Joe Rogan Experience #1320 - Eric Weinstein

Create but without [ __ ] it's very important when you recreate you have no [ __ ] so it's Eric Weinstein not Weinstein yeah I think it was originally vine stain vine stain stain of Einstein yeah German you know but ja it was we came from a town between Edessa and kiev called o'mine and that's where the family though the vine stain family came from we talked about how many people Mispronounce ya 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 sir guy named Mike I know Mike Einstein no no Einstein is there a guy like that you remember the old I was Blazing Saddles of sure Mel Brooks yeah Mel Brooks and Harvey Korman Carroll it was Hedley Lamarr and everyone would call him Hedy Lamarr that was like the running joke in Affection that's right I [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] movies man just

silly fun outrageous movies yeah I mean he was it he was transitional right I guess it was the borscht belt being updated for the modern era yeah into 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 will happen I know right it's one of the saw recently that he turned 93 and I thought [ __ ] is he dead like Mel Burke you know because they were saying all these great things Mel Brooks I'm like [ __ ] 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 you know 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 right imagine kids today imagine trying to describe to 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 and yeah you know backup plans well if You're not there at this time yeah used to have to yell overnight you know yell for your friend I remember when I first got an answering machine that 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 like hey it's Joe not here right now but if you leave

a message I'll get Back to you probably and then you've got like old people worst I think I think someone in my family still has one of these cutesy messages from like the late 80s really yeah on their voicemail but then who leaves voicemail and the thing that gets that marks me as an old person is I actually call people mmm 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 I

it's very interesting how we separated ourselves into this the 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 is a podcast pasta podcast is mine my breasts for three hours I'm not talking anybody other than you so all those texts that come through I'll get the end of the Podcast I'll go and look at my phone There'll be 40 texts sometimes okay this is madness if I had to make 40 phone calls they'll be it would be impossible

to manage it would be it'd be calls constantly be coming in you'd never really be able to say anything so we were feeding into this weird loop where we just have these short-form things right okay dinner tomorrow sure what time how about nine I can do seven okay let's do it you know I mean it's like These weird little bursts of information you ever see remember this program California and that it wasn't called it was a Californication double gin show with yeah with the David Duchovny Yeah right so there's the scene where he's having some

really hot intergenerational sex and this gal says like lol and it kills said it out loud she said it she says lol and he loses total interest there's no amount of the heat in the moment that can compensate for the fact That she's using like verbal emojis hmm well he needs to [ __ ] get over that and it also depends on how you say it if she's really funny 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 lol like he'll he'll say something really ridiculous and then say lol yeah but he's just what mocking him said 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 offline yeah I know if i text ben shapiro I'm not getting a text back on Saturday evers dark yep but it went dark he text you as soon as they're three stars in the sky there's been on Twitter is like what did I miss that's so weird it's so

it's so weird That people by I mean in on one hand I think it's probably a really good idea to just take a break from all that electronic [ __ ] and just connect with humans and a very old-school type of way I think it's probably very good for it connect with yourself I had this experience I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years and we landed in this Orthodox round hotel and on Friday night everything shut down you know like they textbook and I then moved into a an Ultra-orthodox neighbor neighborhood right in the

on the boundary of a place where the secular and the Orthodox met what was really fascinating to me is 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 downtown 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 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 that 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 in that in 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 to freedom to just talk to human beings you know I think constraints and it's like do you know Jocko is Jocko willing totally everybody knows Jocko discipline Equals freedom discipline equals really doesn't seem like that makes sense like this [ __ ] is up at 4:30 in the morning throwing heavy weights around grunting and acting 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 [ __ ] watch 4:30 hits the gym like a savage and then takes a photo sometimes of 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 four-thirty knows what he's gonna do knows what he's gonna do just you just go do it and that way I mean you look at the guy he's

a [ __ ] tank why is he a tank cuz he's always up at four thirty [ __ ] throwing weights around it just doesn't he never stops he never never Takes never takes self-indulgent time to lay in bed and beat off and pick his nose and then [ __ ] check his text messages does this thing of this right now and thinking may I do a little bit I don't think he does really know 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 or a slice of pie and it's like you know the drama of there it Was temptation I held out for 45 minutes but eventually I became weak yeah I don't [ __ ] with that I just do it I'm gonna party just eat that cake no I mean I just feel like I do it enough I'm alright we're gonna be fine there's this story about Jackie O that she got this cancer diagnosis so there apparently her first words upon finding out that she had metastatic

cancer was then what did I do all those sit-ups for I met interesting comment that's an Interesting comment she thought if 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 Jamie something on TV yeah like telling her that sit-ups you want you want no cancer sit-ups that's the way to do it 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 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 mm-hmm and then you start to realize like you're when your Testosterone starts to go down you don't

feel you 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 she looks at me she says oh it's I love salt and pepper I thought damn oh

really worst is that what you barely salt and pepper I can barely see any she's just talking about the salt she's bullshitting you know she just didn't want me flirting with her so she just shut me down by saying you want me to hold your hair okay you crossed the threshold here yeah say but just that's all right yeah soon as someone says say Something nice like doctor 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 when

we look behind a problem we'd established a rapport before that actually I actually think she thought it was a kind and sensitive comment hmm but but I don't see any salt I'm looking now I'm just fishing Joe there's I don't believe There might be a few in there but not like somebody's gonna screenshot and they're gonna count all the hairs with arrows this isn't something I've learned when you come on your show 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 we salute you Cheers I should say for the folks at home that before we started this you to ask me did I want Laird Hamilton coffee and I said Laird Hamilton coffee wetzler damn own coffee and she gave me something laced with turmeric now which may turn our lips funny colors so if now I don't know I drink it every day all right it's fine no it's really good though but it does give you a little phlegm a little hmm a little bit of that because it's

got all sorts of MCT oil and all sorts of great stuff in there Laird Hamilton's a real Freak really interesting not a pioneer yeah just like just talking to him and hanging out with him and say seeing 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 does 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 oil that thing is amazing and it doesn't it's so weird looking if you look at it like why are you standing on like why is it elevated well that is the magic carpet of the sea let's be honest that's what it is and I am obsessed I was asking it 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 discontinuous jump and if you if you Think about sport from the perspective of wended things just changed like almost overnight you know 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 that so it's really interesting when somebody changes the game it is in and 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 waive the consequences are so [ __ ] grave if you make a mistake and you're

on an 80-foot wave and that [ __ ] comes slamming down on you but part of the innovation is safety right with these vests inflatable vests 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 a two wave hold down in a way you couldn't before hmm or you're gonna survive all sorts of things that might have been fatal right right so you have this open area to innovate yeah

that may mean 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 a couple weeks ago and I'm such a [ __ ] I'm just I'm smoking with my kids right so of course like I'm trying to figure out how to be the the mama duck and like Corral everybody so if the sharks coming it gets me I'm just trying to just looking around cuz some guy got gay he got jacked are they snorkeling in Maui just a couple months ago like right off

of a resort tiger shark yeah probably yeah just a problem yeah well so yeah some lady got it yesterday not yesterday a Couple days ago in was it the Bahamas three sharks one took her arm off and the other two just ripped her apart in front of everybody college kid yeah from California well I'm very interested in situations that change with sharks like Reunion for example in the Indian Ocean off of Madagascar used to be a surfing hotspot and they had a bull shark problem where the 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 now how does this make any sense are not apex predators because orcas will 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 Dix of the deep because there's such [ __ ] I didn't know that there Was a

recorded byte of anyone in the while I thought it was all in captivity no there's a certain there was a surfer who got a bite really yeah but you know on the other hand how are you gonna 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 a orca wanted to kill you and you're in the water that's like if you let an ant go okay but why of

orcas 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 Joe yeah let's try because we've got well first of all what [ __ ] are we that we have those goddamn things in captivity and a big [ __ ] shout out to Canada because Canada mostly probably through the noise that my friend Phil DeMars has created in trying to get Marine land 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 kind of slavery they're almost us they're like a cross between us and wolves in English 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 you there's thinking happening they're like really complex highly a little

thinking well am i right that they have menopause like they're the only that essentially the only other species with menopause mm-hmm and you're only going to get menopause likely if females are contributing some sort of like intellectual labor past their Reproductive horizon wait because well I thought menopause was just a shift in the hormonal balance well 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 in particular can breed deep into their old old age well if

you have a resource that's limiting you'd be better off for in terms of systems of selective Pressures of shifting something that is continuing past that point you know this is the old point of it I think it was Henry Ford who used to go to the the dump to see what broke down on the cars and what was still working mm-hmm he would transfer materials and resources from things that were dependably found to work to the things that would be the limiting feature that would break so that the the cars would all break down sort

of uniformly at the end and you see This like with salmon or salmon disintegrate because it's a discretized discretized reproductive strategies no Salmons gonna make another run mm-hmm so you might as well go out in a blaze of glory right yeah that's interesting um 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 in the asterisk yeah and that the Strategy that the female dolphins have acquired to mitigate that is that they become

