for whoever it was, if that's true, that was in charge of this construction, uh, that it became that people got T-shirts with his name printed on them, that-

Eric Weinstein 27:07 This was already going wrong in the early 2000s. You see, my sense of this is that this was a pre-internet plan that lived into the internet age and couldn't survive contact with the internet age.

Chris Williamson 27:27 What did the internet bring in that didn't allow it to survive?

Eric Weinstein 27:29 Eyeballs, discussion.

Chris Williamson 27:31 Level of surveillance?

Eric Weinstein 27:32 Well, you know there's a claim that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein (laughs) because it's this many years later and we've all moved on. Yeah. That's completely untrue. And we know that it's untrue because if you start talking about Jeffrey Epstein, the- the engagement goes up. So, you have these fictions, like, you know, that are put out by mainstream media or traditional news desks, which is, "And nobody cares about that story." Well, that- You can see from social media that that's not true, from the internet. So the internet is constantly providing an ability to check whether or not these claims from inside the structure are true. And Jeffrey Epstein is an example of what I call an- an anti-interesting phenomenon.

Chris Williamson 28:20 What's that?

Eric Weinstein 28:21 Well, an anti-interesting (laughs) thing is something that would normally be fascinating, imagine for example you had a story where you could get a Pulitzer Prize for breaking it, everybody cares, you'd sell papers like hot cakes, blah, blah, blah, and nobody wants to report on it. And it's like right there. You could just ask the dumbest questions and it would o- Like, New York Times says, "Disgraced financier." Well, tell me, did you find his prime broker? Did you find the forms? Did you go to his offices in Villard House? No, nobody does, ever. The story is anti-interesting and it's very different than being uninteresting.

Chris Williamson 29:02 Which would suggest more collusion, more coordination.

Eric Weinstein 29:08 Hello? I mean, see, this is wa- this is one of the most uncomfortable things. I think there was a time when mostly when people said collusion or coordination, the presumption was, "Well, that's kind of, that's pretty far out there." We now know, like post-Elon Musk's $44 billion adventure at Twitter, that there are these coordinating groups, coordining s- coordinating social media with the intelligence community or with the Department of Homeland Security or with the State Department. We now know that we're living in an orchestrated quar- you know, curated, choreographed world. And we can't know it officially, but we all know it if we wanna know, which is hysterical. Now we have to talk about, "Well, are you a conspiracy theorist?" Like, k- I- I read (laughs) , I read the Slack messages, I read the emails. What- what- what are you even talking about now?

Chris Williamson 30:08 Sam Bankman-Fried-

Eric Weinstein 30:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:10 ... currently being re-charged-

Eric Weinstein 30:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:13 ... with witness tampering-

Eric Weinstein 30:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:14 ... as well.That, to me, fresh charges, uh, releasing... Even though he's totally couldn't get in touch with the press. I think s- hundreds of phone calls to the press, leaked his ex-girlfriend's... Allegedly, leaked his ex-girlfriend's, uh, diary entries-

Eric Weinstein 30:31 Right?

Chris Williamson 30:31 ... so on and so forth. And, you know, this is a guy that some of my friends were flown to go and see, on his island.

Eric Weinstein 30:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:40 His, his portion of an island.

Eric Weinstein 30:41 Yeah, his portion. It's very different, so.

Chris Williamson 30:42 Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, for very different reasons as well. (laughs) Um, there seems to be... And you, you hear about the, if they believe they're above the law. There was this really cool documentary on Netflix called The Murdaugh Murders, and it was this small town, big family, lots of money, and the kids ran rampant, right?

Eric Weinstein 31:01 Right.

Chris Williamson 31:01 Classic, like, silver spoon aristocracy bullshit. But when it gets scaled up this much more, Sam Bankman-Fried, the biggest financial crime, alleged financial crime since, uh-

Eric Weinstein 31:16 Madoff?

Chris Williamson 31:16 ... Bernie Madoff.

Eric Weinstein 31:17 Okay.

Chris Williamson 31:17 Yeah. Allegedly tampering with witnesses, allegedly leaking his ex-girlfriend's-

Eric Weinstein 31:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:23 ... diary entries.

Eric Weinstein 31:25 And?

Chris Williamson 31:27 Do the rules not apply to everybody?

Eric Weinstein 31:30 Certainly, they don't.

Chris Williamson 31:34 Why?

Eric Weinstein 31:37 Uh, we stopped prosecuting all sorts of types of people. You know, I... Look, we, we stopped holding hearings. I grew up in a world where we had the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, looking at our own intelligence services. We had Watergate hearings, we had, uh, tobacco hearings, we had Iran-Contra hearings. Do you know how many hearings we need right now? Where, w- where are these things?

Chris Williamson 32:06 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 32:06 It's ridiculous. We've got weird stuff about UFOs, with people making the craziest allegations. Uh, look, this is just not normal. We're in totally weird, uncharted territory.

Chris Williamson 32:23 What do you make of the recent... UAPs, I think, is the new term. Eric, you need to get up with the times here. They're not UFOs anymore, that's the old s- that's the...

Eric Weinstein 32:34 I wasn't even in this game when it was UFO, so I-

Chris Williamson 32:36 Okay, okay.

Eric Weinstein 32:37 ... you know.

Chris Williamson 32:37 So what do you make of the recent UAP stories and attention and response and subsequent response?

Eric Weinstein 32:44 Um, I'd like to ask you first.

Chris Williamson 32:49 So I had a look at the, uh, first whistleblower from about two months ago, quite closely, with Andy Stumpf-

Eric Weinstein 32:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:57 ... who used to have pretty high level security clearance, and he explained to me about how unimpressive that particular type of security clearance is, how very common.

Eric Weinstein 33:05 Which one? This is David...

Chris Williamson 33:07 Yes, David-

Eric Weinstein 33:09 ... Gersh?

Chris Williamson 33:10 No, not, not David Fravor, who was the-

Eric Weinstein 33:12 No, no, no. David Fravor was the Tic Tac.

Chris Williamson 33:14 Correct.

Eric Weinstein 33:14 This is, uh, David Grusch?

Chris Williamson 33:16 Yes.

Eric Weinstein 33:17 Okay.

Chris Williamson 33:17 Um, very common level of security clearance, uh, that, uh... Using that as some sort of, uh, "Oh, this is a legitimate credential," doesn't really wash too much. That it was second auth- it was third-hand information mostly, second-hand information kind of. "I heard from a person who saw-

Eric Weinstein 33:37 Right.

Chris Williamson 33:37 ... or who heard."

Eric Weinstein 33:38 Right.

Chris Williamson 33:39 Um, it just seemed to me to be, rather on the face of it, unimpressive, that release.

Eric Weinstein 33:47 I see.

Chris Williamson 33:49 What did you think? (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 33:51 Well, like I've been telling everybody, um, these are highly conserved stories. This is not the only person I've heard this story from, I've heard this from multiple people. There, there are various versions of this secret world which play out as space opera, you know, that... Then MJ-12 became the real government that only, even the present cou- couldn't understand, you know? And it's like, "Okay." So, that's the weird part about it until y- you start realizing (laughs) how sober many of the people are who believe this, and who claim to have had direct contact with him, and then you don't know what to do. I mean, in other words, whatever this is, there is a thing, it's not necessarily little green men. It could be, for example, that they mock up a floating spaceship in a hangar, and then they, uh, drag people past it and say, "Whatever you do, do not look to the, to your left or right or you'll be shot." And then, of course, people look and then, like, mission accomplished. Now people will say, "Oh my God, you have no idea what we... The US has incredible technology." And then maybe the idea is you've got a cover story.

