In this episode, the boys talk about their favorite movies and TV shows from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. They also talk about how technology has changed the way we think about the past and how important it is to be connected to something that came before it, like the phone, the internet, and the olden days of radio and television. And, of course, there's a special guest appearance from their good friend Joe Pesci. This episode is sponsored by the National Museum of American Jewish History in New York City. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: CROWN10 at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the discount code CROWN15 at checkout. Our ad-free version of the podcast is available on all major podcast directories, including Audible, iTunes, and Podcoin. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast and tell a friend about our podcast! Thank you so much for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! It really does mean a lot to us and we really appreciate it. Cheers, Joe and the crew. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's your favorite movie and TV show from the 70s? 2:30 - Mel Brooks? 3:15 - Who was your favorite TV show? 4:00 5: What kind of movie did you grew up watching the movie you watched as a kid? 6:40 - What was your dad's favorite movie? 7:10 - What is your favorite thing? 8: What do you remember about Mel Brooks's favorite film? 9:20 - How did you think of Mel Brooks s favorite movie growing up? 11:00- What s your favorite part? 12:30- What is the most important thing about your favorite food? 13:30, what s your first movie from a movie from your childhood? 14:00, what would you would you miss the most? 15:40, what are you most important? 16:20, what do you miss most about your parents would you re-memorize? 17:15, what you re going to do in the next episode? 18:40- What are you re most excited about? 19:40
00:01:44.000And the writer's room, I guess, from Sid Caesar's show of shows, was this legendary factory before Saturday Night Live for all of these kind of crazy talents behind the scenes.
00:01:54.000I think he came out of that with Carl Reiner.
00:03:58.000The texting thing, the problem is, it's very interesting how we separated ourselves into this electronic communication world where I will, during the day, be in communication almost constantly with a stream of people.
00:04:16.000The only thing that stops it is a podcast.
00:05:53.000But, you know, in terms of this weird thing about Islands of Time, one of the things that we do is we have Shabbat dinner.
00:05:58.000And every Friday, No matter how atheist and militant people are against any kind of organized religion, they will leave us alone if we say we're going into Shabbat.
00:06:10.000And 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.
00:06:45.000It's so weird that people – I mean, on one hand, I think it's probably a really good idea to just take a break from all that electronic shit and just connect with humans in a very old-school type of way.
00:07:02.000I think it's probably very good for you.
00:07:05.000I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years.
00:07:09.000And we landed in this Orthodox-run hotel and on Friday night everything shut down, you know, like the textbook.
00:07:18.000And I then moved into an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood right on the boundary of a place where the secular and the Orthodox met.
00:07:29.000And 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.
00:07:38.000But it's amazing that this is enforced downtime.
00:07:42.000And about a month in, somebody said, oh, you're in the wrong place.
00:07:46.000Of course you can go out on Friday night.
00:07:47.000You just go to the Russian compound and everything's hopping and you can go dancing and drinking and all these things.
00:07:53.000After 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.
00:08:02.000And so, very weirdly, I appreciated the constraint.
00:08:05.000As soon as I knew you could break the constraint, I was less happy, and I would never actually obey it anymore.
00:08:11.000Yeah, I think having a rigid rule, even though it seems counterintuitive in that it would provide you some freedom by having restrictions, but it does.
00:08:23.000It gives you some freedom like, okay, now we don't have to think about all these other things, so now we have the freedom to just be alone.
00:08:30.000Now we have the freedom to be relaxed.
00:08:32.000Now we have the freedom to just talk to human beings.
00:08:35.000You know, I think constraints, and it's like, you know who Jocko is, Jocko Willink?
00:08:46.000It doesn't seem like that makes sense.
00:08:48.000Like, this motherfucker's 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 a sunrise every morning, goes He goes out and takes photos.
00:09:00.000Takes a photo of his fucking watch at 4.30.
00:09:48.000Well, 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.
00:09:59.000And it's like the drama of there it was.
00:10:18.000There's this story about Jackie O, that she got this cancer diagnosis, and apparently her first words upon finding out that she had metastatic cancer was, then what did I do all those sit-ups for?
00:10:59.000Where the phrase popped into my head, I can see my death from here.
00:11:03.000And it has to do – there's like this weird thing when you hit 40, you start to be able to have analytic thoughts that are uninterrupted by sex.
00:12:37.000There might be a few in there, but not like...
00:12:41.000Somebody's going to screenshot it and they're going to count all the hairs with arrows.
00:12:44.000This is something I've learned when you come on your show, that your audience is so large and active that they will pinpoint every time stamp.
00:12:53.000Yeah, there's a lot of people in cubicles right now wasting their employer's time.
00:13:44.000Okay, this is something I'm totally curious about.
00:13:47.000I don't surf, but 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.
00:14:04.000Well, the big one is that new type of surfboard.
00:14:25.000There's this guy, Kai Lenny, 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.
00:14:41.000I'm just thinking, do you even know what you're doing or where you are?
00:14:45.000He keeps saying this one phrase, which is, I'm just scratching – what blows my mind is I'm just scratching the surface.
00:14:51.000He knows that he's making that discontinuous jump.
00:14:56.000And if you think about sport from the perspective of when did things just change, like almost overnight, Bob Beeman 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,
00:15:12.000you know, somebody jumps a foot more than anyone's ever jumped before, something like that.
00:15:15.000So it's really interesting when somebody changes the game.
00:15:43.000And with these water safety courses for big wave surfers, I think that what's fascinating is...