[ __ ] 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 as many males as she can yeah so that way she's protected and 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 they 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 and you know if she's carrying around cubs the male will try to kill and eat the cubs to force her back in estrus 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 killer whales are of course dolphins yes there are type of dolphin so you know the the issue is you know I think about white why do we not get attacked it's like a professional courtesy [ __ ] recognized absolutely

I don't know man but every time I go to Hawaii we we swim with either not swim with dolphins or 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 it's 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 it's pushing the water they just sort of It like helps them along almost like reverse drafting like 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 that they're they're an incredible little animal I mean it's so here it goes see that's us in the boat it's way cool yeah in a while just wild I mean wild [ __ ] dolphins middle of the ocean they don't know you you

could be an [ __ ] they trust you enough to try to get our technology Joe they want the boats I don't think so you don't think so you think we're do that [ __ ] they're laughing Harry hey well this we can do this can you yeah they don't have to carry anything we were carrying everything by ourselves we're almost useless naked useless we have to have clothes you have to carry the clothes you have to have shoes you got a that's how we roll man we're extended phenotype Guys yes do they think we're

fools they think we're yeah they're out there with free food they don't worry about carrying credit cards Bitcoin all that nonsense they're out there in the ocean just a bit they have a Bitcoin things coin to the d-pad I don't think they do I think they're probably pretty pissed they've killed all the fish though yeah I think that they're actually oh you know the orcas figured out how to use our Fisher's our fishing boats and just wait for us to get stuff on the line and then they're like it's evil thank you for organizing my

dinner yeah well some orcas are not that smart because they're not adapting like there's a particulars I conduct Amman oh yeah and they're trying to figure out a way because the sama populations massively depleted due to a bunch of different factors including they put Dams up and they've done a bunch of stupid [ __ ] 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 is 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 chinook salmon so they're [ __ ] literally starving to death you know I think they read this book on fixed versus growth mindset in the transit or transient pods like hey every day is a new day we could do something

different the other one saying no I'm kind of a creature of habit you know there may be the salmon They're coming back they just have a very specific diet that they just won't deviate from which I I find to be really weird what is it that pods missing right now cuz I probably all dead they haven't they haven't been seen in over three weeks which is the longest they have been gone for Oh washington's resident orcas go missing oh yeah I remember that like no new babies had been born in the Puget Sound and I

hope um I hope they're not dead and that's horrible I don't Know it's just sad because they can't figure out a way how to teach them to eat marine animals 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 chinook salmon and reintroduce them to that area but then again you know you know so like how do you how 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 do you do do you tell them put it back it's for the Orca mmm yeah Joey I don't have any actual expertise in this area me neither I'm just talking well you know we went down to a Hearst Castle and there's this elephant seal colony there and my family decided that this is the worst species ever of mammal Alif and 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 who are

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 Bulls just Trampled them on their way to fights 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 whole thing if

you transpose like human if you answered from horrifies 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 then 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 cuz 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 [ __ ] up enough they're all dead but there might be you know

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 just laying there oh they're not dead they're just chillin oh yeah they're showing well you've seen When orcas do Beach themselves to get those things right it's yeah well I mean that they that it's right on the edge they Hydra the hydroplane Honda and then they waddle back in look I was like scratched up they are from the ground and everything it's a weird-looking animal too what a weird [

__ ] thing that is William Randolph Hearst was a real piece of [ __ ] he really was you know he's the reason why we have wild pigs in California that [ __ ] imported wild boars and released him on his property syndrome oh 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 really I look up and there's a herd of wild zebras what hearst castle has closed 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 [ __ ] up are you Serious I have won the Joe Rogan experience I finally told you something you don't know anything about specially about invasive wildlife yeah that's crazy so zebras in California that change your mind a little bit one mr. Hearst no he's a piece of [ __ ] all right he's 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

stoners 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 cannabis was made for hemp yes I did that all that stuff is

made from hemp it's far superior to cotton far superior in terms of strength in terms of its durability cousins jute I don't know what Jude is Jude is what burlap bags like oh yeah that's okay no hemp is a alien plant it's the hemp if you had a piece of hemp Like the stalk of hemp and you cut it into boards like this table yeah that it would be as hard as this oak but as light as balsa wood it's incredibly strange i I've seen these like the actual stalk 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 acid one don't ban it oh it's my [ __ ] amazing amazing plant alright but anyway they came out with his décor Decatur and the decor Decatur because the 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 notice so popular science magazine in see if you could find to cover this in like the nineteen nineteen thirties had a cover said hemp the new billion-dollar crop and because they had this decor Decatur right so we Randolph Hearst on top of having Hearst publications right he also had paper mills because you know he had to he wanted to make his own paper so we had these forests and he had paper and he 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 um so William Randolph Hearst would have had to have shift over because hemp paper and if you ever played with it no it's incredibly durable it's crazy it's a it's hard to tear it's really [ __ ] strong like it's a [ __ ] alien plant there's nothing like it It's so weird like you see a piece

of pay everything oh look at this light piece of paper to tear it no no [ __ ] really durable so they were saying this was gonna replace all paper that's made out of wood and William Randolph Hearst is like slowly roll [ __ ] 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 repurposed this name and called it this this plant called this marijuana I gives this gigantic conspiracy so that this [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] could save money alright that's really what it was because he had access he was like the YouTube and the Google of you know You belong with those 1930 he did blows he had access he was the one who you 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 [ __ ] all that stuff was all about economics the whole thing was about economics American farmers are promised a new cash crop with an annual value of several hundred million dollars all because of a machine has been invented which solves problems more than Six thousand 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 [ __ ] labor [ __ ] labor wow what does that mean I don't even know

what that means let's not talk about it 2008 means no no it'll provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land so this was all in February 1938 they thought they Were gonna they were gonna change the world with this [ __ ] and then you had all these people that were a part of the whole prohibition for alcohol they just shifted those [ __ ] over to him I mean think about 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 a bunch of people from the Bush administration that we're really into banning certain drugs and you still have Them hanging around you know a lot that [ __ ] that was the Attorney General for a while with the Foxes named that little weasel the little weasel the Trump got rid of sessions that piece of [ __ ] that guy same thing same thing these little weasel but for good people don't smoke marijuana don't you you know he's a Viper he's a Viper is that what they used to call people

who smoked weed back in the yeah he's not smoking weed well that Look anytime I see somebody's really against homosexuality I said a clock yeah right yeah and yeah you have to ask yourself who in the modern era like I found it astounding that when Elon came on this program and had a blonde that like it was an issue yeah and can you imagine if like Elon it had a glass of chardonnay well he did yeah I know but the just the fact that our language and our thought process around 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 3 that you find were most informative in terms of self-revelation changing your understanding for the better etc I was astounded that of the people who seemed to be very Knowledgeable about mind-altering substances almost everyone put cannabis in the top 3 why because so why would