Chris Williamson 35:11 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 35:11 Maybe you, you've got the, your, your adversary investing in things that don't make any sense. I don't know. But there's not, nothing here. This is not about Mylar balloons and seagulls anymore.

Chris Williamson 35:26 I'm trying to come up with a word for it but it's like a... It's like recursive false flags-

Eric Weinstein 35:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:33 ... in a way, where the goal is not to give or hide truth-

Eric Weinstein 35:39 The goal-

Chris Williamson 35:40 ... but to fire hose with information so much that the truth can no longer be discerned.

Eric Weinstein 35:44 It's a haystack of bullshit to make sure that any needle is very difficult to find.

Chris Williamson 35:50 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 35:51 It is.

Chris Williamson 35:52 Yes. Bullshit haystacking, I love it.

Eric Weinstein 35:54 Right.

Chris Williamson 35:54 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 35:55 Okay.

Chris Williamson 35:55 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 35:55 So they, they haystacked the crap out of this thing. I have no question that there was something that was used to develop US aircraft like the B-2 Bomber and the SR-71 Blackbird. So if you see something crazy in the sky, better that you think it's a UFO from outer space than some advanced thing from Lockheed.

Chris Williamson 36:13 Mm.

Eric Weinstein 36:14 I have no question that we use this to deal with things like the Chinese balloon shootdown where we shot down several things in a week and we couldn't recover debris from any of them. I mean-... come on, guys. Um, you know, maybe the idea is that this is a, uh, a head fake to our adversaries to develop the wrong things and to use their treasure on things that won't work. Maybe there's a secret program, uh, where some of this stuff is actually real and true, and we're not allowed to know it because it would be too mind-blowing. Maybe there's a cult, uh, inside of our government that has replaced angels with saucer-shaped aircraft. Um, whatever this thing is, it's being used for many different purposes. There's something here, we just don't know what. You, you know, this is the problem, the princess can't feel a pea because that would be impossible, the princess feels a disturbance. And you can't say what the disturbance is, maybe it's a golf ball, maybe it's a cantaloupe, maybe it's a banana, but (laughs) whatever it is, there's something wrong with the mattress.

Chris Williamson 37:30 (laughs) Yeah, it seems to me this fire hosing, the goal of uncertainty.

Eric Weinstein 37:36 Hmm. Right. How do things muddle out? Who wins in a muddle is a great question we're not taught to ask. Sorry to jump in on that-

Chris Williamson 37:44 No, tell me more.

Eric Weinstein 37:45 ... but I just love... Yeah. Always look for who is trying to muddle to win. Like, very often, you're in a dispute with entrenched status quo, and somebody will say, "Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one." I'm like, "Oh, well, who wins if we agree to dis- Oh, it's you."

Chris Williamson 38:05 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 38:05 Right?

Chris Williamson 38:06 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 38:06 This is, like, an old principle of mine, which is that you can always tell who's guilty by who d- first declares a time of healing.

Chris Williamson 38:14 Why? Why is that a razor to use?

Eric Weinstein 38:16 Well, because if (laughs) you do something wrong and the public is clamoring for, for, for your blood, you say, "There's been too much, uh, blame and finger pointing on all sides."

Chris Williamson 38:28 At me. (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 38:29 (laughs) It's-

Chris Williamson 38:31 I- I think what we need is to come together and declare a time of healing. For me.

Eric Weinstein 38:36 Right. So, I believe that, in general, whoever declares a time of healing is suspect number one.

Chris Williamson 38:43 That's a very nice, uh, razor to use.

Chris Williamson 38:50 I wonder about this. Uh, how would you say, epidemic of uncertainty?

Eric Weinstein 39:01 Brilliant. Speaking my language.

Chris Williamson 39:06 And I wonder ... how, first off, how as an individual you are supposed to put up any kind of effective defense, so just take some sovereignty, be an, you know, an agentic individual.

Eric Weinstein 39:29 Right.

Chris Williamson 39:31 And secondly, I wonder what the end goal is. I, I understand why uncertainty would be useful for manipulation, because if people can't discern truth from untruth, it can be easy to poke them and prod them and, and float them in particular directions.

Eric Weinstein 39:48 Sure. Right.

Chris Williamson 39:48 But it also seems like a, I don't know, kind of also useless as well that some people w- um, a non-insignificant, uh, large cohort of people will just reject it entirely, which actually-

Eric Weinstein 40:00 That's what they're doing.

Chris Williamson 40:01 Which actually makes it more chaotic and more unruly. So it makes me think, well, maybe if this is the case, if the fire hosing is happening-

Eric Weinstein 40:09 Right.

Chris Williamson 40:10 ... this epidemic of uncertainty, maybe the outcomes were predicted but haven't manifested in the way that was intended. Maybe there's more of a rebellious streak in-

Eric Weinstein 40:21 Say more about that. I'm try- trying to understand you.

Chris Williamson 40:23 That if people who, if you make the public very uncertain about most things by overloading them-

Eric Weinstein 40:29 Right.

Chris Williamson 40:29 ... with information, or by even the, uh, i- it doesn't even need to be coordination, it could be a byproduct of having 24/7 access to the entire world's population through Twitter and Instagram Stories and blah, blah, blah.

Eric Weinstein 40:39 Right.

Chris Williamson 40:40 There is so much I can no longer discern, even due to a multiplicity of opinions that's not coordinated to be a multiplicity that go in opposite directions.

Eric Weinstein 40:46 Right.

Chris Williamson 40:48 If it was coordinated, the outcomes that are occurring at the moment a lot of the time don't seem to be happening with people just, "Oh, roll over, tell me exactly what to do," there is a massive non-insignificant cohort of people that say, "I'm checking out and I now no longer trust anybody at all," and that doesn't seem-

Eric Weinstein 41:07 Right. Or anything.

Chris Williamson 41:07 Yes. And that doesn't seem to be if the goal was, uh, ease of control, that doesn't seem to be effective for the person that wanted that or the group that wanted that to be the outcome.

Eric Weinstein 41:20 First of all, I'm really glad to get a question about this as a seat change, which is that our lives have become wall-to-wall uncertainty. We can't discern, if the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor today, we would spend 10 years discussing whether it was a false flag, whether it was actually the Japanese, whether there was any attack, whether it was a sound stage, whether it was a PSYOP, whether it was a f- you know? Right now, the main institutions of our society have abdicated their role for public spirited adjudication of what is true based on expertise. And so what you're seeing is people coming to hate experts and coming to hate institutions because they're realizing that these institutions lie to them at a level that they've never considered unless they were Alex Jones fans to begin with. And so you're, you're, what you're having is you're having a large number of people waking up to the idea that-Yeah, there really are (laughs) organizations and working groups that determine what you hear from a multiplicity of venues. It's the same message relentlessly.

Chris Williamson 42:42 Do you think people are overly pattern-matching that now?

Eric Weinstein 42:45 Say more, b- by what you mean?

Chris Williamson 42:47 That they're seeing conspiracy where there isn't because the lack of faith in institutions...