00:15:53.000You 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, or you're going to survive all sorts of things that might have been fatal.
00:18:35.000Well, first of all, what assholes are we that we have those goddamn things in captivity?
00:18:40.000And a big fucking shout out to Canada.
00:18:43.000Because Canada, mostly probably through the noise that my friend Phil Demers has created in trying to get marine land shut down, Canada has banned all orca and all dolphin captivity.
00:19:44.000Because, well, I thought menopause was just a shift in the hormonal balance of the female.
00:19:48.000Well, what is the purpose evolutionarily of continuing life beyond...
00:19:56.000That's a good point because that's not the case in mammals.
00:20:00.000In mammals, deer in particular, can breed deep into their old, old age.
00:20:05.000Well, if you have a resource that's limiting, you'd be better off in terms of systems of selective pressures of shifting something that is continuing.
00:20:17.000I think it was Henry Ford who used to go to the dump to see what broke down on the cars and what was still working.
00:20:25.000And 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 cars would all break down sort of uniformly at the end.
00:20:37.000And you see this like with salmon, where salmon disintegrate because it's a discretized product.
00:21:08.000And the strategy that the female dolphins have acquired to mitigate that is that they become sluts.
00:21:16.000Because the male dolphins don't know whether or not the female's baby is theirs because they don't have 23andMe under the ocean.
00:21:23.000So what happens is the female will have sex with as many males as she can.
00:21:28.000So that way she's protected and her child is protected because then all the males think it could possibly be their baby.
00:21:35.000They don't want to kill their own baby, which is really interesting that they differentiate.
00:21:38.000Because many mammals that also participate in this don't.
00:21:41.000Like, bears don't differentiate between their babies and someone else's babies.
00:21:46.000If the females, if she's carrying around cubs, the male will try to kill and eat the cubs to force her back into estrus and perhaps just even for food because they're so ruthless and cannibalistic.
00:21:57.000But dolphins, who we think of as our beautiful, charming, wonderful little buddies in the water, they kill babies.
00:22:20.000I don't know, man, but every time I go to Hawaii, we swim with, we either not swim with dolphins, but if you're in a boat and you go fishing, the dolphins find the boat and they swim with the boat.
00:26:45.000Like, first of all, in terms of sexual dynamics, you know, one beach master, he's got a couple lieutenants who are trying to take over his role, and the lieutenants seemingly can have sex with one or two of the females.
00:27:01.000And 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 trample them on their way to fights.
00:29:22.000Well, 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 It came up with a chemical composition for nylon and when it was a combination of several factors and the decorticator was invented.
00:29:47.000The decorticator was a way that they could effectively process hemp fiber without the use of slavery.
00:29:52.000See the reason why they switched over from Hemp clothing and hemp sales and canvas.
00:29:58.000Canvas, which actually comes from the word cannabis.
00:30:22.000If you had a piece of hemp, like the stalk of hemp, and you cut it into boards, like this table, it would be as hard as this oak, but as light as balsa wood.
00:31:03.000Oh, it's a fucking amazing, amazing plant.
00:31:05.000But anyway, they came out with this decorticator.
00:31:09.000And the decorticator, because the way they used to do it, 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 and paper.
00:31:18.000So, Popular Science Magazine, and see if you can find the cover of this, in like the early 1930s, it had a cover that said, Hemp, the New Billion Dollar Crop.
00:31:29.000And because they had this decorticator, right?
00:32:20.000So, they were saying this was gonna replace all paper that's made out of wood, and William Randolph Hearst was like, slowly roll, bitches, I got an idea.
00:32:30.000So he starts putting together all these stories about Mexicans and blacks that are smoking this drug called marijuana, and they're raping white women.
00:32:43.000When Congress made marijuana illegal, they probably didn't even understand that it was hemp, because it was the same goddamn thing.
00:32:51.000Marijuana was a Mexican slang for tobacco, for a wild tobacco.
00:32:56.000So they repurposed this name and called it this plant, called this marijuana.
00:33:02.000Like, it was this gigantic conspiracy so that this fucking piece of shit could save money.
00:33:33.000American farmers are promised a new cash crop with an annual value of several hundred million dollars, all because a machine has been invented which solves problems more than 6,000 years old.
00:34:18.000It's like over the period of, you know, 10, 15 years.
00:34:21.000If 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 were really into banning certain drugs, and you still have them hanging around, you know, a la that dipshit that was the attorney general for a while.
00:35:28.000I had a dinner at our house a 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 I pharmacology.
00:35:47.000Of the interesting substances, what are the three that you find were most informative in terms of self-revelation, changing your understanding for the better, etc.?
00:35:59.000I was astounded that of the people who seemed to be very knowledgeable about mind-altering substances, almost everyone put cannabis in the top three.
00:36:10.000Trevor Burrus Well, I thought it would be sort of commonplace.
00:36:16.000Somebody would say 5-MeO-DMT. Somebody else would say ketamine.
00:36:19.000Somebody else would say LSD or DMT or ayahuasca.
00:36:26.000But the common thread throughout all of these people, many of them were researchers, was that they felt that cannabis was a miraculous substance.
00:37:05.000And when it goes through the liver, it produces this 11-hydroxy metabolite that's somewhere between four and five times more psychoactive than THC. And it's responsible for people thinking that they got dosed.
00:37:16.000Like, a lot of times when people eat edibles, they're like, oh my god, this isn't pot.
