Eric Weinstein: The State of American Science, Breakthrough Coverups, and the Danger of Physics

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/3d24d4147307c567

We have become a p nation when it comes to science. You were called a French scientist. Keep saying French. Yeah.
I totally disagree with the narrative of the feel.
I want to blow a giant pole in the Civil Rights Act. The stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species. When we make this jump.
the world will become unrecognizable.
I'm gonna-
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Eric Weinstein.
Mathematician.
physicist, economist, PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard.
National Science Foundation postdoc, O and R fellow at Harvard.
Published a proposed mathematical framework and speculative
Unified field theory called
Geometric unity.
In twenty twenty one.
Formally with deal capital.
Podcast host and guest.
Welcome to the All in Interview.
It's great to be here. Now we're the besties.
They declined the opportunity because this is an extended science corner.
That
Can't believe that Jason
Uh.
Turn tail and and ran.
No, you and I I mean just for
The audience, you and I both happen to be in D C right now, so we're in a
rented studio during this interview, but
Good timing.
What brings you to D C
Uh opportunity. I'm really excited. Uh meeting with the Department of War.
Um
And took the opportunity to stay a couple of extra days.
been talking to director Kratios over at OSTP and
White House Science Advisor, fantastic meeting. Been talking to Jay Badacary, who's an old friend.
over now I age.
About to talk to Jim O'Neill, who's hopefully coming into NSF.
Yeah.
And really just taking a look at the first major proposal.
To reform
American science since Venevar Bush at the end of World War Two.
So this is couldn't be more exciting. Did Cratzios tell you that I just interviewed him on this topic? No. Okay, well I did. Okay. You guys are old colleagues, right? Yeah, yeah. Michael's Michael's great. And so yeah, he that came up. He said, you know, here I am in this new role. And
I guess.
I was sort of worried that this report, you know, obviously he's filling huge shoes.
And I was worried that it was gonna be a disaster. And I was
Stunned. How
How good it was. I mean it wasn't perfect.
But never never is.
And then I told you that.
Mm. And you said that while you and I had been talking and that you had been
conveying a lot of these issues to him. Uh I feel like he's uh
He's really grown into this role trying to become a student of the American Science Project. Yeah, I
Couldn't be
Happier.
At hearing him say things like, We know that we don't know everything. We're just at the beginning, we're just getting started. So it looks like a great blueprint.
Government driven science has played a fundamental role in the success of the republic, at least over the last hundred years, last fifty, seventy five years.
Prior to that
There's a argument to be made in the
In Science and New Golden Age that Kratzio's published and that others have been making, I've heard you make it, that science has really stalled in America. Can you make that case for us now?
Well
It's a question of which science is stalled.
Um, so one of the great things about what Michael's saying is is that science is a big place.
And it's not being done in one way.
So
what I really think is the biggest if you wanted to sort of fly over
And
Give an idea of what's what's at risk. It's
The absolutely courageous science that we can afford to do as a rich
ruggedly individualistic nation that no one else can afford to do.
And so
More or less when when I see us doing incremental research.
And doing things that are incredibly careful with low variance and calling it excellence.
I get depressed because my feeling is is that what we should be taking on
Is the bets no one else can afford to take on. It's also the case.
That our chief geo political rivals China.
has a problem with freedom.
And quite honestly, freedom is a weapon. It is a
a serious advantage that we can afford to look at ourselves and say we don't do everything perfectly.
And we wanna know the truth. I wanna know whether
Fauci.
Childs.
Ten million people.
I should be able to investigate that as a virologist, as an epidemiologist. I I should be able to get answers and and go through the process of justice.
When we have a situation in which our scientists are hamstrung
Because the conclusion is known ahead of time.
We limit our own ability to use cowboy science.
to drive the rest of the world. And and quite honestly, we're giving away our biggest advantage, which is
The middle finger.
The American ability to say screw you to a su supervisor who tells you what is true and what isn't true.
Young person.
Should be able.
Two.
say, Hey, I think my field is going in entirely the wrong direction and I'm willing to bet my career on it.
Don't interfere.
This was always the biggest question for me is where were all the sceptics?
Or overall the scientists that are supposed to question the dogma
during the lockdowns, during Covid, during that pandemic.
And I talked to Kratios about this when we did our interview.
That if everyone in the room agrees on something, it's probably wrong. Like you know, there there has to be some degree of skepticism.
But particularly because the fundamental basis of science is to ask questions.
Interrogate.
Generate evidence, generate data.
And then draw some
You know, conclusion and ask your next question.
But it's almost like the asking question stopped.
Where did that
come from it sounds like you're saying it's because folks were hamstrung.
socially, was it economic? What is it that happened?
But
Not just in this pandemic, but just broadly.
Are we seeing this happen more in the scientific domains where everyone kind of aligns?
around one thesis, one dogma.
And your
Not gonna get funding, you're not gonna have friends, you're not gonna get colleagues to work with you.
You're gonna get chastised if you ask different questions.
Or ask whether these assumptions are correct.
And let me just answer it. This is that we created the scientific precarious.
We created a world in which professors cannot afford
to go against a consensus now the problem is consensus
Because if everybody agrees on something
You shouldn't need a consensus. There's no arithmetic consensus.
Do we have an arithmetic consensus that two plus three equals five? No.
It just is.
When I hear the word consensus.
I get very, very nervous because a consensus is usually an artificial agreement.
achieved through pressure.
The Washington consensus is
Some sort of a thing where we're all going to go in a particular direction and if you don't go in that direction
You don't have a job.
So
When you ask.
Mm.
What happens, you know, my question is the the the uh
Jay Bhattacharya is the perfect example of what should happen.
You have a guy who has a PhD in economics and an M D.
And
He went against it with the Great Barrington Declaration.
Now he's the head of NIH.
I I knew Jake when he was
called a fringe epidemiologist by this loser Francis Collins.
And you know, his uh sidekick was probably our bioweapons are
Anthony Fauci. Now if I say
Anthony Fauci was probably our bioweapons czar.
That's gonna strike all these people, particularly on the institutional left, is
Well that's conspiracy theory talk.
So my question is we signed a couple of uh agreements in the seventies, the Geneva Convention and Bioweapons Treaty.
We have a cryptic system.
Somehow we chose in that case a mysterious Ukrainian
uh British zoologists receive huge amounts of money through
A hippie dippy charity called the Eco Health Alliance.
Money from like DITRA, the defense threat reduction agency.
The whole thing doesn't make any sense. So if you start doing things through covert operations
The problem is that scientists can see right through covert operations.
If you have great tools.
Yeah, you if you say I
I wasn't at the scene of the crime as oh well but
We have it.
A hair follicle and I can
Pretty much tell you you were at the scene of the crime.
That's how powerful science is.
So now you have this different problem, which is is that you've got all of these B minus policy people in Washington, particularly in the covert community, not the intelligence community, but the
covert community inside the intelligence community.
Who don't want
kick ass independent scientists because they're telling stories and narratives that are easily exploded.
So right now we don't don't I just have a problem with good science. We have a problem with good journalism.
Right.
With the the narrative. Exactly.
So there are times when you when you have to
You know, when the US went to war, Roosevelt was in a wheelchair with these leg braces.
And there was a general agreement that we won't report on the state of the
President's health.
Well, we had the same thing with Biden.
Martin was undergoing some form of dementia.
Did anyone think to ask
A leading geriatric neurologist, look, examine his gate, examine his speech patterns, and tell us
Where h is he likely in his cognitive trajectory?
So if you're trying to to
You know, tell a lie.
That's important structurally.
You really don't want scientists exploding it. When we did the
Yeah, and I I'm I'm not arguing with that. We we shouldn't have been honest about what we were doing.
And a
New Mexico boys school from nineteen forty to nineteen forty five because
Science was creating the most powerful weapon ever seen on planet Earth. For those not aware, that's the Manhattan Project. Absolutely.
So what I'm trying to say is is that right now
You're not taking those people who stood up and making them the
president of a university or the chairman of a department. You're not giving them a chair.
And I just gave a talk on this at at uh Jordan Peterson's ARC conference.
You haven't reinserted
The tiny number of people who stood up
You haven't rewarded them.
My question is where's my third home for standing up?
Mm.
Where's the ability to put my kids
You know, I want to put three kids through school.
I want to participate.
And the security
And the prosperity.
That we provide to everyone else, and this is the the key issue.
You've created the American scientific precarious.
That's one of the reasons why you have
Yeah, such strange
political affiliations where you don't have balance uh in the professor.
you've got this incredibly dangerous situation where we are not participating in freedom. And I will say in particular theoretical physics physics.