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 ketamine somebody else would say you know LSD or DMT or ayahuasca but the common thread throughout all of these people who were many of them were researchers was that they felt that Cannabis was miraculous substance well it's certainly well the deal is it has two different forms right as a smokeable form which you know you can get really [ __ ] 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 actors there's something called eleven hydroxy metabolites that it's only present when you eat it I say it's processed by the liver there's something called the One-pass and when it goes through the liver it produces this eleven 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 think oh my god this isn't pot something's in there well it's just the

11 hydroxy metabolite that's what it is it's known about it yeah it's way different it's way different like that's why it's Confusing to people like oh I can't [ __ ] with edibles it's a different drug it's 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 [ __ ] weird body a high and interdimensional relationship is it better worse it's more interesting well for the tank its bueno it's the best for the isolation tank that's my favorite

my favorite is a good stiff dose of Inedible of an edible and then you know wait about 45 minutes then get in the tank so there's 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 100 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 you're 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 [ __ ] unrelated 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 psyche like the the 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 you 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 vision and interpretation and just creativity like well how much of this is your imagination how much this is not well you when you add any sort of psychedelic to that tank experience everything gets 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 and how much experience you have with the tank not much how many times have you done it but I've been in once yeah it was when I was a teenager ha man you Should have won all right I should it's just a great way to relax - it's a great way and you as a mathematician you think of things in your conten you 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 help most helpful for look at when I get out there I get way the hell out there So you like an ambient level of distraction sometimes for example I'll go to an all-night cafe and like 2:00 in the morning and they'll be oh just enough human I mean I have very ambiguous feelings about humans don't worry I'll consider you one what are you what do you consider yourself we'll talk about this one okay yeah no

I really think that in many ways I've left this planet real 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 it where 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 to 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 you do you find that that stimulates thinking well it depends I mean if I'm in a stimulating conversation I'm very present hmm if I'm at 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're all do it you experiment with people well sure like you like say something to someone see if they bite well you know it's like let's let's imagine for example you were gonna move to Austin okay are you gonna just be the same old you you're not gonna 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 don't like that I like that with you with your crazy hair yeah you with some yellow aviators and don't even address it don't go in public yeah where I'm indoors oh but if I do any sort of alter is like maybe maybe I've never seen what what I look like with a bald head so if I were Done [ __ ] yeah if I was gonna move cities when's the best time to try it try something new 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 want to experiment change like what is it that I could continue to do to grow and if you can't play an experiment like maybe you know imagine you wanted to you wanted to Go by Joseph I'm just to see whether it worked mmm 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 habitually their audience for change and so the idea is that every time you 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 and I just had 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 danger is that if you Think about like your output somebody will 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 pretending and if you say I don't think that way anymore People don't want to accept that they will because it's a disingenuous conversation they're not really trying to find out what you think they're trying to get you you know it's more interesting for example there's been a ton of pressure we can get to this in a second - for me to address the question of the IDW is it still alive is it the national dork web yes I was the intentional dirt dirt bag with the let's come back

to that when cher did this Remake of I got you babe with beavis and butt-head she took this remember cuz she had this duet with Sonny Bono and then she got into a bad thing with Sonny and so she said I'm gonna rerecord the song and I'm just gonna torch it right now the problem is somebody had that as their wedding song right Eve uh some but hood no no this is the way yeah oh I mean somebody probably did with beavis and butt-head but yeah there's some point they don't care people from Florida okay

that one all right that's Florida man is the problem when you change things is that other people Wed themselves to where you were so when you pull up and 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 anybody who sort of invested in that version of you and integrated that into their law Is now angry they're upset mmm wait a minute you pulled the rug out from under me and so right

you know in part with what 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 gonna do something totally different from time to time I like the Idea of doing things or just do it just do it yeah don't try to explain yourself cons love it they didn't explain themselves right they just they did

it in a clear enough way that people could understand the pattern and so you know for example and 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 sane 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 way yeah 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 and try to see the way other people open-hearted and not not trying to destroy each other right 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 refused to actually

say what it was or who was 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 way there's a clubhouse we just don't tell the members where it is because there's an article about the IDW that doesn't mention me I'm like yes yeah yeah I'm slipping away but well I do like Pacino and three always gonna brag you back it's uh but there are

there's been some discussion about certain members and certain people that Are losing their [ __ ] 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 or just celebrity in general which I think part of the culprit is especially if you're reading comments and articles that are written about you which I do not recommend if you are doing that and doing that don't do that if you're doing that you are subject to A massive amount of pressure yeah it's 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 and you're thinking or maybe this could help you or maybe this is an issue and then you realize that and yourself 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 no I reasons I read my comments is because I want to know what Russia's thinking I'm not kidding listen to me Joe here we go that's good either ever well for sure and we went we talked about this recently let me just say this before you get going yeah we knew that 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 were putting a bunch of illegal [ __ ] up there and I was

kind of responsible for then a few issues came up where I was like oh Jesus I'm gonna I'm gonna get in real trouble we had an influx and by an influx I mean thousands and thousands of Russian emails signing up from my message board I mean thousands with really similar email addresses and they would post and pretend they're from [ __ ] Cleveland or post and be mad that we don't have enough Nazis or whatever the [ __ ] it would be you know right it would just be the same thing that the IRA was

doing the internet research agency was dealing with Facebook and Google into it we were seeing this like four or five years ago that this stuff was kind of happening where they were recognizing that there's these large portals of discussion and so they were trying to manipulate that 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 I think somebody's like putting real money into that account to create a fake person who just dog dog idli 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 on schizophrenia that really is really interested in Eric Weinstock a couple times I've tried to like

talk to the person and suddenly that the thing vanishes it's like you're so disgusting I would never talk to you it's like goodbye click well maybe they just panicked could be just a person well that's the thing we we you never know on the other hand that 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 there were all slightly different versions of the joke and all of the accounts were like striking it's 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 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 you know if you don't if you

don't Address this situation I'm done following 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 had been blind him and confuse him mmm and this you know this is this guy Sam cedar

who do you 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 harass well dunk drag I hate this language I just get honking I like the word dunk oh really yeah that's fun no I'm not I'm not a fan No no no because it's just it 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 [ __ ] 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 it comes up on this show like you know we were talking before we

were gonna go on there where we and talk about Mike come on let's just talk yeah and so when you do that come on let's just talk thing yeah you never know what the [ __ ] is gonna come up and you might have a piss poorly formed idea of what a subject is if you just I ramble yeah that's what I've done my two previous Yeah well no you're not but it seems you know it's easy to think that you did that 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 wasn't even noticing see that's the 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 all the years you 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 what was I too harsh with that guy like when I went on with Jordan Peterson 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 is that I probably was intuitive that I had to be more forceful A lot of the comments said Wow Eric I haven't really seen you this aggressive was 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 reliever 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 to lock in on Bob Lazar right I wanted to get all my feed but I want to find out is this guy full of [ __ ] what I want to I want to lock in with them and well there's another one and also and also there's 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 Gonna work and when one of 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 something even with three great friends I have this issue I mean it's just seen great stuff with multiple people on your show and I've seen 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 any [ __ ] on each other we share on each other and it's friggin important to how we do business and increasing Lee I have this idea that I need that in my life well we have to check each other to see if each other's taking each other seriously you have 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 of jokes at my expense on that there were a couple of 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 yeah then with me and him out pretty

cool podcast we've known each other forever we've been best friends since 1994 is that right yeah I mean cuz that guy's smart I love him so much that I broke up with this girl and uh 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 [ __ ] you and he's just like me high six Brian on my ex-girlfriend and he [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] friend came inside me and I was like well did you tell him that you're on the pill she was 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 it's girlfriend call you up mad because your friend ejaculated inside of her it was one of them uh hung up the phone I literally fell to the ground laughing I was lying

on my back on the floor of my house like it's just so ridiculous as Bryan Callen Frank how's everybody so I called him up I said you what happened and he's like whoops it was just such a ridiculous conversation but I've been friends with That guy forever so all of our conversations are like that I said all of our conversations are like jokes and hazing and [ __ ] on each other but it's all hugs and love I mean I'm so positive and generous and you know one funny thing I was looking at his Instagram

