#1320 - Eric Weinstein

Jul 3, 2019

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and economist, and he is also the managing director at Thiel Capital. His new podcast "The Portal" is available now on Apple Podcasts & Spotify. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-portal/id1469999563

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Hello friends this episode the show is brought to you by Heineken 00 Heineken 00 is Heineken but without the alcohol but it tastes like Heineken I'm a fan of Heineken I drink Heineken all the time it's one of my favorite beers so when I drank it I'm like wait a minute this is got no alcohol

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friends my guest today is a brilliant mathematician a great human being one of the more interesting thinkers that I've ever met in my life and I love them to death he's a great guy please give it up and we had a fucking intense deep conversation this one went three hours and like 40 minutes or something close close to it and particularly got really intense towards the last hour just one of more brilliant people I've ever met in my life please give it up for my friend Eric Weinstein

The Joe Rogan Experience trained by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day

no bullshit so it's Eric Weinstein not Weinstein yeah I think it was originally Vine stain Vine changed in a wine stained with yeah German yeah but Shah it was we came from a town between adesso and Kiev called O Mine and that's where the fam of the the vine stain family came from we talked about how many people mispronounce yeah Weinstein instead of Weinstein it's it's epidemic and yet nobody ever says Albert Einstein yes that's what yeah strange right that is a weird one the Einstein is no a if this is there a guy named Mike I'm like Oh my kind steno no Einstein is there a guy like that you remember the old was Blazing Saddles sure Mel Brooks yeah Mel Brooks and Harvey Korman

Cara yeah it was Hedley Lamarr and everyone would call him Hedy Lamarr and it was like the running joke in the picture that's right I fucking loved Mel Brooks movies you remember the yiddish-speaking Indians that that had to be the best oh yeah that's right he had some great movies man there's fun fucking movies man just silly fun outrageous movies yeah I mean he was at he was transitional right I guess it was the borscht Belt being updated for the modern era yeah indie film yeah but it was also it was you know for the time much more contemporary but with that sort of borscht belt sort of sticky sort of right in the writers room I guess from Sid Caesar show of shows was this legendary Factory before Saturday Night Live for all of these kind of crazy talents behind the scenes I think he came out of that with Carl Reiner oh that makes sense he's how old is Mel Brooks now I don't want to ask the question because maybe something

happen I know right it's one of the I think I saw recently that he turned 93 and I thought shit is he dead like Melbourne you know because they were saying all these great things Mel Brooks I'm like fuck do we lose Mel Brooks but it's like one of those things where is it it's gonna happen I mean he's 93 I know but every time it does I know I mean I guess who Betty White is another one of these people right right and so we need these very exotic links to our past and they become more important as time goes on if they're still vital because we want desperately to be connected to something before you know our current ERA given that I think a lot of us sort of don't believe in anything that happened before Google bright imagine kids today imagine trying to describe two kids today what it was like to grow up without the internet

yeah or not being able to reach people you have to make extensive plans yeah you know backup plans well if you're not there this time yeah used to have to yell over that your window yell for your friends I remember when I first got an answering machine I thought it was the most amazing thing ever when I was in high school my family got an answering machine I was like this is incredible and you would you would leave like stupid music like to let everybody know you were cool like you have some cool music hey it's Joe not here right now but if you leave a message I'll get back to you probably

then you got like old people forced I think I think someone in my family still has one of these cutesy messages from like the late 80s really yeah on the voicemail but then who leaves voicemail and the thing that gets that marks me is an old person's I actually call people hmm But that's I like that I've been doing that more lately yeah I call a lot of people now I just feel like it's just it's better that the texting thing the problem is if it's very interesting how we separated ourselves into this the this electronic communication world where I will during the day be in communication almost constantly with a stream of people the only thing that stops IT as a podcast podcast is my my rest for three hours I'm not talking to anybody other than you so all these texts that come through I'll get the end of the podcast I'll go and look at my phone they'll be 40 text sometimes like this is madness if I had to make 40 phone

does that mean he would be impossible to manage would be would be caused by constantly be coming in you never really be able to say anything so we're we were feeding into this weird Loop where we just have these short form things like a dinner tomorrow sure what time how about nine I can do seven okay let's do it you know what I mean it's like these weird little bursts of information over C remember this program California and it was it called was a Californication - that wasn't show with the yeah with the David Duchovny right so there's the scene where he's having some really hot inner generational sex and this gal says like elal and it kills it said it out loud she said it and she says LOL and he loses total interest there's no amount of of heat in the moment that can compensate for the fact that she's using like verbal emojis hmm well he needs to fucking get over that depends on how hot she is

it also depends on how you say it if she's really fun and she's like lol you know and she's like being silly yeah I said like you know I learned that from I learned that from Jim Norton Jim Norton will always say Ela like he'll say something really ridiculous and then say Ela yeah but he's just what mocking himself you're over 50 it's intrinsically ironic right but you know in terms of this weird thing about islands of time one of the things that we do is we have Shabbat dinner and every Friday no matter how atheist and militant people are against any kind of organized religion they will leave us alone when if we say we're going into Shabbat and so there's this thing about like people will pester me in all sorts of situations but if I invoke something that is vaguely religious even Sam Harris probably wouldn't call me during that period of time hmm

I find that very interesting like could you could you create a religion that was simply there to make sure that you had some time off line yeah I know if I text bench pierrot I'm not getting the text back on Saturday ever looks dark yep but when it's dark he text you as soon as they're three stars in the sky that's been on Twitter is like what did I miss that's so weird it's so it's so weird that people buy I mean in on one hand I think it's probably a really good idea to just take a break from all that electronic shit and just connect with humans and a very old school type of way I think it's probably very good for connect with yourself I had this experience I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years and we landed in this Orthodox Run Hotel and on Friday night everything shut down you know like the textbook

and I then moved into a ultra-orthodox neighbor neighborhood right on the on the boundary of a place where the secular in the Orthodox met what was really fascinating to me as I started telling people you know you'd never think that it's great not to be able to find a restaurant or a nightclub but it's amazing that it's this is enforced downtime and about a month in somebody said oh you're in the wrong place of course you can go out on Friday night you just go to the Russian compound and everything's hopping and you can go dancing and drinking and all these things after I knew that I went dancing and drinking and I was much less happy than believing that somehow Israel actually shut down on Friday nights and so very weirdly I appreciated the constraint as soon as I knew you could break the constraint I was less happy and I would never actually obey it anymore yeah I think having a rigid rule even though it seems caught it seems like counterintuitive and that and that

like it would provide you some Freedom by having restrictions but it does it gives you some Freedom like okay like now we don't have to think about all these other things so now we have the freedom to just be alone now we have the freedom to be relaxed now we have the freedom to just talk to human beings you know what I think constraints and it's like do you know Jocko is Jocko willing totally everybody knows Jocko discipline equals Freedom this point equals four it doesn't seem like that makes sense like this motherfuckers up at 4:30 in the morning throwing heavy weights around grunting and act like a Savage running goes out to the beach and he earns the sunrise every morning goes out and takes photos you know takes a photo of his fucking watch for 30 hits the gym like a Savage and then takes a photo sometimes with the sunrise earning the sunrise and like but you would think God is like a prison to like force yourself into that but no no he know if there's freedom in that because he knows he doesn't have to make any decisions at

he knows what he's gonna do knows what he's going to do you just you just go do it and that way I mean you look at the guy he's a fucking tank why is he a tank because he's always up at 4:30 fucking Throne awaits around it just doesn't he never stops you never never takes never takes self-indulgent time to lay in bed and beat off and pick his nose and fucking check his text messages listening to this right now and thinking maybe I do a little bit of that I don't think he does really no total discipline yeah well did you I think I remember reading his inner dialogue about going to a birthday party and breaking down and having a scoop of ice cream or something there's like the Pod and it's like you know the drama of their it was Temptation I held out for 45 minutes but eventually I became weak yeah I don't fuck with that I just do it I'm gonna party to eat that cake I mean I just feel like I do it enough all right we'll be fine there's this

story about Jackie O that she got this cancer diagnosis and apparently her first words upon finding out that she had metastatic cancer was then what did I do all those setups for

an interesting comment that's an interesting comment she thought someone needs to talk to her John JFK was keeping her in the dark is that right yeah it must be

what's happening over there Jim something I'm DV yeah like telling her that sit-ups you want you want no cancer sit-ups that's the way to do I guess I don't know I mean I think I think we all

we have so many days of our lives that we build this pattern that this is going to go on forever and there's some first moment I think I recall it where the phrase popped into my head I can see my death from here mmm and it has to do you know there's like this weird thing when you hit 40 you start to be able to have analytic thoughts that are uninterrupted by sex really yeah I don't know when I when I turned 40 I found that some aspect of thinking too much about sexuality definitely decreased hmm and then you start to realize like your when your testosterone starts to go down you don't feel you don't feel like yourself yeah you become a different thing yeah yeah when your chemical composition changes the way your body feels changes the way you interface with the world changes like I wasn't I wasn't feeling all that great yesterday and I was sort of clowning around with the person behind the bar at Starbucks and she said oh why are you down I said I don't know

just tell me something nice about my hair and she says to me she says oh it's I love salt and pepper I thought damn oh really worst is that we barely saw him pepper I can barely see any saucepan just talking about the song she's built bullshitting you know she just didn't want me flirting with her so she just shut me down by saying you want me to talk about your hair okay you crossed the threshold here at Ya say which is that's all right yeah soon as someone says say something nice like that could get ugly for a girl exactly yeah yeah and she was in the captive situation wasn't being fair to her oh yeah right does that is the worst but we work behind a bar we'd established a rapport before that actually mean I actually think she thought it was a kind and sensitive comment mmm but I don't see any salt I'm looking

down just fishing John there's no I don't believe there might be a few in the yard but not like somebody's going to screenshot in the going to count all the hairs with arrows this isn't something I've learned when you come on your show that your audience is so large and active that they will they will pinpoint every like timestamp yeah there's a lot of people in cubicles right now wasting their employers time to those people with Solutions you cheers I should say for the folks at home that before we started this you ask me do it did I want Laird Hamilton coffee and I said Larry Helton coffee with Laird Hamilton coffee and you gave me something laced with turmeric now which may turn our lips funny colors so if not I don't not drink it every day alright it's fine all right it's really good though but it does give you a little phlegm a little mmm little bit of that because it's got all sorts of MCT oil and all sorts of great stuff in there Laird Hamilton's real freak really interesting got a Pioneer yeah just like just

talking to him and hanging out with him and say seen how his brain works like you got to do that yeah I'm on the podcast yeah it was really really fun so did you what is he okay this is something I'm totally curious but I don't surf welcome because surfing is in my estimation going through some kind of a Renaissance right now I'm super Keen to understand what the series of Innovations are given that lots of other things aren't innovating at anything like the surfing Innovation rate well the big one is that new type of surfboard what the hell's that called like a sail foil yeah foil that thing is amazing and it doesn't it's so weird looking if you look at it like what are you standing on like why is it elevated what is that Magic Carpet Of The Sea let's be honest that's what it is and I am obsessed I was asking you before yeah there's this guy Kyle any who for me is just redefining Surfing by taking these monster waves and he's turning them

into his private little skate park and doing tricks off the top of skyscraper waves and I'm just thinking do you even know what you're doing or where you are anything you keep saying this one phrase which is I'm just scratching what blows my mind is I'm just scratching the surface he knows that he's making that discontinued to newest jump and if you think about sport from the perspective of when did things just change like almost overnight Bob Beamon are arguably is one of the Great Moments in all of sporting history and it happens in the long jump just because you have an incremental sport that suddenly you know somebody jumps a foot more than anyone's ever jumped before so mmm so it's really interesting when somebody changes the game it is in when you find out that there's stuff that you can do in other sports like skate sports like different crazy flips and stuff and someone figures out how to do that on a wave the consequences are so fucking grave if you make a mistake and you're on a

foot wave that bitch comes slamming down on you but part of the Innovation is safety right like right with those vests inflatable vest and with these water water safety courses for big wave Surfers I think that what's fascinating is you think the Innovation is in the tricks maybe but maybe the Innovation is actually in hey you can afford to waive hold down in a way you couldn't before mmm or you're going to survive all sorts of things that might have been fatal right right so you have this open area to innovate yeah that makes me surfing's fascinating to me I don't do it I haven't done it but I went snorkeling when I was in Hawaii last couple weeks ago and I'm such a pussy I'm just I'm smoking with my kids right so of course like I'm trying to figure out how to be the mama duck and like Chorale everybody so if the Sharks coming to gets me I'm just trying to just looking around

because some guy got gag he got jacked I think snorkeling in Maui just a couple months ago like right off of a resort tiger shark from yeah probably yeah just yeah well so yeah some lady got it yesterday not yesterday to couple days ago in was it the Bahamas three sharks one took her arm off and the other two just ripped her apart from everybody

college kid from yeah in California well I'm very interested in situations that change with sharks like reunions for example in the Indian Ocean off of Madagascar used to be a surfing hot spot and they had a bull shark problem with a bull sharks just sort of learned how to eat humans or attack humans but the great thing is we have got some weird thing going on with the true apex predator of the Seas which is the Orca we have one recorded bite in the wild ever

how does this make any sense of great whites are not apex predators because orcas we'll just take them out right and I had this poll on Twitter the other day which is Orcas: best species ever was number one then the other possibility was the dicks of the deep because there's such asshole I didn't know that there was a recorded bite of anyone in the while I thought it was all in captivity know there's a certain there was a surfer who got a bite real yeah but you know on the other hand how are you going to make contact if you're an orca you don't have opposable thumbs it might be for all I know I mean look it has to be a joke because otherwise the the guy would be dead I mean if an orca wanted to kill you and you're in the water that's like if you let an ant go okay but why have orc has never attacked us there's so many recorded instances of swimmers paddleboarders Surfers running into orcas some weird thing is going on and we have to we have to work this out jump

yeah let's try because we've got well first of all what assholes are we that we have those goddamn things in captivity and a big fucking shout out to Canada because Canada mostly probably through the noise that my friend filled demurs has created in trying to get Marineland shut down Canada has banned all Orca and all dolphin captivity it's amazing and I hope the United States does it as well I hope it I hope it goes worldwide it's I think it's I think it's slavery I really do I think it's a different than actually every they're almost us they'll get cross between us and wolves in in the ocean well they have they just don't have the ability to manipulate their environment but they have a cerebral cortex a dolphin does it's 40% larger than a human beings that's what is going on there like this cerebral cortex see there's thinking happening they're like really complex highly thinking well am I right that they have menopause like they're the only essentially the only other species with menopause hmm and you're only going to get menopause likely if

females are contributing some sort of like intellectual labor past their reproductive Horizon right how was that because well I thought menopause is just a shift in the hormonal balance of what is the purpose evolutionarily of continuing life beyond the ability to reproduce that's a good point because that's doesn't that's not the case in mammals and mammals deer and particular can breed deep into their old old age well if you have a resource that's limiting you can give you better off in terms of systems of selective pressures of Shifting something that is continuing past that point you know this is the old point about I think it was Henry Ford who used to go to the dump to see what broke down on the cars and what was still working it would transfer materials and resources from things that were dependably found to work to the things that would be the limiting

that would break so that the the cars would all breakdown sort of uniformly at the end and you see this like with salmon we're salmon disintegrate because it's a discretized discretized reproductive strategies know Salmons going to make another run hmm so you might as well go out in a blaze of glory right yeah that's interesting they also have a massive infanticide you know that's the horrible thing about dolphins they're ruthless they kill their babies the male Dolphins will kill female dolphins babies in order to force them into estrus yeah and that the strategy that the female dolphins have acquired to mitigate that is that they become slots because the male Dolphins don't know whether or not the females baby is theirs because they don't have 23andMe under the ocean so what happens is the female will have sex with his many males as she can yeah so that way she's protected in her child is protected because then all the

males think it could possibly be their baby they don't want to kill their own baby which is really interesting that it differentiate because many mammals that also participate in this don't like Bears don't differentiate between their their babies and someone else's baby so the females in you know she's carrying around Cubs the male will try to kill and eat the Cubs so the force her back in the asterisks and perhaps just even for food because they're so ruthless and cannibalistic right but Dolphins who we think of as our beautiful Charming wonderful little buddies in the water they kill babies they killer whales are of course Dolphins yes there are type of dolphins so you know the issue is you know I think about why do we not get attacked it's like professional courtesy assholes recognize that I don't know man but every time I go to Hawaii we swim with either not swim with dolphins were if you're in a boat and you go fishing the Dolphins find the boat and they swim with the boat