Theoretical physics is the only
Profession.
Who have lost free speech.
because of something called restricted data, where I am not allowed to put pen to paper.
To write down a physic equation if in any way it affects nuclear weapons. Well
Try doing really good physics.
In a way that doesn't affect.
You know, hadrons and nucleons. It it's impossible.
So you have this threat.
Right. That somehow
Um the law.
I'm not even protected by the First Amendment.
But I I wanna go back to your point about incentives. So
When you say I wanna have a third home
What you're saying, just to I'm I'm gonna do the Eric Weinstein translation please uh here.
But you're saying
А за професор.
I have to fall in line in order to
gain tenure in order to get a grant, in order to
get the the chairmanship role or whatever the fellowship I'm looking for.
If I don't fall in line, if I'm fringe, if I
Say things that are nonconformist. Is that the right kind of way to Heterox. Heterodox. If I choose to just go against the orthodoxy, right?
I believe that
Um
It was insane to take the idea of
The Wuhan Institute of Virology
off the table when it came to the origin of Covet. Right.
Okay.
Insei
It was clear then.
And when you said that, you were called a French scientist.
And you were chastised and labeled an outcast and therefore
You lost access.
You lost jobs, you lost income.
There was much that was left
out of the equation for you. Yep. Because you asked
Questions.
That were heterodox.
I
I came up with a set of equations in differential geometry in nineteen eighty seven.
And I was
uh really treated incredibly badly. Those equations took over my field in nineteen ninety four.
And there was never an attempt to go back and say, Wait a minute, we just
brutalized somebody who got things right and very early.
And so, you know, by the same token
It's just a very simple process. You're not allowed to want.
better for your life. You're supposed to be humble, you know, or
True scientists don't care about money. True scientists don't care about
security the the reward is the work it's you know, blah blah blah blah blah. It's all of this absolute
Drivel.
The fact is is that we are providing your security
And I say third homes to be deliberately provocative. I used to say second homes and I I'm done with that.
You're dealing with
The level of prosperity
in a world in which the Gini coefficients are blowing out, it's almost entirely due.
to the technology that is derivative of science, and the scientists are not participating. So what you're doing
Is you're creating a collectivist mindset.
Because we can't get paid.
We can't
Win.
If we get things right.
We're out.
When did this change happen? Because did we not value
And prize heterodoxy.
Hereticism, outlandish ideas.
The origin of science, the origin of great innovation, which arguably America's still the global leader in today.
arises from what initially seems heretical. It seems like
An idea that is far fetched, unrealistic, not gonna happen.
But all it takes is one out of ten of those things to be true.
And ultimately the envelope is pushed forward.
And we find ourselves in a new frontier.
Science should follow the same formula as entrepreneurship in the sense tech technological or industrial
kind of entrepreneurship roughly. Yeah. But where did things change and why?
Is this just the natural course of
You know, Ted Kazinski, the unibomber, wrote this manifesto where he talked about over socialization. Yeah. Is that ultimately what happened here? Is it social media played a role? Is it just that
This is the saturation of social systems over time. Yeah, this or was there a deliberate external effort. The one thing you didn't uh recite in that
Listed thing. You didn't mention
My being
Um
In the physics, I guess, uh at Hebrew University.
MIT MIT uh
Postdoctoral fellowship
But the the most important one is that I was the co chair
co PI with Richard Freeman of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard.
In the economics department.
Because I was worried that we were we had been losing this. And there's a very crisp answer to this. And between nineteen sixty five and seventy five, everything went wrong.
Right. And and it's basically from the beginning of the Medicare Act
Of sixty five.
to a controversy over something called Man, a Course of Study, in 1975 that ushered in peer review and the control.
But if you wanted to really pinpoint it.
It really sixty five sixty nine and to seventy one is particularly brutal. And what happened was
The MIT physics department, I think in nineteen sixty nine in the spring, walked out in protest of the Vietnam War, including people who had been part of the Manhattan Project.
And the government took one look at this and said, Okay, you are wobbly. We can't trust you.
We haven't we have a very
Complicated cryptic agreement.
With our
Physicists in particular.
You were the most dangerous, most deadly, most intelligent, most successful group.
Along with the mathematicians.
And we've relied on you, and now we can't trust you because you're not you're not rowing
uh in the same direction that the country is rowing with the with the war because you're joining the protest movement.
What happened was

Where lots of government money was being funneled through.
was taken outside the university and turned into Draper Labs.
And the Mansfield Amendment in sixty nine seventy one, named after Mike Mansfield of of Montana.
Said.
Okay, the military can no longer fund blue sky research.
inside of our university system.
Unless it has a direct military
Uh express military purpose.
That was the disaster.
Because what the military had done is they said, Look, we want you guys fat and happy.
doing blue sky research, which is what you
think you should be doing. We trust you guys.
We just want to know that you're there for us.
When we need you.
So the military was our best friend. Now that was uncomfortable because quite honestly.
You have a huge paraply of different
Ideas
Inside
of high energy.
Highly dynamic.
Science project.
If you don't have communists and fascists in the same department having tea together, something has gone wrong.
Because scientists are very extreme.
And Ted Kazinski.
You know?
wrote a marvelous story, for example, called
Ship of fools.
About a bunch of people overly concerned about political correctness on a ship that then
You know, runs into an iceberg because nobody's actually paying attention to the running of the ship. They're having questions about. I didn't even know this. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Everybody should should read it. Now of course I'm not
I'm not pushing people to uh a mass murderer.
Uh you know. Yeah. How however
It's heretical to acknowledge, by the way.
Scientists are weirdos.
Or at least many scientists are weirdos. And if you're not going to deal with
Truly dangerous minds.
I don't even know why you're suiting up for the science game.
So where do those mines go?
If they're not
Enabled or allowed into
The institutions, the establishment, the machinery of science in America, are they still around or their brains just blunted out?
And they're only allowed to say certain things. Or are we taking great scientists and reprogramming them
And missing all the alpha. I mean what Yeah, yeah, you're you're missing you're missing the alpha. And it's funny that you should say that because of that that makes it
Like alpha male or the uh alpha in investment theory, right? Yeah.
Both works. Yeah, I'm a I also do freestyle rap. Really? Yeah. No well
Sometimes. Okay. We'll talk later about that. Yeah. Cool.
Um
Well, mostly what you're doing is you're spaying and neutering.
uh your best minds. Uh but the other thing is is the look at Palmer Lucky.
Okay.
That guy looks to me like a scientist.
He's irreverent. He's got a crazy shirt.
And he builds things to kill people. Yeah.
Right. Now
If he was in a physics department, um
He could not easily be that guy.
But if you wanted somebody who's in still in science, who looks to me like a great scientist, I would point you to Nima Arkani Hamed.
Incredibly.
Brilliant as the day is long, completely uncompromising, did not go in for the string theory fad at a deep level, even though he's sympathetic to many aspects of it.
Do you guys even know that he's there?
He's the best of us currently, and he's still not that old.
You know?
Um my feeling is

There's pretty much been
A
Giant decrease in our effectiveness.
And I know why.

Jim Watson out of Cold Spring Harbor, which he built.
Wh wh what are you doing?
Do you know that Mark Tashne
I was in his mid eighties, uh
Guy who wrote a genetic switch on Fave Lambda and one of the most brilliant irreverent people.
You know, I at some point I think I send a journalist to him and the journalist came back with his tail between the leads and said, That that that guy's insane.
Mm.
Well
Eric Lander was the White House
uh science advisor Kratzios' role. I think his picture isn't up on the wall because he's sort of an uncompromising, difficult to deal with guy.
And my feeling I hate to say this is tough.
Mm.
You know, i i if you ever saw the movie whiplash, one of my favorite movies. Okay.
Well, there's a reason that that guy has the best band. He you know, he's not handing out tissues.
And I I don't mean to be mean about it. I don't want a brutal place, but like
This stuff is pretty unforgiving. What's the solution?
So
Morass.
Stagnation
What do we do here to try and
catch up again? What do we do here to to restructure?
Institutions, is it about funding? Is it about people? Is it reprogramming? I mean
How do you get out of the social circuit that's fully programmed?
Great question. I mean really great question.
Let's just be provocative and throw some stuff out.
National interest waivers.
I wanna blow a giant hole in the Civil Rights Act so that we can have
Teams that are not constantly afraid of HR.
What does the Civil Rights Act do that
makes it difficult for individuals to do what they need to science.
My closest friend.
Uh
from college, uh we have a group of three, two Jews and a Muslim.
And the Muslim is constantly teasing the Jews about, you know.