00:37:55.000My favorite is a good stiff dose of an edible and then wait about 45 minutes and then get in the tank.
00:38:03.000Because 45 minutes, the way I describe it is 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.
00:38:17.000Especially in the tank, because in the tank, in the absence of any visual stimulation, when your eyes are closed, you have these wild, almost like neon visuals.
00:38:28.000You start seeing these strange dancing cartoons and weird, weird shit.
00:38:38.000You can get similar situations on other psychedelics, especially in the tank.
00:38:44.000The tank is a really unique way to experience anything.
00:38:48.000Even normal state of consciousness that you have without any drugs at all.
00:38:58.000Inside the tank, it transforms, right?
00:39:01.000Because 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.
00:40:02.000And you, as a mathematician, you think of things, and 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.
00:40:16.000Yeah, although I actually have a kind of ambient level of distraction, which is most helpful for...
00:40:23.000Look, when I get out there, I get way the hell out there.
00:40:26.000So you like an ambient level of distraction?
00:40:28.000Sometimes, for example, I'll go to an all-night cafe at like 2 in the morning, and there'll be just enough human...
00:40:36.000I mean, I have very ambiguous feelings about humans.
00:40:41.000Don't worry, I don't consider you one.
00:41:00.000I think that when you get deep enough into your own mind and you start dealing with abstractions and you find that the real world – I wasn't planning on going here, but we can try it.
00:41:11.000When 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?
00:41:29.000You start to prefer living in the abstractions.
00:42:18.000Are you going to just be the same old you?
00:42:21.000You're not going to take the opportunity to perhaps reinvent yourself?
00:42:24.000So, for example, you know, if I suddenly change – if I start wearing glasses – And I wear like a really fashion-forward pair of spectacles.
00:42:35.000You should wear aviators with yellow lenses like Hunter S. Thompson.
00:45:28.000When Cher did this remake of I Got You Babe with Beavis and Butthead – She took this, remember, because she had this duet with Sonny Bono, and then she got into a bad thing with Sonny, and so she said, I'm going to re-record the song, and I'm just going to torch it.
00:46:41.000And I think that that's sort of the more responsible way of doing it, is that you're allowed your evolution, but you have to let people know, I'm going to do something totally different from time to time.
00:47:01.000They just – they did it in a clear enough way that people could understand the pattern.
00:47:05.000And so 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 co-inhabit 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.
00:47:25.000Like all of these weird pressures – The ideas behind the intellectual dark web that you coined.
00:47:31.000This 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,
00:47:46.000objective point and try to see the way the other people view things.
00:47:50.000Open-hearted, not trying to destroy each other.
00:48:38.000And I think one of the things that we're all recognizing, whether it's the internet, Or just celebrity in general, which is, I think, part of the culprit.
00:48:49.000Especially if you're reading comments and articles that are written about you, which I do not recommend.
00:49:03.000And sometimes people, they apply that.
00:49:07.000That pressure can help you like if it's a good friend or someone who you trust and it's done with It's intellectual honesty and they just really, they think that there's maybe a flaw in your thinking or maybe this could help you or maybe this is an issue and then you realize that and you self-correct.
00:50:10.000And by an influx, I mean thousands and thousands of Russian emails signing up from my message board.
00:50:18.000I mean thousands with really similar email addresses.
00:50:22.000And they would post and pretend they're from fucking Cleveland or post and be mad that we don't have enough Nazis on or whatever the fuck it would be.
00:50:33.000It's the same thing that the IRA was doing, the Internet Research Agency was doing with Facebook and Google.
00:50:39.000We 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.
00:50:48.000And so they were trying to manipulate that discussion and turn certain discussions toxic and come up with preposterous conspiracy theories and attack people for nonsensical reasons.
00:51:02.000I keep seeing the same message modified a hundred different ways from a bunch of accounts that have suspicious similarity.
00:51:11.000Not one of these accounts usually is followed by anyone I care about.
00:51:14.000And then they have a few high-value accounts with blurry photographs of a person that – I think somebody is putting real money into that account to create a fake person who just doggedly follows you and is constantly trying to talk to you in your ear,
00:52:00.000There was this huge number of jokes about Ben Shapiro and a booster seat that were all slightly different versions of the joke and all of the accounts were like strikingly similar.
00:52:11.000I was just thinking like, well, I could imagine a little bit of this.
00:52:52.000But I believe that there are sophisticated players who are engaged in trying to Either boost our signal or start to alter the signal.
00:53:06.000Somebody will be up, somebody will be down.
00:53:09.000And then there's like really weird dynamics.
00:53:13.000I 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 blind him and confuse him.
00:53:24.000And there's this guy, Sam Seder, who- Do you think he's a Russian?
00:53:58.000It's just like, oh, this is that thing in third grade that I never figured out.
00:54:02.000Well, they found out that he won't engage with them, and so they think it's cute to just constantly shit on him, 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.
00:54:25.000Like, one of the things that comes up on this show, like, you know, we were talking before we were going to go on there, what were we going to talk about?
00:54:33.000And so when you do that, come on, let's just talk thing, you never know what the fuck is going to come up, and you might have a piss-poorly formed idea of what a subject is, and you just start rambling.
00:54:46.000Yeah, that's what I've done in my two previous appearances.
00:54:48.000Well, no, you have not, but it seems, you know, it's easy to think that you did that.
00:55:07.000And, 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.
00:55:19.000See, that's the benefit of not paying attention.
00:55:22.000And this is something that I've been pretty rigorous about over the last six months, a year or so.