Eric Weinstein 42:52 Same person is saying that they see a conspiracy and they see no conspiracy. They have part of their head that remembers that conspiracy theorists are crazy people, and they've got part of their brain that remembers that normies who don't believe in conspiracies are crazy people, and they can't integrate those things, right? They cannot figure out, "How are these things being coordinated? Am I a crazy person for seeing these patterns? Am I a crazy person for ignoring them when-"

Chris Williamson 43:15 For believing them?

Eric Weinstein 43:16 "... they're un- for when they're, when they're unearthed?" Um, what you're seeing is a complete destruction of bedrock reality that if you weren't actually physically there... How do we know that these people actually met in a warehouse? Is this really a table or is it just-

Chris Williamson 43:35 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 43:36 ... you know, CGI? Was it green and we could superimpose wood onto it? Nobody knows what's true. And, you know, if you w- if you ask me, "Well, h- Eric, how are you dealing with this?" I would say, "I'm failing. I'm just flat out failing." A- as are all of you, I, I'm just more honest about it. Some of you have an idea that you've got one lens, which is, "Fix the money, fix the world. Bitcoin, that's the answer." Yeah, Bitcoin, rock on. But no, that's not the answer. Or somebody else says, you know, "I really think that we just need to be open and tolerant, and realize it's a big world, and we just have to give people their due." Well, that doesn't work either. You can't just let everything run riot, or, "We have to go back to our institutions." With these people at the helm? Are you kidding? "We have to abandon our institution." Wait, what are you saying? We're gonna abandon our institutions? Are, are y- a- d- do you know what that looks like? Nobody has an answer.

Chris Williamson 44:39 We'll get back to talking to Eric in one minute, but first, I need to tell you about Gymshark. Gymshark make the best training kit on the planet. This T-shirt that I've been falling in love with and traveling in for a very long time is phenomenal, and these shorts, the studio shorts that they make are the best men's training shorts on the planet. They have lasted me over a year now, they come in amazing colors, the length is perfect, they're sweat wicking, they're lightweight, they wash and dry perfectly. You don't need that many pairs of shorts, as a guy, but the ones that you do have need to be very good. So, if you need new gym kit, this is where to go. I highly, highly recommend that you go and check out everything that I use and recommend from Gymshark. They've updated my product page with everything that I use and recommend for men and women, and you can get 10% off everything sitewide with no minimum order. And they have 30-day free returns worldwide. Head to bit.LY/SHARKWISDOM, that's B-I-T dot L-Y slash SHARKWISDOM and use the code MW10 at checkout. You're sounding an awful lot parallel.

Chris Williamson 45:38 Your, th- the conversation is moving in a similar direction to one I had with Sam Harris recently.

Eric Weinstein 45:43 I would think it's very different, but, uh, happy to hear more.

Chris Williamson 45:47 He identified, on an episode that I did with him not long ago, the fact that we have lost trust in our institutions, and yet abandoning them is also, a wholesale is- is also not an option.

Eric Weinstein 46:01 Sam also tried to say, "I can see the problems on the..." I say, "Can see the problems on the right, and I can see the problems on the left," and there is a group of people who have allowed their irritation with the left to color their thinking to the point that they now are in a right wing situation without understanding the dangers on the right. I think Sam is discounting the idea that once people wake up to the i- to the concept that they were living in an orchestrated Truman Show, that they did not understand, they're not going to have the idea of like, "Oh, sure, the vaccines were a little bit more dangerous than claimed, and maybe a little bit less effective, and maybe we knew a little bit more about the lab leaks." No way. You spat directly in my face and told me, not only that it was raining, but that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face and you piled up how many Nobel laureates t- to defend, uh, the idea that any inquiry into the origin of this virus was racism? It's like, you're dead to me. And I think that that's what people are not understanding in the Democratic Party, and... Increasingly, the basic attitude is, whoever this class of people is that crawled into our elite institutions is just dead. Like, there's nothing Anthony Fauci could say at this moment that I wanna hear. It's not that I don't think that he doesn't know virology or epidemiology. I know I can't trust him because of the way in which he looked into my eyes. And then, you know, when Stephen Vec- uh, Colbert is dancing with syringes singing the vaccine song, and Ariana Grande, you know, is in a super highly produced number from, like, Hairspray but converted to vaccines, uh, with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and everybody's celebrating like it's a mayday celebration, um, I get it. I live in a completely fake world and I wrote an article about this in 2011 on kayfabe, which is the system of lies that undergirds professional wrestling. So now you're, (laughs) you've woken up to the idea that you've spent your life watching something like Major League Baseball or Premier League Soccer or whatever it is, and it's all fake. And now you don't know who you are, you don't know what your country is, you don't know what a ballot box is, you have no idea what news is or media, you don't know what a university is actually teaching.You've got people running around who are calling themselves scholars, who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats, and you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong and it's directly in their area of expertise.

Chris Williamson 48:54 So, the thing about pattern matching that I said

Chris Williamson 48:56 was, there are still many people who are scholars, who are in positions of authority inside of high-faluting institutions that presumably do want to do good and do want to deploy their skills in a way that does this. Is it a case that every single institution is completely wrong? Or is this reflexive skepticism-

Eric Weinstein 49:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:24 ... being tuned up too highly, to the point where there is skepticism about things that don't deserve it? And how do we determine between the two?

Eric Weinstein 49:32 Okay. So we have to talk about the institutions that are fighting back. Twitter, which has become X, is not on the same standard that the, uh, Facebooks are or Google is. Elon is doing something different. We can talk about what. The University of Chicago is still fighting. Uh, my daughter just graduated from the University of Chicago.

Chris Williamson 49:58 Congratulations.

Eric Weinstein 49:58 So, I d- yeah, I never mentioned where she was while she was there. Um, i- it is... It needs s- it needs support. We have to support th- the schools that fought back, for example. I believe Ohio State fought back, and there's a school in Oklahoma that fought back. And leading that charge is the University of Chicago. We have organizations like FIRE, uh, that promote free speech. Uh, we have professors who are taking on some risk, like Jonathan Haidt. But we're not seeing the Noam Chomsky effect, where you do amazing research and they have to put up with every crazy idea that comes through your mind. Right? That's important. Look up a person named Serge Lang in mathematics, and something called The File, to understand how dangerous it is to screw with real scholars.

Chris Williamson 50:52 What happens? Give us a 30,000-foot view.

Eric Weinstein 50:55 You know, pe- they put- people tried to put, like, say, uh, Sam Huntington into the National Academy of Sciences, who was an architect of the Vietnam War. And Serge Lang just said, "I looked through his papers, I find the following mathematical statements. This is not science. Why is this person in the Academy?" And then they fight back. And I fought back with Serge Lang when he was at Harvard, um, where we tried to engage Sam Huntington on, on that topic. You can't have these dangerous people running around. That's why all of us are discredited. Maybe you haven't noticed this. But, like, Jordan Peterson is discredited, Sam Harris is discredited, Joe Rogan is discredited, Bret Weinstein is discredited, Ben Shapiro is discredited, Bari Weiss is discredited. Everybody (laughs) is discredited.

Chris Williamson 51:39 Tim Pool referred to it as the IDW's walking corpse phase-

Eric Weinstein 51:44 Oh.

Chris Williamson 51:44 ... at the moment.