You guys own the all the banks of the newspapers and we to talk j you know joke with him about b him being a terrorist. Now that is not a model. I can explain.
To anybody.
But we've been.
Yeah, incredibly close.
Uh s since nineteen eighty two.
My claim is that you don't understand how
High.
agency people.
Actually form tight cohesive social units.
If you have the HR department saying, You know, Eric, I understand you are you are making an inappropriate joke.
Screw up.
Get out of here.
Who are you and what are you doing in my lab? Let me call security.
W why do I need a note for my mommy and daddy to
To do everything.
I'm not saying be horrible.
I'm saying you don't know enough about the culture of greatness.
to be my HR department.
That's sort of what I'm saying. So like I'm just throwing out a provocative idea.
Which
By the way, I'm a democrat.
I'm sort of a democrat from the
J F K school rather than I w I I don't think I would join. I don't know what you would be today.
Well, I I'm I'm staying in the party. I'm a nail house democrat. You know the nail house is the house that you build a mall around because the person won't sell. Yes.
I'm not I'm not leaving the party.
Um, but my party has gone insane. My feeling is
If we were really
Who we say we are.
We'd be making common cause with the republicans I met with.
And saying, Let's get on with it and reform the system together.
And
If you want to brag about how you made America great without us, you can go screw yourself. Um my feeling is that I'd rather work with you, make America great, and then fight over the credit later.
That's how you work in a war.
You know? So my my first recommendation is Throw out the Civil Rights Act. No, not throw it out.
Poke holes in it because you like the intent of it. It's the letter.
It's arbitrage to
Against the i the intent which creates this sort of collectivist thinking. You can't do
Great.
What?
Without hyper individualism.
And with that rugged hyper individualism. And so my feeling is is that
That's not an Ayn Randian thing. That's not a conservative thing.
It the issue is is that
I'm I consider myself left of center.
And there's no one more individualistic than I am.
Yeah. So
What you need is I I need not to have
Peer review. Peer review is a fake story that was retconned into science.
It is no you can look it up on Google Engrams, but quote.
Space peer review.
Space close quote.
And you'll notice.
That there's really no mention of it before nineteen sixty five.
And the reason for that is that the Medicare Act made the government the major payer.
for medical procedures. The government said, Well why are we paying for all this stuff?
Well the doctor said it we don't want you
having oversight over our decision making. So our peer we will peer review each other. It started in a Utah clinic.
And
Then it wasn't until Nineteen Seventy five.
When
fiscal and social conservatives.
Attack the NSR.
over something called man a course of study.
Or make us.
Now some for some reason.
The NSF.
grouped in anthropology.
As a science. I I think that's a mistake.
I think what we really need is we really need very hard sciences.
Separated.
And my feeling is the weaker scientists should go form their own organization and stop using our credit card because
They're destroying our credit limit.
Those are social sciences and soft sciences versus hard sciences, where
There's an industrial endpoint.
Well, it's not a question of an industrial endpoint. I mean, I I think w that's another thing that's really screwed up is that science has become
synonymized with biomedical, which it isn't.
Yeah. And science has become
Uh in the
conservative mind, something that the the market can do well. When
It's like did did no one take econ one oh one because that you know, on the first day of school they're supposed to tell you that markets work really well.
As long as you're not in a category called market failure.
And if you miss that day, you say well markets are perfect, then they can price everything. But anything that's
uh inexhaustible and inexcludable.
Which is exactly the definition of science. Can't be priced by your market unless you create an artificial market.
So I can't tell you how dispiriting, you know, this is
If I've been kind to the Republicans, here's a place where I'm gonna be cruel.
You can't have morons.
Who do not understand that markets cannot see everything. There's a reason that we pay taxes for an army.
And it's a technical reason.
It's not a
We think that's a good thing.
If market the army
uh exhaustible and excludable. You wouldn't need to pay for it with taxes.
So that your tax dollar has to be used for things that the market can't reach.
Homotopy theory is a great case. When I say homotopy theory, in these science discussions, people say, Well, what is that?
Mm.
My response is Well, you don't know.
It's an incredibly inf important.
Hard.
Of mathematics, pure mathematics.
I don't know that it has any industrial applications.
But you go after homotopy theory and you're you're pulling out a Django block.
From an incredibly important ecosystem that you don't understand.
So my my feeling about this is I'm going to inject
A PhD perspective into this conversation.
'Cause the what the PhDs are doing wrong is that they're staying out.
Trump to them has cooties. They don't want Trump cooties.
So they don't show up.
And now, okay, well, if if they are not going to explain to you why we need homotopy theory and we need to tax people.
And
The administration's not hearing what they need to be hearing.
And the people that are supposed to be saying it are not showing up to the administration. That's right. And it's completely dysfunctional. And quite honestly by the way, the statistic I gave Kratios is uh nature did a survey of two thousand scientists, their readers.
Nature being a scientific journal that's widely read and
By the scientific community and
Six percent. By the way, not peer reviewed until the seventies. Right.
And six percent
of the readers poll uh voted for
President Trump.
Eighty five percent or something.
Camilla Harris. And then there was an undecided.
Grab.
But I think it speaks to your point. Like
S.
is deemed to be so anti science, the institution of Trump is deemed to be
Anti science that there doesn't even want to be an engagement. Assume that you detest Trump.
Okay, assume that you think Trump is the devil.
I just met with Michael Cratzius.
Great.
I I wanted that role. I put my hat in

Yeah.
For that role.
I didn't think I would get it because I wasn't willing to pledge sufficient loyalty to Donald Trump.
happened to go to Michael Cratzius. I was very nervous because he he's not coming from a PhD background.
What it
What an unbelievable growth in that role. The f I understand. I don't know.
All sorts of things. I'm here to learn. Tell me what I need to know.
And if no one shows up to do that tutelage, you're gonna you boy, do you deserve exactly what you got because I think
Michael is trying to do absolutely the right thing.
I know Jim O'Neill very well from the Peter Till universe coming in at NSF.
J bought a chariot.
Absolute gem.
If you can't work with these people
Is that
Their problem or is that your problem?
So arguably this
And sorry, let me just go back
To talk about markets.
And I'll I'll make a libertarian argument.
If markets work well for driving
economic value and
those who are good at that participate meaningfully in that value creation.
There will be wealthy people. And those wealthy people will see the value of
Mathematics, the value of pure physics, the value of astrophysics and cosmology, and they'll fund it. Jim Simons.
Didn't he fund quite a lot of
Research Jim was a genius with
Detailed knowledge.
Of pure mathematics. Mm-hmm.
So if you have
You know, Uri Milner is a guy who has a background in quantum chromo dynamics.
If you have more of those people. And there are. Point is, and I'm not trying to argue with you about it, but my point is shouldn't the market work
regardless that they'll see the value of the science that you're identifying.
They'll identify it.
capital will flow to that research. It will get funded somehow.
There's a lot of
independent institutions out there that get capital.
And is or is that not sufficient?
for the landscape. And I'll also state like
You know, one of the uh statistics that I brought up with Kratios, which he published in his book
Is that over time
We have seen
A significant decline.
In the effectiveness of dollars deployed against scientific research in the US.
an eighty fold decline in return on every dollar invested.
In government.
research. So I just want to throw those two points out there. Like is there not private market capital that will find its way to solve these problems?
And isn't the government getting worse over time at deploying capital and driving returns? And I'm I might be giving you a a a T ball here, so I guess or
Or I feel like I should have I should have gotten high on cannabis, uh in order to even take that question on. I don't believe
Any of that first point. Um and and it's I knew Jim
Simon's decently well.
Uh Jim
was the kind of guy who could do that.
But
Even he didn't understand my last conversation with Jim Simons. I was trying to explain to him
Uh the Chern Simon's uh transgression.
interpreted as as an action functional.
is the only rival to Einstein Hilbert, um and that effectively he will find
Um if you if you
pursues this that Chern Simons and Einstein Hilbert are in an equal playing field as daughters of the
ultimate theory.
Uh he didn't know that.
So
Partially the issue is is that it is so difficult in my area.
To know what's going on.
in the adjacent area. I just got off the phone before the podcast with my good friend Edward Frankel.
Who does
uh algebraic geometry whereas I would do
Differential geometry.
It's very difficult for us to communicate.
Even though those fields are adjacent to each other.
So
Yes, if you happen to have an algebraic geometer who's a billionaire.
Uh and uh one who's a representation theorist, another one who's uh
interested in
Um
Oh, I don't know, uh category theory. You could do it that way. But this is
Completely insane. So
So government should fund
Government.

The next part of this we need to have the right people representing the decisions on where we should be funding. What we should be funding. Correct. And that's what we did previously, is that we sort of had slush funds.