I've never done that oh ditz here I'll show you a little video it's kind of wild because what they do is they literally go and they hang out with the wave of your boat so as your boat is as your boat is tuning along they they they ride the Wake they figure out a way how to do that they figure out a way to get in front of the boat and as the boat is pushing the water they just sort of like helps them along almost like reverse drafting because they're kind of in front of it so as you're pushing the water let me find it here it's really interesting man there are there are an incredible little animal I mean it's so here goes

so that's us in the boat

it's way cool yeah

in a while

this is wild this is hanging out with you I mean wild fucking Dolphins middle of the ocean they don't know you you could be an asshole they trust you enough to the trying to get our technology Joe they want the boats I don't think so you don't think so you think we're dating app by that shit there laughing Harry hey watch this we can do this can you yeah they don't have to carry anything we were carrying everything by ourselves were almost useless naked useless we have to have closed if the carry the clothes you have to have shoes you got to have no we won't man were extended phenotype guys yes they think we're fools they think we're yeah they're out there with free food don't worry about carrying credit cards Bitcoin all that nonsense they're out there in the ocean just a bit they have Bitcoin there's point of the deep gash I don't think they do I think they're probably pretty pissed of killed all the fish though yeah I think that their actual you know the orcas figured out how to use our Fishers are fishing boats and just wait for us to get stuff on the line and then they like a steel thank you for organizing

I think my dinner yeah well some orcas are not that smart because they're not adapting like there's a particular pod in the Pacific Northwest that relies on Chinook salmon oh yeah and they're trying to figure out what caused the salmon populations massively depleted due to a bunch of different factors including they put dams up and they've done a bunch of stupid shit that they didn't they did a long time ago and they didn't really understand the consequences of it it's really been devastating to the salmon population up there and Chinook salmon in particular because this this what these orcas eat now they also have this migratory pod that comes in that relies on marine mammals and the migratory pod is doing great brilliant they're doing great they're eating all the seals and they're having a good old time but for whatever reason the Pod that stays in that area doesn't want to eat marine mammals they only want to eat chin up salmon so they're fucking literally starving to death yeah I think they read this book on fixed versus growth mindset and the transit or transient pods are like hey

every day is a new day we could do something different the other ones that know I'm kind of a creature of habit yeah there may be the same but they're coming back they just have a very specific diet they just won't deviate from which I find to be really weird what is it that pods missing right now because they probably all dead they haven't they haven't been seen in over three weeks which is the longest they have been gone for Washington's resident orcas go missing oh yeah I remember that like no new babies have been born in the Puget Sound dad I hope I hope they're not dead man that's horrible

I don't know she's sad because they can't figure out a way how to teach them to eat marine animals they've there's all these different strategies they've tried to figure out a way to teach them to eat seals but they're not interested and they've also decided to try to figure out a way to farm raised chin up salmon and reintroduce them to that area but then again you now if you have to like how do you how do you designate those salmon specifically for the orcas and not for fishermen like what do you do when people you know they catch fish what are you doing dude tell him put it back it's for the Orca

Mmm Yeah Joe I don't have any actual expertise in this area me neither I'm just talking well you know we went down to Hearst Castle and there's this elephant seal Colony there and my family decided that this is the worst species ever of mammal elephant seals oh man they're horrible like first of all in terms of sexual Dynamics you know one beachmaster he's got a couple lieutenants or trying to take over his role and the Lieutenant's seemingly can have sex with one or two of the females like not too much but just enough to keep them happy yeah yeah right and then the beach Masters have to fight each other and they're all these dead babies all over the beach because the giant bowls just trample them on their way to fight right and so then then you have like the females if they lose the pup they've got to get rid of their milk so they steal somebody else's baby so the

thing if you transpose like human if you answer for more phi's you just think these people are horrible this is a crack house on the beach and there's no way how do we get some great whites and in remove these mammals immediately they're making the family look bad yeah maybe we could get the orcas to start eating that's right yeah because orcas are we have a deal yeah and it's a big animal so it's a good meal look at those dead babies that is so fucked up they're all dead but it might be yeah and they are lazy they are not an industrious I mean they are when they're in the sea but when they're just on land well they're just laying there well they're not dead they're just chilling yeah they're chilling look how many of them there are well you've seen when orcas do Beach themselves to get those things right it's wow well I'm they it's right on the edge they Hydra the hydroplane on the and then they waddle back in look how is like scratched up they are from the ground everything so weird-looking animal to what is weird fucking thing that is William Randolph

it was a real piece of shit he really was you know he's the reason why we have wild pigs in California

that dipshit imported wild boars and released him on his property tax hunt them but yeah okay so we're driving down the highway and my son says look dad wild zebras I said haha son that's very cute he says no no no really I look up and there's a herd of wild zebras what Hearst Castle has a close down the zoo they let the zebras out we have a herd of wild zebras in California that no one told me about shut the fuck up I serious I've won The Joe Rogan Experience I finally told you something you don't know anything about especially about invasive wildlife's yeah that's crazy so zebras in California that change your mind a little bit on mr. Hearst no he's a piece of shit alright he pulled out he's one of the main reasons why marijuana became illegal was he smoking too much well it's all conspiracy theory and conjecture but the story is the traditional told by stoner

with some education story is that William Randolph Hearst along with Harry anslinger conspired to make marijuana illegal when Dupont came up with a chemical composition for nylon and when it was a combination of several factors and the décor Decatur was invented the core Decatur was a way that they could effectively process hemp fiber without the use of slavery see the reason why they switched over from hemp clothing and hemp sales and canvas canvas which is actually comes from the word cannabis all canvas was made from hemp yes I did all that stuff is made from Habits far superior to Cotton far superior in terms of strength in terms of its durability other than jute I don't know what you'd is Jude is what burlap bag like oh yeah dude is way better that's okay don't you hemp is open a lien plant its hemp if you had a piece of hemp like the stock of Hamp and you cut it into boards like this table yeah that it would be as hard

this Oak but as light as balsa wood it's incredibly strange I I've seen these like the actual stock of a hemp tree when it gets really big right and you'll have it thick around like like a man's shoulder right but it weighs like nothing it's really strange it's a strange strange plant not like any other plant it has all the essential amino acids it contains protein you can cook with the oil the oil can sustain you it's got essential fatty acids Wonder we have to ban it it's my fucking amazing amazing plant but anyway they came out with this décor Decatur and the décor Decatur because the way they used to do it was like a very labor intensive process of breaking down the hemp fiber and turning it into something that you can make clothes with in paper so Popular Science magazine in see if you can find the cover this and like the 19 or early 1930s had a cover said hemp the new billion dollar crop and it because

hit had this décor Decatur right so William Randolph Hearst on top of having Hearst Publications right he also had paper mills because you know he had a he wanted to make his own paper so we had these forests and he had paper and he would make paper out of wood There It Is Well does it say there's a cover of it though that says hemp hemp the new billion dollar crop that's just the inside part of it see if you can find it anyway so William Randolph Hearst would have had to have shift over because hemp paper and we've ever played with it no it's incredibly durable it's crazy it's hard to tear it's really fucking strong like it's a fucking alien plant there's nothing like it it's so weird like you see a piece of paper thing oh look at this light piece of paper to tear it no no fucking really durable so they were saying this was going to replace all paper that's made out of wood and William Randolph Hearst is like slowly roll bitches I got an idea

so he starts putting together all these stories about Mexicans and blacks that are smoking this drug called marijuana and they're raping white women and when Congress made marijuana illegal they probably didn't even understand that it was hemp because it was the same goddamn thing marijuana was a Mexican slang for tobacco for a while tobacco so they repurpose this name and called it this this plant called this marijuana because this gigantic conspiracy so that this fucking piece of shit could save money all right that's really what it was because he had access he was like the YouTube and the Google of you know keep along with in the 1930s he did but yes he had access he was the one who could just decide what gets distributed and so he that's in and that was big part of the whole Reefer Madness film campaign and all that shit all that

of was all about economics the whole thing was about economics American farmers are promising new cash crop with an annual value of several hundred million dollars all because of a machine has been invented which solves problems and more than 6,000 years old it is hemp a crop that will not compete with other American products instead it will displace Imports of raw material and manufactured products produced by underpaid peasant and coolly labor Cooley labor well what does that mean I don't even know what that means let's not talk about it when you're late teens no no provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land so this was all in February 1938 they thought they were going to they were going to change the world with this shit and then you had all these people that were a part of the whole prohibition for alcohol this is shifted those motherfuckers over to him I mean think about it it's like over the period of you know 10 15 years if you had 10 15 years ago you know we're talking about like 2004 you know you had bunch of people from the Bush Administration that were really into

Banning certain drugs and they still have them hanging around you know a lot of that dipshit that was the attorney general for a while but the fuck's is named that little weasel the little weasel that Trump got rid of sessions that piece of shit that guy same thing same thing these little weasel we're good people don't smoke marijuana but then it'll you know he's a Viper he's a Viper is that what they used to call people smoked weed back in the other hand he's not smoking weed well doubt that look anytime I see somebody who's really against homosexuality I set a clock yeah right yeah and you have to ask yourself who in the modern era like I found it astounding that when Along came on this program and had a blunt that like it was an issue yeah and can you imagine if like Elon it had a glass of chardonnay well he did yeah no no I know but the just the fact that our language and our thought process around the time right I see what you're saying I had a I had a dinner

at our house while ago where we took some of the most knowledgeable people on psychedelics and related substances to just have a discussion about what is the state of schedule 1 pharmacology and we asked a question of the interesting substances what are the three that you find were most informative in terms of self-revelation changing your understanding for the better etcetera I was astounded that of the people who seemed to be very knowledgeable about mind-altering substances almost everyone put cannabis in the top three my because it's so well I would if I thought it'd be sort of commonplace you know I wouldn't have guessed you know somebody would say 5 Meo DMT somebody else would say kettlemans somebody else would say you know LSD or DMT or I wasc but the Common Thread throughout all of these

who are many of them were researchers was that they felt that cannabis was miraculous substance well it certainly has the the the deal is it has two different forms right as a smokeable form which you know you can get really fucking high or it has the edible form which is like a psychedelic yeah but it's like a psychedelic it's very much so it actually is more psycho a there's there's something called 11 hydroxy metabolites that own it's only president when you eat it it's processed by the liver there's something called the one pass and when it goes to the liver produces this 11 hydroxy metabolite that's somewhere between four and five times more psychoactive than THC and it's responsible for people thinking that they got dosed like a lot of times when people eat Edibles they got come across this isn't pot something's in there well it's just the 11 hydroxy metabolites that's what it is it's so bad yeah it's way different it's way different like that's why it's confusing to people like all I can't fuck

Edibles it's a different drug is a different drug because 11 hydroxy metabolite is not present in psychoactive form when you smoke it so when you eat it that's when you get that really fucking weird body a high and interdimensional relationship use it better worse or interesting well for the tank it's Bueno it's the best for this isolation tank that's my favorite my favorite is a good stiff dose of an edible of an edible and then you know wait about 45 minutes then getting the tank so because 45 minutes it's like the way I describe it is like with certain psychedelic drugs and I do consider edible marijuana psychedelic especially when you get into the hundred milligram 200 milligram doses it's very psychedelic and especially in the tank because in the tank when in the absence of any visual stimulation your when your eyes are closed you have these wild almost like neon visuals like I start you start

seeing these strange dancing cartoons and like weird weird shit done related to other substances you can get similar situations on other psychedelics especially in the tank the tank is a really unique way to experience anything even even normal cycle like The New Normal State the normal State of Consciousness that you have without any drugs at all inside the tank it transforms right because in the absence of any sensory input and you don't have anything coming your way don't feel your skin your brain starts really getting free and loose and you start you it gets very confusing as to what's reality and what's not what are the boundaries of of vision and interpretation and just creativity like well how much of this is your imagination how much of this is not well you when you add any sort of psychedelic to that tank experience everything

is ramped up it's like you know it's like you know you add some drugs when you mix them with other drugs they become like way more potent that's what happens in the tank the tank in and of itself is some kind of a drug or it produces some kind of profound drug like effects like it can it be banned the tank I don't think I have you how much experience you have with the tank not much how many times we've done it I've been in once yeah it was a when I was a teenager come on you should have one all right should it's just a great way to relax too it's a great way to link and you as a mathematician you think of things and you're caught you're spending a lot of time contemplating things and you have to realize that any other input whether we think about it or not is chewing up some bandwidth yeah although I actually have a kind of ambient level of distraction which is how most helpful for look when I get out there I get way the hell out there and do you like an ambient level of distraction sometimes for example

go to an all-night Cafe and like 2:00 in the morning and they'll be a just enough human I mean I have very ambiguous feelings about humans don't worry I don't consider you one what do you what do you consider yourself we'll talk about this one okay no I really think that in many ways I've left this planet really yeah I think that there's a way in which I've checked out how so well

I think that when you get deep enough into your own mind and you start dealing with abstractions and you find that the real world I wasn't planning on going here we can try it when you find that the real world is often a kind of noisy place to think and that you actually prefer really powerful abstractions and then you check in with the real world say does that abstraction actually govern the world that I'm in you start to prefer living in the abstractions that's interesting like do you feel the same way about like a crowded nightclub like if you go to a bar and do you do find that that stimulates thinking well it depends I mean if I'm in a stimulating conversation I'm very present mmm if I'm a nun stimulating conversation I have to make my own fun right and so I will start to sort of

play I mean you know at times I'll just make up a story and see how it flies you know if I don't think I'm hurting anybody and sometimes I'll sort of experiment with people I think we'll all do it you experiment with people well it sure like you like say something to someone see if they bite well you know it's like let's imagine for example you were going to move to Austin okay are you going to just be the same old you you're not going to take the opportunity to perhaps reinvent yourself so for example you know if I suddenly change if I start wearing glasses and I wear like a really fashion forward pair of spectacles you should wear aviators with yellow lenses like Hunter S Thompson I would like that like that with you with your crazy hair yeah

you with some yellow aviators and don't even address it damn in public yeah we're indoors and we if I do any sort of alter is like maybe maybe I've never seen what I look like with a bald head so if I were to Mitch yeah if I was going to move cities when's the best time to try it try it yeah they knew right and so you know at our at our age Joe yes how old are you 53 yeah that's all right yeah I'm 51 almost 52 so the great danger is complacency and so I I'm terrified about becoming complacent so I always wanted experiment chain like what is it that I could continue to do to grow and if you can't play and experiment

maybe you know imagine you wanted to you wanted to go by Joseph and just to see whether it worked hmm whatever it is we get so locked in and if we change anything people get angry and I've always looked at Madonna and David Bowie as like genius squared not only did each iteration of them do something that was kind of artistically interesting but they habituated Their audience for Change and so the idea is that every time you met a different David Bowie you know he would effectively say do you like this incarnation of me because it's not going to be it's only here for one year and then I'm going to do something new the next time they're just had a conversation with Sean Lennon

in which we talked about how his father John Lennon always kept changing and yet people want to plug in with the idea that John Lennon was just the guy who wrote imagine let's say right and that's that's a great dangers that if you think about like your output somebody say well you know didn't you in 2014 tweet X

gotcha it's like well you know maybe you have 10,000 tweets and maybe you changed maybe maybe new information came in so yeah that is a weird thing about pulling up thoughts that you had from a decade or more ago and trying to put them on you today yeah and pretend and if you say I don't think that way anymore people don't want to accept that they because it's a disingenuous conversation they're not really trying to find out what you think they're trying to get you know it's more interesting for example

there's been a ton of pressure we can get to this in a second to for me to address the question of the IDW is it still alive is that they are always going National dark web yeah so it is the intentional dirt with a third bag with the let's come back to that when share did this remake of I Got You Babe with Beavis and Butthead

he took the ceramic is she had this duet with Sonny Bono and then she got into a bad thing with Sonny and so she said I'm going to re-record the song and I'm just going to torch it right now the problem is somebody had that as their wedding song Right Beavis and Butthead no no whistling yeah oh I'm sorry probably did with Beavis and Butt-head but yeah there's some point they don't care people from Florida okay that one right but Florida man uses the problem when you change things is that other people wed themselves to where you were so when you pull up you say yeah I don't think that that's just wrong I was confused man I was going through a dark time and I probably was saying stuff I should if you do that right and anybody who sort of invested in that version of you an integrated that into their lives is now Angry they're upset hmm wait a minute you pulled the rug out from under me and so right you know in part with Bowie and Madonna did is they said look

these are stages and if you like that stage that stage is yours but I'm not staying there

and I think that that's sort of the more responsible way of doing is that you're allowed your Evolution but you have to let people know I'm going to do something totally different from time to time

or I like the idea of doing things or just do it just do it yeah don't try to explain yourself console but they didn't explain themselves right they just they did it in a clear enough way that people could understand the pattern mmm and so you know for example in this is something that I think would be kind of interesting to talk about everybody is losing their mind at the moment in the space that you and I sort of Cohen habit of ideas and trying to figure out how do we remain saying and plugged in and open-hearted and open to new things but also rigorous and fair like all of these weird pressures the ideas behind the intellectual dark web that you coined this this concept of having a bunch of people that have different ideologies but yet share this common theme of wanting to have real honest communication and honest conversations and try to figure out instead of looking at things from an ideological perspective look at things from an honest objective point and try to see the way the other people view things in hearted and not not trying to destroy each other