00:55:27.000You, Sam Harris, and Dave Rubin have all given me versions of this advice.
00:55:31.000And I worry about it because I'm not large enough yet that I've been the target of a steady campaign.
00:55:41.000But what happens is You see people's feedback loops interrupted.
00:55:46.000And in part, to course correct, you kind of want to know, was I too harsh with that guy?
00:55:52.000Like when I went on with Jordan Peterson on Dave's show, I was more aggressive because I think I'd seen Jordan and Brett on your show together.
00:56:31.000There's an issue always with more than one person.
00:56:34.000There's a reason why I do one-on-ones almost exclusively.
00:56:37.000Even when I had Bob Lazar with Jeremy Corbell, just having a third person that wants to chime in oftentimes interrupts the flow of conversation.
00:56:47.000In that case, it was because I wanted to lock in on Bob Lazar.
00:57:49.000And one of the things I found astounding was that everybody was taking the piss out of each other.
00:57:55.000And 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.
00:58:04.000And I had to remind myself About how men actually manage intimacy and closeness.
01:01:23.000They're not pets, but they're so used to people, because people are always going on safari there, and apparently you can get real close to them in some environments.
01:01:31.000But cheetahs, in particular, a lot of people keep them as pets.
01:01:35.000You see a lot of sheiks, rich guys in the Middle East, they'll be driving around in their fucking AMG wagons with a cheetah next to them.
01:02:36.000And they have an herbivore's digestive tract, but they'll still eat a bird.
01:02:40.000There's a lot of videos of deer and birds.
01:02:42.000I 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 going to dedicate my life to hanging out and not getting eaten.
01:03:10.000That is an animal that bites so fucking hard.
01:03:13.000They have one of the strongest bites ever measured because their whole thing is just smashing bones and trying to get out the nutrition that the lions leave behind.
01:03:23.000So they're all just about crushing bones.
01:03:26.000So their whole face is designed to smash bones.
01:03:59.000Well, that was the thing with my friend Phil Demers, who worked at Marine Land.
01:04:03.000One of the reasons why he's so furious at them is because he's got a walrus named Smooshy, and the walrus imprinted with him when it was really young.
01:06:05.000Now he's made a place called the Electrified Garage in Massachusetts where He is working on Teslas and electric vehicles outside of their ecosystem.
01:06:15.000So he's doing it on his own, like an independent Tesla.
01:08:04.000He and I were walking down the road and, you know, there was this Crip Alert Yeah, the Crips from Long Beach said, you know, Kanye, you better stay in Calabasas.
01:08:14.000It was a little bit of a tense situation.
01:08:15.000So we're walking along the road and like people were hanging out of the windows of their car.
01:09:10.000And then he took a drug to control the Tourette's Syndrome, and the guy's drumming became kind of monotonous, very regular, but not creative.
01:09:19.000Yeah, look, what that guy's got inside of him, he's so prolific.
01:09:24.000I mean, you listen to his music, it's so interesting and eclectic and prolific, and he's just constantly churning out more great shit.
01:09:43.000He is exploring, I don't want to get into the details, but one of the things that really impressed me, Yeah.
01:10:10.000I'm going to mine that as a source of art because I bet it's in everyone.
01:10:14.000And by exploring these contradictions and these false fronts and – he's got a level of internal access.
01:10:23.000I'm actually quite interested in the mental health aspect of this, which is – There's so much mental unhealth as we term it that I don't think it's all mental unhealth.
01:10:37.000I do think that there's something about the artistic process that seems to be very informed by states that we call unhealth.
01:10:44.000Well, we require people to stay inside these rigid boundaries.
01:10:48.000And these rigid boundaries, they're great if you want to show up at a job and work nine to five and don't use certain noises with your mouth because it makes people upset.
01:11:00.000But that's not for the creative process.
01:11:03.000If 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, different interesting things that are part of the creative process,
01:11:18.000those people are all unwell, every single one of them.
01:11:22.000I mean, in terms of like, if you made him do what a normal person has to do every day, I think normal life is unwell.
01:11:31.000This 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?
01:12:45.000Somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence in an ordinary world until some sort of magical portal Accidentally or on purpose enters their life.
01:12:57.000And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, looking glass, platform nine and three quarters.
01:13:05.000Or Dorothy famously was used to introduce Technicolor, where she – the first part of the film, she's in Kansas and it's in sort of grayscale black and white.
01:13:15.000And then she lands in Oz, and they open the door, and it's Technicolor, and there's this transitional scene where you see Technicolor for the first time.
01:13:26.000Was that the first time ever in a movie?
01:14:24.000There's a person who starts from his head and grows down until his feet reach 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, you know, like left and right hemisphere.
01:14:51.000I mean, it's all very clever wordplay and stuff.
01:15:01.000The toll booth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it, you know?
01:15:07.000And so my question was always, why on earth would we tell the same story over and over and over and over and over again?
01:15:14.000It has the same format and it's always a different context.
01:15:17.000And 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.
01:16:24.000And like, you know, most things, you're sort of prepared for them your whole life, and then you see it and you think, eh, I guess that's cool.
01:16:32.000I've been seeing this thing my whole life, and I had no concept of what a genius this human being was, because nothing he did – Look at the outside of it.
01:16:44.000The outside of it – I mean, look, this guy – If he never did the inside of this church, he would be a very famous and idiosyncratic architect.
01:17:16.000When I was on this program before, 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?