And they're very good people.
Had money.
Somebody years ago I was at a conference in Bursheva, um on physics.
And people were talking about where they were gonna get their next job and this old guy comes up to us and says, I just pity all of you. There's an American.
And I said, W in what way? He said.
You know I never applied for a job in my life.
Is it sorry?
What do wh what do you mean? He says.
If you were any good and you needed a job, you talked to one of the people who
was high up in the field.
And they got on the phone.
And by the time they got off the phone you had a job where you needed to be.
And so my claim is that
When you have
Administrator types.
come in and say what we need is KPIs.
Uh w we need to to drive this on a uh data we I'm data driven. I wanna know what the translation is.
D do you even know what ROI is?
Or is it just what you can measure?
Yeah.
And so my claim is
A lot of what you want is you want these people on retainer.
So whenever you have a real problem, you call up the Jasons and it's stocked with the most terrifying intellects you can imagine.
And we can get to work and we can solve your problems.
But if you're saying
Well why should my taxpayer dollars uh
No, go do whatever you find interesting.
Well.
If I can pursue what I find interesting.
And when when you call me up
I'm gonna be very friendly to helping my own country, my own nation. I'm gonna feel positive about that.
If you tell me you should work on this because this thing is what drives the ROI.
My feeling is do you just not understand science? Do you imagine that your technology mindset
Is the same thing as my scientific mindset. You want to get paid. I mean
I I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley.
I'm not nearly interested at
is interested in having a new McLaren.
as whether my name is gonna be discussed ten thousand years from now if humans are still around.
And I I say that
Because you know, Jim Watson just died.
My good friend's Isidore Singer, Raul Bott.
Are are now dead.
Those are people whose contributions will be discussed ten thousand years from now.
Can you say that about almost anyone?
You know who's doing
Software as a service, uh
Hard to say.
Yeah, as I used to say, um
What's the difference between uh Grisha Prolman and Ron Prolman?
And so in the modern era, the question is who's Grisha Proman?
And
You know, a thousand years from now, it's who's wrong problem. Mm-hmm.
So my feeling is that we have our own toys.
But we've
We care about. We care about
Our history.
We care about different things. It's it's not unreasonable to want a dacha.
And to want to be able to check into a four seasons uh into fly business class.
But w we don't need a corporate jet.
Like
That's your stuff.
So
Treat
scientists like
the rock stars that they should be, will be
Otherwise you're gonna lose them.
You're gonna lose that talent, you're gonna lose that moment.
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When you say slush
Fun.
The way the funding process works in the modern era is grants you you apply for a grant with a very specific
set of objectives and that's what the capital's gonna be used for.
And to your point earlier, grants
Are typically approved if there
Lower beta.
Which means more predictable.
In terms of the outset. So we're appropriating modern portfolio theory to science. Love it.
Yes.
Well, I mean that's the way it it's been operating, is my argument. Yeah. Or has it not been?
And does that not miss the opportunity to take
Crazy high beta bets.
And not just bet on the idea, but bet on the person.
So crazy hi beta bet.
Yeah, that's let's do an example. Yes. Imagine that I have
A one percent chance.

Right.
Should you hire me?
Well.
Ninety nine percent failure.
It's pretty expensive.
But
The benefit of killing curing all cancer.
Um, the government is incredibly rich.
And when you're incredibly rich.
You can afford
To take different bets to maximize your outcomes. The problem is that the government coin vested
True things that are poorer than it.
Mm. So each department says, you know, we can't really afford we don't get that many appointments.
So we're gonna go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest
outcome and then we're gonna start lying about how important that is. You'll notice that
If you ask people, how's your field doing? Everybody says it's never been a better time to be
A particle theorist. Well it's a terrible time to be a particle theorist.
Right.
And and we can't say that. And and it's funny because again, in portfolio theory
If you have
A balanced portfolio, and part of it starts succeeding and part of it's failing.
What you usually do is you take money out of the thing that's succeeding.
and put it into the thing that's failing because otherwise you get too much concentration in the portfolio.
Nobody's ever thought about any of this stuff.
And so what you have is you have people who don't even understand modern portfolio theory.
And don't understand market failure.
Designing things.
It's really important to know basic.
m market theory. And we don't.
Yeah.
So if we fix that, do we fund individuals
versus ideas, you know, this is the other kind of.
So
The whole story I I gave this example to Crazio, Stuart Butterfield
worked on this project for a couple years. He was down to three million bucks. All the VCs put money in sort of nearly failed. And he calls him up. He called up Ben Horowitz. He just told the story recently. He said, Hey should I give the money back? This project didn't work. But by the way, we've been doing a
intra company communication tool for our engineering team.
Maybe I could pivot into that. He's like, Yeah, keep the money, do that.
I trust you. Yeah. You pivoted it, turned it into Slack.
Sold it for thirty billion dollars.
The idea being that
You back the person, not the idea that the the great people, the great entrepreneurs
continuously evolve, continuously build, continuously pivot. I mean
Here you are with Zuck reinventing that company again and again and again. And if you find
the up and comers. Is there a way to kinda find the individual that are emerging in their fields?
And you fund them for a period of time and you say or is this a portfolio theory again where you say
Some bets are on an idea.
Some bets are on people.
And you know, the people that's
should be long term and fully funded. Right.
I'll give you the magic.
Formula that gives you an idea of the
Mm.
How difficult.
this is and how tricky you have to be.
Tell me.
Who
The established leaders of
of a field.
We'll block.
But will not short.
Fun that guy.
Mm-hmm.
Because if you're not willing
I mean
View.
I'll say this with my own
uh main theory.
If you are
Willing to short either geometric marginalism or more importantly geometric unity. I want to dance with you.
Because I wanna take your house. I wanna take your retirement.
It would be my absolute pleasure to destroy you in the market.
But that's not what happens. It's like well we're we wanna block him.
But we know that he knows a lot of stuff.
Yeah. And we know that we haven't really read it.
And you know, there's something about somebody say, look, you're ninety nine point nine nine percent
Uh going to fail.
And I say.
Care to formalize that? Mm-hmm.
No, let's have it. Well, why I'll bet you a hundred dollars that by next year you haven't gotten full acceptance. That's not what you said.
You said
That you'd be willing to put up.
your house to win a dollar from me.
And I wanna do that at size.
Yeah, so my feeling is
Come at me, baby. That would be fun.
Mm-hmm.
And let me tell you something.
You also listen for things that no one is willing to say.
I I am on record as saying that
The the smartest man in the world
Today is Edward Whitten.
Brilliant.
Mm-hmm.
Unbelievable.
The guy drove theoretical physics off.
The road.
Uh off a cliff.
Forty two years ago. Mm-hmm.
Nobody else is willing to say it. Mm-hmm.
So
question is is the one person
Who noticed?
But
Nobody's gone to Stockholm.

The the standard model has not
Changed the recent conference uh in string theory, supposedly the only game in town in fundamental physics.
Go to strings twenty twenty six website.
There's a list of all the talks. There's a search engine.
Put in these following words.
Electron.
Had drawn.
Higgs.
Web Time.
There's no physics in this.
They're not talking about anything that could hurt
A foe.
They're not talking about the physical world.
I was at
Arguably the world's
Leading
Physics Institute.
And I said, Who are the smartest people here?
And it was I was given three names. Two of them were pure theorists.
I tart.
Deeply with both of them.
About
how to advance the standard model, which is our notion of all the particles you see in the w in this room.
Both of them said
I have no interest.
in the physical.
I said, Well, you're the two leading professors that are major our our most
Expansive theoretical physics institute.
And neither of you care about the physical world.
Just
Openly expressed.
This is madness.
And you know.
I give talks at physics departments and I I've now started
non cooperation with the departments who asked.
Me to come and talk.
But will technically deny me a talk.
So for example, I've given talk
a talk at the University of Texas, Austin. But I'm all I'm
Not
allowed to say that the talk occurred in the physics department.
Really? Yeah.
I gave a talk at the perimeter institute.
In the Sky Room.
It is not a talk.
Eric is answering questions.
I gave a talk at the University of Chicago in the M this is because your talk
And your persona's view to be fringe and outlandish and keep saying fringe. Yeah.
I totally disagree with the narrative of the field.
I just out and out say that when physics in nineteen eighty three, physics made sense. In nineteen eighty four, it did not. It was
Very stark. And it was like overnight.
More or less three people, Leonard Suskin, David Gross, and Edward Whitten.
drove the field in a totally different direction.
And now
The achievement of this has not been any advance in our knowledge of the physical world.
But it has been something that no one knew was possible.
You take the field.