press yes and effectively trying to become the adults in the room as we watch the kids run Riot right and and and not always not always achieving that now because I refuse to actually say what it was or who is in it because there was a lot of pressure to codify it I knew that if I codified it it would die I want a membership card you have you have one but if I don't if I don't get one you have what there's a clubhouse we just don't tell the members where it is because we time there's an article about the IDW doesn't mention me I'm like yes yakking away yeah I'm slipping away but well I'd like Pacino and three we still have dragged you back it's their eyes there's been some discussion about certain members of certain people that are losing their fucking marbles yeah yeah I think it's pressure you know and I think one of the things that we're all recognizing from whether it's the internet and the or just celebrity in general which I think part of the culprit is especially if you're reading comments and articles written about

which I do not recommend if you are doing that I'm doing this don't do that if you're doing that you are subject to a massive amount of pressure yeah it's a lot of pressure and sometimes people they apply that sometimes that pressure can help you like if it's a good friend or someone who you trust and it's done with intellectual honesty and they just really they think that there's maybe a flaw in your thinking or maybe this could help you or maybe this is an issue and then you realize that and you self-correct that's great but there's a lot of people that are bending to the will of the masses and they also are responding to the pressure of the mass I don't even think it's the masses I think knows what reasons I read my comments is because I want to know what Russia's thinking they're not kidding listen to me Joe here we go let's go down the rabbit hole to go for sure and we went we talked about this recently let me just say this before you get going we knew something was going on

years ago I used to have a message board and on my message board of my website it became problematic for legal reasons people are putting a bunch of illegal shit up there and I was kind of responsible for more than a few issues came up where I was like oh Jesus I'm going to I'm going to get in real trouble we had an influx and by an influx I mean thousands and thousands of Russian emails signing up for my message board I mean thousands with really similar email addresses and they would post and pretend they're from fucking Cleveland or post and be mad that we don't have enough Nazis on or whatever the fuck it would be you know right would just be the same thing that the IRA was doing the internet research agency was dealing with Facebook and Google and Twitter we were seeing this like four or five years ago that this stuff was kind of happening where they were recognizing that the disease large portals of discussion and so they're trying to manipulate the discussion and turn certain discussions toxic and

certain and you know and come up with Preposterous conspiracy theories and attack people for nonsensical reasons well this is the thing I keep seeing the same message modified a hundred different ways from a bunch of accounts that have suspicious similarity not one of these accounts usually is followed by anyone I care about and then they have a few high value accounts with blurry photographs of a person that like I think somebody's like putting real money into that account to create a fake person who just dog doggedly follows you and is constantly trying to talk to you in your ear that account but how do you know that that's what that is and how do you know it's not just some person I'm gets a friend yeah that really is really interested in Eric Weinstein was a couple times I've tried to like talk to the person and suddenly the thing vanishes like you're so disgusting I would never talk to you goodbye click well maybe they just panicked could be just a person well that's the thing we you never know

on the other hand you remember when we took that photograph at that dinner yeah there was this huge number of jokes about Ben Shapiro and a booster seat that we're all slightly different versions of the joke and all of the accounts were like strikingly similar mmm I was thinking like well I I could imagine a little bit of this but it's way too many and this is part of what I believe I believe that we are in a new world in which a lot of the Grassroots stuff is is AstroTurf and if you start to listen to it you start to get pushed and I start to watch certain tactics and I make models of the tactics you know like one of the tactics is gosh Eric I once thought that you had a lot of integrity and now I know that X hmm you know if you don't if you don't address this situation I'm done following you oh really goodbye click but

I believe that I believe that there are sophisticated players who are engaged in trying to either boost our signal or start to alter the signal somebody will be up somebody will be down and then there's like really weird Dynamics I think that there's a very strange thing going on not with Dave Rubin but with the crowd of people that is just trying to eat Dave Rubin and and blind him and confuse him mmm and this you know this is Kai Sam Cedar who think he's a Russian I hope he is well I don't know I don't think he's Russian but I do think that his his I think he has a Grassroots following I don't think this is inauthentic that just loves to dark her ass well dunk drag I hate this language I just like it honking I like the word donkey oh really yeah it's fun no I'm not a fan no

no no because it's just a cheapens all Converse oh you got dunked on you got dragged just like oh this is that thing in third grade that I never figured out well they found out that he won't engage them and so they think it's cute to just constantly shit on them and they also think it's cute to take anything that he says and interpret it in the worst possible way possible and not think of it as him just being a guy who's trying to talk about things on the Fly and maybe isn't even prepared about the subject at hand like one of the things that comes up on this show like you know we were talking before we were going to go on there we're going to talk about my come on just talk yeah and so when you do that come on let's just talk thing yeah you never know what the fuck is going to come up and you might have a piss poorly formed idea of what a subject is if you just start rambling yeah that's what I've done my two previous well no your has not but it seems you know it's easy to think that you did

but with Dave you know there's enough moments where he's misstepped where they just feel like okay we got a wounded Antelope yeah they're trying to pick him off and you know I think there was probably a move to do Shapiro and there was a period where you were seemingly in the crosshairs but you're hard to kill and you know I have no doubt that I was in the crosshairs I want him noticing see that's that's the benefit of not paying attention and this is something that I've been pretty rigorous about over the last like six months while they are sooo Sam Harris and Dave Rubin have all given me versions of this advice and I worry about it because I'm not large enough yet that I've been the target of a steady campaign but what happens is you see people's feedback loops interrupted and in part to course-correct you kind of want to know was I was I too harsh with that guy like what

on with Jordan Pederson on Dave show I was more aggressive because I think I'd seen Jordan and Brett on your show together and I come from an ethnic family we interrupt each other that's normal and Jordan is an interrupter and so what I found is that I probably was intuitive that I had to be more forceful a lot of the comments that wow Eric I haven't really seen you this aggressive was it there three of you on the conversation it started off Dave Jordan and myself and then Ben Shapiro came in for an hour and I think Sam Harris might have been scheduled to come in and I'll remember there's an issue always with more than one person there's a reason why I do one-on-ones almost exclusively yeah like even when I had Bob Lazar with Jeremy Korbel just just having a third person that wants to chime in like oftentimes interrupts the flow of conversation like in that case it was because I wanted a lock in on Bob Lazar right I wanted to get home

feed but I want to find out is this guy full of shit what I want to I want to lock in with them and there's another one and another and also and also is another person even if they have a good thing to say it's a distraction it becomes a problem you never know when one of these is going to work when one of the when it works it can be magical and yes when it doesn't you know it's a little bit like jazz guys if that group is meant to be then they don't trip over each other solos and they're trying to come up with some but even with three great friends I have this issue I mean it doesn't great stuff with multiple people on your show and I see stuff that doesn't work and you know the other the other night we had

Bryan Callen is fast becoming one of my favorite people in the world and he had us over and was really fascinating it was all guys who could rip your head off not your head off they could certainly rip my head off and very thoughtful ones at that there were people from all different ethnicities my wife was the only female and one of the things I found astounding was that everybody was taking the piss out of each other and it was the most intimate positive loving kind of an environment you could imagine where people are joking about each other's ethnicity their religion and I had to remind myself about how men actually manage intimacy and closeness and it's not the way women do it and hinari shit on each other we shit on each other and it's friggin important to how we do business and yeah recently I have this idea that I need that in my life well we have to check each

to see if each other's taking to the seriously you have to be to make sure you're not taking yourself too seriously I didn't feel like lots of jokes were made at my expense I was probably the only guy there who wasn't you know some form of a combat sport veteran and you know there were a couple jokes at my expense on that they're a couple Jewish jokes I felt terrific leaving that place there was no part of me that felt like wow I really got hazed but I hope I got through it I mean these guys were just so positive yeah and generous of spirit Brian is one of the best of that he's so silly like most of his podcast that he does then with me and him have pretty cool podcast we've known each other forever we've been best friends since 1994 is that right yeah I mean guys that guy Mart I love him so much that I broke up with this girl and Brian she was she was calling me because she was horny and I was like look I have a new girlfriend but

I have a friend oh fuck you and he's just like me it's something I sick Brian on my ex-girlfriend and he fucked her one of the funniest conversations I ever had with an ex-girlfriend she calls me up she goes your friend came inside me and I went what she goes yeah your fucking friend came inside me and I was like well did you tell him that you were on the pill she goes no no I'm not on the pill and I was like well I don't know what to tell you you know that's Brian you guys should have worked that out what happened ex girlfriend call you up mad because your friend ejaculated inside of her it was one of the most I hung up the phone I literally fell to the ground laughing I was lying on my back on the floor my house going to look at this is so ridiculous as Bryan Callen Frank hello everyone so I called them up and I said did you what happened and he's like whoops

who's this such a ridiculous conversation

but I've been friends with that guy forever so all of our conversations are like that I see all of our conversations are like jokes and hazing and shitting on each other but it's all hugs and love I mean I love those guys yeah so positive and generous and you know when funny thing I was looking at his Instagram and he's seated next to I don't know it was can't remember was it cheetah about yeah actual wild cheetah in Africa yeah and he's talking about how he had sex with it I like to get up in the morning perhaps we will hunt together I smell Antelope nearby just like he's clowning it isn't actually a real cheetah yeah but it does cheetahs are interesting when you actually pet them it's weird I didn't know as I get it was a game reserve I see like one of those types of farms are as we can image no no I mean yeah a lot of that is in Africa I'm not in terms of like like they're they're not pets yeah but they're so used to people because people always go on Safari there and apparently

get real close to them in some environments but cheetahs in particular a lot of people keep them as pets like you see like a lot of sheikhs like Rich guys in the Middle East we driving around in their fucking AMG wagons with a cheetah next to them cheat on a leash the Cheetahs just cool with it so you nobody nobody nobody is that with hippos I think if you want to go next level yeah that wouldn't work out hippos just decide to fuck you up yeah what is with us in the hippos hippos are like they're a cousin to pigs and their right yeah they're a ruthless fucking animal oh now I see it then I'll play any games yeah and for vegetarians it's not even like that where their food they are vegetarians but do you delete me I know they're capable so dear you know dear and cows they'll eat birds we're not going back into that vampire do your thing there's no no no freak me out last time but dear oftentimes eat birds the ground nesting Birds there's a lot of video of it like people don't want to believe it they think that you know they just eat grass as most of the time they do but

they will eat a bird if they get a chance you know they know it's food

yeah it's weird yeah and they have an herbivorous digestive tract but no can still eat a bird there's a lot of videos well I do here I guess I've been really fascinated by the number of species in which some human like totally deadly species were some human has decided I'm going to dedicate my life to hanging out and not getting eaten by hyenas the some asshole that is he's hanging out with hyenas on the internet and petting them they seem really playful and friendly real sweet it's real weird this guy's like nuzzling these hyenas imagine choosing the idea that's your system that is that is an animal that bites so fucking hard they have they have like one of the strongest bites ever measured because their whole thing is just smashing bones and trying to get out the nutrition that the Lions leave behind so they're all just about crushing bones so their whole face is designed to smash bones yeah and you know they're they're fucking see here's the guy

hanging out with these hyenas he plays with them look at this asshole

but stay there playing with them there they seem to think he's like there buddy look they're all they're biting him but they're gentle I mean they could rip his arm clean off but they're biting his leg and you know he's nuzzling with them this lady right his face I do not know I do not know because I think a lot of these have to do with imprinting you oh yeah for sure yeah well that was the thing with my friend filled demurs who worked at Marineland one of the reasons why he's so furious at them is because he's got a walrus name smooshy and the walrus imprinted with him when it was really young right the walrus thinks that's his mom okay that he's rather the walruses mom you know so he's just on this fucking furious quest to get this walrus released and to shut down this shithole known as marine land yeah he's been sued forever he's been involved in lawsuits as long as I've known him and he's been coming on this podcast for years for years we've been you know trying to boost his signal and trying to get the word out and then when Blackfish

came out that sort of really turn the time right or people got a chance to see what Orchid captivity is really like they're like holy shit this is horrific it is absolutely barbaric but anyway his that's that's a his this war has come from him he gave me that it's cool that yeah that's it's there for fill that sits on the desk for Phil who who is the Hall of Fame here on the desk is there a camera over there though this is a district these are all little little little statuettes from the company called plastisol and plastisol is how do you say Fong's name Palm Tran he's an amazing artist who's created all these little little little figurines this is Rory MacDonald who so Elite UFC fighter Bruce Lee Notorious BIG that's my dog Marshall Marshall has one that's me

Tupac Conor McGregor Kanye and then that is a different one the bobblehead one does Rich rebuilds he's got this really dope really dope website or YouTube channel or he he's the only guy that I know of that's ever rebuilt a Tesla he bought a wreck Tesla and then bought another one and put the parts together and figured out how to make it work and the Tesla people do not like him they don't like these doing that now he's made a place called the electrified Garage in Massachusetts where he is working on Tesla's in electric vehicles outside of their ecosystem so he's doing it on his own like an independent whistle mm Massachusetts you think he's going to hybridize with Boston Dynamics know he's an independent guy that really cool he's not how do you say his last name Benoit right it's been no it looks like binoy but it's been War very cool guy who was on the podcast recently hey what happened what do we know about the Kanye situation where you could talk about Mental Health

I was kind of excited about that I you know if he wants to he can do it I'm not yeah it don't he's a is there something he is a brilliant artist but oftentimes a brilliant artist is not this is not the best format for them to just talk like sometimes it's better for them to express themselves through their work may be although I found you know I spent two days with him and I found that when he's in a relaxed frame hmm his flow state is just it's beautiful why I enjoy talking to him I talked to him on the phone I really enjoyed our conversation with a nice conversation he's I think he's a very good dude very sensitive human be a very cool guy but this is not a relaxed environment you know this right here everybody knows how many people are listening it's just fucked people's head up really cuz the illusion that I have

is just you and me talking and then I come out of here and people like what did you think well you and I are friends so that illusion is more maintained when you don't know me and you come in and I mean I'd have to be friends with me until I just want to thank she wanted me to come to his church and it's got these run a cult essentially everybody's wearing white there all day and some doing religious stuff I do that yeah busy man so you're busy yeah son is your family time so he studies are fairly well I'm not into I just I get it I think it's beautiful you know but I'm not he and I were walking down the road and you know there was this crip alert which is up the creek yeah the Crypt from Long Beach said you know Connie better stay in Calabasas it was like a little bit of a tense situations or walking along the road and like people were hanging out of the windows of their car Kanye and I think was just like positive you know like right make contact but it was very disconcerting and this guy was Predator naturally calm

he was just like mmm I was nervous how long ago was this this was you remember when he went on TMZ well we talking to year or less I think is probably a year ago it's probably medicated not anymore I was there right yeah yeah he talked openly about the fact that last six months or so he's been off of his medication and he whatever they had him on was fucking with him creatively well you do remember Oliver Sacks hat this chapter in The Man Who mistook his wife for a hat about a drummer with Tourette Syndrome no and then he took a drug to control the Tourette syndrome and the guys drumming became kind of monotonous very regular but like not creative yeah you look the what that guy's got inside of him he's so prolific I mean you listen to his music it's so interesting and eclectic and prolific and he just constantly turning out more great shit

he doesn't have any flops I mean his music is pretty fucking amazing and he's just that's his shit man he knows how to just get in there and create and he's got this whirlwind going on in his mind he's Fearless yeah studies he is explore and only into the details but one of the things that really impressed me was he would go to places that I'm too scared to go to in my own mind and I'll just you know thinking about your inadequacies and externalizing them and your vulnerabilities and knowing you know what is going to emasculate you and his point is like I'm so comfortable with myself that I'm going to mind that as a source of art because I bet it's in everyone and you know by exploring these contradictions and these false fronts and you know he's got a level of internal access I'm actually quite interested in the mental health aspect of this which is

there's so much some incremental unhealthy as we as we term it that I don't think it's all mental and health I do think that there's something about the artistic process that seems to be very informed by states that we call and health yeah well we require people to stay inside these rigid boundaries and these rigid boundaries there are great if you want to show up at a job and work nine to five and don't use certain noises with your mouth because it makes people upset you know but that's not for the creative process if you look you look at true outliers if you want to discuss true outliers like people that are really capable of producing extraordinary art or architecture Works different interesting things that are part of the creative process those people are all on well every single one of them I mean in terms of like if you made him do what a normal person has to do every day I think normal life is unwell in terms of

this this requirement of showing up five minutes early working all day long getting off maybe bring some of your work home getting some sleep getting up in the morning and doing it all over again all while raising a family and trying to enjoy your time your limited finite time on this planet well this is why I said I've left three left is that it's not healthy here so where are you well maybe maybe this is a good segue I hadn't thought about this way but so can we use this format to announce that I am in fact starting the podcast I've recorded a couple boom episodes already that are in the Canon it is it is called the portal the portal yeah hmm the portal is refers to this

this very interesting thing that I thought everyone was aware of but very often people wouldn't react to it when I was a kid I read all of these stories that I thought were known to be the same story but different versions of it and I called it the portal story and it was always the same somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence in an Ordinary World until some sort of magical portal accidentally or on purpose enters their life and either they go through a wardrobe they go through a rabbit hole Looking Glass Platform 9 and 3/4 or you know Dorothy famously was used to introduce Technicolor where she the first part of the film she's in Kansas and it's in sort of grayscale black-and-white or oh that's right and then she lands and ahhs and they open the door and it's Technicolor and there's this transitional scene