01:17:31.000And suddenly, if you recall, I said to people, this is the most important object in the universe.
01:17:36.000Not the Hopf vibration in particular, but the class called Principal Bundle, which people have no idea it's out there.
01:17:43.000And it is the basis of the construct in which we live.
01:17:47.000So, how is it that a normal human being can make contact with real physics, with real beauty of biology, or just understanding order, symmetry, all of these things that are beyond normal experience?
01:18:03.000And What I hope to do with the podcast is to have amazing guests and interesting conversations.
01:19:44.000Is probably the most representative, I would say he's the most representative in terms of artists in the DMT space, in terms of like tryptamines and psilocybin and things along those lines.
01:19:56.000And so, if you think about psychoactive chemicals, some of them are stupefying, but some of them are portals.
01:20:06.000And this concept of, if you look at a wall, How do you know that the wall doesn't have a door?
01:20:13.000How do you know that there isn't a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book?
01:20:18.000We learn to stop looking for the portal.
01:20:22.000And I think what I do differently than other people is that I became obsessed with exits.
01:20:30.000That there are other worlds and they're real.
01:20:33.000That this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole and the matrix Is metaphor for very real things.
01:20:41.000And that we just, we live our lives in the most ordinary mesoscale phenomena where we don't see the quantum because we're not playing with polarized lenses in ways that show us what light actually is.
01:20:59.000We're not playing with superfluid helium.
01:21:01.000We're not understanding just how bizarre olfaction is or whether there's some sort of quantum aspect of biology.
01:21:13.000And what you see people doing is that they start grasping for everything.
01:21:18.000I'm not saying that there's nothing to ancient aliens or UFOs or whatever, but a lot of that is just...
01:21:25.000People want something richer and more amazing for their lives.
01:21:30.000And I'm not going to pass too much judgment on that, but I am going to say if we just restricted the rest of our days to the provable stuff that we know is out there, it could be amazing.
01:21:46.000With all of the rationality, with all of the mystery we've taken out of the world, it's time to put a ton of it back in.
01:21:54.000When you say, put a ton of it back in, how are you going to put it back in?
01:21:59.000Well, you know, if I were to start talking about the Octonians, an eight-dimensional number system that no one understands, I can do that totally rigorously.
01:22:11.000I can show you all sorts of bizarre stuff involving the Octonians.
01:22:16.000You don't even know that there are four types of numbers whose dance, it's called the real numbers that we know, complex numbers that you were tortured once with in high school.
01:22:27.000Maybe during some kind of a trip, a friend of you mentioned the quaternions to you.
01:22:33.000And then there's this one system of numbers Which is like the crazy relative nobody discusses.
01:22:47.000Well, my guess is that that's probably back to the root lattice of E8, which we discussed last time, which has this kind of Mandela pattern to it.
01:22:56.000But I could show you their multiplication table.
01:23:07.000Like, if I got to – I probably know more about the Actonians than most mathematicians.
01:23:13.000If I got to the end of all of my knowledge of the Octonians, I still wouldn't know what to tell you about why they're there and what they mean.
01:23:26.000Now, 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.
01:23:34.000Well, maybe, yes, maybe no, I don't know anything about it.
01:23:37.000If I just focused us on what we know is out there that we don't grasp, which is 100% rock solid, it provides so much mystery and meaning and invitation to adventure.
01:23:50.000If you're looking for a hero's journey, I'll show you a ton of these things.
01:24:20.000Well, so for example, let's take an easier system that we feel a little bit more confident with.
01:24:27.000There'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.
01:24:40.000So 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.
01:24:50.000There's a multiplication table for these objects.
01:24:54.000And these objects help with computer vision, computer simulation 3D projections.
01:25:03.000They're used all the time in probably video games.
01:25:09.000I 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 that good stuff that you read about in physics.
01:25:26.000So, in essence, the Octonians are a system where IJK keeps going effectively through elemental PQR, you know, until you've got eight different objects.
01:25:37.000And they're not even associative, which is one of these rules that you learn about, you know...
01:25:44.000And you think, well, what isn't associative?
01:25:46.000So if you talk about commutativity, for example, I can't tell whether you put on your shirt first or your shoes first because it's commutative as to which order you did it.
01:25:56.000But if you put on your underwear in a different order than you put on your pants, it'll become immediately obvious which order you did it in.
01:26:51.000In fact, there are two processes where you can build these number systems up from each other.
01:26:55.000So you build the complex from the real, you build the quaternions from the complex, you build the octonions 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.
01:27:10.000And by the time you get to the Octonians, you're exhausted.
01:27:12.000When you say giving up a magical power.
01:27:14.000Well, like, for example, it's very hard to think about the square root of negative one.
01:27:19.000So, like, what does it mean for something squared to be negative one?
01:27:23.000So that's like the complex numbers gave up that kind of sensibility.
01:27:27.000And then the complex numbers are at least commutative.
01:27:30.000A times B equals B times A. But the quaternions don't have that property.
01:28:50.000And 300 of those cells make up a very primitive neural system.
01:28:55.000And we're going to 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.
01:29:08.000So this will be the first of two images.
01:29:10.000Well, that is a complete map of how one fertilized egg becomes a tiny microscopic worm for every possible division.
01:29:33.000Everyone in biology knows how cool this thing is.
01:29:38.000And very few people, not enough people outside of biology, know that we have completely mapped how one cell – like, if you're 30 trillion cells around – It's too big to write a diagram.