In which Edward Teller and
J. Robert Oppenheimer.
And Richard Feynman.
And
Stanislav Ulham created the most terrifying weapons.
From
SU three cross U one gauge theory.
And you've made it safe.
It is now safe to do physics with your geopolitical rivals. You can invite your friends from China to come and become graduate students in your department.
And you will fill their heads.
With things about ADS C F T that couldn't hurt a fly.
Because there's no physics in it.
So the question is it
Mm-hmm.
Did I
Is this a secret program?
Go back to nineteen eighty three.
We so we drove off a cliff in nineteen eighty three.
The question is did someone say, Hey, let's drive this off a cliff? Well this happened before. Do you do you think that there is some
community subgroup.
Set of assets.
Set of
projects that are happening somewhere on earth.
that are making advances in physics and have been for the last
Fifty years. Great that you asked that question.
That would be crazy, wouldn't it, David?
Can you imagine if there was like a secret place that was making advances in an important field of physics?
And
People who were studying physics outside of that place were being stymied.
I would find it hard that it would be kept secret.
Okay.
What happened in nineteen forty?
Is that something that you've never heard of called the reference committee was established inside of the National Research Council.
So
When the neutron was first hypothesized in nineteen eleven by Rutherford.
It was then discovered in the early thirties.
A woman named Lise Meitner came up with the concept of the chain reaction, which was then proven by Fermi at the University of Chicago with something called Chicago Pile One.
Thereafter.
A guy named Bright.
uh B R E I T.

uh reference committee inside the National Research Council. So that if you submitted a paper on chain reaction physics
to a journal.
It got shunted.
into the National Research Council. And they would return it to you saying, unfortunately, you know, these results are really preliminary.
Um, we don't see this as being uh at the level of the journal, please revise, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay, and now you've resubmitted it, it's still not going. You don't know that this thing exists. And this is how people outside of the Manhattan Project, outside of the white badges.
Treated.
their colleagues who weren't allowed inside the Manhattan Project.
So
Let's at least agree.
They're from nineteen forty to nineteen forty five.
There was a review process.
Which destroyed the ability to earn a living.
If you were doing chain reaction physics and you weren't invited into the secret group. Yes.
Okay. The question isn't.
Is that nuts? It's clearly not nuts because I know that this actually existed and happened.
Question is did it happen once?
Or more than once.
If it happened more than once, the question is, what is the analog of the boys school in New Mexico?
What is the analog of the white badges? What is the anal analogue of the reference committee?
And you have a theory? Yeah.
Okay.
If it's happening.
I've said that the leading candidate
would be Renaissance technologies on Long Island.
I've heard you say this. Yeah. But surely there's let's look at the cover story.
Okay.
The cover story would be
You know, we are so good at trading.
that we don't even allow people who know markets into our firm.
We only hire people.
in directly relevant subjects of physics.
Like particle theorists.
Like differential geometers.
Like machine learning experts.
And we have a very strange thing that we have a very close relationship with the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
And by the way.
There's a middling university right next door.
Who happens to be absolutely world class historically in the exact subjects.
That would be relevant doing
Next level physics.
Okay.
So you m multiple fields metalists.
And US News and World Report never ranks this as like one of our great
facility, even though if if if you look at the people who've passed through State University of New York at Stonybrook,
It's unbelievable.
Yeah.
To me.
That looks like Fort Mead.
When it was still no such agency collecting way too many number theorists. But Eric, people have come out of that place, that workplace. I know one or two of them.
And there are no such
stories. I at some point you would envision that some number of them, some small percentage of them would
leak some information or some set of facts if that were to be true.
About some of this advanced physics work going on.
Yeah.
There would be probably more innumerable returns realized from that than perhaps there have been.
I'm not saying that I know that that's true. My point was and I tried I tried to be careful. If you said
Eric, that sounds preposterous because to be entirely honest.
Concept of Los Alamos, which was published
In nineteen forty four by a journalist named Jack Raper in a Cleveland newspaper.
He broke the story.
Nothing happened because what he said was crazy. He said there is a secret city with a mayor.
Who's supposed to be
The next Einstein
Working on a doomsday weapon, and the town is so secretive.
that nobody knows what's going on inside it.
So my claim is
Is that
I'm doing the Jack Rapor thing and you're doing the
What happened to Jack Raper?
Well, clearly there's only one person saying that and he's nuts.
Well, in the in both cases I could show up and start asking questions and interrogate and see if I can find something. Yeah, I'm not saying
that renaissance technologies is that.
I am saying you have a secure campus with a story that makes no sense. Yeah.
You you know markets. Do you have any idea how much the medallion funds are. Oh yeah, yeah, I know. Because of again, my friends who were there
They get to leave their money there, and then the returns continue to get to leave their money there is not what happens. Okay. They closed the fund to all but internal money. Yes, yes. That's what I mean. You know another interesting story. But if you leave the firm, you get to
Your capital can stay in the medallion fund.
So my claim to you is Jeffrey Epstein had a story, which is that he only accepted a billion dollars or more invested with him if you gave him power of attorney. These things tend to have some reason that no person
Outside.
has money and gets to ask questions.
Right.
So Jeffrey Epstein did not run a hedge fund.
He told me that he ran a multi-strategy FX hedge fund and that he needed a seven twenty seven.
Because it had a training for and he filled it with yeshiva students.
Because they were the only ones you could trust.
He was extremely specific about using
Trend following, mean reversion, and carry is the three strategy. I think he didn't say he said he didn't do any gamma trading.
Uh, you know, or or or options trading.
That was a lie. It was a cover story that that was burned and then he became disgraced financier.
And then he became tax expert, Geoffrey Estein.
You're looking
In a fake world.
What cover stories.
That fail over if you remember the old get smart one. Yeah. Would you believe
Yeah.
You know, a thousand special agents are going to swarm this place. I find that very difficult to believe.
Uh a hundred policemen.
Yeah, not not true, Miss Maxwell Swart. C choose two boy scouts with a sling shot.
This is fake.
And my claim is
I don't know what's going on at Renaissance.
But Jim Simons is an absolute genius.
Hardly distinguished in that.
We have many.
And I don't know anybody who's ever gotten close to these returns.
I don't know any
information about what that thing actually did.
Does claims to do. Yeah.
And I'm saying it has very close relationships with
A a talent pool.
Stony Brook, which is not acknowledged.
And an and all national layout.
Go back to eighty three, eighty four. Yeah.
And
Assume we did not go
Into this quantum universe that we look at. Quantum quantum gravity universe.
Quantum gravity universe. Right.
And
We're in a different universe where we have a sense. What does that physics look like today? If we progressed physics, help.
An audience that's a generalist audience.
Understand a little bit about what it means that if physics didn't stall out.

Before I do that, let me just ask this question.
Some would argue that physics has played an important role and maybe it's not
fundamental and you could I that might be your answer here.
in advancing things like semiconductor manufacturing technology, advanced lithography.
material science. We've
We've made tremendous progress in our
capacity to drive compute. And that's led to this moment today where we have these tools that we call AI. Right.
And all of the underlying advancements in
Chemistry, material science, physics got us to this moment.
Today.
And that we have made progress and it has been applied, and that would be one argument.
And so maybe
Tell me why that's
That kind of
Misses the point.
And then we can talk a little bit about kind of what would the world look like today if we didn't go off track in nineteen eighty three, eighty four. Great question. Let me try to engage that.
And then feel free to redirect me if I'm not answering the question.
In the theory we have.
Of
Which I'm gonna call it the the frontier model, which combines general relativity
And
the standard model of particle theory.
We know
certain things that we can't use.
We found out that there was
three valence quarks inside of every proton and every neutron.
And nobody's ever pulled a valence cork out of a proton or a neutron in isolation.
Something called infrared slavery.
uh and screw the woke for not saying we can't say the word slavery, inference slavery, deal with it, boys.
Um
You have a situation in which there is no industrial application. We've known about it since nineteen sixty eight.
So sometimes you don't get to use something for an extraordinarily
long period of time.
But what happens if some advancements maybe we're never gonna pull a cork.
out of a proton. Maybe it's impossible.
What if there are other things we might be able to do?
had physics actually advanced. So for example, in the
mid nineteen seventies, the two gentlemen called uh Abdu Salaam and uh I forget Petiz.
First name.
So put forward the
uh Petit Salam model.
I believe that the Petit Salaam model will be found to be
The correct
first order grand unification above where we are.
Problem is is that it has something called SU four.
Rather than SU three.
And the SU three is what generates the force.
It keeps all those protons.