Eric Weinstein 51:45 Well, my point is, this... Personal destruction is the coin of the realm. And some of the personal destruction that you see that looks organic is, is orchestrated as well. And we're just in this thing where, in my opinion, what you're looking at is something called deconfliction, but people don't know what that is. Deconfliction is supposed to stop what are called blue-on-blue incidences. So a blue-on-blue incidence is you have two branches of government that don't know that w- they're operating covertly. So maybe you have an investigative team and an undercover team, and the investigative team is about to blow the cover thinking that they've got a target, but is actually an undercover agent. So what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to check in with these centralized systems and say, "Do you have any assets in this arena we're about to move?" "Yes, we do." "Oh, okay." So, they find out. And this is supposed to stop blue-on-blue. The interesting thing is, even though there are three systems called Safety Net, RISSafe, and Case Explorer, you can't use them unless you are an official part of the government. So I called up one of them, had a half an hour conversation before I started asking about Jeffrey Epstein, and then they immediately said, "This call will be terminated in five seconds," uh, for... I, uh, maybe it was Case Exp- Case Explorer for South Florida, something like that. What happens when you have a civilian that's not signed up for nondisclosure under no rules? You're an American citizen with full right to free speech, and you s- stumble on something that you're not supposed to know about. That is a deconfliction problem that nobody has ever solved. So, the first thing I'd like to throw out is if we have three separate systems to keep, like, the intelligence community and local police departments from tripping over each other, what do you think we do when ordinary citizens get wind of something amiss that's some super secret operation? And my claim is we discredit them. We prebunk them, in the language of the GEC, I believe. You see, we're all familiaring- we're all familiar with debunking misinformation and disinformation. You've got some disinformation that's spreaded around and we debunk it by giving you the truth. What happens when somebody is spreading the truth in a way that is unhelpful to a statecraft-level narrative? Well, we didn't know what the words were, but we just found out, and it's you prebunk the malinformation. Now, if you didn't grow up knowing what malinformation is, here's a quick refresher. Malinformation is actual information, but it's harmful-

Chris Williamson 54:42 Right. The equivalent of politically incorrect incarnation.

Eric Weinstein 54:45 Well, or, you know, you're trying to make sure that, uh, there's support for the war in Ukraine, and somebody actually realizes that things are much more desperate than, than they'd thought. Well, that would be deleterious to our, our efforts if the objective is to get Putin to ca- capitulate. So, now you have to pre-bunk the mal-information, which means destroy the reputation of the person spreading the information that's countering the official disinformation and misinformation. So- (laughs)

Chris Williamson 55:18 I can't work out why anybody's confused and why they're having trouble existing in the-

Eric Weinstein 55:23 Stay in school, kids.

Chris Williamson 55:24 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 55:24 Um, so-

Chris Williamson 55:25 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 55:25 ... the point is, I've got all of these friends who are pre-bunked mal-informers. That's what I-

Chris Williamson 55:31 What a club. What a club to be in.

Eric Weinstein 55:32 That's what I do. I'm a pre-bunked mal-informant. I s- I, I-

Chris Williamson 55:37 There's never been a sexier title, actually.

Eric Weinstein 55:38 I spread mal-information.

Chris Williamson 55:40 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 55:40 And I need to be pre-bunked. So, of course, I'm gonna be a grifter. I'm going to be, I don't know, a charlatan. I'm gonna... "Well, he's over. Can we stop trying to make Eric Weinstein a thing?" Blah, blah, blah. And there's like, you know, giant farms of, of people and bots that are dedicated to spreading bad feelings about anybody who's gonna contradict narrative.

Chris Williamson 56:02 Well, don't forget as well that the, the coordination doesn't necessarily need to be there because the incentives align online for-

Eric Weinstein 56:11 There's an emergent part.

Chris Williamson 56:12 Yes.

Eric Weinstein 56:12 There's a non-emergent part.

Chris Williamson 56:14 Correct.

Eric Weinstein 56:14 I will not agree with anyone who tells me it's all one or the, or all the other, but part of this is actually coordinated.

Chris Williamson 56:22 Yeah. So, close that loop-

Eric Weinstein 56:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:25 ... on the agentic sovereign individual existing in the world. Holy fuck, I'm getting bukkaked with this total awfulness of, of information here.

Eric Weinstein 56:39 Bukkake just means splattered in Japanese.

Chris Williamson 56:42 That's why it's not a-

Eric Weinstein 56:43 Sure.

Chris Williamson 56:43 ... a terrible term to use. It's-

Eric Weinstein 56:45 Absolutely not.

Chris Williamson 56:45 Thank you. It's actually been appropriated by the adult industry in a way that I think the Japanese should reclaim.

Eric Weinstein 56:50 Actually, Melissa Chen has probably done more to popularize this in intellectual circles than anyone else. So, shout out to Miss Melissa Chen.

Chris Williamson 56:57 Melissa Chen and bukkake in the same sentence-

Eric Weinstein 56:59 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:59 ... something that we weren't expecting today.

Eric Weinstein 57:00 But she, she, uh, I think sh- there was a period of her life where she would use it in every public appearance, just sneak it in.

Chris Williamson 57:06 Right, okay.

Eric Weinstein 57:07 Okay?

Chris Williamson 57:07 The buk- the bukkake of the gaps.

Eric Weinstein 57:10 So, anyway, you have a situation where nobody knows what's going on, and I don't think Sam is comfortable, by the way, being here. Like, you're in open water, and you have all of these instructions about what to do when you're swimming near land, which is, you know, try to align yourself with the shore, don't fight the current, and like, that's not where you are. You're just in open water, and you're treading water, and you don't know whether there are oceanic white tips around, and y- you don't know whether you can keep this up for much longer, but there is no land. There's a big difference with Sam.

Chris Williamson 57:46 Go a little deeper. Make that a little plainer for me.

Eric Weinstein 57:50 You cannot trust Harvard or Nature. You cannot trust the Office of Management and, and Budget.

Chris Williamson 57:58 Or The Lancet.

Eric Weinstein 57:59 Or The Lancet or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You cannot trust any newspaper that I'm aware of. You cannot trust the CDC or the NIH or the WHO. Now, people will hear that and they'll say, "Oh my God, Eric, you're spreading distrust and fear." It's like, I'm a pass-through. Shoot the messenger all you want. All of those institutions are out of control, and we all know it. And Sam-

Chris Williamson 58:34 Entirely out of control?

Eric Weinstein 58:35 No. No, th- uh, uh-

Chris Williamson 58:36 Mostly out of control?

Eric Weinstein 58:37 ... I did this on trigonometry. We, we have this anti-institutional point. How is it that the airlines can't keep my seat clean, uh, and can't make sure that I'm able to recline it properly or that the Wi-Fi doesn't go out and then their planes never crash? So, the institutions are functioning and not functioning. They're lying and telling the truth. They're getting it done and failing outright over and over again. And it's, it's even worse because if, if, if the planes crashed all the time, then you'd say, "Okay, well, these people are incompetent." But it's like this selective incompetence and madness, and what I think is, is that Sam wanted to treat this as, look, it's pretty annoying what's going on on the left, and it's pretty annoying what's going on with the institutions, but let's not, let's not lose sight of the fact January 6th. People don't feel that way. People feel like, "Wait a minute, I don't know which end is up. I don't know who's telling me the truth anymore. I can spot these lies that are so transparent." And this is the theory of lies as a checksum. So, when you get a binary for a computer program that you wanna install on your computer, you wanna know, "Well, is this what came from Microsoft, or did somebody adulterate it? And when I click on this thing, it's gonna install ransomware on, on my machine." So, there's something called a checksum, which is generated by how the program was compiled, and it would be almost impossible to come up with a second program that would generate the same checksum.