where you see Technicolor for the first time was that the first time ever in a moving believe so and so so the question is where's the portal like why do we tell the same story over and over and over again with different protagonists but it's always the same formula it's somebody is trapped in an Ordinary World they're sort of there were around normies they find the portal

and the portal becomes the Call to Adventure and they spend time in the alternate universe

and then somehow they're able to live very often they return

if you remember the Phantom Tollbooth Milo gets this present of a car in a toll booth and he goes through the toll booth and what does that from Norton juster was the author and Jules feiffer with did the illustrations which is This brilliant book where there's like the land of letters in the land of numbers so it's Arts and Sciences and you know like there's a there's a person who starts from his head and grows down until his feet reach the ground and there's a numbers mind and he has to rescue the princess has of rhyme and reason in order to restore order between the two kingdoms of the you know like left and right hemisphere it's some incredibly exciting story and the idea is that after he goes and does all of these

there's an island called conclusions and when you make an assumption you leap to conclusions so you suddenly jump I mean it's all very clever wordplay and stuff

at the end of the adventure

the toll booth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it you know and so my question was always white why on Earth would we tell the same story over and over and over and over and over again it has the same format and it's always a different context and I came to believe that this story is actually this unkept promise for most people that in their adult lives they don't find these portals

so for example have you ever been to Barcelona Spain know there is a church in Barcelona Spain which is plenty impressive from the outside when you go inside I've been looking at pictures of it my entire life called La Sagrada Familia

it is a psychedelic drug trip and a half like you've never seen like it is the most bizarre interior space I've ever seen in my life can you bring up the interior of this thing whoa and on the one hand it induces like a hallucinogenic State on the other hand it's an idea of what this architect Gowdy now gaudi's very famous he did a lot of buildings around Barcelona there is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet and wow

fuck that's beautiful and if you look up at the roof

wow

and like you know most things you're sort of prepared for them your whole life and then you see it and you think yeah I guess I guess that's cool I've been seeing this thing my whole life and I had no

no concept

of what a genius this human being was because nothing he did really outside of it the outside of it I mean look this guy fuck is a Min if he never did the inside of this church he would be a very famous an idiosyncratic architect wow but they doing work on it there it was very finished it that in fact he's such a he's such a genius that they can't finish it in the style that he started it because nobody knows it's like an unfinished Symphony what would you do nobody smart enough to finish this church wow look at that roof on that poke now that is a portal other that is a portal

right and when we when I was on this program before you know I thought long and hard what is it that I could push out to the planet to let people know how wonderful and beautiful the world that we live in is and we pushed out the hopf fibration and suddenly if you recall I said to people this is the most important object in the universe not the hopf fibration particular but the class called principal bundle which people have no idea it's out there and it is the basis of the construct in which we live so how is it that a normal human being can make contact with real physics with you know real beauty of biology or you know just understanding order symmetry all of these things that are Beyond normal experience and

what I hope to do with the podcast is to have amazing guests and interesting conversations but to thank you for that Jack guy was on drugs that guy was he was drunk he well that's you know I remember that's what Dolly said somebody said dolly do you take drugs he said I am dressed right another Spaniards Spaniards are really something but that is very similar to psychedelic States

well maybe some people have access to them all the time right in part well there's another there's actually an illustration that sits above our sink out there from a guy who has a tumor in his pituitary or is not pituitary gland his

what is the one that the one that they think produces DMT what the fuck is it called

not the pituitary gland no peniel pineapple thank you he has a tumor is put thank you tumor in his pineal gland and so he accesses he States all the time so this guy has it's a hundred percent DMT inspired art work I mean if you look at it it's like what you see when you do DMT trips it's like it's a version you know and in his style of art but you can see the the you can see the signature DMT there it is there's his artwork what is his name Sean Thornton Sean Thornton thank you Sean thanks for the artwork it's fucking awesome it's it's in our kitchen I'll take a picture of it later and put it online but that's his stuff like that super DMT like that's amazing I mean that's a thing a tryptamine type experience at you like you could say like Alex Gray is probably the most representative I would say he's the most representative in terms of artists in the the DMT space in terms of like tryptamines and psilocybin and things on

lines and so if you think about psychoactive chemical some of them are stupefying but some of them are portals and this concept of if you look at a wall how do you know that the wall doesn't have a door how do you know that there's no Panic Room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book we Are we learn to stop looking for the portal and I think what I what I do differently than other people is that I became obsessed with exits

that there are other worlds and they're real that this this mythology of the Looking Glass in the rabbit hole in the Matrix is metaphor for very real things and that we just

we live our lives in the most ordinary mesoscale phenomena where you know we don't see we don't see the quantum because we're not you know playing with polarized lenses and ways that show us what light actually is you know we're not playing with superfluid helium we're not understanding just how bizarre olfaction is or you know whether there's some sort of quantum aspect of biology and what you see people doing is that they're they start grasping for everything like I'm not saying that there's nothing to Ancient Aliens or UFOs or whatever but a lot of that is just

people want something richer and more more amazing for their lives and I'm not going to pass too much judgment on that but I am going to say if we just restricted the the rest of our days to the provable stuff that we know is out there

it could be amazing people need more meaning with all of the rationality with all the mystery we've taken out of the world it's time to put a ton of it back in

when you say put a ton of it back in like I'm going to put it back in well you know if I were to start talking about the octonions an eight dimensional number system that no one understands

I can do that totally rigorously I can show you all sorts of bizarre stuff involving the Octo nians what is the arc Tony well that's my point you don't even know that there are four types of numbers whose dance called the real numbers that we know complex numbers that were tortured once with in high school maybe during some kind of a trip a friend of you mention the court mentioned the quaternions to you and then there's this one system of numbers which is like the crazy relative nobody discusses and that's called the octonions and the arcturians are so weird that mathematicians don't even really understand why they're there that's a knocked Owen that thing well my guess is that that's probably back to the root lattice of E8 which we discussed last time which has this kind of Mandela pattern to it but I could show you their multiplication table I could describe their symmetries there's a symmetry group called G2 which involves these strange numbers but it's a mystery like if I got to

I probably know more about the Octo nians than most mathematicians if I got to the end of all of my knowledge of the actor nians I still wouldn't know what to tell you about why they're there and what they mean nobody knows I promise you that

that's a real mystery now we could talk about like you know my friend said that that event that happened in Siberia in the early you know 20th century was actually an alien visitation well maybe yes maybe no I don't know anything about it

if I just focused us unlike what we know is out there that we don't grasp which is hundred percent rock-solid it provides so much mystery and meaning and invitation to Adventure like if you're looking for a hero's journey

I'll show you a ton of these things and it's empowering it's just incredibly it's incredibly empowering to know that you're a hair's breadth away from superpowers

so I want to help people explore that so what is that like when you're explaining this when you saying this is bizarre series of numbers right what is it doing like what how do we interface with it well so for example let's take a easier system that we feel a little bit more confident with there's this thing called the quaternions which are based on the number one the complex number I if you remember that from some distant math class and then there's something called J and K so I times J equals k j times k equals i j times I is equal to the negative of I times J so negative K there's a multiplication table for these these objects and these objects help with computer vision you know computers simulation 3D projections they're used all the time in probably video games

they may come up in nature I mean we know that nature uses complex numbers and most people never found out why they were being told about complex numbers are imaginary numbers because they never got to the point where you're actually looking at wave functions that describe photons and electrons and all of that good stuff that you read about in physics so in essence the Octo nians our system where ijk keeps going effectively through element o p q r you know till you've got eight different objects and they're not even associative which is one of these rules that you learn about you know multiplication is associative and you think well what is an associative right so if I you know if you talk about commutativity for example I can't tell whether you put on your shirt first or your shoes first because it's commutative as to which order you did it but if you put on your underwear in a different order than you put on your pants it'll become immediately obvious which order you did it right okay well there's another thing called associativity and it's almost everything that we deal with in

elementary mathematics is associative seems like why do I learn about associative I've never made anything that is an associate well the Octo Nyan then associate a number system that is responsible for most of the platypi of mathematics if you will things that just occur anomalously

so that's an example of an invitation out of this planet you know if you start to think about the Octo nians and care about them and say are they a message do they have meaning we can prove that they're they're construct them for you but they generate so much bizarreness in some sort of abstract space how are they recognize like how was it how did it come to be that this is a point of discussion well there's there's a process in fact there are two processes where you can build these number systems up from each other so you build the complex from the real you build the quaternions from the complex you build the arcturians from the quaternions and then you can't build anything beyond that because each time you're giving up a magical power to get to the next stage by the time you get to the Octo nians you're exhausted this is a giving them a magical power well like for example it's very hard to think about the square root of negative one so like what does it mean for something squared to be negative right so that's like the complex numbers gave up that

kind of sensibility and then the complex numbers are at least commutative a times b equals B times a but the quaternions don't have that property so then you have a further property called associativity so you're sort of to eat to build the next system you're giving up properties that sort of make sense to us and by the time you've gotten to the arcturians you've given everything away there's no way you're going to build the next system but yet it's real yes yet it's real in a in a in a very real mathematical sense so does it just highlight our lack of understanding yeah and it is a call to Adventure it's like a message from something that isn't human I'm not going to say that it's God I'm not going to say that it's logic or design but it's a more complex it's something time of the universe that's right and you have to uncover that these things are there or for example you know C elegans I don't know if you've liked played with you know about C elegans no all right CLA UCL against see this letter uh-huh elegans and now again Michael agains I think it's

too so it's this worm that was chosen by this guy Sydney Brenner who just died and it's a shame because he would have been a great podcast guess just like one of the most brilliant biologists that we didn't focus on and he said you know what we're missing a species that we can completely describe

Soup To Nuts here's the one that's about the simplest thing with a brain it's only got a thousand cells and 300 of those cells make up a very primitive neural system and we're going to track where every goddamn cell like bring up Jamie if I could ask you some to bring up the cell lineage diagram for C elegans

does be the first of two images well that is a complete map of how one fertilized egg becomes

a tiny microscopic Worm for every possible division what right now fuck am I looking at I love when you say that that is so wild yeah right now here's the thing everyone in biology knows how cool this thing is and very few people not enough people outside of biology know that we have completely mapped how one cell like if you're 30 trillion cells around it's too big to write a diagram it's only possible because they're only a thousand cells and this thing has Locomotion it has sexual reproduction you know it eats so you're looking at the architectural plans for an actual organism and Jamie when we're done with that if I could trouble you for the for the folks that are just following my kind of pause for a moment for the folks that are following at home listening just listening not watching what we're looking at Jamie

explain how someone can see this image if they want to go themselves the letter c it's not the Nazi like the ocean to C elegans and then that cell lineage it looks like a really long basketball bracket yeah that's pushed out forever that's a good way to describe it yeah it's fucking wild yeah talk about March Madness yeah oh man is June man February it just doesn't stop if we could bring up the wiring diagram or adjacency Matrix yeah let's see how it goes white warning to all right yeah perfect that is a complete map of the three hundred neurons

in the C elegans worm how they are wired to each other like that is a map of the mind of the worm

wow okay so that's the portal that's another portal here's an organism which is completely mapped and has complex behaviors it has I think about half the number of adult cell types that you and I have so maybe we have like 250 like only 250 different kinds of adult cells more or less I don't want to get too precise about that and yet we are like ten trillion or 30 trillion copies of those tiny number of different types of cells well I think the C elegans has about a hundred and twenty-five or something like that different cell types and it only has a thousand cells and it's able to do most of what we're able to do

we move around we eat we have sex pretty simple life do you think it's ever possible well it's I'm sure it's probably possible but do you think In Our Lifetime will ever see a map like that of a human organism I don't think so but the cool thing is we have this map and we still don't understand it like we've got this thing dead to rights hmm we've got a boxed in it can't we know every single cell what it does we have all the wirings between the neurons we still don't get it right right so like imagine that your what eight years is that well what did what a genius this guy Sydney Brenner was for choosing this organism mmm right because this organism

is the simplest place to look at complex life

mmm

this image of the reconstructed biological neural networks but like you're looking okay now we could have a discussion about some weird Peruvian structure and whether we've been visited mmm and I'm be up for that look I get it pretend that I'm too good for it but I know that this is real right I don't have any doubt I'm not going to sit around asking well do you believe that you know aliens talk to this federal government in the 40s right that might as well be an alien yeah and it's an invitation to Adventure yeah and we are destroying I mean you know getting just getting back to it the reason that I'm fighting through culture were issues which are not very interesting to me is that we are destroying the thing that has the ability

to make sense of the world right it's really the design and logic yeah but I mean like the ability to say no you know you come with an experiment that failed you know and you say I think it's exceeded I say no it didn't it failed and you say well I actually am Cambodian and I think you're discriminating against me because I'm Cambodian like look your experiment failed it has nothing to do you mean Cambodia hmm yes seriously and you keep that stuff out of my lap I mean if you lost your War stuff yes really what I'm animated by is

get your fucking social engineering out of my laboratory you've got 10 minutes and I'm calling security that's my issue it's not telling people how to behave or that I have all the answers or that we need to be objective in our lives and we just want to have sensible discussions it's your coming after core reality in our ability to make sense of the world and so I'm happy to entertain all sorts of things you take one foot step one foot in my lab and I'm calling security and if I can't do that if I can't maintain a scientific journal or university in which the bullshit departments do not invade the Departments that are actually doing the super important work we're lost and there is a distinction and I mean this distinction needs to be made there is a distinction between hard science and gender studies if you could pull up Jamie

let's do the anomalous Magnetic Moment of the electron

oh you can do that yeah you went all Sean Connery on me one raised the eyebrows yeah when I breath isn't that like a genetic thing like you can curl your tongue like yeah I could do that some people can't do that apparently turned over uh-huh

we mean turn upside down oh no I can do that all right you got one thing I got another okay this is very mature Joe

but what is going on here put see where I'm looking for a number with like 10 or 11 significant digits

we are able to do calculations in Quantum electrodynamics let's say a Quantum field theory in which we can figure out the Precision of something we can predict it to like 10 or 11 decimal places of accuracy and when I look at the achievement that was necessary to have Theory agree with experiment to that level

and then I listened to some of the discussions about won't just take these hoaxes about you know somebody submitted parts of mine Kampf to a you know as with Jews re-written as men Peter look I was in right yeah those two subjects are taking place in the same institution hmm one is incredibly rigorous and demanding and completely unforgiving and the other thing is just like frivolous and nonsense or well maybe there's a core of it that makes sense but there's it's not going to get anywhere close to the achievements of the of the hard Sciences but the core of it whether or not it makes sense the real problem is the motivation for doing it in the first place well the real motivation maybe activism but

Activision activism and scholarship aren't I mean there's so many things that I want to be true that just aren't

I want beautiful I mean like you know nature you spend time in nature you want to thank you know like Nature's a community and where the forest is a bunch of different organisms all working together no it's red of tooth and Claw everything that you think about the universe that is purely beautiful and aspirational is contradicted by some system in nature

and that's why evolutionary theory was the first thing on The Chopping Block it's just like well this contradicts everything we want to Claim about organism well tough luck I feel like there's a way to define this clearly that makes people understand it better okay and I don't I don't know if I'm the guy to do it but I feel like someone there's a this is an incredibly complex issue right where you're dealing with emotions and feelings and people who feel like there's Injustice in the world and inequality and they focus on those things to the point where they're almost participating in Social Engineering By ignoring reality and focusing on what they want to be true in sort of this way of reimagining the world and they're also demanding compliance this is a big part of this whole thing that's going on here then on the other hand you've got this stuff yeah these hard sciences that

just regular rigorous intellectual debate they demand careful study of the facts they demand a deep understanding of complex mathematics in order to achieve these results and to be able to verify them their unforgiving unforgiving yeah there's just they're two totally different things and what you're saying is when one of them that is this sort of fervor frivolous Airy kind of utopian version of what they like the future to be and that interferes right where they want a certain amount of diverse people on the IT staff and I'm not even saying that it's frivolous I'm not even saying it's not scholarship I'm saying that whatever it is I don't care

maybe it's maybe it's some beautiful social thing what do you do but then they'll hit you with you don't care because you're a white male and you have white male privilege and I don't and what I realize is that it's important in as inclusion is exclusion is equally important and the instant you say that I don't know you the time of day what does that mean by exclusion well the important we keep talking about diversity and inclusion diversity inclusion inclusion and there's an implicit threat in that which is what makes it really juicy and interesting which is like

well let's look at us we have three white guys in here there's Jamie you and me so like speak to yourself I'm 1.6% Africa elected recognize that I knew who is I knew it was gonna play that card but you sir can passes white right yes okay now in order to have the objection like there's some little bit of guilt which is like well why aren't there any people from Cambodian here is that we're really anti Cambodian if you carry that guilt you're always worried that you have to be able to prove that your inclusive doesn't matter right right okay it is also important to exclude certain voices from the conversation so the voice that plays the card which says well you're only saying that because X I don't have to listen to that voice and I think this is really important

that is not a voice that needs to be answered it's not a voice that needs to be taken seriously or paid attention to unless there's some serious allegation that there has been some kind of discrimination or inclusion the burden of proof is on you for saying why that's interesting in a particular conversation

the burden is on you to explain why that's interesting right well for them they're trying to engineer a more fair and balanced Society if I was going to take their perspective they would say that the reason why there aren't more women in science or trans people in science or you know Phil and I'm also trying to engineer a world where there were more women in science how are you doing that by trying to figure out what is it that selecting against women for example that we need to get women more money as I said on this program earlier in their lives so they can hire help to help raise their children so they can spend more time on their careers and balance yeah but a lot of women don't find that attractive they don't want to do that maybe but I'm trying to think but my point is is that there are lots of reasons that men and women are different right yeah so for example I saw a beautiful video of a guy who jumps down it enormous flight of stairs

skateboard and he just Nails the landing and it's just a it's a thing of Art and then it shows you a hundred and fifty attempts where this guy just abused his body and it failed and failed maybe broke a tooth you know blood everywhere and you're thinking oh you showed me the success and you didn't show me that this guy was willing to put his brain his life on the line in order to nail that trick and he's actually one of the world's falling Champions right okay well when you start saying well why are you putting this video of this person who's doing this thing you know on the internet because that person belongs to a privileged class I'm saying well