From running away from each other inside of a nucleus because obviously
like charges or want to repel. That's why
we were able to take out two Japanese cities in nineteen forty five. This is that we got control of the strong force and then that allowed us
to use the electromagnetic force to g generate completely destructive.
um power, but it didn't destroy protons and neutrons.
What happens when you have SU four?
Is is that you see that the electron
And the neutrino are the fourth color.
that we associate with the up quark and down quark, which make up protons and neutrons.
You could have a weapon.
That rotates.
up quirks and down quirks into the lighter leptons that disintegrate matter.
Mm-hmm.
You could have dark chemistry. Dark is not the right concept.
It's really decoupled matter.
Dark matter is decoupled matter.
Neutrinos are essentially dark matter.
They're barely detectable. They don't interact.
Well they do.
But very, very weak.
Very, very weak. Only through the gravitational and weak forces, which are the two incredibly weak ones and gravity's
So weak it's not worth it. Well, but here's another here's a here's a possibility. If you rotate a neutrino.
Into some charged
Just explain what you mean by when you say rotate.
What does that mean? So this neut these neutrinos are these subatomic particles.
They don't really interact well, but what does it mean to rotate them? Well,
Let's take and and and I think a large amount of the energy produced in the sun is utrinos.
Yeah. Actually come out. Like if you actually you and I are being irradiated.
By billions of neutrinos, and the only reason that we're not dead
Is that
They don't interact with our atoms. Well, they barely interact. Once once in a blue moon they do.
So you know, at night
The sun is streaming this through the earth.
Passing through Hollywood. Yeah.
But it it when it gets to us, it goes it it keeps going. You know, you can shoot it through w I forget what it is, uh a a light year of lead and you know, you very rarely correct.
What happens with the rotation?
Is in the sort of internal
sense.
metaphor of rotation in this
Abstract place.
Which leads to a neutron. If I put a neutron on the table and we just sit there and watch with a half
Life of something like seventeen minutes, I forget. It'll turn into a proton.
And this is called beta decay.
Because what came out is is the people saw
An electron.
Scream out of the neutron.
And that's why a neutral particle became positive because the negativeness went off in the electron. So just to be clear for the audience, a neutron can turn into a proton and release an electron at in at the same time. Yeah. But that turned out to be the wrong model because what it really did
Is is that you
There were three quarks inside of it.
And one of the
Down quarks. So a neutron is down, down, up.
So a down quark.
Let off.
It's something called a W minus.
Which is a force particle, not a matter particle.
And then that thing decayed into an electron.
And something else. The only reason we determined that there was something else going on.
It's a little bit like accounting.
If you have a really good accounting system and you notice that
Yeah.
The envelope from the till is a little light.
You say okay, according to conservation principle, somebody
has been messing w with the money itself. Yeah. And that turned out to be the neutrino.
And so what happens is is that a neutrino
And an electron have the same relationship as an up and a down quark. You can
Transmute them.
Using these W
Uh W particles.
The danger when you have more force particles than we know currently.
Things that are
To all intents and purposes stable now, might not be stable in that new regime.
So you could disintegrate a mountain potentially if S U five.
uh is present. SU four is more stable than the SU five.
I don't think SU five is relevant.
But
What I'm saying is if you think about physics, think about boom.
Room and zoom as an easy way to keep track.
of why this is our most terrifying
And most
Amazing subject.
Boom is weaponry.
Room is energy.
And Zoom.
This propulsion, computation, all the cool stuff that we get to do.
So if if you want to think about it.
You've been denied.
For
It's standard malgut.
Finalized more or less fifty.
Фіфті три єрськофті три.
You've been denied new boom, vroom, and zoom.
And potentially.
The stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species.
Because the boom is so terrifying.
I can't tell you whether that's true or not.
But it means that you don't have any room.
And Zoom.
From the new stuff that could have occurred.
So we have to be honest. I want
I want the
The Zoom in particular.
We could probably
Make the case.
That no one on earth
got there and everyone has aligned around
The distraction
The disinterest in the pursuit
Because of
That
Absolute risk.
Did actually make advancements.
And they could access the bigger boom.
Yeah.
It would be game over already. I mean, there's no such thing as more absolute power.
that would give an individual or a group
The ability to leverage that in some way to their
kind of infinite will and
I don't I don't agree with this at all. Great, okay.
So
I spent
Two years indoors.
Being hounded to be vaccinated.
because of four amino acids.
being spliced into spike protein of coronavirus.
Yeah.
My guess is that that's pretty easy.
Right? Think about it.
You need twelve nucleotides.
to code for four amino acids at the exact right place in spike protein.
And that's enough.
to shut down earth.
This is high leverage science.
And my claim is before we decide that what we want
is let's get back to kicking ass and taking names.
Let us at least
Pause and say
Most people

Of how much power
Is present with a little bit of scientific knowledge за marvelous scene in breaking bad.
Where the protagonist named Heisenberg
Takes what appears to be crystal meth and throws it.
Uh in the office of a psychopath named Tuco.
And
Chuco says, Well, like what the hell was that that caused that massive explosion? I forget whether it was lead azite or mercury fulminate or one of these extremely volatile compounds.
Do you have any idea?
How easy it is to make black powder.
I I w I asked modern audiences. Nobody knows that it's seventy five percent saltpeter, ten percent sulfur, and fifteen percent charcoal.
The Anarchist Cookbook.
Has gone out of discussion.
The power of science, the leverage of science, is so profound.
That we should at least ask the question.
What if you had nuclear weapons that didn't require centrifuge?
What if there are easy things to do?
That
high school students could do.
You you remember this guy who scavenged the Amarium in the smoke detectors.
to build a working reactor, I think it was Brooklyn. Yep.
Okay.
Well, nobody thought collect two hundred and eighteen smok detectors and you can have a working nuclear reactor.
So my claim is that if you want to think about Walter White.
Is a paradigm.
You have to go back to something called the United States versus Progress the Progressive Magazine in which
The Teller Ulam design.
For the thermonuclear weapon.
was put forward by a publication.
And the government said, No, no, this is restricted data. We need prior injunction. This is the most dangerous piece of geometry. This is Stan Long's work.
And the whole idea is that if you're going to use a vision device
Chemical shell.
Compresses sub
uh critical facile material.
To create a detonator out of an atomic bomb.
How do you get that to compress a rod or something?
into a fusion device. The only thing that can reach that tertiary stage fast enough is light. You have to figure out the geometry
Because it's the
The the detonator's gonna rip apart the entire assembly if it doesn't get
No.
That secret got published. And the only reason the government didn't go after it.
Um
Howard what is it? Howard Moreland.
Is that
We stupidly declassified all sorts of pieces and shards of this, and he went to the Los Alamos library.
He pieced it together.
So
My claim is
If you don't know the story of John Aristotle Phillips
The substandard
Um
physicist who in his Princeton PhD thesis is the Princeton mascot.
Said, look, I'm not very good Freeman Dyson. I want to use the fact that I'm not very good.
To do something amazing.
Tell me whether or not
You will let me
come up with a plan for an atomic bomb.
Freeman Dyson said, I will give you no help, but I'll tell you whether it will work.
So the substandard physicist put together this and he submitted his junior thesis.
And I forget whether it's page twenty four.
But that that
Thesis is not in the library, and the government removed the page that has the plan.
The fact is that this stuff is readily present.
And we've never seen an atomic weapon used since nineteen forty five, mostly
Yeah.
We don't
Use this power.
But if it turns out that it's easy to do.
And and by the way, if the US fails
But they're wrong.
you're gonna see a proliferation of countries
Acquiring nukes.
Бізвест до ЮС.
But you've got this. You are the world's policeman.
Petro dollars aren't petrolars.
They're violence dollars. The US was supposed to have the violence needed to secure the oil.
And the oil backs the money.
We're watching the disintegration of that regime in real time as the US goes through its suizmom.
I you know.
Where whether you think Donald Trump should have
Go on in.
to Iran or not. And I I happen to think that he was courageous.
And did something that we should have done in
nineteen eighty one or eighty two or something.
We have to win.
We have we have to win.
Because if you have a world that decides that there is no world's policeman
Everybody's gonna want their own nuke.
And you can go back to the Tom Lehrer song called Who's Next and you'll you'll you'll find that more or less you're gonna have a world in which you can't figure out the game theory because it's no longer dyadic.
It's multipolar.
Imagine a world beyond nukes.
True. What does that world look like? So what else is there beyond the boundaries of
But at this point is almost uh eighty
Your old technology.
And again, th I go back to the eighty three story. We're making advancements. Did we stop making advancements? And is someone else? Is China gonna make these advancements? And what does that look like?