and he's seated next to I know it I can't remember was it cheetah wild yeah and he's talking about how he who's next with it I like to get up in the morning perhaps we will hug Together I smell antelope nearby just like he's cloudy there's a real cheetah yeah but the cheetahs are interesting then you can actually pet them it's weird I think there's like it was a game reserve I see like uh one of those like so far no no no no 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 you can 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 sheiks like rich guys in the Middle East they'll be driving around and they're [ __ ] AMG wagons with a cheetah next to them a cheetah on a leash and the Cheetahs just cool with it see nobody nobody nobody is that with Hippos I think if

you wanted to go next level yeah that wouldn't work out hippos just decided to [ __ ] you up yeah what is with us in the hippos hippos are like they're our cousin two pigs and they're right yeah they're a ruthless [ __ ] animal oh now I see it they don't play any games yeah and for vegetarians it's not even like that we're their food they are vegetarians but do you eat meat I know the kid well sewed up dear You know deer and cows they'll eat birds we're not going back into that vampire

deer thing they've known on freaked me out last time but deer 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 most 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 herbivores Digestive tract but notice they'll eat a bird there's a lot of video well idea I guess I've been really fascinated by the number of species in

which some human like totally deadly species where some human has decided I'm gonna dedicate my life to hanging out and not getting eaten hyenas there's some [ __ ] that is I mean he's 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 vania that's your system hey that is an animal that bites so [ __ ] hard they have they have like one of the strongest bites ever measured because they're 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 they're their whole face is designed to smash bones yeah and you know they're their [ __ ] roots see Here's the guy he's hanging out with his hyenas he plays with them look at this [ __ ] but stay there playing with them there yeah they seem to think he's like their 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 it's lady read his face I do not know I do not know because I think a lot of these have to do with him pretty oh yeah For sure yeah well that was the thing with my friend Phil DeMars who worked at Marineland one of the reasons why he's so furious at diamonds because he's got a walrus named smooshing and the walrus imprinted with him when it was really young walrus thinks that's his mom okay that he's rather the walrus his mom you know so he's just on this

[ __ ] furious quest to get this walrus released and to shut down this [ __ ] known as marine land yeah he's been sued Forever he's been involved in lawsuits as long as I've known them 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 turned the tide right where people got a chance to see what Orca captivity is really like and they're like holy Sh this is horrific

it is absolutely barbaric but um anyway his uh that's that's uh his this walrus Come from him he gave me that that's cool that yeah that sits there for fill that sits on the desk for Phil who is the Hall of Fame here in the desk is there a camera over there oh this is just so these are all little little little statuettes from the company called plastisol uh-huh and plastisol is how do you say Fong's name farm Tran he's an amazing artist who's created all of these little little little figurines this is Rory MacDonald

who's a elite UFC Fighter Bruce Lee notorious b.i.g 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 dozen rich rebuilds he's got this really dope really dope website or YouTube channel where he he's the only guy that I know of that's ever rebuilt a Tesla he bought a wrecked Tesla uh 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 and electric vehicles outside of their ecosystem so he's doing it on his own like an independent Muslim Massachusetts you think he's gonna hybridize with Boston Dynamics no he's an independent guy that would be cool he's not how do you say his last name Benoit right it's been naught it looks like binoy but it's Benoit very cool guy he was on the podcast recently hey what happened would we know about the Kanye situation we're just gonna 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 don't he's he's a he's a something he is a brilliant artist but oftentimes a brilliant artist it's 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 maybe although I found you know I spent two days with them and I found that when he's in a relaxed frame mm-hmm his flow state is just it's beautiful well I enjoy talking to him I talk

to him on the phone I really enjoyed our conversation we had a nice conversation he said I think he's a very good dude very sensitive human yeah 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 if [ __ ] people's head up really because the illusion that I have is it's just you and me talking and then I come out of here and people what'd you say 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 would have to be friends with that's one of the things he wanted me to come to his church you know he's got These running occult essentially everybody's wearing white they're all dance and doing religious stuff I'd do that yeah so you're busy yes your family 38 Sunday's are fairly well I've run 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 crippled alert yet across from Long Beach

said you know Kanye you better stay in Calabasas it was like a little bit of a tense situation we're walking along the road and like people were hanging out of the windows of their car you like Kanye and I think was just like posit you know like right make contact but it was very disconcerting and this guy was preternatural II call you know who's just like mmm-hmm I was nervous how long goes this this was you remember when II went on TMZ well the we talking a year or less yeah I think is probably a

year Ago it's probably medicated not anymore was that 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 [ __ ] with him creatively well you remember Oliver Sacks had this chapter and the man who mistook his wife for a hat about a drummer with Tourette's syndrome no and then he just took a drug to control the Tourette's syndrome and the guy's 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 churning out more great [ __ ] he doesn't have any flops I mean his music is pretty [ __ ] amazing and he's just that's his [ __ ] 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 he's got he is explore and wanting 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 just well 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 gonna mine 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 he's got a level of internal access I I'm actually quite interested in the mental health

aspect of this which is there's so much so much mental unhealth as we as we term it mm-hmm 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 in health yeah well we require people to stay inside these rigid boundaries and these rigid boundaries they're they're great if you want to show up at a job and work 9:00 to 5:00 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 at true outliers if you want to discuss true outliers like people that are really capable of producing Extraordinary art or architecture or works you know different interesting things that are part of the creative process those people are all unwell every single one of them I mean in terms of like if you made them 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 bringing

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 after you 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 Is it is called the poor the portal yeah hmm so the portal is refers to this this very interesting thing that I 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 an sort of grayscale black-and-white all that and then she lands in Oz and they opened the door in 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 movie I believe so and so ah 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 any what is that from mm Norton Juster

was the author and Jules Feiffer was did illustrations it was just this brilliant book where there's like the land of letters and 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 reached the ground and there's a numbers mine and he has to rescue the princesses 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 I think 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 huh at the end of the adventure the tollbooth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs you know and so my question was always why 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 no there is a church in Barcelona Spain which is plenty impressive from the outside when you go inside I've been looking pictures of it my entire life called la Sagrada Familia it is a psychedelic drug trip and a half like you've never seen it is the most bizarre interior space I have 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 Gaudi now Gaudi is very famous he did a lot of buildings around Barcelona there is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet and Wow [ __ ] that's beautiful and if you look up at the roof and like you know most things you're sort of prepared for them your whole life and then you see it 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 if he never did the inside of this church he would be a very famous an idiosyncratic architect Wow but they do him work on three they haven't finished it and 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's smart enough

to finish this church Wow look at the roof on that okay now that is a portal rather 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 At 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 in particular but the class

called a principle 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 the 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 just oh thank you for that that guy was on drugs that guy was he was drunk yeah well that's you

know remember that's what Dali said somebody said dolly do you take drugs he said I am drew 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 no this is actually an illustration that sits above our sink out there a guy who has tumor in his pituitary or his knots pituitary gland his what is the one that the one that they think produces DMT what the [ __ ] is it called not the pituitary gland

no pineal Pine Anna thank you he has a tumor thank you tumor in his pineal gland and so he he accesses these states all the time so This guy has it's a hundred percent DMT inspired artwork I mean if you look at it that's like what you see when you do DMT trips it's like it's a version you know in the in his style of art but you you can see the the you can see the signature yes 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 [ __ ] 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's super DMT like that's amazing I mean that's a thing a trip to mean type experience 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 along those lines and so if you think about psychoactive chemicals 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 and the rabbit hole 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 in 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 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 judgement 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 gonna put it back in well you know if I were to start talking about the octo nians 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 octo no 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 you were tortured once with in high school maybe during some kind of a trip a friend of you