01:29:52.000It's only possible because there are only a thousand cells and this thing has locomotion, it has sexual reproduction, you know, it eats.
01:29:59.000So you're looking at the architectural plans for an actual organism.
01:30:05.000And Jamie, when we're done with that, if I could trouble you for the...
01:30:12.000For the folks that are just following, I'm going to pause for a moment, for the folks that are following at home listening, just listening, not watching, what we're looking at, Jamie, explain how someone can see this image if they want to Google it themselves.
01:30:22.000The letter C. It's not C like the Ocean Sea.
01:30:57.000That 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.
01:31:17.000Here's an organism which is completely mapped and has complex behaviors.
01:31:22.000It has, I think, about half the number of adult cell types that you and I have.
01:31:27.000So maybe we have like 250, like only 250 different kinds of adult cells, more or less.
01:31:33.000I don't want to get too precise about that.
01:31:35.000And yet we are like 10 trillion or 30 trillion copies of those tiny number of different types of cells.
01:31:43.000Well, I think the C. elegans has about 125 or something like that, different cell types, and it only has 1,000 cells, and it's able to do most of what we're able to do.
01:31:59.000Do 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?
01:32:07.000I don't think so, but the cool thing is we have this map and we still don't understand it.
01:32:11.000Like, we've got this thing dead to rights.
01:33:20.000And we are destroying – I mean, 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,
01:34:21.000It'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.
01:34:31.000You're coming after core reality and our ability to make sense of the world.
01:34:36.000And so I'm happy to entertain all sorts of things.
01:34:41.000Step one foot in my lab and I'm calling security.
01:34:44.000And if I can't do that, if I can't maintain a scientific journal or a university in which the bullshit departments do not invade the departments that are actually doing the super important work, we're lost.
01:35:47.000I'm looking for a number with like 10 or 11 significant digits.
01:35:55.000We are able to do calculations in quantum electrodynamics, let's say, or quantum field theory.
01:36:02.000In which we can figure out the precision of something, we can predict it to like 10 or 11 decimal places of accuracy.
01:36:11.000And when I look at the achievement that was necessary to have theory agree with experiment to that level, And then I listened to some of the discussions about, well, just take these hoaxes about,
01:36:27.000you know, somebody who submitted parts of Mein Kampf to, you know, with Jews rewritten as men to a feminine.
01:36:36.000Those two subjects are taking place in the same institution.
01:36:40.000One is incredibly rigorous and demanding and completely unforgiving.
01:36:45.000And the other thing is just like, Frivolous and nonsense.
01:36:48.000Well, maybe there's a core of it that makes sense, but it's not going to get anywhere close to the achievements of the hard sciences.
01:36:56.000But the core of it, whether or not it makes sense, the real problem is the motivation for doing it in the first place.
01:37:02.000Well, the real motivation may be activism, but activism and scholarship aren't – I mean, there's so many things that I want to be true that just aren't.
01:37:14.000I want beautiful – I mean, like, you know, nature.
01:37:58.000This is an incredibly complex issue, right?
01:38:01.000Where you're dealing with emotions and feelings and people who feel like there's injustice in the world and inequality and they focus on those things to the point where they're almost participating in social engineering by ignoring reality and focusing on what they want to be true in sort of this Yeah.
01:38:45.000A deep understanding of complex mathematics in order to achieve these results and to be able to verify them.
01:38:56.000And what you're saying is when one of them that is this sort of Frivolous, airy, kind of utopian version of what they like the future to be, and that interferes.
01:40:15.000In 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?
01:40:23.000Is it that we're really anti-Cambodian?
01:40:49.000That is not a voice that needs to be answered.
01:40:53.000It'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.
01:41:05.000The burden of proof is on you for saying why that's interesting in a particular conversation.
01:41:14.000The burden is on you to explain why that's interesting.
01:41:19.000Well, for them, they're trying to engineer a more fair and balanced society.
01:41:24.000If 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...
01:41:32.000But I'm also trying to engineer a world where there are more women in science.
01:41:37.000By trying to figure out what is it that's selecting against women.
01:41:41.000For 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...
01:41:55.000Yeah, but a lot of women don't find that attractive.
01:42:00.000Maybe, but my point is that there are lots of reasons that men and women are different, right?
01:42:07.000So, for example, I saw a beautiful video of a guy who jumps down an enormous flight of stairs on a skateboard, and he just nails the landing, and it's just a thing of art.
01:42:19.000And then it shows you 150 attempts where this guy just abused his body.
01:42:27.000And failed and failed, maybe broke a tooth, blood everywhere, and you're thinking, oh, you showed me the success, and you didn't show me that this guy was willing to put his brain, his life on the line in order to nail that trick,
01:42:42.000and he's actually one of the world's falling champions, right?
01:42:47.000Well, when you start saying, well, why are you putting this video of this person who's doing this thing on the internet because that person belongs to a privileged class, I'm saying, well...
01:42:57.000I don't know, that guy abused himself and put himself at risk and devoted his life in a singular way that no sensible – I mean, I would be appalled if my son did that.
01:43:10.000There are things that are happening that result in imbalances that aren't about some kind of unfairness.
01:43:17.000And I think it's very important to say that unfairness is real and structural problems are real and non-structural problems I think we both agree that it's important for people to have the opportunity to pursue what they enjoy pursuing.
01:43:42.000We want more of that kind of person that's interested in something when they might not necessarily naturally gravitate towards it.