Is that what UAP's unidentified aerial phenomena are?'Cause you've recently made comments that
You were a deep skeptic on UAPs, but now you
You have a view that maybe there's something there that's Oh, there's definitely something there there.
Yeah.
That's something there there, by the way. Maybe China.
It may be us.
It may be a fake story.
But th there's definitely something there.
First person accounts
Not the videos.
I've never cared about the videos. Uh huh.
I've talked to too many smart, sober people.
Too many similar stories.
There are definitely special access programs that are all about this. Yeah. The only thing that we learn from uh
that that works for to keep secrets is compartmentalization.
And so
We are so compartmentalized.
That almost no one can piece the story together. It may be that
the the so called stove piping is such that we can't figure out
What we
No, because we can't talk to each other.
If you want to know what's possible.
I could freak you out and it would be super cool and super frightening. But one thing is is that uh I'm worried about multi temporal
Adversaries.
Time traveling.
Mm times travel. Time Everybody says time travel because they think that time can only be one dimensional, but
Imagine for example that you put
A giant gun on a rail car.
The rail car can only move in one dimension.
Now somebody puts
A giant gun on something like a tank.
And you go to the Bonneville salt flats. Now you can move in two dimensions. Now you put it on an A ten warthog and you can move in three.
Those are all spatial dimensions.
Why do you think there's an arrow of time?
It's because you believe time can only be one dimensional.
I don't think time is one dimension.
And I if you meet an adversary who has access to multi time
It's like you're trying to compete with them with an eight ten warhog and you've got your only gun on a
On a track.
Except.
With time rather than with space.
If I could sneak up behind you in time, knowing your intent.
I mean, this is terrifying stuff to me.
It's also like
I would love to have this over our adversaries.
But I don't want to meet anybody who knows how to do this kind of stuff.
not on a level playing field. Let me say another one.
The solar system is an escape room.
And Elon is focused was focused on Mars. I said that Mars is a red herring, it's a McGuffin.
Tonight's focused on the moon.
He is our only adult, so far as I can tell.
Uh crazy and mad as he is.
And he uses that to motivate engineers because Mars is barely doable.
These are the only rocks that are potentially habitable.
It's not enough diversity if we have this much power and this these few
spheres with which where we could put atmospheres. So assume that you could put atmospheres on the Mars and on the moon.
And you could get back and forth between them with chemical rockets. You'd have three places to screw up.
We need tens of thousands, if not millions, of places before we figure out how to civilize ourselves. So we have to get out of here.
It's too expensive to leave the solar system.
So my claim is
But
In an Einsteinian world.
You're never going to.
If Einstein is left.
To be in force.
The speed of light is too brutal.
So you go to office and jury, four or light years away, you come back.
You do it at nearly the speed of light.
Everything is eight years advanced by the time you get back home. Nobody wants to do that. And that's just the first star.
My claim is that
We have been too long in Einstein's prison.
General relativity really begins in 1913. It's really due to Grossman and Einstein, not just Einstein alone. I don't know why we say that.
Uh it's not really Einstein Hilbert, it's really Einstein Grossman.
But more or less since nineteen fifteen, nineteen seventeen, the equations haven't moved.
They're going to break.
Because of what's happening in southern Arizona.
Chip Peak has this object called DESI, the dark energy spectroscopic instrument, and I believe that it is going to show.
that the cosmological constant times the metric, which is how we encode dark energy into the equation, is going to break because it's not constant.
The only reason that you have lambda times the metric
Which is this term.
Is the product rule if you take a derivative called
Divergence.
You have to take the derivative of lambda
times the metric left alone plus lambda times the derivative of the metric, the derivative of the metric has to vanish.
That term.
is the only possible term that can go there because of something called Lovelock's theorem if you're within general relativity you're trying to do this geometrically.
My claim is that that's going to break.
We're gonna get to five sigma if we aren't there already. I haven't kept up with the news.
And then we're going to realize that the dark energy, the most important generally
Makes up sixty, seventy
Eighty percent of our universe.
We have the wrong formula for it.
Contemplation of
What it is.
I'm focused on saying
I have a candidate.
formula and I think everybody who has one should come forward. We should hold a conference.
And say
Who wins?
Who's who's got the best idea? We can't just have Ed Whitten patting himself on the back saying
Well string theory is the only game in town. It's like
Forty two years later.
Come on.
This is preposterous. Getting back to policy.
Give me some money and and get rid of these people. I don't want them reviewing anything that I'm doing. Give me somebody competent to talk to.
So sorry, let me just go back. The dark energy
measurement, which we're gonna end up having a very high accurate estimation. Right.
Tell us that
The general
theory of relativity and the equations associated with it.
Are wrong.
because of the relationship that we see between matter and rotation and movement. And so there's something off.
About that and that's general relativity is not the last.
We know general relativity is wrong.
It is a view. It is a derivative.
And not the territory. It is a great
Great model.
Whoever comes next has to recover it.
But
There is no initial singularity due to the Bing Bang, nor is there a singularity in the s in the center of a black hole called the Schwarzschild singularity.
That's that's where our ignorance shows.
We have two singularities we can't get rid of inside the theory, so you have to go outside of it. Yeah. But the thing is it's so perfect. Yeah.
That nobody can figure out
You know, sort of in the first four seconds.
You say
Let X one three be a space time air. Well okay.
It's over.
Yeah. That's the sarcophagus, and you're already in an Einsteinian frame of thought.
And so we know that it's wrong and nobody can figure out
How
To make it wrong.
And
That
Is what keeps us stuck here.
There's a marvelous demonstration.
Around two thousand and three.
At a TED talk.
Of this guy.
Showing a surface.
And he's got some sort of
Display.
And he does this, and suddenly everything enlarges.
And then he does this and everything gets smaller.
This is the beginning of a multi-touch gesture called pinch to zoom that we all use.
My claim is is that
We don't realize that pinch to zoom is probably built into the thing that we're confusing.
For space time.
So we don't know to do this.
And when you do that
You change the distances, so you don't need to break the speed of light. So this is just
Again, you're asking
Somebody
Who can't come in.
to the physics establishment who is in the physics. I am in the physics establishment
This is
Ми і сам сортов крази вол.
In which people who have radical ideas
Can't
do the radical ideas inside of the institutions.
Like a radical idea is is that
Male and female are mostly determined.
By the SRY complex.
on the Y chromosome.
If I say that I can't
B and A.
Meeting because I'm a bigot.
Okay.
I can't be in a physic department because I don't
I think Ed Whitten drove the field off of Cliff.
Nobody's has nobody else is saying it. Clearly the one person who's saying that has to be wrong. Yeah.
Now, this is the whole thing. Is the I have the first uh
First paper I think on the danger posed by mortgage backed securities.
The only person to loudly say you don't know whether Biden's gonna make it to November. And I think I said loudly, I think this is four years of dementia.
Dimension.
When people say something different.
Do you do you force them back into this consensus?
Well, that's what p nations do, and we have become a p nation when it comes to science.
Talk about China.
Yeah. From what you know.
Is China thinking differently?
about physics is China trying to
recast the paths is China trying to invite
innovative ideation amongst their scientific community.
Or are others I mean it seems like the West is probably clumped together. Is China different? Is anywhere different?
Yeah.
Let's let's talk about that. First of all, France
is historically the world's greatest mathemati mathematical country.
China.
We we're always taught to be, you know, so scared of the Chinese
In math.
couldn't buy a base hit until very recently.
Now what they're doing is is that they're looking at us with our
Absolutely.
Ridiculous collectivist fiction.
And they're
They're styling up.
to our best people and they're saying, Are you sure you wouldn't want to be free?
She wouldn't want to get paid.
Come over to China, taste the freedom, get paid, have fun. Right.
And our people are going there.
American scientists are going to China. American scientists, Russian scientists.
All sorts of scientists.
Are going to China.
For some prestige.
Some money?
And some freedom.
And we are going to train them up and they are going to be frighteningly good up until the point
That that freedom.
Involves Tibet.
Tiananmen Square.
And Taiwan.
Are they
Going to
Rethink.
Some of
These thoughts on
The path we're taking in physics.
Are they gonna be fundamental?
And how they rethink things.
Let me tell you what I really believe on that. Yes.
The AIs are going to
Change.
Sure.
Right now the AIs are trained on a corpus that privileges
things like Cell Nature and Science as the prestige journals of biology or in mathematics, it would be the invenciones and the owls and the journal of the American Math Society.
These are where the narratives of the fields are held.
Okay.
The trash can is also a corpus.
Take all of the ideas that have been poo pooed.
And laughed at.
And call that the trash can corpus.
The T C
Corpus.
The AIs are gonna start reading.