mentioned 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 octo nians and the Arcturians are so weird that mathematicians don't even Really understand why they're there that's a knock Tony on that thing well my guess is that that's probably back to the root lettuce a v8 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 two I probably know more about The octo nians than most mathematicians if I got to the end of all of my knowledge of the Arcturians 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 100 percent rock-solid it provides so much mystery and meaning and invitation to adventure like if you 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're 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 let's take an 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 videogames 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 or 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 all of that good stuff that you read about in physics so in essence the the octo nians are a system where ijk keeps going

effectively through elemental PQR 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 like you know multiplication is associative and you think well what is An associative right so if I you know if you 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 it's commutative as to which order you did it but if you put on your underwear in a different order then you put on your pants that'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 you know Elementary mathematics is associative series like why do I learn about associative a I've never met anything that isn't associative well the octo nyan thing associate a number system that is responsible for most of the platypi of mathematics if you all 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 there I construct them for you but they generate so much bizarreness in some sort of abstract space how would they recognize like how 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 they're 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 octo nians 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 and by the time you get to the octo nians you're exhausted this is giving them a magical power well like for example it's very hard to think about the square root negative one so like what does it mean for something squared to be negative all 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 Act onehans you've given everything away there's no way you're gonna build the next system okay but yet It's real yes yet it's real in in us 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 gonna say that it's God I'm not gonna say that it's logic or design but it's a more complex it's some 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 like Played with do you know about C elegans no all right CLU C elegans C letter uh-huh elegans and L again elegans I think it's okay 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 guest 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 gonna track where every goddamn cell like bring up Jamie if I could ask you something to bring up the cell lineage diagram for C elegans so this would 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 the [ __ ] am i look in there 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 thirty 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 local motion 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 falling apart for a moment for the folks that are following at home listening just listening not watching what we're looking at Jamie explained how someone could see this image if they want to give themselves the letter C it's not not see Like the ocean C elegans and then that cell lineage it looks like

a really long basketball bracket yeah pushed out forever that's a good way to describe it yeah so it's [ __ ] wild yeah talk about March Madness it just doesn't stop if we could bring up the wiring diagram or adjacency matrix yeah let's see elegans wire orient it all right yeah perfect that is a complete map of the 300 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 10 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 I'm sure it's probably possible but do you think in our lifetime we'll 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 mmm we've got it boxed in and 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 you're eight years yeah well what did what a genius this guy Sydney Brenner was for choosing this organism mm-hmm right because this organism is the Simplest place to look at complex life mmm this image of the reconstructed biological neural networks what 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 it's not gonna 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 gonna sit around asking well do you believe that you know aliens talk to the 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 war 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 did the design and logic yeah 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 succeeded 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 Cambodia hmm yeah serious I and you keep that stuff out of my lab I mean if you watch your war stuff yes really what I'm animated by is get your [ __ ] social engineering out of my laboratory

you've got ten 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 that we just want to have sensible discussions it's you're coming after core reality and 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 a university in

which the [ __ ] departments do not invade the departments that are actually doing the super important work we're lost and there is a distinction I mean this distinction needs to be made there 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 well raise the eyebrows yeah one eyebrow isn't that like a genetic thing like you can curl your tongue like yeah I could yeah some people can't

do that a prime trade over we mean turn up some no no I can't do that all right you got one thing I got another okay this is very mature Joe yeah um a little bit what is it going on here um put signal 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 some thing 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 listen to some of the discussions about well just take these hoaxes about you know somebody has submitted Parts of mine comp to it you know as with Jews rewritten as men people right now those two subjects are taking place in the same institution mm-hmm one is incredibly rigorous in demanding and completely unforgiving and the other thing is just like frivolous and nonsense 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 the real problem is the motivation for doing it in the first place well the real motivation may be 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 think you know like nature's a community anymore the forest is a bunch of different organisms all

working together No it's read of tooth and claw everything that you think about universe that is purely beautiful an 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 unjustice in the world and inequality 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 right that's going on here then on the other hand you've got this stuff yeah these hard sciences that demand just wriggle is 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 and they're unforgiving unforgiving yeah there's just they're two totally different Things and 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 all not a half 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 well 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 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 we 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 got three white guys in here there's Jamie you and me sake speak to yourself I'm 1.6 percent African I did recognize that I knew who was good I knew he was gonna play that card but you sir can pass his 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 Cambodia in here is that that we're really anti Cambodian if you carry that

Guilt you're always worried that you have to be able to prove that you're inclusive it 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 threat 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 I'm also trying to engineer a world where there are more women in science how are you doing that by trying to figure out what is it that's 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 that 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 an enormous

flight of stairs on a skateboard and he just nailed the landing and it's just a that's a thing of art and then it shows you 150 attempts where this guy just abused his body and you know 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 in order to nail that trick and he's actually one of the world's falling champions right mm-hmm 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 I would be appalled if my son did that I'd be furious with it 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 agreed 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 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 also biologically Bennet that's been proven in studies but I'm trying to make it a different point right okay to me what I'm trying to say is I made a mistake years ago I think of engaging and answering this point which is you Know let's it let's take piano competitions why our piano competitions historically disproportionately you know let's say entered in won by Russians or chess or who knows what well 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 it's not 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 jujitsu 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 thing That's true we can make him better than he was yeah we need daily stem cells we're gonna we're gonna have to do some real we're gonna take a chance on cancer and all sorts of other diseases bright we can we can achieve some things okay but the previous conversation that we're young that you need to develop you need to develop it needs to be a part of your well here's the thing that

I would say about striking sports right striking Sports are probably one of the more interesting ones in that when you start out at an early age your body develops learning a strike when it's a gigantic advantage over someone who learns once they're there past puberty when you get someone who's learning how to strike and they're in their 20s 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 Oh I didn't understand if you it's not

free you know it's like a very it's a very expensive got this your left arm and you got a 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 don't you think That along the way you have to kind of address that the culture wars are a

thing try to figure out why they're a 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 cult 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 d'amour issue right for you this is a great example publicly ok but my wife went on Dave Rubens show and she you know look this is a woman who brought techniques of gauge field theory into economics so she's she's no slouch when it comes to analytic thinking she's a mage field Theory similar to gauge symmetry that gauge Theory ok just call it gauge Theory and she wasn't she wasn't doing she wasn't doing quantum theory but she was taking she she her thesis brought techniques of bundle theory like the hopf

fibration that we had and showed the economics without any alteration was a mature geometric system and engaged theoretic idiom so I didn't S&E we collaborated on on showing that you can't accommodate changing preferences In economics without gauge Theory so that was kind of pretty amazing it was really great great fun the she 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 the collaboration we were doing which was you know she she and I Came from two different worlds and we found this bridge between them so she went in 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 necessarily and that should but when she said it on Dave Rubin show didn't register anywhere then date then James d'amour said it and like the world freaks how'd Brier if that's also because he said it within the

Environment of Google he just wasn't on the podcast if he just said 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 you would have created it was also Spector mean it was the fact that and the fact that you can get paid for these you know these weird sort of spectrum II 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 I you know I've 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 cause a flurry of activity and if a if a person says that who's not suspected of trying to keep women out of something like my Point is I want a much more equal world but we 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 in kin 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 or

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 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 interests

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 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 in my 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 a's and stem subjects a lot of the men

are 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 if you let women in in pairs maybe they're gonna 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 every that's it it's a feature where financial privilege actually enabled somebody to stay in science so you know the issue isn't a