Chris Williamson 1:00:12 Verification.

Eric Weinstein 1:00:12 Yeah. If the checksum is off, I don't install the thing and the checksums are all off, and that's why people are going crazy. And that's why, to your earlier point, isn't it interesting that we're not talking about the level of uncertainty, right? Like, this is not sustainable. So, Sam is 100% correct on a lot of things that people are making fun of him for, and I assume that I will be, uh, keelhauled all over Twitter for saying this. You cannot have a world without institutions. We're not built for it. We're just-There's no part of you that is prepared to generate all your own electricity and- and- and- e- you know, kill all your own game, and get your own clean water, and... It's ju- You need an army. Y- you need a police department. You c- You can only play, um, frontier, you know, Wild West so long before you realize that modern life can't be supported this way. And we can't go with the institutions we have. So we need institutions. We can't go with these institutions, not because the institutions are wrong, but because the inhabitants are wrong to a person. They've been selected for... by this ability to lie because growth evaporated. That's one of my main riffs, we don't have to go into it, but it basically that... in the absence of real growth, everything turns pathological. And so it's just heartbreaking to see some of these people saying, "Look, we've always known that the institutions were wrong. We finally have the ability to prove that. Let's tear them all down." So that's a very popular perspective at the moment. Other people wanna claim, "Let's cling to the institutions because we know we need them, and we'll look past the fact that they're obviously lying about almost everything of importance." That's not really tenable. We can't vote these people out because, like, Dianne Feinstein could beat me easily in a run, uh, you know, for- for Senate. I don't know why, because the machine is stronger than actually the- the vision we had for democracy. So we've got, you know, Mitch McConnell having a temporary, uh, you know, e- ischemic attack on camera. Um, we've got somebody post-stroke in Pennsylvania, uh, having defeated Mehmet Oz. We've got Dianne Feinstein. We've got, um, Nancy Pelosi trading up a storm.

Chris Williamson 1:02:35 (laughs)

Eric Weinstein 1:02:35 We can't get rid of any of these people. Joe Biden is way too old for this job and has been in government since he was 29 in 1972, when he won his Senate seat. This is a joke. It's beyond preposterous. And- and by the way, it comes out of not loving your children.

Chris Williamson 1:02:53 How so?

Eric Weinstein 1:02:56 People who love their children don't drill holes in their children's life raft. In the modern world, post-World War II, was a life raft to get us to the next stage. And the number of... older people I see liquidating everything... so that they can live out their final days in the same style to which they've become accustomed is impossible in a world where people love their children.

Chris Williamson 1:03:25 It's cavalier with the future.

Eric Weinstein 1:03:29 Yeah, I don't think they care.

Chris Williamson 1:03:32 Are you familiar with Toby Ord's analogy of The Precipice?

Eric Weinstein 1:03:35 No. Tell me.

Chris Williamson 1:03:36 Really cool. So his book, The Precipice, that everybody should go and read. It's my best primer on existential risk. Toby Ord's from the Future of Humanity Institute, uh, at Oxford with, uh, Nick Bostrom, and he's a- a colleague of William MacAskill, long term is MEA, et cetera. And, um, he uses this example of... You can imagine, uh, on a journey-

Eric Weinstein 1:03:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:56 ... uh, a particular individual getting to a beautiful, lush, abundant meadow would have to take a treacherous mountain path. And along this mountain path, there is a particularly thin, small, steep, sharp, uncertain, unstable part of it. That's the precipice. And he talks about... You could... I- I- I like to think about it like an hourglass.

Eric Weinstein 1:04:21 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:04:21 You have width with room, and then you have a choke point. And at that choke point, things can get dicey. And it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice, you broaden out-

Eric Weinstein 1:04:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:34 ... and you have the meadow, uh, you are a multi-planetary species, you have redundancy, genetically, redundancies, uh, civilizationally.

Eric Weinstein 1:04:42 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:04:42 Uh, you have overcome some of the limitations of the, uh, cast-offs from your energy production and consumption. Uh, you don't have value lock-in in a bad way that means that it's despots all the way down or it's ty- tyrants all the way down-

Eric Weinstein 1:04:55 Assume that I hear you.

Chris Williamson 1:04:57 Yep.

Eric Weinstein 1:04:59 Where do you think we are?

Chris Williamson 1:05:02 It feels very precipice-y.

Eric Weinstein 1:05:04 Yeah, doesn't it?

Chris Williamson 1:05:05 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:05:06 What's more, as one of the only people who are really seriously hitting this multi-planetary note, there is no interest in this.

Chris Williamson 1:05:17 From who? I'm interested.

Eric Weinstein 1:05:20 Hmm. Are you?

Chris Williamson 1:05:21 Fuck yeah. Don't I count, Eric?

Eric Weinstein 1:05:23 Well, all right.

Chris Williamson 1:05:24 Am I not legitimate-

Eric Weinstein 1:05:25 I don't know.

Chris Williamson 1:05:25 ... in the future of this civilization's direction?

Eric Weinstein 1:05:27 What- What... What are your best stories for how we become interplanetary? Uh, I say it because you brought it up.

Chris Williamson 1:05:36 Stories or strategies?

Eric Weinstein 1:05:38 Yeah. Stories about how we get to be interplanetary.

Chris Williamson 1:05:41 I'm not sure what you mean by story.

Eric Weinstein 1:05:44 Tell me a story by which we have 10 planets that human- humans have settled.

Chris Williamson 1:05:54 Well, if you wanna do 10, we're going to have to go to planets that are outside of the solar system.

Eric Weinstein 1:05:58 Right. So the- there's this one which is really troubling.

Chris Williamson 1:06:03 Mars.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:04 Mars is really screwing up this whole story because Elon has gotten everybody-

Chris Williamson 1:06:09 Fixated.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:09 ... focused on Mars and it's the only m- It's a marginal planet that would be very difficult to get to using chemical rockets, and it's not a stepping stone. Because once you master Mars, if, if, if, if, which we're not gonna do-

Chris Williamson 1:06:25 Yep.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:25 ... it doesn't really get you anywhere. It's just Mars.

Chris Williamson 1:06:32 So Avi Loeb-

Eric Weinstein 1:06:34 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:06:35 ... new book that recently came out, Interstellar, spoke to him last week about it.

Eric Weinstein 1:06:39 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:06:39 I asked him about this. I said, um, "Do... Will we ever visit other galaxies?" And he made this cop-out answer of saying, "Well, Andromeda's going to crash into the Milky Way." I was like, "That doesn't count, Avi. We can't blend two together and say that we've been there."

Eric Weinstein 1:06:53 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:06:54 Um, and he's talking about, uh, interstellar travel, right?

Eric Weinstein 1:06:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:58 From here to Proxima Centauri. Pick- pick your other star, right?They are trying at some point in the not too distant future to do the light sail, laser pointer added thing. Maybe we can... and this is me asking him, uh... My conception was generation ships. You know, you and the next 500 generations of your progeny, you condemn them to be locked in this tin box, and it's group sex and, and plants and CO2 for the next however long until you get to Proxima Centauri, hope that it's not totally wrecked. His point was light sail, uh, desktop DNA sequencer, artificial womb, send it out there-

Eric Weinstein 1:07:42 You guys are being ridiculous.