All of the things
that our quote leading physicists have laughed at.
Look out.
That's where the discovery and the reinvention's gonna happen.
China is going to have a private model and they're gonna say
Assume that the
Completely failed. The most failed theory in the history of modern physics, string theory, and something called M theory and quantum gravity.
Assume for the moment
That it's
A red herring meant to distract us.
It's not our leading theory. It hasn't been our leading theory for forty two years. It can't that the dog can't hunt.
What was it meant?
To stop us from seeing.
I mean AI will get there.
A I will get there.
And when the AI gets there.
We have
Everyone.
Who has an AI that can do this.
Again, I'm I'm saying completely radical things because quite honestly, that's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to have
John Von Neumann's and Richard Feynman's
And Paul Durks and uh
All of these.
characters and we don't have any of them.
So I'm trying to say what this sounds like.
You're all wrong.
And I'm right.
And don't tell me that I'm arrogant or that I'm conceited or that real scientists are humble, or if you understand something, you can explain it to a five year old. That's all nonsense.
What I'm trying to say is
String theory has not been our leading theory.
For forty two years. It has never been the only game in town.
And just the way Jeffrey Epstein was never a hedge fund manager.
We're not allowed to say this. I don't know why.
I want to know.
Is there somebody over at CIA in the science and technology directorate who would like to have that conversation?
Is there anybody over at the Department of Energy?
who would be interested in not having this conversation. We right now you and I are having a conversation with our friends the Chinese and the North Koreans and the Russians.
Why are we doing this?
Are are you so confident that I'm wrong?
Given this
Obvious huge amount of knowledge that most people have never heard.
Well
I think the
question is, can you really distinguish
And can you really cage the AI?
I think
At the end of the day.
Say more.
So if the rate of progress with AI is such that and the the ubiquity of access and the corpus to your point
Uh
Knowledge and non knowledge. Right.
Is apparent to everyone.
The AI can be directed from anywhere.
And it's probably a conversation about what does humanity look like.
And I think that's a conversation with humanity, not with
nation states per se.
Well I think what I'm trying to get at is
My model of the AI.
is it is insane to have pushed out the AI as a commercial product.
It's just funny.
Let me imagine
The scene.
From silence. It's just matrices and linear algebra. I mean
Yeah, it's just inner products. Mm-hmm.
There's a scene in uh Silence of the Lambs.
Where Hannibal Lecter is wheeled out on a gurney.
In a straitjacket with a crazy
Mask.
And there's all these people around because he's so dangerous, but he's very, very intelligent.
That's what I think anthropic.
is doing.
H here's your new employee, Hannibal Lecter. He's a consultant. You've hired Hannibal Lecter.
From a temporary agency and the harness.
that is supposed to keep you from hurting yourself is all the people around him, the mask and the straight back.
And we've decided that this military research project is something you need in your home. It's like telling people.
Look.
Second Amendment just says the right to keep and bear arms, we have this thing we haven't used called the Davy Crockett.
Soldier launch personal nuke.
Why isn't it available at Kmart with a waiting period?
Yeah.
Well, it's been
Distilled at this point.
I don't know if that's a relevant point anymore because
Models have been distilled or
The model development's been commoditized.
And it's been open weight.
released and it's out there now. So models are there.
Models are here. Yep.
And to your point, maybe those models get pointed at
the path of discover novel physics and
Look at
strange texts and ideas and
And rethink everything. It's gonna be a hell of a ride.
Gonna be a hell of a run. Yeah. I just wanna hear your your one assessment.
'Cause I I I wonder if this is a glimmer. What what do you think UAPs are?
Today.
Is that really
the first window and what's happening if there's something there. The question for you is what do you think today UAPs are?
Let's
Answer that question.
But I wanna take let's do it in a debugger and we'll step through it line by line of the code as it executes.
I look at you. I'm on a podcast.
My first thought is
I know what risks I'm running.
If I say what I think
I can tell you which colleagues will not open their doors to me. No, I'm not kidding.
When I took a job with Peter Thiel
Let's imagine that there are only about one hundred and twenty five people I can speak to about
My work.
I would say thirty percent of the door is closed to me.
Just by virtue of the fact that I work with Peter Till.
And I don't think he's the devil.
And he's a close personal friend.
Now you're asking me the question of how many of the remaining doors would you like to close there?
It's not just a question.
I know how these people think and I know how terrified they are.
Let's answer it anyway.
If general relativity is really the last word, I think that these UAP UFO
Things are nation states experimental weapons system.
I think that
There's been some breakthrough, particularly in the nineteen seventies.
No, sorry, in the sixties.
There's a nineteen seventy one Australian intelligence document where Australia, which was the testing ground for nukes that of the
of the United Kingdom.
started seeing all these UAPs near their nuclear tests just the way we see them near ours.
And
The Australians revealed that all of our best people not all of our best people, many of our best people and many of our top institutions
We're doing anti gravity.
technically gravity shielding research.
And the cover story was the golden age of general relativity, where suddenly general relativity was hot from the early fifties to the lit late sixties, early seventies.
The claim from the sev that seventy one document is no no no, the only reason everybody went towards gravity is that
The word.
There was interest in gravity shielding, anti gravity, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't believe general relativity is the last word. I believe pinch to zoom exists.
There's another multi touch gesture called shear to tilt, and that means that we can leave our solar system.
Okay, that's great news because it means we can survive.
The implication is if we can leave everyone else can come.
And given the size of the universe.
We're the odds that we are the most advanced
Life form is laughable. There's no point in worry about that.
So if we can leave.
I think they're here.
And I think we can leave.
And I think
The thing the scenario to worry about is North Sentinel Island.
Yeah.
Everybody who lives in North Sentinel Island is considered a citizen of India.
And they don't know the word India.
They're an uncontacted people who don't know that they're part of something larger that watches
them that does not allow people to land.
But if they started sending out radio
signals and then they started letting off nukes.
On that tiny little island.
India would not have this
Paternalistic.
attitude towards its primitive tribe.
So my concern is that when we let off a nuke
In nineteen forty five.
Or when Italy.
became very good at quantum theory.
with Fermi and I forget what the name of the the atomic boys.
And there was this magenta.
Incident under Mussolini.
Somehow UAPs are very tied.
Danukes.
And I believe that a nuke is the sign that you become advanced enough that the next thing you figure out how to do is to leave.
And traverse through propulsion.
We don't realize that yet because we've never seen
That happened.
But my claim is is that almost every civilization before it gets to
Using the profound
Propulsion game.
Which is these multi-toch gestures.
First lets off a new.
And that we alerted.
Whatever India is in this analogy.
We're almost
Ready to come out. And we're so
Pathetically.
Unevolved.
That we're a danger.

Other civilizations.
If there's so much power in the next theory, which I b I believe geometric unity.
Is the next theory.
Now that will s cause
A certain percentage of your audience and say, Oh, it's just self promotion.
As opposed to no no no.
That's what you're supposed to do. If you have a theory.
You talk about yes, I think
I think that there are all sorts of things that you can do. I think there's multi temporal
movement. I think that there's dark chemistry. I think that there's dark light.
I think
That there are
Two other
Families.

left to discover at a luminous level.
Spin three halves matter exists.
I believe that
SU four, crus, S U two, crus, S U two.
Is the next
Grand unified theory that we'll find.
There is so much more to do.
That when we make this jump.
The world will become unrecognizable.
And I believe
that there are other life forms in the universe and that they can come and they can visit. And I don't think that that's preposterous.
I think that we are an uncontacted people.
On that note, I think we have more to talk about in the future. This has been
A truly
unique, fascinating
And I think for a lot of people in our audience, this is not a typical
conversation, but I I I just want to highlight the importance of
Hearing what you have to say.
Because
I think it's very important that even if something seems not apparent.
Yeah. Particularly when things seem
unlikely or when things seem outlandish or heretical or whatever term you might want to put onto things.
It's valuable to
To take that in.
It's definitely a lot to kinda think about the paths ahead.
And I'd love to talk more.
I'd love to do that. I'd love to do it with your friends. And I also just wanna say thank me.
It's time.
For America to lead because there's no other nation I trust.
Like I trust our people.
To take care of the
of uh
Of this planet.
We should make common cause with our rivals as fast as we can.
Because
the danger of getting to the next level of leverage.
In a contested situation.
Is overwhelming. It's very important we went in the Persian Gulf, and it's very important that the scientific community recognizes that despite their feelings about Donald Trump.
We've got four or five individuals with the science portfolio who are much, much better
than the PHDs think. And before you turn up your nose at this
consider doing what I did, which is to come for a few days to Washington, D C and
Utter the dangerous words, How can I help?