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 gonna 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 a couple things one I think that certain positions became like the the failing business of traditional Media meant that it you couldn't actually employ people at the same level that you could employ them before so a lot of people who didn't have huge opportunity costs entered journalism was a huge opportunity 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 $150,000 a year

job and ideology isn't a large part of the offer only the ideological people are gonna Give up $100,000 a year for the privilege of activism hmm 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 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

and the Millennials just don't even see a path through you know standard careers nobody's putting a a glass of scotch and their hand in 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 we create safe space right and you coddle yeah and you make you mean all these pieces are in places many many moving parts right and I think all these little pieces are in place where where we also have these massive echo chambers because of social media we have these people that you know They find ideologically similar heat beings and they bounce off of each other but these were all real problems like I have an intersex friend I was eating somebody whose

indeterminate between male and female physiologically so okay let's imagine that they have it some karyotype XY profile right and that the developmental process did not produce unambiguous genitalia okay okay is that a hermaphrodite okay just in ourselves okay this is a Person I think of pretty terrific and I look at all the forms that say male/female and I just you know my heart sinks like we're not even in trans here we're talking about somebody whose biological card that they were dealt 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 at an increased risk of suicide and it breaks my heart and 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's some tiny percentage of the population which is not vanishingly small it's just not large is neither unambiguously male and female in terms of genotype phenotype concordance we will do most of the work necessary to take care of our transfer so

we're suffering too 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 you know 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 I and I give this example of like kilts and loonies from Scotland in India our 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 we if you know if we used intersex as the test case to break them 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 malaria inducts syndrome so I'm phenotypically on the outside male and I go to my doctor he says hey you've got a uterus what yeah 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 it's a weird Situation maybe the idea is we're talking about extremely rare circumstances does that really define it as being oppressive like what like what is for for a friend of mine who is in neither situation yeah it's oppressive but I

mean is it a present 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 Like most people recognize as being able to walk if there was no category called dis disabled right okay like or 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 alright 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 mm-hmm but it's another thing to hard code hard code where are you talking about Java yes forms yeah the Federals are making a form there's a binary it says male or female alright 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 well you have to Let me

define motion or female emotionally emotionally I think this is oppression oppression yeah 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 it's sort of most part they're just trying to figure out what's what for their statistics yeah 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 I there's no society is so conservative that they've sorted the world into male and female you know the famous example of in Iran 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 it's now 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 gay man 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 this but yeah and there are all sorts of you know 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 oppresses that many people but I believe that it's an important oppression that we have to realize that we hard-coded And that's what generated

a lot of the feelings before we get to trans you can simply say from the position of intersex that the world is a richer place than male and female and people say oh it six six versus XY is like no it isn't it just isn't it for the most part is it for the most part it is so in terms of it is a it has been an edge case to deal with but that edge case is important to me right does the edge case are they are human beings that are not only then I

Actually okay I like people who are outside of the norms I think that 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 in edge cases so to get back to the civil 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 grievin studies a lot of these gender studies or sentiment if they interfere with hard science which you Are getting particularly the evolutionary biology you're getting a lot of interference you got it right and you're not interested in that but that does not mean that you're an insensitive person that's on it shouldn't he was not interested in the disruption

of the the the acquiring of data and the analysis of said data I don't think that activism makes for good advancement well I think is also a problem with who's the activist was it and what what age you're Talking about and how idealistic these people are and what how are they 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 what's what's significant about the right but my disagreement let'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 a fish Aryan equivalents 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 and an intellectually depending in equal numbers and in an in a demanding occupation so you'd start saying huh if I already assume 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 about is of this is 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 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-code like it's Sean Carroll I think just had a podcast in which he said something to the effect of well on the IDW has kind of been too interested in race and 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 of the skin 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 in some finding that says that one group is Smarter and other groups are not as smart do I believe that IQ equal smartness 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 fare less well in terms of IQ demonstrate actual intellectual dominance this is some rich weird area I've never cared about before 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 same or 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 interesting how is discussed it before but he discussed it with someone who was studying I don't think Sam cared I think so I felt that he had Sam felt that charles murray had been railroaded yeah 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 Ezra Klein 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 just a 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 deeply polarizing I think I'll curve the whole idea about being able

to recognize the differences in jetan and race and IQ it's like it's a very contentious Subject both analysts of all I mean look I have to admit that I don't score that well on certain tests so I have it built in total skepticism of IQ tests SAT test a CT 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 never met someone who has a really a 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 intelligent people that met might not score well on SAT test but they're capable of producing amazing stuff whether it's literature comedy whatever whatever it is movies they can make things they can do things they have a genius in their ability and That requires some intelligence like requires some immeasurable - something that you can't put on a

scale well this is about you know I said to Jordan I said Jordan Peterson I said I don't think I have an IQ because the conceit you 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 really surprising tell me something of the various forms of intelligence is one of

the things that you call intelligence processing yes yes process is 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 as 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 is it 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 it 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 don't even thinking you're just trying to get the word out and even 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 in four feet on it I'm so non-observant like my my handwriting is sent 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 well you know famously mrs. buck euro in first grade sent me out of the class because I said that the spider wasn't an insect because it had eight legs and then she sent you out of class yeah 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 [ __ ] Chernobyl chickens yeah man turn Chernobyl chicken chicken Kiev that's good That's comedy cold

well 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 mark yeah so Charles Murray it is it's hard to say he wrote the bell curve right I 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 the human the 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 which was maybe he's a closet racist then there was facts that will tend to empower people who are actually racist all 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 the real numbers like if you say Nigerians in particular who are incredibly industrious and some of the more successful immigrant groups come Over to America yeah 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 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 tried out the Asian one right that eight 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 one because I think with certain people with certain males let's just go with males they look at african-americans and they see superiority in in certain ways they see superiority athletically artistically

musically you look at the contributions of African Americans culturally across the board in terms of like the real that the Jimi Hendrix those Miles Davis speed of thought and creativity analytic but not just that also athletically like the [ __ ] 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 are just extraordinary or in 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 see

I'm saying okay they're not they're not creating this insane music although there are a few 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 intellectually so I can't be racist I'm pointing out that 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 you're they're pointing out all the things that the African Americans can do that they can't do mm-hmm but

they're saying all but they're intellectually inferior well this is proven I'm not racist I don't want this to be true but it seems to be true I say you see them saying it's like a way of it's a way of suppressing accomplishment right Wow 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 top yeah your topic it's a weird sound but it feels greasy even touching it well but now we

have to write like this I 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 All right like I don't want the data on chess we have an idea of how many grandmasters 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 some amount of music I can guarantee you that both of us have had our ass kicked at some point 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 funk in a competitive situation you know looking over somebody's shoulder on the keyboard and

they're 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 but you know in a way that is really unpleasant is this new thing which is that all imbalances are all structural oppression all 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 aunty Finnish prejudice so we don't think about it right it's just not a it's not a big issue for us now Finnish humor how many Finnish comedians are there no idea right well how many do you run into it The Comedy Store that's a bet it's a bad example because you're dealing with America America in 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 is worried about auntie Finnish behavior we're worried that were prejudiced against certain groups we're worried that were prejudiced against Jews we're 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 Lube richest quality so that what are you really up to over there well why are you looking at

that data set all 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 you're if your idea is that we're gonna 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 who's it affect affected by a disease and that could possibly help fund research help fund preventive measures what if there's a 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 if what about an examining impairment from people who've been injured should we avoid doing that because we don't want to be able 'us do You see what I'm saying not quite 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 it is examining that in some way some sort of prejudiced it should we avoid examining we avoid examining it we might do some damage if we examine it and publish the findings we might do Dude it I mean there's a saying you might do damage to the people that are infected look or Afflick 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 and our history predisposes us to bad behavior now that we're living with each other like we have to start I mean as hippie-dippie as the sound we have to start from a place of love and decency I I'm here I certainly agree but I think that we should avoid reality well that's this is the thing right 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 gonna jump the fire road and it's gonna be as much a heterosexual problem as it was a homosexual problem that turned out not to be true it was an ideological Statement that 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 visibly off from the rest of their body you know we we haven't taken up the challenge of our time which is oK we've got a lot more information than we wanted and we have a lot more ability to analyze it and we know something

about ourselves we know that we have got bigotry is part of Our our makeup and we know that we're not really good at certain ways of integrating information and not you know becoming triumphalist and jerkish about it and taking victory laps as if it's a competition like my group's better than your group right so that's where we're stuck now I want to be struggling with other people or 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 in 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 with social justice is it's not about I don't want a better planet or