I don't know that guy abused himself and put himself at risk and you know devoted his life in a singular way that no sensible primary would be a I would be appalled of my son did that I'd be furious with him you know there are things that are that are happening that result in imbalances that aren't about some kind of unfairness and I think it's very important to say that unfairness is real and structural problems are real and non structural problems and things that really aren't unfair are also real I think we both agree that it's important for people to have the opportunity to pursue what they enjoy pursuing I think there's also an issue where we want people to be more represented we want more of that kind of person that's interested in something when they might not necessarily naturally gravitate towards it and it might not be that there's some impediments and that there's some boundaries and some some sort of boys

club that keeps them out and it might be more that they're just not that interested in that well that they're all sorts of biologically been that's been proven in studies but I'm trying to make it a different point okay to me what I'm trying to say is I made a mistake years ago I think of engaging in answering this point which is you know let's let's take piano competitions why our piano competitions historically disproportionately you know let's say entered in one by Russians or chest or who knows what Russians are beasts in the way that they destroy children on their way to the concert stage they will do things that most American families will not do to produce a concert pianist

okay that's not an unfairness for the rest of us I mean I play the piano I can't get on stage with these guys because they're just amazing it's not snot an unfairness that right I'm not represented on that stage you know if I told you that my intention is to become the world's greatest Jiu-Jitsu expert at age 53 being overweight and not having any history in Combat Sports you know and I know that it's not going to happen with the right amount of drugs come on Joe and Engineering we can do miraculous things that's true we can make him better than he was yeah we need daily stem cells we're going to we're going to have to do some real we're going to take a chance on cancer and all sorts of other diseases right we can we can achieve some things okay but the previous conversation we're no Yang that you need to develop you need to develop it it needs to be a part of your well here's the thing that I would say about striking sports right striking sports are

only one of the more interesting ones in that when you start out on an early age your body develops learning how to strike when it's a gigantic advantage over someone who learns once they're past puberty when you get someone who's learning how to strike and they're in their twenties it takes a real outlier to become super successful it's very very rare but I remember being in a fistfight and throwing a punch and not connecting and hurting my arm yeah that happens all the time oh I didn't understand if you it's not free you know it's like a very it's a very expensive now all you've got is your left arm and you got to really pissed off person across from you what I was getting back to is I wanted to talk about in part the portal and how it relates to the whole sort of weird social justice thing the key point is I'm not that interested in the culture wars I'm interested in the pipeline

of amazing stuff that is unforgiving right but do you think that along the way you have to kind of address that the culture wars are thing try to figure out why there are thing trying to figure out what what are the main points and main factors that are responsible for it being a thing right and is there a way to mitigate its impact on progress well this is I'm concerned that the culture wars are going to keep girls black people whoever short people I don't know what out of the things that they want to do why because we're not being honest about what it actually what is involved in selecting against people so you brought up the issue of interests so like the Google memo the James de Moura Shoe Right for exact great example publicly okay but my wife went on Dave Rubin show

you know look this is a woman who brought techniques of gauge field Theory into economics so she's no slouch when it comes to analytic thinking she's a big field three similar to gauge symmetry that gauge Theory okay same thing just call it gauge Theory and I wasn't she wasn't doing she wasn't doing quantum theory but she was taking she her thesis

brought techniques of bundle Theory like the hopf fibration that we had and showed that economics without any alteration was a mature geometric system in a gauge theoretical D so it is necessary we collaborated on on showing that you can't accommodate changing preferences in economics without gauge Theory so that was kind of pretty amazing was really great great fun the sheet her point was I didn't enjoy the unpleasantness

of focusing on these things because they were so abstract and so I wanted you know I was interested in people I was interested in making sure that our models could capture human dynamics better and you know I was just really excited by the collaboration we were doing which is you know she and I came from two different worlds and we found this bridge between them so she wanted Dave Rubin and said look it's not about abilities women are as smart as men its interests we're not interested in the same things necessary and that should be a way but when she said it on Dave Rubin show didn't register anywhere then date then James Dewar said it and like the world freaks how dreary but that's also because he said it within the environment of Google you just wasn't on a podcast if he had just hit but he but if he had said that same exact thing and he was an employee of Google and he was on a podcast even it was a popular podcast I don't think it

of create he was also such an issue Vector mean it was the fact there is Google in the fact that you can get paid for these you know these weird sort of spectrum e-skills yeah you know guilty that's what I care about I really enjoy doing isolated things in the absence of other people that have a very technical nature to them and you know my experience in general is that iíve had female collaborators in very technical subjects fewer women are interested in things that involve isolation and technical things removed from human interaction and so that statement will undoubtedly caused a flurry of activity and if a if a person says it was not suspected of trying to keep women out of something like my point is I want

a much more equal world but have a very different diagnosis as to why the world is as unequal as it is and your diagnosis is that it's unequal because people have varied interests and that but also like something is dumb as kin work gwiin Kim work women take care of sick relatives children and the elderly at a level that most men can't be bothered with you know that's just like yeah I don't care so you know you've got all of these guys hyper-focused on their career who are doing the equivalent of jumping down a flight of stairs on a skateboard you know maybe it's not healthy and then you've got another group of people who is like saying you know I want to have children I want to stay home with the kids for a couple of years because it's really important in terms of their development and bonding and all these things and I say absolutely how do we create a financial product that gets you money early in your life when you need it

and then you know maybe you pay something out when you like it's just a different diagnosis as to what the problem is it's not all oppression part of it is resources and financial products part of it is interest part of it is the fields being set up in a way that is biased I do believe in structural oppression I just don't believe in the level of structural oppression or the remedies for start structural oppression like if we don't we are losing many of the best Minds that are on female shoulders we just are there's no question about it mind and rather than saying what do you mean by we're losing them well they exit the system we they get through the like let's say b as in stem subjects a lot of the mentor PHD programs like let me give a very simple example from the Harvard math department from years ago I think Harvard had this weird thing where it would very often allow one woman in a year to the Ph.D program in mathematics and that person usually felt isolated

and would often kind of leave the program and then one year a female who was admitted deferred so that meant that there were two women starting the next year and they formed a support network and they both got through and then other women came in after them so it's like oh that's interesting we just learned something

right if you let women in pairs maybe they're going to do better and then then maybe three will do better or four will do better okay I'm totally up for that kind of a remediation up until we can build up enough female experience so that women have Role Models like it's really helpful to be able to look at a senior female researcher

and go to her and say how did you do it you got married you had kids you had a very successful career how did you come back you know one of the things I found I used to be interested in this problem and I found that a lot of the women in the 1950s were very successful in stem subjects had a lot of money or their husbands had stable jobs that allowed them to use nannies and housekeeping in order to free themselves from drudgery

well that was an unadvertised feature of the system because that's not available to everyone that's it it's a feature where Financial privilege actually enabled somebody to stay in science so you know the issue isn't question of inclusion or exclusion of groups it's a question of how are you so sure that everything is structural oppression hmm that's that's a really weird thing and if you can launch that objection cheaply if you can just say I can take any group and say why is this group have no one in a wheelchair

now I've got to spend 30 minutes explaining that

right I don't want to do it it's not a good enough objection like if we're going to make progress let's actually make progress that matters rather than making ourselves feel good why do you think that this social justice movement has reached such hysterical levels over the last decade well couple things one I think that certain positions became like the failing business of traditional media meant that you couldn't actually employ people

at the same level that you can employ them before so a lot of people who didn't have huge opportunity costs entered journalism was I mean by huge opportunity well let's imagine for example that you're very ideological and somebody offers you a $50,000 a year job which allows you to be ideological or you could take a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year job and ideology isn't a large part of the offer

only the ideological people are going to give up $100,000 a year for the privilege of activism mmm so in part when you have a failing business model you start select is a system of selective pressures it's going to start selecting for very different people so that's one of the things that's going on is that you have very economically frustrated people because the silent generation started a problem the Baby Boomers Amplified the hell out of it Gen X is still waiting to take its place in society in the Millennials just don't even see a path through you know standard careers nobody's putting a glass of scotch in their hand and a cigar in their mouth and saying come with me kid let me show you how it's done well isn't it also partly because the discussion is out there and the discussion is a very attractive one the discussion of one of the reasons why you haven't gotten by in this world is because of inequality and because of some sort of systemic racism or systemic sexism or systemic

homophobia or transphobia and it becomes when you give people an option to find an excuse yeah they gravitate towards that big when you create safe space right and you coddle yeah and you make it mean all these pieces are in place as many many many moving parts right and I think all these little pieces are in place where we also have these massive Echo Chambers because of social media we have these people that you know they find ideologically similar human beings and they bounce off of each other but these are all real problems like I have an intersex friend who I was dating somebody who's indeterminate between male and female physiologically so okay let's imagine that they have some karyotype XY profile right and that the developmental process did not produce unambiguous genitalia okay okay is that a hermaphrodite I don't want to okay just intersects okay

there's a person I think of pretty terrific and I look at all the forms it's a male female

I just you know my heart sinks like we're not even in trans here we're talking about somebody who's biological card that they were Del could have been you could have been me right and through no no choices at all this person is being shoehorned into a paradigm which puts them in an increased risk of suicide and it breaks my heart we should change it we should break the male-female dichotomy absolutely now I have a different feeling about trans but if we solve the issue of intersex which is not pressuring just accepting that some tiny percentage of the population which is not vanishingly small just not large is neither unambiguously male and female terms of genotype phenotype concordance

we will do most of the work necessary to take care of our trans folks who are suffering to right now trans is a much more Rich world because there are a million different issues taking place in trans and they're all conflated part of it because of Developmental biology part of it because gender really in some sense is socially constructed in a way that like when people say mathematics is socially constructed I have to reject it you know and I give this example of like Kilts and lungis from Scotland and India are skirts but they're not female in those places so you have to learn about male and female relative to the codification in your society and the issues of what are our what are our obligations to recognize hey this is really a female mind in a male body versus this is a regular mind in a regular body but needs instruction all of these things are conflated and I was really hoping that if we if you know if

used intersex as the test case to break the the binary because the binary is an oppression there's no question in my mind about it well how is it an oppression because it let's imagine that I let's say I have persistent eulerian duct syndrome so I'm phenotypically on the outside mail and I go to my doctor and says hey you've got a uterus

what yeah you have a uterus okay that's an exotic situation maybe I want to identify male you know because the outside equipment looks male it's a it's a weird situation maybe the idea of it is we're talking about extremely rare circumstances so does that really defined it as being oppressive like what like what is for a friend of mine who is in either situation yeah it's oppressive but I mean is it a present look some people are born paralyzed right some people are born with like serious neurological diseases that don't allow them to be motile that's right like what is it oppressive if people are just recognized most people recognize as being able to water if there was no category called Des disabled right okay like you're in a wheelchair okay no category all right yeah so you've got somebody who's got a spinal cord injury

and you have people saying all right everybody Walk This Way what do you mean you can't walk get up why are you lazy that's what it sounds like to me

like it's one thing to recognize that not everybody is in the standard category hmm But it's another thing to hard code I can hard code where you talking about job applications forms yeah the federal government gives me a form there's a binary it says male or female let's imagine it doesn't say other or prefer not to say Okay so we're just talking about filling out forms which is how often does that take place in your life

often enough that it represents oppression where you have to redefine motion or female emotionally emotionally I think this is oppression oppression yeah

I'm not look it but really isn't it done under the interests of defining people simply because for the most part you're dealing with males and females and for the most part they're just trying to figure out what's what for their statistics but you know again this is this is fun I'm glad you're asking me these questions because usually I have to be on the other side of this issue and this is really where my heart is which is I care about these people and I know that in every single conservative Society in the world there are accommodations made for the failure of simple binaries to accommodate the population

there's no Society this there's no Society so conservative that they've sorted the world into male and female

you know the famous example of it in a neuron of the Ayatollah making a fatwa that said it's fine to have gender reassignment

right we have to recognize that every single population produces gender sexual ambiguity but isn't that also to get around the idea of homosexuality being a grievous crime because like I believe in Iran it's illegal to have homosexual activity but you can have gender reassignment so if you're a game and you can choose to become a female that's true but there's also a thriving gay scene in Tehran

you know do they have to recognize it and they're all sorts of execution of that there was a situation in India where I you know I have more experience where you would say oh those two people are confirmed Bachelors you know that they're so dedicated to their professions that there's no room for family and they live together right so like traditional societies have everybody accommodates homosexuality and failures of simple gender binaries and you know I always bring up the example of Turkish where Turkish doesn't hard-code the third person singular pronoun as male or female it just has one pronoun for both so

thank you for giving me the opportunity to show where my heart actually has been this entire time which is I believe this is oppressive and I don't think that it presses that many people but I believe that it's an important oppression that we have to realize that we hard-coded and that's which generated a lot of the feelings before we get to trans you can simply say from the position of intersects that the world is a richer place than male and female and people say oh it took six verses X Y is like no it isn't it just isn't it for the most part is you for the most part it is so in terms of it is it has been an edge case to deal with but that each case is important to me right because the edge case are they are human beings that are not only that I actually look like I like people who are outside of the Norms I think the probably a larger percentage of those people are going to be more interesting people because they're forged in the fire hmm so it's not just a

case that you know do you want to chase a couple of edge cases everybody with a really different experience is more important to me than everyone with the standard experience I think we have to keep take care of the standard case but I'm absolutely interested in outliers and edge cases so to get back to the to the to the line of thought well that's an important distinction and what you're saying is very important because you are in one way someone could pigeonhole you from your earlier statement that you're not interested in a lot of these different studies grievance studies a lot of these gender studies because they're sending it if they interfere with hard science which you are getting particularly The evolutionary biology you're getting a lot of interference you gotta write and you're not interested in that but that does not mean that you're an insensitive person is on it shouldn't human beings you just not interested in the disruption of the

ring of data and the analysis of set data

I don't think that activism makes for good advancement well I think is also a problem with who's the activists and what age you're talking about and how idealistic these people are and what how was it going back to biology where's their mind at it how how formed is their mind how narrow right is their view of what the world is or should be and their impact you know what what's what's significant about their in my disagreement it's give you an idea of where my energy comes from

let's imagine that you actually believe that males and females are equally intelligent okay just fishery and equivalence can I say lol

then you're then what would you be you'd be fascinated as to why you don't have males and females in an intellectually depending in equal numbers in any in an in a demanding occupation so you'd start saying huh if I already assumed that males and females are equally intelligent I care about different categories how much of this is about fertility how much of this is about kin work how much of that is of this about structural oppression how much of this is about path dependence you do some very careful thing

in order to understand your problem and only when you'd finally understood your problem

would you say okay now I have an idea of how to remediate it we need a financial product that transfers money from late life to early life because the the huge burden that knocks women out of the stem pipeline might be that they have to take care of elderly parents or young kids Bingo now you're working in a totally different idiom because you've actually come up with a different idea or for example if you make if you hard coat like it's Sean Carroll I think just had a podcast in which he said something to the effect of well the IDW is kind of into interested in race than IQ I have never been interested in racing like you the only time I became interested in race and IQ

was when I started hearing there is absolutely no variation between groups and you know in any kind of cognitive endowment well certainly there is in terms of height the ability to radiate heat melanin content attend to the skin the ability to absorb sunlight it doesn't pass the smell test that you could be able to say that a priori it's just it's not a scientific type statement it's something you'd have to investigate so

in that situation am I interested in some finding that says that one group is smarter and other groups are not as smart do I believe that I Q equals Martin is no I don't believe I Q equals smartness do I believe that there's no cultural bias I think there is cultural bias you know I'm definitely on record of saying there are ways in which groups that are said to Fair less well in terms of IQ demonstrate actual intellectual dominance this is some rich weird area I've never cared about before and the only reason that it becomes interesting to me is that suddenly we're making these incredible proclamations with certainty

like you know you can't say this word or this is absolutely true and like life doesn't work like that there's no word in the English language George Carlin made this point all the time there are no bad words there's bad intent yes they're bad people well isn't it also the issue being a part of a group say more I the IDW is too interested in race and IQ I'm not I'm not who is I mean I'm really not I don't discuss that at all I understand but who is interested am Harris has discussed it before but he discussed it with someone who is studying I don't think Sam cared I think that well I felt that he had Sam felt the Charles Murray had been railroaded by him by he Sam Harris and then as Sam came to understand what it is like to have a mob turn on you Sam said maybe I'm wrong about Charles Murray and then as recline made this really interesting point in a really unfair way against Sam which was basically like hey you don't know what Charles Murray is he's a hybrid he's not

the social scientist he's also got an agenda

right is that accurate I think so I have never read Murray's work but I don't know enough to say either but I deeply polarizing