Chris Williamson 1:07:44 It's- it's a thought ex-

Eric Weinstein 1:07:46 No, no.

Chris Williamson 1:07:46 This is my story.

Eric Weinstein 1:07:47 I know.

Chris Williamson 1:07:47 This is my story.

Eric Weinstein 1:07:48 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:07:49 This is my story, and I'm allowed to tell my story.

Eric Weinstein 1:07:51 But-but it's exactly why I wanted it, if I could... just to riff.

Chris Williamson 1:07:55 (laughs) Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:07:56 It's an enervating story.

Chris Williamson 1:07:59 What's that?

Eric Weinstein 1:08:01 It... We're not energized by this story.

Chris Williamson 1:08:04 I'm energized by it.

Eric Weinstein 1:08:05 Except for the group sex and the plants, right?

Chris Williamson 1:08:07 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:08:07 So (laughs) the issue is-

Chris Williamson 1:08:08 If we could sprinkle some bukkake in there, everybody would get on board and Melissa Chen would be there.

Eric Weinstein 1:08:11 Moving-mov-moving at light speed, um, what we're doing is that we're telling people we've crawled inside our modern theories, and our modern theories make our imaginations our enemy. We're not excited about the i-... We don't really believe that we're gonna open a wormhole. We don't really believe in multi-generation ships. We don't believe that we're gonna reboot from tardigrades. We don't believe that we are going to scan all of our synapses and reconstruct the brain, uh, from the beginning. Einstein is the problem. Now, I know Avi decently well, and Avi, for the Galileo Project that he's heading up, doesn't want people to consider new physics. So whenever I speak at all as somebody affiliated with the Galileo Project, with wearing that hat, I don't think about new physics at all. I accept the constraints of the physics we know.

Chris Williamson 1:09:14 Yes, yes, yes.

Eric Weinstein 1:09:16 When I take that hat off, it's all about new physics. It's not about new technology using the old physics. And the way you can measure whether people are serious about interplanetary is how much they're focused on new physics. Anybody who isn't focused on new physics is not serious about interplanetary.

Chris Williamson 1:09:41 Is this because with the current conception of physics that we have, it's going to be essentially impossible for us to go interplanetary?

Eric Weinstein 1:09:47 Yeah, and the word essentially is doing some work there. And so you, what you get is you get these enervating workarounds. Like, oh, if we use time dilation, if we went really fast, then it wouldn't be that fast.

Chris Williamson 1:09:57 Can you just explain the word enervating, please? Do you mean as in innovation or is this E-R?

Eric Weinstein 1:10:01 No, enervating-

Chris Williamson 1:10:03 What's that?

Eric Weinstein 1:10:03 ... means to, to lessen in, um, potency, to dec-, to sort of discourage and... You know, as long as I have to do things that don't involve me cruising to new planets and taking in the vis-, it's like, oh, it'd be your great, great, great, great, great, great to the 12,000th power grandchild who actually sees a new planet. That's not gonna work. Or you're gonna open a wormhole or you're gonna have an Alcubierre drive. All of these sorts of things discourage us, and we know that we're telling lies about it, and so we don't work on it. You wanna know how to work on this? We're abandoning the one field that has the chance of making us interplanetary, and I don't know what to do about it because nobody sees this as the emergency I do.

Chris Williamson 1:10:50 We'll get back to talking to Erik in one minute, but first, I need to tell you about Cozy Earth. Look, we spend one third of our lives asleep. You do not want to spend 33% of your existence inside of sheets that do not make you feel amazing. Cozy Earth has the best quality bedding. It's not just about what you sleep on. It is what you sleep under, and the quality of your sheets make a massive difference to the quality of your sleep. Sleep is the ultimate game changer, and improving your sheets will improve your sleep quality. Cozy Earth is a premium bedding and loungewear company where they make the best quality bedwear. Their products are made from super soft viscose from highly sustainable bamboo. They're temperature regulating, so you'll sleep cool all year round. Best of all, they've got a 10-year warranty on all of their products. That's how confident they are that they'll last. You can get an exclusive 35% discount sitewide on everything from Cozy Earth by going to cozearth.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM35 at checkout. Cozearth.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Okay, so let me see if I can get the topology of what you've said right. The fact that Mars is within reach broadly and-

Eric Weinstein 1:12:00 With chemical rockets.

Chris Williamson 1:12:01 Correct. Of current technology, of current physics.

Eric Weinstein 1:12:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:12:04 And we do it, hooray.

Eric Weinstein 1:12:07 Super hard, we did it.

Chris Williamson 1:12:09 Uh, interplanetary.

Eric Weinstein 1:12:11 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:12:12 But your point is that... well, it seems like, uh, that is insufficient and also kind of like a false duck type scenario where we did it, but we didn't actually do the thing we needed to do, so we may have even been better off had the nearest, closest planet been two light years away.

Eric Weinstein 1:12:34 Assume Mars didn't exist.

Chris Williamson 1:12:35 Correct, yep, yep.

Eric Weinstein 1:12:36 And assume that Elon was still the visionary that we want him to be and he didn't have a chemical rocket company. I'd like to think that he would be focused on physics. I would like to think that any of these people would be focused on physics. Take anybody with 11 figures. What is your allocation to building a life raft to get humans out of here? You don't... you haven't even thought about it. Immediately, you're gonna think technology. Well, what kind of a hole would I need? It's like, no, you need a blackboard.You need blackboards and physicists who are not afraid to do physics. Right now, we are destroying the fundamental physics community at a rate that you could not believe.

Chris Williamson 1:13:24 What's happening? Give me, give me the gossip from inside.

Eric Weinstein 1:13:27 For 39 years, we've been dominated by one community's madness, and that community is called quantum gravity, string theory, or M theory. It changed what we were researching. Its, its cardinal sin is not about string theory. It's not about quantum gravity. It changed the questions that me- defined what it meant to be a fundamental physicist. So if I say to you, "How many generations of matter are there?"

Chris Williamson 1:13:58 I don't know.

Eric Weinstein 1:13:59 You don't know that it's three, because we don't talk about that all the time anymore. Or if I say, "Do you know why, why is matter chiral?" You wouldn't know about that. Or if I said, "What's the nature of the quartic potential for the Higgs field?" Or, "Why is there a Yukawa coupling in one case and a minimal coupling somewhere else?" All of the real physics questions that would cause progress got subtly replaced between 1984 and, like, 1987. And then we had questions like, "How do we quantize gravity?" And that became this, oh, that is the ultimate question. Well, it's, it's not. That's, that's just wrong. This comes out of Bryce DeWitt. This comes out of a guy who, in 1952, went with his wife to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, then wrote an essay for something called the Gravity Research Foundation that was about antigravity, and they w- he was supposed to write an essay, and then he said, "Well, to get antigravity, what you'd really need to do is to do quantum gravity." And for 70 years, we've been trying to do quantum gravity, and it's an abject failure. And the physicists at the, at the helm changed the questions. The o- the official questions should sound something like this. Why are there three generations of matter? Why is it flavor chiral? What is the nature and the origin of the Higgs mechanism? Why are we in one comma three dimensions, and what is with SU3 cross SU2 cross U1, which is a bunch of symmetries, and why does it seem to represent on a 16-dimensional space with the observed quantum numbers? That may not mean a lot to you, but I guarantee you, if there are physicists in the audience, they're getting pissed off right now, because they allowed their f- their subject to be dragged away from our real questions, for reasons that are unclear, and put in the service of these questions that can't be answered, and we can't even question them 39 years into this complete train wreck that is the community that could build the life raft.