01:43:50.000And it might not be that there's some impediments and that there's some boundaries and some sort of boys club that keeps them out.
01:43:58.000And it might be more that they're just not that interested in that.
01:44:02.000Which is biologically that's been proven in studies.
01:44:07.000But I'm trying to make it a different point.
01:44:09.000To 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 take piano competitions.
01:44:22.000Why are piano competitions historically disproportionately, you know, let's say entered in one by Russians or chess or who knows what?
01:44:30.000Well, Russians are beasts in the way that they destroy children on their way to the concert stage.
01:44:37.000They will do things that most American families will not do to produce a concert pianist.
01:44:43.000That's not an unfairness for the rest of us.
01:44:47.000I can't get on stage with these guys because they're just amazing.
01:44:51.000It's not an unfairness that I'm not represented on that stage.
01:44:57.000You 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.
01:45:38.000Well, here's the thing that I always say about striking sports.
01:45:42.000Striking sports are probably one of the more interesting ones in that when you start out at an early age, your body develops learning how to strike.
01:45:51.000And it's a gigantic advantage over someone who learns once they're past puberty.
01:45:58.000When you get someone who's learning how to strike and they're in their 20s, it takes a real outlier to become super successful.
01:46:19.000Now all you've got is your left arm and you've got a really pissed off person across from you.
01:46:24.000What 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.
01:46:35.000The key point is I'm not that interested in In the culture wars.
01:46:40.000I'm interested in the pipeline of amazing stuff that is unforgiving.
01:46:46.000Right, 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, try to figure out what are the main points and main factors that are responsible for it being a thing, and is there a way to mitigate its impact on progress?
01:47:05.000Well, I'm concerned that the culture wars are going to keep girls, black people, whoever, short people, I don't know what, Out of the things that they want to do.
01:47:53.000She wasn't doing quantum theory, but she was taking – her thesis – Brought techniques of bundle theory, like the Hopf vibration that we had, and showed that economics,
01:48:09.000without any alteration, was a mature geometric system in a gauge-theoretic idiom.
01:48:21.000So we collaborated on showing that you can't accommodate changing preferences in economics without gauge theory.
01:48:52.000I was interested in making sure that our models could capture human dynamics better.
01:49:00.000And, you know, I was just really excited by the collaboration we were doing, which was, you know, she and I came from two different worlds and we found this bridge between them.
01:49:11.000So she went on to Dave Rubin and said, look, it's not about abilities.
01:49:35.000But if he had said that same exact thing and he was an employee of Google and he was on a podcast, even if it was a popular podcast...
01:49:43.000I don't think it would have created nearly as much of an issue.
01:49:45.000Well, he was also somewhat spectrumy, and it was the fact that it's Google and the fact that you can get paid for these weird sort of spectrumy skills, which, you know, guilty.
01:51:06.000So 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.
01:51:18.000And then you've got another group of people who are saying, I want to have children.
01:51:22.000I 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.
01:53:24.000One 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.
01:53:44.000Well, that was an unadvertised feature of the system because that's not available to everyone.
01:53:48.000It's a feature where financial privilege actually enabled somebody to stay in science.
01:53:55.000So, you know, the issue isn't a question of inclusion or exclusion of groups.
01:54:01.000It's a question of, how are you so sure that everything is structural oppression?
01:54:07.000And if you can launch that objection cheaply, if you can just say, I can take any group and say, why does this group have no one in a wheelchair?
01:54:15.000Now I've got to spend 30 minutes explaining that?
01:54:38.000One, I think that certain positions became – like the failing business of traditional media meant that you couldn't actually employ people at the same level that you could employ them before.
01:54:54.000So a lot of people who – Didn't have huge opportunity costs entered journalism.
01:55:02.000What does that mean by huge opportunity costs?
01:55:04.000Well, 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.
01:55:24.000Only the ideological people are going to give up $100,000 a year for the privilege of activism.
01:55:32.000So in part, when you have a failing business model, you start – as a system of selective pressures, it's going to start selecting for very different people.
01:55:40.000So that's one of the things that's going on is that you have very economically frustrated people because the silent generation started a problem.
01:55:49.000The baby boomers amplified the hell out of it.
01:55:51.000And Gen X is still waiting to take its place in society, and the millennials just don't even see a path through standard careers.
01:56:01.000Nobody's putting a glass of scotch in their hand and a cigar in their mouth and saying, come with me, kid.
01:56:09.000Partly because the discussion is out there and the discussion is a very attractive one.
01:56:14.000The 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.
01:56:26.000And it becomes, when you give people an option to find an excuse, they gravitate towards that excuse.
01:56:34.000You create safe spaces and you coddle and you make, I mean, all these pieces are in place.
01:56:39.000There's many, many moving parts, right?
01:56:41.000And I think all these little pieces are in place where we also have these massive echo chambers because of social media.
01:56:48.000We have these people that, you know, they find ideologically similar human beings and they bounce off of each other.
01:57:52.000Now, I have a different feeling about trans, but if we solve the issue of intersex, which is not pressuring, just accepting that some tiny percentage of the population, which is not vanishingly small, just not large, is neither unambiguously male and female in terms of genotype-phenotype concordance.
01:58:11.000We will do most of the work necessary to take care of our trans folks who are suffering, too.
01:58:26.000You 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.
01:58:39.000You know, and I give this example of like kilts and lunges from Scotland and India are skirts.
01:58:47.000But they're not female in those places.
01:58:49.000So you have to learn about male and female relative to the codification in your society.