I think Al curve the whole idea about being able to recognize the differences in gender and race and IQ it's like it's a very contentious subject both analyzed of all I mean look I have to admit that I don't score that well on certain tests so I have a built-in total skepticism of IQ tests SAT test act tests any kind of test because it's an unnatural examination not intelligence it just isn't what is it it's a proxy like there are people who think oh it's a really good proxy I've I'll never met someone who has a really high IQ though that I deemed to be intellectually inferior yeah but I've met people who don't have very high IQs who just blow me away yes right well there's absolutely there's a type of intelligence that certain people possess particularly creative intelligence yeah there's a creative and telling their certain

people that met might not score well on SAT test but they're capable of producing amazing stuff whether it's literature comedy whatever it is movies they can make things they can do things they have a genius in their ability and that requires some intelligence that requires some immeasurable the something that you can't put on a scale well this is what I you know I said to Jordan I said Jordan Peterson I said I don't think I have an IQ because the conceit we have to remember that a priori we would always have guessed that I intelligence was many different things it was a composite of like lots of different types of intelligence right the conceit around IQ is you'd think that was true but guess again

there's essentially one kind of intelligence there's one scale it's a surprise oh that's that's really surprising tell me something of the various forms of intelligence is one of the things that you call intelligence processing yes yes process and very important okay I don't score well on processing in fact I don't think anyone in my family has ever scored well what do you mean by processing some kind of mechanical process of how quickly and flawlessly you can encode information play with it and get it out you know like if you're a dyslexic but let's take spelling

lots of people on Twitter say haha you misspelled here in fact it's hea are in the case that you meant is really just shows me something about your intelligence that you can't keep track of spelling okay that's your level of thought do you happen to know how many brilliant people can't can't spell can't write well also you not even thinking you're just trying to get the word out and you misstep yeah but like my mind you know at some point I got sent home I think because I was asked to draw a chicken in school and I put two wings and four feet on it I'm so non-observant might my handwriting might at home yeah something like this they sent you home I was like aberrant or you know I was making fun of the teacher because it was for love while you know famously mrs. Bucky row and first grade sent me out of the class because I said that a spider wasn't an insect because it had eight legs and that it she sent you out of class time because I was well you're correct in that case I was in the case of a chicken I wasn't but well maybe saw some weird fucking

Chernobyl chickens yeah man turn Chernobyl chicken chicken kiev that's good that's comedy gold my point my point being that if you don't have a high confidence in net normal metrics the race and IQ discussion doesn't land like so to get back to Charles Marsh yeah so Charles Murray it is hard to say he wrote the bell curve right was either dismissed as being racist or applauded by people who you would call White nationalists who Trot out his ideas as proof right as measurable proof that certain races are superior and you know we could discuss this human E online people who Trot those out all the time and they use it to form these weird groups of people that love to hear that right and that smacks of racist so this is the issue which is

you have a situation in which he appeared to have a political orientation which is that he didn't want money spent in certain ways and he wanted it spent in others there there was an in political interpretation of why he wanted that be which was maybe he's a closet racist then there was facts that will tend to empower people who are actually racist right but let me pause you there sure but then there's the actual data right now in examining the actual data if you just look at the actual data

is is it racist to look at the real numbers like if you say Nigerians are particular who are incredibly industrious and some of the more successful immigrant groups that come over to America also happen to be black if you wanted to look at Nigerians right in terms of like if you wanted to if you if you if all if you wanted to look at them particularly as a group be very difficult to be racist you'd have to say well these are superior a lot of superior intellects come from Nigeria they also Trot out the Asian one right that ate like this one of the weird things that people like to show that they're not racist right like look at shows Asians are of a superior IQ i-i-i puzzle on that one that one's puzzling same way because I think with certain people

was certain males let's just go with males they look at African Americans and they see superiority in certain ways they see superiority athletically artistically musically he's look at the contributions of African-Americans culturally across the board in terms of like the real the the Jimi Hendrix those Miles Davis the speed of thought and creativity analytic not just that also athletically like the fucking outliers are just so many there's so many Michael Jordan's Mike Tyson's Sugar Ray Leonard's there's so many African-American outliers who just extraordinary terms of their their accomplishments right but not that many asian-americans in that regard so it's almost like they'll concede like they're not doing the things that make me jealous I'm saying okay they're not they're not creating this insane music although there

you right but overall they're not creating these insane athletic accomplishments that these white Americans can't keep up with right so we'll say but look they're Superior intellectual e so I can't be racist I'm pointing out these Asians who I'm not jealous of because they don't do the things that I wish that I could do but then when it comes to the African-Americans your they're pointing out all the things that the African Americans can do that they can't do but this thing all but they're intellectually inferior why this is proven I'm not racist I don't want this to be true but it seems to be true I see you see them saying it's like a way of it's a way of suppressing accomplishment right while like almost mitigating the impact of the the jealousy that they feel so if you think about for example first does that make sense I think so first of all I just

I hate this topic yeah it's your topic is the weirdest topic feels greasy even touching it well but now we have to write like this I feel like

my wrong view of it is if you'd never brought this thing up we would never have had to deal with it and I no longer believe that's true because we have so much inadvertent data right like I don't want the data on chess we have an idea of how many Grand Master's there are and which groups like male female Asian black you know various portions of Europe I don't know what that data means but I can't stop the data because it's going to be generated even if nobody comes up with a standardized test because it's a game and it's scored and it has something to do with intellectual abilities right on the other hand I mean I'm a competitive guy and I you do comedy I do some amount of music I can guarantee you that both of us have had our ass kicked at some point my African Americans who excel in both of these areas and I don't mean you know All God's Children Got Rhythm I mean getting out thunk in a competitive situation

you know looking over somebody's shoulder on the keyboard and their thinking so quickly and in so many dimensions I can't even imagine what the hell's going on right so therefore I never had a lot of fear about it because I you know I'm in close proximity with somebody who's just kicking my ass and therefore I thought I could leave these topics alone I would never have to deal with it the way in which that they come up you know in a way that is really unpleasant is this new thing which is that all imbalances are all structural oppression

right and which doesn't allow for trade-offs between groups like fins fins are good at some things and not good at others nobody believes in like anti finished Prejudice so we don't think about it right it's just not a it's not a big issue for us finish humor how many finished comedians are there

I've no idea right but how many do you run into at The Comedy Store that's a bet it's a bad example because you're dealing with America America and American Comedy and also you're also dealing with the highest level of the game it's like you know The Comedy Store is essentially like the it's like the Harvard research Labs of stand-up comedy yeah but some might

nobody's worried about anti finish Behavior we're worried that were prejudiced against certain groups were worried that were prejudiced against Jews were worried that were prejudiced against Mexicans against blacks we have a pretty clean idea of what bigotry we really still need to worry about right and we feel guilty about it and that's why you say it has this kind of lubricious quality just like what are you really up to over there why are you looking at that data set right and what my comment is is I don't know how to stop this thing I'm not excited about it I'm not interested in it I definitely think that we have to actually think about the social implications of all these things but if your if your idea is that we're going to stop this at the level of data and Analysis I can't afford that

I just can't afford that we need to have somebody who's able like for example microcephaly you've got people with smaller heads than the rest of us maybe because of the zika virus well is it is it unethical to study what the cognitive impairment due to microcephaly is right I don't know I don't know what to do but I know that I want to have a very thoughtful conversation well how can it be how can it be unethical to study the cognitive impairment of someone is it affect affected by a disease and that could possibly help fund research help fund preventive measures why does the correlation with with smaller heads and cognitive impairment you know and like what if somebody like let's take Mosaic Down syndrome Mosaic Down syndrome doesn't have the same profile as regular Down syndrome you get much higher functioning people

right I mean ultimately we're all souls and we have to figure out dignity and we have to figure out some system by which we can live with this increased level of knowledge but does examining impairment right does that really mean that it's a prejudiced like what about an examining impairment from people who have been injured should we avoid doing that because we don't want to be able list

do you see what I'm saying not quite what because we're talking about reality right we're talking about issues if you're if you're examining someone who contracted the zika virus and it led to them developing a smaller head which is one of the horrible side effects of that right is examining that in some way some sort of prejudiced it should be avoided examining well cognitively avoid examining it we might do some damage if we examine it and publish the findings we might do do do do it I mean there's you may say might do damage to the people that are infected look or a flick if we don't begin with an idea that ultimately the issue is compassion for ourselves and others and that a lot of our genetics in our history dis predisposes us to bad behavior and now that we're living with each other like we have to start I mean it's hippy-dippy is a sound you have to start from a place of love and decency now I care I certainly agree but again I think that we should avoid real well that's the thing

yeah so now I have this other thing which is reality is compassionate in and of itself remember when HIV was an equal opportunity disease and it just started in the gay community and it's going to jump the Fire Road and it's going to be as much a heterosexual problem as it was a homosexual problem that turned out not to be true it was an ideological statement the didn't look at the differences between different kinds of epithelium and different sexual practices between gays and straights it was a it was a an activist position that started to compete with a epidemiological position or a biological position and so historically what we did is we had private expert communication and it's not always clear that you can trust your experts it's not always clear that you should start with the data what if the data says terrible things like maybe the data on people with microcephaly says something and you have got a person who's going to be judged by the size of their head which is

bleah off from the rest of their body you know we haven't taken up the challenge of our time which is okay we got a lot more information than we wanted we have a lot more ability to analyze it and we know something about ourselves we know that we have got bigotry as part of our makeup and we know that we're not really good at certain ways of integrating information and not becoming triumphal list and jerkish about it and taking Victory laps as if it's a competition like my groups better than your group right so that's where we're stuck now I want to be struggling with other people are saying look I don't know what the answers are I don't think you know as I brought up before I don't think East Africans are cheating on the Boston Marathon because they've come to dominate it

just because you know suddenly you had a diverse group of people replaced by a very tiny group from Ethiopia and Kenya we are we are behaving as you would expect when compassionate people who recognize that they have been bigoted and structurally oppressive encounter data that they can't handle which the science is giving us more data than we ever wanted on these things and we're not answering the challenge of our time and that's what my issue is social justice has it's not about I don't want to better plan it or more inclusive Planet it's like stop crowding out the really difficult interesting open-hearted and hard-headed conversation with this dime-store nonsense about simple answers and simple simple truths because those aren't true and it's not going to work in the long term

I mean I guess that's maybe the idea is we're competing with social justice for the rights to try to come up with a better more Equitable future and the complaint about it isn't you guys are trying to come up with a better more Equitable future it's what if you're going to make the same mistake when we said well the heterosexuals are as much at risk is the homosexual well that wasn't true we needed to devote resources to our homosexual community and we did need to get the heterosexual Community interested in we had a problem and we needed to think about you know very thoughtfully we've got an epidemic that's killing people I think when we're talking about this I think everything you're saying resonates and everything you're saying makes sense and I think when we're talking about compassionate

compassionate human beings looking out for each other right and that this should be something that we all this is like one of the one of our primary concerns whenever we address any any issue right I think our problem in this country there's many problems with one of our problems is the loudest voices on the fringes and this is one of the things that I want to discuss with you is what's going on in Portland yeah and I think what's going on in Portland is the loudest voices on the fringes that the people on the right and on the far right and whether they are recognizes recognizing as emblematic of the left they think it defines the left and I don't think it does and I think it is it's a symptom of it's a symptom of first of all terrible government of someone who's allowing this to flourish inside the the mayor of Portland who seems to be supporting this and some sort of a weird

weird way and and ideologically believes that antifa just because of a name stands for anti-fascist if you had no name which you would have is a bunch of Hood wearing mask wearing violent Thugs who are beating people who disagree with them and because that's what we saw with that Andy how do you say his name go is it I think its in Dino know and it's NGO right I treated them is silent until somebody called think I think you're right what you saw from that video yeah that anyone could support that of with a person who's just talking they mean he if what I've seen of him yeah what they have tried to describe that he supports neo-nazis that he supports the proud boy I have seen none of this I've seen no evidence that this but I've seen the narrative trotted out over and over again as a justification for violence against him when the left supports bullying in the worst possible form be ganging up on someone punching them hitting them with sticks Crow

bars all this crazy shit thinking that it's okay to throw milkshakes and people thinking that this is fine this is nothing if you what I think this is a horrible precedent to set and it's a terrible it's a terrible move if you're playing a game it's a terrible for first move because things only escalate they don't deescalate no one says wow you beat the shit out of and Enos is a mystery right like what the hell is going on what the hell's get you allowing people to wear masks and carry backpacks with weapons and there's a natural human inclination when someone gets hit to jump in and hit them too so if you see it all the time watch world star go to World Star Hiphop.com and watch someone gets hit a bunch of people just jump in and hit them it happens at truck stops and fucking high schools it happens people get brain damage you people die each other all the time people permanent injury when you're seeing in Portland there was one of them where an old guy got hit in the head with a fucking crowbar by some mass kid because the old guy apparently disagreed

or they all disagree on things I don't someone's decide guess is that the old guy is not exactly as portrayed I believe that the old guy may have been there with a telescoping baton

L said he was hitting people let's take this I think this is so worthwhile but like let's do it right okay because I think this is so mysterious what the hell people doing supporting right Andy know being beaten up on video so let's stay with him okay so that's the best clearest example of someone who's a tiny little gay man he's tiny mean he represents so many different maligned populations right he's pretty intersectional yes he's Asian is an immigrant he's an immigrant he's gay is he a Republican I thought he was left of center but I told you he's a conservative Jew well I've been told I'm a fucking alright guys so I know it's very confusing all right he's also diminutive in physical form as he's not dead he's not threatening physically right and they've chosen this guy as an example and one of the more disturbing things were how many people saw the video and were justifying it saying things like get another hobby these end are the

this will not stand for you know your your your bigotry in your hate like what are you talking okay you think it's okay to punch this guy like the fact that you guys all piled on and punched him and this is the milk I've been thinking a lot about it I have a model I'm happy to hear yours because there is a mystery can we both agree to be at the beginning that you would imagine that that video would have shocked people and to find so many people sort of excusing it is really shocking well it given that he's also interested clearly intersection like yeah you wouldn't predict this from first principles right no you wouldn't do it looked at it on paper you definitely wouldn't especially if if you allowed him to self-identify as left of center okay so here's how the I think the model goes okay unless you want to give yours first now go ahead right

the first thing that we have to understand is that there's a Division I want to lay this at Super carefully the first division is between the what you're calling the loudest voices and I'm going to call the most courageous call courageous the most willing to accept loss the voice is most willing to accept loss most of the left does not want to be dragged to the extreme left so you hear this thing about why are you focusing on a fringe and the answer is because The Fringe is running the show in my opinion what do you mean by willing to accept loss

if you go into an antifa vs. proud boys melee

you're willing your you accept that you may get clocked with a bike lock I don't think that's correct time I don't think that's correct I think you're dealing with people that have no concept of real violence no experience of real file their Larkin if you seen yes therefore it's fucking cosplay cosplay lerp have you seen the image of the guy who's a suspect looks like he's never worked a day in his fucking life looks like he's never been outside and I think these people are playing a fucking game we've agreed on yes okay but you are willing so you think you're going to get into a Wily coyote versus the Roadrunner kind of a thing where both of them always survive to the next car to have no idea what they're doing if you ever have you ever seen a fight between people who have no idea how to fight yes yeah okay well I've been one of those okay that's stuns me as a martial arts expert stuns me that people are willing to participate in that it's like mean not knowing how to get in a motorcycle and getting in a race I don't I don't know how anyone's willing to do that but they're willing to do that and they're willing to do that because

delusional and are supported in their delusion of perspective by the giant numbers of them they all get together and then the wear masks which further emphasizes this illusion that there are total game look

assume that you are not even in a physical situation you're willing to be very loud on social media about very simplistic perspectives yes and you're willing to become a pariah at some level because are you though I think mostly your support I need far more support I'm not necessarily you're going to trigger so many times on this explanation that I probably just need a little place in the table to start building this up and then you can tear it the held okay okay the first believe is that the belief that I have is that the fringes are much more running the show than the people who claim that this is a small number of people believe that the fringes are scary

fringes are willing to go places the rest of us aren't I agree with them on both sides left and right left and right so I spend a lot of time focused on the fringes because the fringes of become terrifying and the middle has become cowardly the whole principle about the whole idea of value thing was about creating a non cowardly core that could actually potentially hold the center because people are actually fairly courageous like you would have to say my brother is fairly courageous Ben Shapiro Andy know Sam Harris these are people who stood up to death threats you know II have a guy who's threatening me every day of my life you know coming through the internet and my family you have to have some courage in order to be part of this thing and that's what part of my irritation when people come after it

so there is a cowardly Center and a very terrifying Fringe and The Fringe is going around the whole thing right left and right

the next thing is that people are secretly weirdly sympathetic with their violent the violent Fringe to their extreme rather than making common cause of cross the center so for example you imagine that you run a laundromat and you're being visited by a member of organized crime every week and it comes into your laundromat and you kind of plays with your stuff and he says I would be a shame if anything happened to your business and Shakes You Down start saying oh you know I noticed that you have a daughter I would love to date her Perhaps Perhaps we'll go out sometime you hate this guy then some sort of violent vigilante element that's a operating extra judicially after you've gone to the police over and over again

breaks this guy's kneecaps

all right you're weirdly sympathetic with the Vigilante because you're being terrified by a group that is not being taken care of