Chris Williamson 1:15:58 What is so seductive about quantum everything?

Eric Weinstein 1:16:01 Quantum gravity?

Chris Williamson 1:16:02 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:16:04 It allows for toy problems, so that you can not do your work on the, the world that we have, and you can say, "Well, the world that we have is too complicated, so I created this fake world over here that's not in four dimensions, it's in two dimensions, it's not in Lorentzian signature, it's in Euclidian signature, it's not the full gauge group, uh, it's just SU2, and I've changed all the parameters." (laughs) And then I say, "And I've made some minor incremental progress in that fake world." And then everybody claps. And meanwhile, 10 years later, you don't even remember what the particles are that are present in the universe. You don't even remember the, the standard model of particle theory, and this is a, a very real effect. Today's physicists, s- a lot of the young ones, are completely ignorant about the physical world. They could not find the men's or women's room at CERN, uh, if their life depended on them.

Chris Williamson 1:17:03 Yeah, so it seems like a hijacking of attention and focus from difficult problems to, from useful difficult problems to useless or less useful easier problems.

Eric Weinstein 1:17:21 But if you try to talk about the real problems, you can't get engagement, and they will say it as, uh, "Well, maybe people just aren't interested in your ideas." Well, it's like, yeah, but you're not listening to... So far as I can tell, everybody who comes from outside with an interesting new idea isn't being listened to. It's not personal. And we also have a responsibility. This is like, this is the really crazy part. We doomed humanity. Like, Francis Crick, who was a co-discoverer of the three-dimensional structure of DNA was a physicist. Edward Teller was a physicist. Stanislaw Ulam was a geometer. We doomed humanity on Earth, and then we're treating science as if, "Oh, it's a series of puzzles. Well, what do you wanna work on today?" "Well, I don't wanna be arrogant. I'll just work on this tiny little problem." And, and I'm just thinking, like, do you, do you not feel any (laughs) basic responsibility after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and COVID? I- just how crazy are you?

Chris Williamson 1:18:30 Is that... Y- you know, we've spoken about the interplanetary challenge.

Eric Weinstein 1:18:35 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:18:36 And the fact that physics needs to make some progress in order to facilitate that, if we're going to do it.

Eric Weinstein 1:18:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:42 Is, in your opinion, forgetting the fact that chemical rockets-

Eric Weinstein 1:18:46 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:18:46 ... limitations, all that sort of stuff, is going interplanetary as useful... I- i- is it the highest priority?

Eric Weinstein 1:18:54 The highest priority. You'll, y- you cannot stabilize this place. Just imagine every communalist dream came true. We turned away from fossil fuels towards a, the greenest New Deal you could possibly imagine.... all billionaires realized the errors of their ways and contributed their money to bring up the poorest of the poor. AI was as beneficial as it could be and only helped humanity to live its dream. Just go full wild Pollyanna optimism. You still can't stabilize it.

Chris Williamson 1:19:34 Why?

Eric Weinstein 1:19:36 Um, too many people-

Chris Williamson 1:19:41 Not for long.

Eric Weinstein 1:19:41 ... too much lev- Say more.

Chris Williamson 1:19:43 Not for long. Population rates, birthrates at the moment.

Eric Weinstein 1:19:46 Y- we're talking at totally different scales. I'm telling you that with CRISPR-Cas9, with the Teller-Ulam design-

Chris Williamson 1:19:58 IVG.

Eric Weinstein 1:20:00 IVG.

Chris Williamson 1:20:02 You don't know IVG?

Eric Weinstein 1:20:03 Uh-uh.

Chris Williamson 1:20:04 IVF, but being able-

Eric Weinstein 1:20:06 Oh.

Chris Williamson 1:20:06 ... to use from any other...

Eric Weinstein 1:20:07 Sure.

Chris Williamson 1:20:08 Yep.

Eric Weinstein 1:20:09 Uh, so I was trying to th- I was trying to think, uh, in a different context. You are going to have, um, people... Wh- what happens when you distribute the coronavirus because everybody's had it? You've had it?

Chris Williamson 1:20:31 I w- got an antibody test and I had it-

Eric Weinstein 1:20:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:20:34 ... but never felt it.

Eric Weinstein 1:20:35 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:20:36 So yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:20:36 So you have this d- this plat- platform, this virus, viral platform that's spread all over the world, and you have the ability to edit it. Are you telling me that people aren't gonna figure out how to come up with fun viruses and gain-of-function projects and people are gonna be able to do these, uh, you know, polyp- polymerase chain reaction I think was taught in my daughter's high school?

Chris Williamson 1:21:00 Are you familiar with, uh, Nick Bostrom's balls from the urn analogy?

Eric Weinstein 1:21:05 Yeah, vaguely.

Chris Williamson 1:21:06 Yeah, so for the people that don't know, you can imagine that you, you have an urn and each time that you make technological progress, you pick a ball out and you don't know what color. Some are white, perfectly good-

Eric Weinstein 1:21:16 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:21:16 ... some are gray, bit of good, bit of bad, and some are all the way down to black. And black is permanent, unrecoverable collapse.

Eric Weinstein 1:21:24 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:21:25 And the unrecoverable bit is important.

Eric Weinstein 1:21:27 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:21:28 And each time, we just keep picking out balls.

Eric Weinstein 1:21:32 So, my take on it is, there's already too much leverage, too much leverage, too little wisdom, too many people.

Chris Williamson 1:21:39 What was it that you once said? Uh, "We are gods, but for the wisdom, we're just shitty gods."

Eric Weinstein 1:21:44 I don't know if I said the second part. But, um, you know, I, I guess when I heard the story about this kid who scavenged the americium from all of these smoke detectors in Brooklyn and built a self-sustaining nuclear reactor from these tiny (laughs) little radioactive strips, you don't know what people's creativity is. Y- you know, I found it fascinating when I was growing up that I was the only kid who knew that gunpowder or black powder was 75% potassium nitrate, 10% sulfur, and 15% carbon. Like, you could just make it, you know? And, uh, you know, that's the recipe. And that, that just blew my mind that the rate-limiting step was that people didn't know that potassium nitrate was saltpeter or where to get it, uh-

Chris Williamson 1:22:35 Yep.

Eric Weinstein 1:22:35 ... it was like meat tenderizer, but mostly, we're saved from this stuff because nobody's so sociopathic and competent that they go for these high-leverage attacks. That's gonna end. You know, that was like what happened on 9/11. I always wanted to know, why were little kids allowed to go into the cockpit of a plane? Used to be able to meet the pilot. I remember meeting the pilot.

Chris Williamson 1:22:57 I did. I mem- I remember doing it, yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:22:58 So, that's where we're, we are now, is, is that we've got all this high-leverage stuff, and you're gonna see nuclear proliferation. Eventually, you're gonna get some despot backed into a corner who says, "Well, this is my only move."

Chris Williamson 1:23:12 Well, I mean, for the nuclear concernists out there, at least what I know-

Eric Weinstein 1:23:19 Wouldn't that be all of us?