a 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 as 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 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 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 as many problems but 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 recognises recognizing as emblematic Rather 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 its 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 in some sort of a weird way weird way and and ideologically believes that an Tifa 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 eating 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 it's ending no no and it's NGO right I treated his silent until somebody could 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 I mean he what I've seen of him yeah what they've 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 of 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 but ganging up on someone punching them hitting them with sticks crowbars all this crazy [ __ ] thinking that it's okay to throw milkshakes at people thinking that this is fine This is nothing if you say what I think this is a horrible precedent to set and it's a terrible it's it's a terrible move if you're playing a game it's a terrible first move because things only escalate they don't deescalate no

one says wow you beat the [ __ ] out of Andy this is a mystery right like what the hell is going on well if 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 worldstar go to WorldStarHipHop calm and watch someone gets hit a bunch of people just jump in and hit them it happens at truck stops and [ __ ] high schools it happens people

get brain damage people dodge each other all the time people who permanent injury when you're seeing in Portland there was one of them where an old guy got hit in the head with a [ __ ] Crowbar right some mask kid because the old guy apparently disagreed or they all disagree on things I don't someone's Desai guesses that the old guy is not exactly as portrayed I believe that the old guy may have been there with a telescoping baton you know that 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 help are people doing supporting right and II know being Beaten up on video so let's stay with him because that's the the best clearest example of someone who's a tiny little gay man he's tiny I mean he represents so many different maligned populations right he's pretty intersectional yes he's Asian he's an immigrant he's an immigrant he's gay is he a Republican I thought he was left of center yeah I'm servant of joy well I've been told I'm a [ __ ]

all right guys 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 for how many people saw the video and we're justifying it saying things like get another hobby these end are the anti-fascists will not stand for you know your your your bigotry and your hate like what are you talk 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 so sudden 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 defines so many people sort of excusing it is really shocking well it's a given that he's also interested clearly intersection like yeah you wouldn't predict this from First principles right no you wouldn't do we 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 and unless you want to give yours first no bad the first thing that we have to understand is that there's a division and I want to lay this out 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 ant Aoife versus proud Boys melee you're willing you you accept that you may get clocked with a bike lock I don't think that's a good 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 life there was me have you seen yes it's [ __ ] cosplay its cosplayer have you

seen the image of the guy who's a suspect looks like he's never worked out a day in his [ __ ] life looks like he's never been outside and I think These people are playing a [ __ ] game we've agreed on yes okay but you are willing so you think you're gonna get into a wily coyote versus the roadrunner kind of a thing where both of them always survive to the next card do you have no idea what they're doing have you ever seen a fight between people that have no idea how to fight

yes yeah okay well I've been one of those okay that stuns me as a martial arts expert it stuns me that people are Willing to participate in that it's like me 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 they're delusional they're supported in their delusion of perspective by the giant numbers of them they all get to get and then then they wear masks which further emphasizes this illusion

that there be joke 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 some level because are you though I think mostly your support are more support I'm not necessarily your gonna 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 to hell okay okay The first believe is 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 I left and left and right so I spend a lot of time focused on the fringes because the fringes have become terrifying and the middle has become cowardly and the whole principle about The whole idea blue 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 and ii know sam harris these are people who've stood up to death threats you know III 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 more 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 but they're violent the violent fringe to their extreme rather than making common cause across 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 it comes in to your laundromat and he kind of plays with your stuff and he says I'd be shame if anything happened to your business and he 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 operating extra judicially after you've gone to the Police over and over again breaks this guy's kneecaps 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 it should be more responsible that have institutional positions that have platforms that they can broadcast are weirdly sympathetic to an Tifa and why Country Club Republicans

are weirdly sympathetic to some of these far-right Groups is is that they view them as this is the dangerous group that's kind of taking care of the problem and 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 and like in my case I view myself as a progressive or at least a liberal I have more in common with a country-club Republican than 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 these sort of proxy groups to handle the problems is saying look we're gonna we're gonna sound an airhorn 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 you're collateral damage and that's on you that's how they see this I think that's Right so in other words I think and Ino is the guy who doesn't

listen to the airhorn Bret Weinstein doesn't listen to the airhorn Jordan Jordan Peterson Sam Harris don't listen to the airhorn know that I think 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 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 organ yes 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 gonna actually stand up to the mob and I'm actually not gonna pay you your goddamn protection money because I'm gonna own a laundromat and this is the United States of America and [ __ ] off that's that's the view that I represent yeah I don't want I don't thank you Auntie if I don't need your help yeah you know what I actually am much more afraid of the far-right and the reason I concentrate my energy on the far left is what are you 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 that you need to worry about it's armed people who come and they're not they're not bringing bike well we're pushing Ordinary human beings to the extremes Yeah right and the thing that I get is 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 their country clubs I have an older model they're 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 they were the ones that laughed about clubbing the baby seals hahaha I just always had this attitude [ __ ] these people right this is mine this is my emotional cadence and we always had this thing where the Democrats were this 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 taken 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 nineteen teens or Twenties

you know we came from pogroms is anybody gonna be paying Jews for the pogroms that am i gonna be get getting Ukrainian reparation let's not be ridiculous what do we want civil war do we just want to open up tear off every band-aid for the purpose of you know trying to make everybody as 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 a 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 gonna do that to my body ever I don't want an

equality of outcome with Jackie Chan if I make some little film and 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 to serve the other I don't want to see science abused 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 and 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 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 maybe that's giving you a little bit too much credit it's not very far off we're doing that we're trying to Stand up

and if people respond and you know you've given me courage to start a podcast I got to tell you I did not want to do this I 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'm late I know while I'm sort of well it's looks oh this is the crazy thing when I 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 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't leave this planet I love this planet I love this Plant 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 the first hydrogen bomb and when we figured out the double helix and I call this the twin nuclei problem and 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 and 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

it 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 it's been surpassed by our intellectual achievements in terms of our technological innovation these things which well 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 a synthetic biology we are now gods but for the wisdom

mmm and that's a great quote we are now gods but for the wisdom should be the meme picture you make sure you know God let's keep all of that that's gonna get you up there someone's Doing this right now I know let's follow that focus okay sorry okay so that started this clock and the world's most serious human beings should be work 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 hundreds probably maybe a few

hundred years tops because sooner or later You're gonna have Boonton like or Trump like people I mean I'm sorry I would have a very deep antipathy towards Donald Trump he's not temperamentally fit to have the secrets of theoretical physics at his fingertips he 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 Alon 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 nothing there Mars is pretty uninteresting to be in 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 Stuart we're still having idiotic climate change debates I mean even if even

if climate science is somewhat junka fired 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 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 pasta we'll places we can go behind three to say nothing of Space Station's because that's not realistic now none of these things make sense so the first place that you have to get to is

were 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 Einstein II and 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 beyond Einstein and that's the thing and I've been most uncomfortable talking about although I've been talking about it more I gave these lectures in 2013 and

in May of 2013 in 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 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 but no please so what is my responsibility in terms of the portal what I'm going

to try to do with this podcast has gained 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 what 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 that went to the physicists from the physicists that you found

Pauling 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 Marcos de Soto 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 this 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 you know it's sort of what happened with Andrew Wiles And Fermat's Last Theorem which was a really interesting story because his first proof of Fermat's Last Theorem 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 it's 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 had sort of husbanded 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 in 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 its it might be safer to go further once you've unlocked once you've unlocked nuclear fusion you're pretty much as screwed as you need to be so then the issue is okay We know that we're