I think that this is in part why some elements of the left that are should be more responsible that have institutional positions that have platforms that they can broadcast or weirdly sympathetic to antifa and why Country Club Republicans are weirdly sympathetic to some of these far-right groups is that they view them as this is the dangerous group that's kind of taken care of the problem that I can't stand up to so you've got this bizarre cowardly sympathy from the center who won't actually stand up and say I have more in common with a country club Republican like in my case I feel myself as a progressive released a liberal I have more in common with a country club Republican then somebody who's got a bike lock who's looking for trouble in a street demonstration trying to smash up a Starbucks right I don't want the help

from my left

now the the group that wants to play this out using the sort of proxy groups to handle the problems

it's saying look we're going to we're going to sound an air horn before one of these things so that all reasonable people can get the hell out of the way and if you don't respond then your collateral damage and that's on you that's how they see this I think that's very so in other words I think Andy know is the guy who doesn't listen to the air horn Brett Weinstein doesn't listen to the air horn Jordan Jordan Peterson Sam Harris don't listen to the air horn

that's very accurate new description of these Fringe people doing the work of the people that are more reasonable but are happy to have these bad people do their work to fight this battle for them because they think that ultimately it's for good yeah I need my organized crime group to get rid of your organized chaos right and so the idea is that the Law and Order people like I really don't want anybody's organized crime group and I'm going to actually stand up to the Mob and I'm actually not going to pay you your goddamn protection money because I'm going to own a laundromat in this is the United States of America and fuck off

that's that's the view that I represent yeah I don't want to thank you Auntie if I don't need your help

yeah you know what I actually a much more afraid of the far right and the reason I concentrate my negative energy on the far left is what he trying to do you're trying to get the genie out of the bottle on the far right that is the danger yeah you want to see more tiki torches it's not tiki torches to you need to worry about its armed people who come and they not that I'm bringing bike well and when we're pushing ordinary human beings to the extremes yeah right and the thing that I get is that like I believe that the Republican party you know I just I never get a chance to say this stuff

I have never gotten along with the Republican party I just don't like it I view it as the thing that wants to exclude me from the country clubs I have an older model there the group that wanted to put in condo developments in Yosemite Valley because they couldn't figure out why we would want to preserve the national parks there were the ones that laughed about the clubbing the baby seals ha ha ha I just always had this attitude fuck these people write this is my this is my emotional Cadence and we always had this thing where the Democrats were thus we had most of the smart people and so in a tiny fraction of time we have seen this giant evaporation of intelligence if not

actually through a lack of Courage the people who represent responsible left-wing thinking who believe in structural oppression but don't believe in the extent claimed you know who want to keep making progress who want to make sure that traditionally marginalized groups are taking care of that we take our responsibilities but not our guilt as the reason for trying to make a better world I'm not paying reparations for slavery I mean my family came over here and like what the 19 teens or 20s and because you know we came from pogroms is anybody going to be paying Jews for the pogroms that you know how am I going to be get getting Ukrainian reparation let's not be ridiculous what do we want Civil War Two we just want to open up tear off every Band-Aid for the purpose of you know trying to make everybody is uncomfortable In Their Skin as possible what we have is a situation in which

we don't have courageous people willing to fight for what works we have a tiny number of people who are animated by this the reason I'm animated by this is that I'm trying to keep the pipeline open for science it's really what happened to my brother before it ever happened to him my brother and I were in this discussion about what are we going to do to make sure that there's always a place to do biology to do mathematics to be able to weigh you know competing claims and when you start politicizing everything and you choose activism over thought and reason and Civility and comity

you can sign yourself to becoming a less great nation and you're no longer able to lead you can't build a world on Angry activism that's trying to go back to a lily-white nation that will never happen and you can't enforce like equality of outcome we don't even want that

people who work their ass off deserve some of the pleasures of working your ass off and I don't always want to work my ass off and I you know Jackie Chan is the one I always look at that blooper reel at the end of every Jackie Chan film tells me he deserves his money I'm never going to do that to my body ever I don't want any quality of outcome with Jackie Chan if I make some little film in this guy's risks his life for every scene it's insane

we need to create a world in which people are excited and animated about keeping the pipeline of decent thought compassionate thought open-hearted thought and rigorous and unforgiving thought

both on the table at all times and not adulterating one to serve the other

I don't want to see science abuse to oppress anybody and I don't want to see somebody's dime-store concept of Utopia infecting our ability to make sense of the world

those are those are twin

you know twin directives this is this is what I'm excited about we need to get the world excited about curing disease we need to get the world excited about cross-pollination of ideas between different groups we need to get the world excited about every group that is sort of marginalized

contains neurons that we are not accessing

right and so you know for example asian females make up about a quarter of the world's population and very few of the world's Nobel prizes we should be getting greedy about how do we get those Asian female brains

into into our stem Labs so that we can have the fruits of their discoveries people can't hear this because they've settled on very cheap versions of progress it's time to get back to real progress not fake progress how do we do that I agree with everything you just said but how do we do that

honestly this is my third time on perhaps the biggest podcast and in the world I don't know maybe that's giving you a little bit too much credits not very far off we're doing that we're trying to stand up and if people respond and you know you given me courage to start a podcast I got to tell you I did not want to do this my brought my producer Jesse Michaels here I was a pain in the ass to this guy I did not return his phone calls he tried to get me to sign contracts I wouldn't look at them I've started with this TurnKey podcast company called cast media they put up with me for like eight or nine months where I dragged my heels I don't want to be famous I don't want to be well-known I really I know while I'm sort of on them

well it's time look so this is the crazy thing you want to get really nuts yes it's time to leave time to leave what this planet oh boy

listen we can leave this plan I got something right here no take you to another planet right now he's joking federal agents

let me let me give you my argument where we going well we don't know that we can leave this planet I love this planet I love this plan I have a good time here it's my favorite planet mine too I know but here's the real reason

we started a clock

around 1953 which is when we had the explosion at bikini and the first Hydrogen Bomb and when we figured out the double helix and I call this the twin nuclei problem it began in 1953 1953 we started a clock it was also the height of the McCarthy era

we do not have the wisdom to be able to fuse nuclei we don't have the wisdom to be able to investigate the cell it's too much power so our wisdom may have increased slightly maybe didn't I don't know but our power is now Godlike so our biological intelligence what our minds are capable of has not it's been surpassed by our intellectual achievements in terms of our technological innovation these things which while complicated

succumb to our intellects right right like they're much simpler than we ever imagined to be able to create something that normally happens in the sun on an island in the Pacific or to be able to rewrite a cell the way Craig Venter did you know synthetic biology

we are now Gods but for the wisdom mmm and there's a great quote we are now Gods but for the wisdom

should be a meme picture you make sure you are now God let's keep our the last boom that's gonna be up there this one's doing that right now I know let's not focus okay sorry okay so that started this clock and the world's most serious human beings should be working on the twin nuclei problem what do we do with new Godlike powers given our history of conflict our history of Envy our history of Madness right because we succumb regularly we are you know I was born 20 years after the end of World War Two and we all know what really happened there I mean we're nuts we're absolutely not capable of this level of responsibility and so the question that we have is do we believe that we have a long-term solution in terms of increasing our wisdom

we should definitely try it everybody believes that should work on that problem

but if we don't think that we have the wisdom to live like this we don't know how much time we have left but it's probably not hundred Indians probably maybe a few hundred years tops because sooner or later you're going to have Putin like Trump like people I mean I'm sorry I would have a very deep antipathy towards Donald Trump

he's not temper mentally fit

to have the secrets of theoretical physics at his fingertips you just isn't and it's imperative to me that he not be elected in 2020 and that the Democratic party wake up and get rid of it's crazy Fringe so that we can buy some time and it's nice if Ilan thinks we can go to Mars maybe that will allow a small number of us to diversify in case we do something really dumb to the planet but if human beings are to continue and we are to continue evolving we need to spread out there are three rocks that are inhabitable there's the Earth there's the moon and there's Mars and the moon has nothing in there Mars is pretty uninteresting to be blunt I know that it's beautiful that we send back these pictures and we've got this one gorgeous planet that we are clearly not smart enough to Stewart we're still having idiotic climate change debate let me even if even if climate science is somewhat junk of hide

we should still be taking climate super seriously because we don't know what we're doing it's such a complicated nonlinear system and we're not even capable of focusing you know we're like two seconds later I'll be watching the Kardashians for sure so what is the answer well in my opinion we got to increase the number of possible places we can go beyond three

to say nothing of space stations because that's not realistic none of these things make sense so the first place that you have to get to is we're really deeply screwed and not because of apocalyptic cult like reasons just because of science

just because of 1953

so the only opportunity is if we can break the einsteinian speed limit so far as I know or we can upload into silicon or we can reboot from tardigrades like none of these answers are good

so

what I've been toying with since I was 19 was

what is the theory behind Einstein

and that's the thing that I've been most uncomfortable talking about although I've been talking about it more I gave these lectures in 2013 in May of 2013 and Oxford and I was appalled by the way in which the world's physics Community responded I mean I was very scared I'm not a physicist

I don't claim to be but I felt like

I tried to present what I hoped was a path forward given that the field was completely stalled out

and this is it physics and biology led us into the valley of death

and it's now time to try to get out

and people said no please thank you so what is my responsibility in terms of the portal

what I'm going to try to do with this podcast is gaining the courage to share whatever ideas I've had about breaking the speed limit in the form of I don't think I have the wisdom to

figure out what it means but at least I have a hope of trying to write the fundamental rules to figure out our source code and that was that would that was the plan which is what is this place what is the source code for reality

now what was the response to the physics is to the physicist from the physicist that you found pollen well

there were two articles that appeared in the Guardian newspaper or website that talked breathlessly about what I had done or what I might have done

to call attention to the lectures that I was giving so these were the special Simoni lectures by Richard Dawkins successor Marcus DeSoto

who is a colleague of mine from way back who found me in New York City I think in 2011-2012 or something like that working on this Theory I called geometric Unity

and I was very uncomfortable I hadn't really told anybody that I was working on this theory for all these years because it's a crazy you know there's certain stories that you find in theoretical physics which are kind of the precursor to Madness where you know somebody thinks that they've solved some big problem and they're working in secret they know the sort of what happened with Andrew Wiles and firm as Last Theorem which was a really interesting story because his first proof of Fermat's Last Theorem what I think was unfixable so he announced a proof that he had solved like this most famous problem in mathematics and he didn't have a proof and then bizarrely he was under such pressure that he found another proof and actually pulled it off so it's like you know hats off to him as one of the crazy story but he was working in secret for seven years and nobody knew what he was doing

so sometimes these stories work out but he was a professor at Princeton and very highly regarded and he'd sort of husband died seven years worth of work to pretend that he was releasing papers when he was actually secretly doing this thing that would have made him a madman and some sense and so this is what I was trying to do is I was not able to work on these issues in the string theory Community because the string theory Community was possessed of this belief that they had found the answer back in the 80s in 1984 they had what they thought was a Revolution and the math Community doesn't think in these terms like both of these are very conservative communities historically and very focused on following the leadership of the top people unless there's a revolution and so I started working on a different idea to unify the two branches of physics that appear to be incompatible that was different than the string theory idea and different than the loop quantum gravity idea or any of the other in your main

motivation was to do this to try to figure out a more advanced version of space travel well it wasn't space travel it was we need the source code like it's it might be safer to go further once you've unlocked once you've unlocked nuclear fusion you're pretty much just as screwed as you need to be

so then the issue is okay we know that we pretty I'm pretty sure that Einstein's theory is not final because you get these singularities which I don't associate with ultimate equations so the black hole Singularity called The schwarzschild Singularity or the initial Singularity that we associate with the big bang

like the freedmen robertson-walker spacetimes are signs to me that these equations are incomplete but the big problem with Einstein is that Einsteins work with so fundamental that it's like you can't get in under the ground floor of Einstein You Begin a physics seminar and you're already immediately in his world you say let X be a space-time manifold boom you're already a in relativity so it's almost impossible to figure out a way to get in at a deeper level of physics than Einstein's theory we know that we have to recover Einstein's theory because that's been proven you know to work in all sorts of situations and the same thing with Quantum field Theory which is why I talked about you know the anomalous Magnetic Moment of the electron

so my idea was that only since the 1970s have we known that particle theory was based on Geometry

we knew that Einstein's theory I thought use geometry to develop his theory was the language of Relativity called Romani and geometry but many years later we found out that bores sort of quantum and Planck's Quantum and Einstein's Quantum as well was based on a different geometry of the sky Charles are Osman was an Alsatian geometer who worked with Carton and that geometry was figured out at Stony Brook in New York by Jim Simons who became the world's greatest hedge fund manager and CN Yang who is arguably number one or number two greatest living theoretical physicist he's now in his 90s

and they figured out that the secret language of particle theory was also geometry but a different geometry and so geometric Unity is simply the idea that it's not a fight between Einstein and Bohr

it's the two parents

Ramon on Whose I work Einstein based relativity and Charles are Osman with this gauge theoretical stuff that we did in the time before this which in fact empowers particle theory

and so when do those two geometries unify two different geometric theories and I've found that in general they don't unify in a way that you want you don't have the ability to do einsteinian tensor analysis where you compress something called the Riemann curvature tensor and the gauge stuff where you do this gauge symmetry that we were talking about because gauge symmetry ruins the ability to compress the Einstein tensor never mind what that means but in one or two rare circumstances you can actually combine the two geometries

and that's where I think we are and so partially what the part purpose of the portal podcast is is to use you know I'll just sort of tear the mask off a little bit we've been talking about lots of interesting things about social justice about mathematics about wonder about psychedelics and trying to be decent human beings to each other and to set an example and I think it's been partially a success and partially a failure

but what I'm trying to do is to gain the courage to talk about what these ideas are and the worst comes to worst is that I wasted a lot of my life on a crazy theory that turned out not to be true what was the response though like how did the physicist react and what was what was disappointing about it so the Articles engendered a an immune reaction immune yeah it's an immune response okay okay so somebody's giving a lecture and now how many times have we heard before the next Einstein yada yada yada yada and I totally understand this it's a reasonable reaction like Sean Carroll had this reaction he referred to me as a backyard Einstein

and his wife and him twice today yeah he's on my mind

and his wife wrote this amazing article in Scientific American called dear Guardian you've been played

now she's not a physicist but she has access to Sean's brain and she writes on physics

and then there was this whole thing where the New Scientist said okay this guy claimed to give this lecture in the physics department but he hasn't written a paper and he didn't tell the physicists it was a sneak attack well of course that wasn't true there there was an announcement of the talk I stayed in England and I gave the talk once more and then it a final time a week later and by that point all sorts of people from Cambridge and Oxford came to the talk is it was a worldwide topic of discussion what the hell's going on and I gave it to our talk consider that nobody nobody outside of theoretical physics gives talks on physics it's like North Korea they don't get many visitors right to the extent that they get visitors they do get visitors from mathematics but in general mathematicians don't take an interest in the real physical world and to be blunt about it I don't think that the string theorists are very focused on the real physical world either they've been playing with toy models for

you know nearly 40 years

so a lot of it was playing out in the press and the New Scientist had to retract I said know what we wrote wasn't true they did publicize the talk and then there was an article he sent a reporter to the final talk that I gave And the reporter did not know any physics so I spent the morning with this person teaching him what the Dirac equation was like a very fundamental thing question came up in the talk about is your is your model anomaly free

and my model is has a property called non chirality chirality which is the difference between the Left Right asymmetric models are called chiral and left right symmetric models are called non chiral so my model is non chiral but the chiral nature of the universe is supposed to emerge from it and I was asked questions that didn't seem to make sense which is you can't have a chiral anomaly in a non Cairo model and the person in the reporter picked up on this and didn't really get it so there was like a flurry of activity with a big WTF and if you ask me by the time I gave the second lecture people weren't laughing it was a serious lecture people heard that it was an it was in the light he wasn't like somebody come up with their own language and their own

you know written in crayon in some in decipherable thing it was written in the normal language but I hadn't written a paper and papers are very much the stock and trade of that community so I would say that the the community settled on a rubric which is paper or it didn't happen

in other words put up or shut up give us a paper I'd written something but because my trajectory through this through math and physics was very unusual