Chris Williamson 1:23:20 Everybody is concerned, but for the people that are nuclear war is a genuine X-risk-

Eric Weinstein 1:23:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:23:25 ... permanent unrecoverable collapse-

Eric Weinstein 1:23:27 Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 1:23:27 ... you can set them all off unless there's, like, f- th- 10 to 100 times more than we think that we have, which there very well could be. Um, it seems difficult for it to be permanent unrecoverable collapse for me-

Eric Weinstein 1:23:42 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:23:42 ... as a true, true, true, true X-risk.

Eric Weinstein 1:23:44 May I say something?

Chris Williamson 1:23:45 Yeah.

Eric Weinstein 1:23:46 This is ridiculous. It's bad enough that it would completely transform life as we know it.

Chris Williamson 1:23:53 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 1:23:53 You would agree that, with that.

Chris Williamson 1:23:54 Absolutely.

Eric Weinstein 1:23:54 Absolutely. It's time, it's time to get serious about things we can actually do. And the most interesting thing is that nobody's interested in interplanetary physics. I, I just, I've never seen anything like it.

Chris Williamson 1:24:13 Interplanetary physics would be physics in service of us becoming interplanetary, or is there something specific about the way the planets figure together in this?

Eric Weinstein 1:24:21 No, no, no. It's, it's about... Let, let me give you an analogy that's more than an analogy. Assume that somebody hands you a physical paper map, a- an enormous one, okay? And you're trying to navigate it on this table that we're, we have here. You're starting to do motions like this where you're moving the paper across the table, you know, to get from Los Angeles to Fresno, California if it's at the right scale, and it might take you a long time to do that. Okay, but now you have somebody trained on an iPad. What are they gonna do? Well, they might do that, but that's not the key thing they're gonna do. They're gonna do what is called multi, multi-touch gestures, and the one that you're thinking of should be pinch to zoom. So the most natural way to do this is to treat it not as if it's a paper map, but a stack of paper maps, and you wanna go to the, uh, one with a different scale if-... if y- you were doing this on an iPad that was mirroring this. The key point is, is that the paper map doesn't have an extra dimension to play with, but the pinch-to-zoom dimension is a scale dimension, so imagine what you did instead was you looked at your house, you pinched to zoom out, you then do this motion or whatever it is to get to your friend's house, and then when you land there, you expand it again. Imagine that you only know about paper maps, but your adversary has an iPad. That's what I'm worried about. We're not looking for pinch-to-zoom.

Chris Williamson 1:26:02 What would that be in this?

Eric Weinstein 1:26:05 Um, well, I claim that there are going to be ten extra coordinates, and four of them, uh, are pinch-to-zoom, and six of them are what I would call, um, sheer-to-tilt. So imagine that you have a copy of a picture of, of the, uh, Leaning Tower of Pisa on your iPad. You should be able to do something in Paint which changes the angle, right? So if you go into MS Paint, there's this little thing that allows you to change by a particular angle, but you could do that as a gesture, where... So, my claim is if you have four dimensions of time and X, Y, and Z of space, you have pinch-to-zoom on all of all four of those, and then for any two dimensions, like X and Z, you have sheer-to-tilt. So the, the first are the four rulers, and the next are the six protractors. Now, that's something called a symmetric 2-tensor or a metric, which Einstein knew all about, but he only chose one through his equations, and he let all the other ones lie fallow. And my claim is, I don't think that's where we are. I think that interplanetary physics is going to involve moving from what we called spacetime to something called the observerse, which contains pinch-to-zoom and sheer-to-tilt. And you wanna get off this planet, you're not gonna get there using general relativity, and you're not gonna get there using the standard model. It's time to take your pacifier out of your mouth and go back to doing real physics. I think if we were serious about this, we would be struggling with the physics of the world in which we live, not toy models. We'd be taking massive risks in listening to people from various perspectives who haven't failed or have not been invited to fully explain their ideas, and we'd be looking for things that would be new, new variables, new ways of working with the world that allowed us to do things that were previously considered inconceivable. So if you'd... if you look at 1911, which is when I think Rutherford first starts talking about the neutron as a hypothesis, it's 41 years later, we have, um, the hydrogen bomb. We can do incredible things that are not possible yet because we don't know the framework. And my claim is, if you imagine somebody used to paper maps being put on an iPad, and not knowing about multi-touch ve- gestures, that is pretty much an exact analogy of what happens when you do too much general relativity-

Chris Williamson 1:28:43 Mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 1:28:44 ... is that you start to think in general relativistic terms as if that's the last word. Einstein would never have put up with that.

Chris Williamson 1:28:51 That's a question. You've mentioned Einstein

Chris Williamson 1:28:53 a couple of times today, the most famous physicist of all time. How different do you think the landscape of physics would be had Einstein lived for another decade? Just how good was he?

Eric Weinstein 1:29:09 He was that good. It was a... the rare situation in which the man and the myth are roughly at the, the right level, the same level. I don't think you could solve the puzzle of theoretical physics in a final theory before the mid-1970s. We just didn't know enough, um, in particular, quarks in 1968. You needed confirmation because they're not obvious in the world. They're stuck inside of protons and neutrons, and if you thought that protons and neutrons were fundamental, you wouldn't be in contention. I would say that the first time you could really guess the answer would be around 1975, and I don't think Einstein was in a position to guess the answer. I think he was very caught up in a Riemannian framework, which is that you deal only with length, angle, and the curvature of the space in which you live. There is sort of a more modern viewpoint on this that he could've understood, and I don't know to what extent he showed any recognition of it, but a lot of his thinking was really well-suited for the world in which he lived, where he could do these thought experiments in his mind about falling elevators or train cars or whatever. Um... You know, Dirac was every bit Einstein's equal. We don't know how to interact with Dirac because Dirac was so strange, and he... you know, Einstein kept throwing off wisdom at an incredible rate. If you read Ideas and Opinions or Out of My Later Years, you, you have an idea of just what a sage this person was. Even when he's screwing things up and making mistakes, he's... it's, it's all sage-like. Dirac was the singular human being a- and occasionally he says something about life, like I think in... when he was given a Nobel Prize, I think shared with Schrodinger, he's given two speeches, and he uses his lunchtime speech to talk about the bond market and the importance... it's crazy, uh, and the importance of using the toolkit of physics within any sphere that is numbers-based.... um, but th- we don't really know much about Dirac's views on humanity. We know about his bea- beautiful aesthetic of, of the quantum. He gave the quantum poetry. And... I, I think that right now, it's up to us. They're not here right now. It's time to make guesses. I'm very partial to an example which happened on the Wheel of Fortune program.

Chris Williamson 1:31:58 Fold this into-

Eric Weinstein 1:31:59 Chris, Chris.

Chris Williamson 1:32:00 ... the cutting edge of physics.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:01 All right.

Chris Williamson 1:32:01 Come on.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:02 Sure.

Chris Williamson 1:32:02 I'm waiting.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:03 Okay. There's a guy named Ken Wilson who's discouraged all modern physicists from making guesses about the ultimate theory.

Chris Williamson 1:32:11 Right.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:11 Because he taught us that you can only observe the world at the energy scale that you're at, so you and I are in a classical world-

Chris Williamson 1:32:17 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:17 ... we don't see the quantum much.

Chris Williamson 1:32:19 Yep.

Eric Weinstein 1:32:20 On