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 I mean like the Freedman robertson-walker space times our signs to me that these equations are incomplete but the big problem with Einstein is that Einsteins Work was 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 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 and 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 then 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 it was the language called Romani in geometry but many years later we found out that Bohr's sort of quantum and Planck's quantum and in Einstein's poem as well was based on a different geometry of the sky charles eres mom was an Alsatian geometers 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 was arguably number one and 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 riemann on whose i work einstein based relativity and charles eres mom with this gauge theoretic stuff that we did and the time before this which in fact empowers particle theory and so when do those two geometries unify its two different geometric theories and well i found that in general they don't unify in a way that You

want you don't have the ability to do Einstein Ian 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 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 in partial 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 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 physicists react and

what was what was disappointing about it so the articles engendered a an immune reaction immune yeah it's an immune response ok ok 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 hits him twice today yeah he's on my mind and his wife wrote 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 Shawn's brain and she writes on physics and then there was this whole thing where the new scientist said ok 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 so it was a sneak attack well of course that wasn't true there there was announcement of the talk I stayed in England and I gave the talk once more and then at a final time a week later and by that point all sorts of people from Cambridge and Oxford

came to the talk because it was a worldwide topic of discussion what the hell's going on and I gave a two-hour 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 no what we wrote wasn't true they did publicize the talk and then there was a an article II 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 and 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 chiral 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 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 it was in the light he wasn't like somebody come up with their own language in their own you know written in crayon and some Indecipherable thing it was 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 no I had 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 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 and 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 mean 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 subclass 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 but there was no explanation of why was so contention so 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 adviser I don't want to name names had given a seminar saying all of gauge theory has been revolutionized old Gauge theory is dead and there's a new gauge theory and it caused on 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 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 gonna 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 that 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 for my money I've been very vocal about this I've written articles and edge title work and I've said theoretical physics is stalled and you've been claiming that you're gonna ship string string theory And since 1984 well where is it and it's always you know n years away now what was the premise of Sean Carroll's wife's article that they got played well Jamie can you bring it up I had broken the rules the rules yeah you're supposed to submit a

paper the paper is supposed to be reviewed it's 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 on House well I don't know I mean if it is a hoax its unclearly not a hoax you're not hoaxing anyone I'm not trying to so I don't understand because the Adyar 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 and every week somebody

writes to you and says I figured out pipette perpetual-motion mm-hmm I have a laser transport device all right and so Everybody is concerned and frightened that their time is going to be wasted by lunatics now I both fit the lunatic profile and don't fit the lunatic profile on the lunatics side I'm outside of the system I haven't kept up I'm not particularly mathematically minded I mean in fact I'm a sort of a be math student from high school so it's kind of a I'm 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 isn't saying 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 it but it's a it's a gamble and the worst thing that can happen is is that I have something that looks like a final theory That turns

out not to be are you gonna write it out it's already mostly written up I'm in a different phase i felt that i got rolld 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 myself 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 Gonna happen did you find it

dear guardian you've been played I love when they use like contemporary slime it's so good so [ __ ] yeah you love a [ __ ] when it's a girl what one 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 an op-ed by Oxford mathematician Marcos Deus how do you say it so - Marcos de Soto a dis so toy gushing over suppose 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 but all these are capital letters that's why I'm saying it this way nevertheless an actual paper yet so physicists can't check all those Hard mathematical details but trust us it's gonna be awesome while that's super [ __ ] ahem you let me say yeah I can say I can say whatever the [ __ ] I want ahem 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 because you know better well it's just the way it's written it's just it's yummy Haddie yeah it's for clear yeah clearly yeah ok but we could go She's playing after 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 that well or you're delusional what's her motivation for writing this article oh that's what's weird well she's a physics look

she she comes from I think she's approached 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 in her eyes that you were entering into this field that you had not written a paper and you had left academia 20 years ago and that she was like this is all nonsense ok I'm gonna put a stop to this nonsense and I'm gonna do it with sort of contempor language and and and slang I don't like the

bitchiness but it's I understand the Motivation mm-hmm look I think the bitchiness is to make the article more entertaining and more it's part of our but was part of her style as a writer okay and I actually met her as she says and I had a very high and positive impression of her so why do you think she wrote this without discussing you know it looked 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 an you know a prominent atheist so he's a complicated guy he's a great explainer he's got his own sort of economic incentives that he's one of the very few people who sort of a voice of 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 at their roles and ever anyone has a sentence that consists of one word and that word is ahem yes I did not enjoy their wrinkle by him but look yeah but she's trying to throw me a bone he's wicked smart he's a nice guy our buddies 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 US who's against high-skilled immigration because people think why should we keep out the

best in the brightest that's complicated story I before the financial crisis I was saying mortgage-backed securities may blow up the world if you 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 remember I said this is the Beginning I get way out there yeah ok I think Elan Munz musk is totally wrong about going to Mars Mars is not going to save us and maybe going to the stars maybe the IAI will follow us there yadda yadda yadda

but I'm not going to take this lying down we're in a desperate situation and if you're not trying here's the here's the clear thing we know what nuclear weapons look like in the fusion air 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 and the power of physics keeps going the power of information all right 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 armor arms against our new sea of troubles we it's time to rush the cockpit we've got to Get Trump out of office we've got a restore sanity to our sense-making we need newspapers we need fact checkers we need 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 supportive after I've called him an existential risk you know and my boss and

good friend Peter Thiel was a supporter of Trump in the last election I'm taking my huge risk in how much I love this guy Peter Thiel 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 Thiel tool well nobody is 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

the 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 that 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 a regular enough player he's gonna accomplish a lot one of the things I said before the Election is is he might be the best and worst of presidents he might get us

a new North Korea deal because they're gonna look at him and say this guy's nuts who knows what he would do but we we the technical community created this problem and we're abdicating our responsibility by worrying about our egos by worrying about our reputations I am advocating 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 now I watch them take credit for things that weren't you know an assigned credit I don't like

the way they work 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 they're 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 it this Decision tree assume it's wrong I 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 two 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 yeah we're kicking the we're kicking the but we need time in the end 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 happened since 1945 at the scale of world war two and so we've got magical thinking between our ears where we it can't happen here you know

this is the thing that makes me so [ __ ] furious about screwing around with Europeans and sovereignty which is Europe is a dangerous place Europe has historically a 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 caldron 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 this 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 and 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 two won't won't look like World War two for 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 artist across for 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 maybe it comes down to you and me maybe we used to spot guests 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 years 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 well I don't know maybe it's egotistical maybe I shouldn't be Talking about this I guarantee you they're gonna be a lot of people in physics departments are gonna be pissed off when this hits yeah but it's your thoughts there's nothing irresponsible 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 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 vetting 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 like 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 liked 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 you have to deal with this you don't wanna say what your location is where you're gonna be you know people react all day long people say can you get me into Joe Rogan can you connect me with Joe Rogan Joe Rogan Joe Rogan Jurgen 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 but my greater fears is is that maybe maybe will 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 org and every year he asked a question to like 200 scientists and finally he got tired about asking the annual question so he said okay is 20 years is enough the last question is what is the final question and Jamie could I ask you to bring up edge 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 undergirds 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 um whether or not the consequences of those steps are ever really full 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 you know never was able to get anybody interested I I went through graduate school on the Office of Naval Research --is

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 is upon you mean really astronomical breakthroughs yeah like we all know what we're waiting to see what what Tim Cook is gonna do for the next iPhone will Elon 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 that's the shittiest location that we can get to yeah it's a bad name the best note location that we can get to it isn't this one well yeah but it's also like we have spots on earth that 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 gonna work I can say it on the show it can generate a little bit of flurry of activity you'll die down within a week we're gonna go back to you know who got milkshake right and we're gonna want to know is Tulsa is Tulsi gaining on Andrew You know what about Biden

can the center hold well the fringe come in but we're just constantly distracted and at least this is going to be entertaining we are at three hours and three oh 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 this is gonna Be an interesting one I mean it really curious to see what kind of blowback this one's gonna 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 it really touched me that when my brother was [ __ ] out of luck You did a bunch of shows with him and helped him get to a safe place 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 Golden Age 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 and so I've used Ellicott neurosurg and I watch the evolution for example of your jokes about professional wrestling being gay right now 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 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 wanted to say thank you for having me back on the program my Pleasure my friend it's always a pleasure thank you all right thank you bye everybody that was [ __ ] up [Applause] [Music] [Music]