I have a very low Trust of the academic Community I support them as you can tell you know I'm extolling the virtues of science but I was subjected to a situation in graduate school where I had I'm probably the only person you've ever met with a PhD who is not allowed to attend his own thesis defense

why is that I don't know what was your thesis it was on self-dual equations not being as peculiar to dimension for as was claimed but I had a situation in which the thesis when I when I had entered grad school was something that you would present to the world and by the time I was trying to leave it was a closed-door affair where the department would appoint the person for you and I was in the unusual position of not having a thesis advisor so there's some very fraught Story one thing you'll find is that graduate school for some sub class of people becomes an extremely fraught experience where the power of a department not to Grant you a degree or not to help you get a job or to expel you

becomes very contentious right and that was the situation so I got into a very contentious situation there was no explanation of why it was so contentious we can talk about it on it okay on another podcast but I was in a very low trust situation with with Harvard and with the standard community and so when work that I had done that was rejected for my thesis was discovered by others in 1994 and revolutionized topological gauge Theory I became very sort of sullen and angry and withdrawn because my department knew that I had put forward the same equations that became revolutionary in mathematical gauge Theory did you revisit it with them there was a seminar where a guy named David kazdin who I very much admire the person who had been my advisor at want to name names head

giving a seminar saying all of gauge theory has been revolutionized old gauge theory is dead and there is a new gauge Theory and David Koch Don who I will name

said I was in the back center row I think I was picking my nose actually and

he said didn't we have a student who told us to look at these equations and suddenly the whole room turned around and looked at me I think this is in room 507 of the Harvard Science Center and it's just like you know try to imagine you're an anonymous person in a lecture and suddenly everyone is staring at you and your fingers in your nose and

that was the moment and I think I mumbled something just to get out of it but I was angry I was angry that they'd taken away my agency I would you know better better not to give me a PhD better just to say look we're going to go short you screw off you don't get a PhD and then if I end up doing something screw you you know that would have been a better outcome so instead I got a PhD through a very tortuous situation and I came to give up on academics I don't think they're a fair system I don't think that it's open-minded I don't think that they welcomed all sorts of different belief structures which are capable of producing Innovations so you know from my money I've been very vocal about this I've written articles and edged out of work and I've said theoretical physics is stalled

and you've been claiming that you're going to ship strength string theory and since 1984 well where is it

and it's always you know and years away now what was the premise of Sean Carol's wife's article the that they got played well Jamie can you bring it up

I had broken the rule

the rules yeah

you're supposed to submit a paper the paper supposed to be reviewed it supposed to appear in a journal you're not supposed to be doing this from mathematics you don't have training as a physicist this is a hoax but it's all a hoax well I don't know I mean if it is a hoax it's on me clearly not a hoax you're not hoaxing anyone I'm not trying to so I don't I don't I don't understand the bill because the extra time okay imagine that you're the you're the Princeton physics department you probably have a cork board on the wall called the crank the crank board

every week somebody writes to you and says I figured out perpetual motion hmm I have a laser transport device all right and so everybody is concerned and frightened that their time is going to be wasted right on crime by lunatics

now I both fit the lunatic profile and don't fit The Limited profile

on the lunatic side I'm outside of the system haven't kept up

I'm not particularly mathematically minded I mean in fact I'm sort of a be math student from high school so it's kind of a the only person I know with my profile with a PhD in math

and on the non lunatic side I mean look you've been listening to my crazy ideas for a while and they're all over the world I have lots of heterodox ideas I don't think that they're taken as being insane and I don't think this is insane that's been looked at by enough people to say we until you actually write it down very cleanly and clearly we can't fully evaluate but it's a Gamble and the worst thing that can happen is that I have something that looks like a final theory that turns out not to be are you going to write it out it's already mostly written up

I'm in a different phase I felt that I got rolled in an alley so here's here's the big here's the big reveal okay it's gonna be a lot harder to roll me I can roll my self

I can screw this thing up just fine by myself but the opportunity to take me into a quiet corner and make something disappear or to hand the credit to somebody else is gonna be a lot harder to do it's not going to happen did you find it dear Guardian you've been played I love when they use like contemporary slang so bitchy it's so good so bitchy yeah are you lost a bitchy when it's a girl what what girl writes it I don't I don't care I think I mean look it's only like the future of the number of people been privately asking me about the recent Guardian article and accompanying op-ed by Oxford mathematician Marcos do such a toy how do you say it's 02 Marcos de Soto De Soto a gushing over supporters of supposedly revolutionary you new unified theory of physics by a man who officially left Academia 20 years ago or as I've taken to calling it The Eric Weinstein's amazing new theory that solves everything

puzzling conundrum in theoretical physics only he hasn't written an actual pit all these are capital letters that's why I'm saying if this way capital letters and actual paper yet so physicists can't check all those hard mathematical details but trust us it's going to be awesome well that's super bitchy ahem you let us out yeah I can say I can say whatever the fuck I want a ham with a period first a couple of caveats I've met Weinstein he's a nice guy he's wicked smart this is a stupid article he's you know better well it's just the way it's written it's just it's Patti yeah it's for Clear yeah clearly yeah okay well we could go dishes playing laughter she's playing enforcer yes you broke the rules yeah we know why you broke the rules there's Fame and Fortune for you and you think that's what it is well or you're delusional Robert what's her motivation for writing this article that's what's weird well she's a physics look she comes from

um I think she's a protist Protege of Casey Cole the great physics writer from who's not a physicist in her defense yeah do you feel that she felt this honestly and that this was problematic in her eyes that you were entering into this field that you had not written a paper in you had left Academia 20 years ago and that she was likely illegal is I'm so this is all nonsense okay I'm going to put a stop this nonsense Kip and I'm going to do it with sort of contemporary language and and slang I don't like the bitchiness but it's I understand the motivation mmm look I think the bitchiness is to make the article more entertaining and more it's part of warble part of her style as a writer okay now I actually met her as she says

and I had a very high positive impression of her so why do you think she wrote this without discussing it you know look Shawn is also one of these people who's trying to enforce the rules he didn't have the easiest time I think he didn't get tenure at Caltech he's kind of a stickler for reality he's on the one hand talking total nonsense about boltzmann brains and thought experiments which is what I associate with desperation physics on the other hand he's kind of this rigorous rationalist thinker who's and you know prominent atheist so he's a complicated guy is a great explainer he's got his own sort of economic incentives that he's one of the very few people who sort of avoid is a physics to the world and they you know operate in some sense as a couple and there's a richness to this like you know my my point isn't to run them down or to boost them up it's just

people are playing out their roles and ever anyone has a sentence that consists of one word and that word is ahem yeah I did not enjoy that article but him well but look yeah but she's trying to throw me a bone he's wicked smart yeah he's a nice guy but he's but he's delusional yes he's delusional and to the extent that I've been delusional before I'm about the only person in the u.s. who is against high-skilled immigration because people think why should we keep out the best and the brightest that's complicated story before the financial crisis I was saying mortgage-backed Securities May blow up the world people like are you kidding it's the great moderation we banished volatility

people have a chance to know me now they know that I can get way out where I said this at the beginning I get way out there yeah okay I think Elon Musk musk is totally wrong about going to Mars Mars is not going to save us and maybe going to the stars is going to save us maybe the IAI will follow us there yada yada yada but I'm not going to take this lying down we're in a desperate situation and if you're not trying here's a here's the here's the clear thing we know what nuclear weapons look like in the fusion era

if we are trying to get off this planet before people are unleashing Gene drives and you know weaponized Anthrax and who knows what the hell people are going to get up to as the power of biology in the power of physics keeps going the power of information

at least I'm trying

I think I'm doing a damn sight better than trying but assume that I fail completely

how crazy is it that we're not trying to take our my arms against our new sea of troubles

it's time to rush the cockpit

we've got to get Trump out of office we've got to restore sanity to our sense-making we need newspapers we need fact-checkers we what is particularly problematic about Trump being in office

that man has nuclear capabilities and I have zero confidence in his decision-making

and people imagine that I'm a trump supporter of after I've called him an existential risk you know and my boss and good friend Peter teal was a supporter of trump in the last election I'm taking a huge risk and how much I love this guy Peter teal and how much he loves me

because I'm putting the employer-employee relationship at risk and people say okay you're just a Peter teal tool well nobody's going to take that kind of risk unless they have real faith in their friend and I work for a friend I mean a real friend person who doesn't cut and run when trouble starts and I totally disagree with Peter I have come to understand that Trump I thought people would understand the Trump danger and that the Democratic party would re-evaluate their situation but they didn't they tripled and quadrupled down and that is alarming and so that's something I very much got wrong about Trump is it even Trump wasn't enough of a message

to let people know but Trump cannot have the nuclear codes because he's not as skilled or regular enough player he's going to accomplish a lot one of the things I said before the election is he might be the best and worst of presence he might get us a nuclear North Korea deal because they're going to look at him and say this guy's nuts who knows what he would do

but we the technical community created this problem and we're abdicating our responsibility by worrying about our egos by worrying about a reputations I am abdicating I should have turned this Theory over to the theoretical physics Community years ago even if they screwed me over and I'm too Petty and egotistical to want to give up on it

I watched them take credit for things that weren't you know assigned credit I don't like the way they work

I've the theoretical physics Community is our most important community in the world and it is also a very unpleasant community and we need to fund them and we need to let them play their dangerous boys for the most part there are women but in general they're very unpleasant men they've been somewhat cowed they are not the same Cowboys they used to be because they've been failing for 40 years I should be sharing stuff I should be writing things down I have not had the courage to do it and if I really have the courage of my convictions I should share this and see what happens

but one thing is I don't know if it could be weaponized assume it's right you know I have at this decision tree so it's wrong I've got egg on my face it's okay I'll be okay

I worry much more about if it's right the two things that can go wrong if it's right

is one that could be weaponized before it becomes useful and to is that there's no solution in it maybe we actually are stuck in this place we never get to go to the Stars we can look at exoplanets and dream but we're stuck here until we change human behavior isn't a trip to the Stars just a relocation of our own blog we're kicking the we're kicking the but we need time in yeah time we have not gotten to the point where we don't even feel

the danger were in we are in so much danger we haven't had almost anything happen since 1945 at the scale of World War II and so we've got magical thinking between our ears where we think it can't happen here now this is the thing that makes me so fucking furious about screwing around with Europeans and sovereignty which is Europe is a dangerous place Europe has historically dangerous place it's been a place for years where college students can go and take in the sights but it's a dangerous ethnic cauldron and Jews know this better than anyone and the one thing that the far left and the far right agree on is Jews and it's not in a good way

all right

so it is very important we are the canaries in the coal mine we feel the stuff early and things are things are coming apart the the physical world the world of Commerce the world of like structural engineering and building permits is still okay so far but the intellectual world that sort of wraps that keeps it in check is coming unglued and quite frankly I don't want to go through that again

we cannot afford another World War Two because World War II won't look like World War two or three yeah and I don't know maybe it'll look like information Warfare maybe it won't look anything like a war that we've seen before but you know the problem is Joe is that I've got some sort of wildly tattooed martial artists across from me I'm some sort of guy who dropped out of academics years ago and doesn't have a published paper in this area and I really literally think that maybe it comes down to you and me baby wheezing fuck cast and some crazy-ass differential geometry to at least make a go of it at least at the minimum excites somebody to think maybe it's possible to make progress well what's interesting about that is what you said is reaching an astonishing number of ears denies this is why I pushed out look I've been responsible about this up until now this is my first really irresponsible podcast why is it irresponsible

don't know maybe it's egotistical maybe I shouldn't be talking about this I guarantee you they're going to be a lot of people in physics departments are going to be pissed off when this hits yeah but it's your thoughts there's nothing you responsible about your thoughts well you have to appreciate that when you're working as hard as these guys have and these guys have been slogging in the salt mines for forever with no progress in at of the type I mean since the early 70s it's pretty galling

it's pretty galling to hear somebody talking like this who has the luxury of an invite to this podcast with no wedding

with you know nothing behind him other than the hope that maybe he's done something that's interesting and I've never spoken about this you know I have a recording for example of the the lecture that I did at Oxford which I chose not to release you know I just it was so unpleasant the cattiness the bitchiness the nastiness the undercutting the idea that this came down to Ego or fame I guarantee you the thing that I really like least about what I'm about to do with this podcast is Fame

I think Fame is a bad it's a bad deal like you have to deal with this you don't want to say what your location is where you're going to be you know you people react all day long people say can you get me into Joe Rogan to can you connect me with Joe Rogan Joe Rogan Joe Rogan Joe Rogan it's constant I get two to three requests a week

I don't want it I've had a wonderful 53 years without being very well known and if this doesn't work out I'll go back to being very well not very well known my greater fears is that maybe maybe we'll work

and then the thing that I really care about is does it get does it help

does it buy us time can we get off the planet is there anything we can do if we actually know the source code you know Jon Brockman runs this thing called Edge dot-org and every year he asked a question to like 200 scientists

and finally got tired of asking the annual question so we said okay 20 years is enough the last question is what is the final question and Jamie could I ask you to bring up Edge dot-org and my name and my answer

on must have been 29 2018

and it's interesting because you know I kept putting stuff out in Edge like for example I was very worried about professional wrestling priests aging an election so I did an article on kayfabe which is the system of lies that under undergrads wrestling and I did one on bitcoin called go virtual young man so nobody ever paid attention to my series of answers to the edge question so this is the last question the last something unprecedented happened when we finally learn our own source code nobody cared

this is the question that obsesses me this is what I say I've left this planet is this is what I'm focused on what happens if we actually figure out where we are where this place is what are we doing who are we

what built this and who acts on that information once we do figure it out what steps are taken I don't know it's a whether or not the consequences those steps are ever really fully you know I always thought I always tried to talk to somebody like government or the intelligence services like I don't know whether I have something maybe I do maybe I don't but wouldn't wouldn't wouldn't you guys want to know ahead of schedule and you never was able to get anybody interested I went through graduate school on the Office of Naval Research has top grant for graduate study and I always thought they would check in with me but they never have

so like the federal government paid for my postdoc and the military paid for my graduate education and Harvard doesn't care and they don't nobody cares nobody believes that anything is possible which is the really interesting part what do you mean by not nobody believes anything in the pot you mean really astronomical breakthroughs yeah like we all know we're waiting to see what Tim Cook is going to do for the next iPhone

Willie Lon get to Mars does anyone actually care about Mars I I'm I was there for the moon landings and let me tell you we were bored of the Moon by the time we left

it's a very weird thing to say but that's something I was born in 1965 we were bored well my perception of the whole Mars things it's a shittiest location that we can get to yeah it's a bad name of the best Note location that we can get to that it isn't this one well yeah but it's also like we have spots on Earth it suck yeah we don't even go there we don't even go there but like at least you know hats off to Ilan that he at least inspires people by he followed up the scent when we gave up on progress right

so my point is we're not nobody thinks this is going to work

I can say it on the show it can generate a little bit of flurry of activity will die down within a week we're going to go back to you know who got milkshake right and we're going to want to know is tell us is Tulsi gaining on Andrew you know what about Biden can the center hold well The Fringe come in we're just constantly distracted and at least this is going to be entertaining

we are at three hours and three out three and a half hours see last time we almost got to four hours I'm happy to end it if people will go to the portal the portal with Eric Weinstein on on Apple Apple Spotify Spotify and popular clients for podcast

I'm sure they will either this is going to be an interesting one I'm really curious to see what kind of blowback this one's going well two things Joe one you along with Sam and my brother really encouraged me to do this so I'm holding you personally responsible for whatever goes wrong the second thing is I really just I have such a positive feeling about what you've done in terms of empowering people like really touched me that when my brother was shit out of luck you did a bunch of shows with him and helped him get to a safe place and I just want to say that there is like an aspect we keep talking about is there any use for men whatsoever and standing up in a situation in which you can take a fair amount of Guff you can take a lot of heat you know you said this thing to me that was really amazing which is that this is a gold

edge of comedy and my interpretation was that there was a period of time where nobody could figure out how to tell a joke on a college campus and our best comedians have figured out how to be compassionate enough and kind enough and touch the things that are animating us and making us uncomfortable and that that's what you're a part of sand so I view you is like a very delicate neurosurgeon I watch The Evolution for example of your jokes about professional wrestling being gay right no seriously stay with me Joe I watched that it was always funny but it got better and better and better and the idea that that could be told in a way that you'd be totally comfortable with you know your gay friend or lover right next to you laughing your ass off taught me a lot about the power of just radiating decency that

together with analytic thought and it's a bit of a template I don't know that I have the skill to pull this off but you've been an inspiration I just want to say thank you for having me back on the program my pleasure my friend it's always a pleasure thank you thank you bye everybody

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