01:58:54.000And the issues of 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.
02:02:59.000So, like, traditional societies have – everybody accommodates homosexuality and failures of simple gender binaries.
02:03:06.000And, 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.
02:04:39.000Well, that's an important distinction.
02:04:40.000And what you're saying is very important because you are, in one way, someone could pigeonhole you from your earlier statement that you're not interested in a lot of these different studies, grievance studies,
02:05:10.000But that does not mean that you're an insensitive person that's uninterested in human beings.
02:05:14.000You're just not interested in the disruption of the acquiring of data and the analysis of said data.
02:05:23.000I don't think that activism Makes for good advancement.
02:05:30.000Well, I think there's also a problem with who's the activist, and what age you're talking about, and how idealistic these people are, and going back to biology, where's their mind at?
02:05:44.000How narrow is their view of what the world is or should be, and their impact, what's significant about their impact?
02:05:51.000But my disagreement, to 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?
02:06:33.000How much of this is about structural oppression?
02:06:36.000How much of this is about path dependence?
02:06:38.000You do some very careful thing in order to understand your problem.
02:06:43.000And only when you finally understood your problem Would you say, okay, now I have an idea of how to remediate it.
02:06:49.000We need a financial product that transfers money from late life to early life because 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.
02:07:02.000Now you're working in a totally different idiom.
02:07:13.000Sean Carroll, I think, just had a podcast in which he said something to the effect of, well, the IDW is kind of too interested in race and IQ. I have never been interested in race and IQ. The only time I became interested in race and IQ... Was when I started hearing there is absolutely no variation between groups in any kind of cognitive endowment.
02:07:36.000Well, certainly there is in terms of height, the ability to radiate heat, melanin content of the skin, the ability to absorb sunlight.
02:07:43.000It doesn't pass the smell test that you could be able to say that a priori.
02:08:10.000I'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.
02:08:22.000This is some rich, weird area I've never cared about before.
02:08:27.000And the only reason that it becomes interesting to me is that suddenly we're making these incredible proclamations with certainty.
02:08:38.000Like, you know, you can't say this word, or this is absolutely true.
02:08:42.000And, like, life doesn't work like that.
02:08:44.000There's no word in the English language.
02:08:46.000George Carlin made this point all the time.
02:09:13.000I think that Sam felt that Charles Murray had been railroaded by him, by he, Sam Harris.
02:09:20.000And 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.
02:09:28.000And 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.
02:10:42.000Absolutely, there's a type of intelligence that certain people possess, particularly creative intelligence.
02:10:48.000There's certain people that might not score well on SAT tests, but they're capable of producing amazing stuff, whether it's literature, comedy, whatever it is, movies.
02:11:08.000It requires some immeasurable – something that you can't put on a scale.
02:11:13.000Well, this is what I said to Jordan Peterson.
02:11:15.000I said, I don't think I have an IQ. Because the conceit – we have to remember that a priori we would always have guessed that intelligence was many different things.
02:11:25.000It was a composite of like lots of different types of intelligence.
02:11:29.000The conceit around IQ is you'd think that was true, but guess again.
02:11:33.000There's essentially one kind of intelligence.
02:12:32.000You're just trying to get the word out, and you misstep.
02:12:34.000Yeah, but like my mind, you know, at some point I got sent home, I think, because I was asked to draw a chicken in school, and I put two wings and four feet on it.
02:12:54.000Well, you know, famously, Mrs. Bacchiero in first grade sent me out of the class because I said that a spider wasn't an insect because it had eight legs.
02:13:36.000He wrote The Bell Curve, was either dismissed as being racist or applauded by people who you would call white nationalists, who trot out his ideas as proof,
02:13:51.000as measurable proof that certain races are superior.
02:13:55.000And, you know, we could discuss many 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.
02:14:42.000Now, in examining the actual data, if you just look at the actual data, Is it racist to look at the real numbers?
02:14:53.000Like if you say Nigerians in particular, who are incredibly industrious and some of the more successful immigrant groups that come over to America, also happen to be black.
02:15:03.000If you wanted to look at Nigerians in terms of like, if you wanted to, if all...
02:15:10.000If you wanted to look at them particularly as a group, it would be very difficult to be racist.
02:15:14.000You'd have to say, well, these are superior.
02:15:17.000A lot of superior intellects come from Nigeria.
02:16:35.000They're not creating this insane music, although there are a few, right?
02:16:40.000But overall, they're not creating these insane athletic accomplishments that these white Americans can't keep up with.
02:16:48.000So we'll say, but look, they're superior intellectually, so I can't be racist.
02:16:51.000I'm pointing out these Asians who I'm not jealous of because they don't do the things that I wish that I could do.
02:16:58.000But then when it comes to the African Americans, They're pointing out all the things that the African Americans can do that they can't do, but they're saying, oh, but they're intellectually inferior.
02:18:10.000But 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.
02:18:20.000On the other hand, I mean, I'm a competitive guy.
02:18:37.000You know, all God's children got rhythm.
02:18:39.000I mean, getting out thunk in a competitive situation.
02:18:44.000You know, looking over somebody's shoulder on the keyboard and they're thinking so quickly in so many dimensions, I can't even imagine what the hell is going on.
02:19:09.000The way in which that they come up in a way that is really unpleasant is this new thing, which is that all imbalances are all structural oppression, right?
02:19:19.000And which doesn't allow for trade-offs between groups like Finns.
02:21:09.000How can it be unethical to study the cognitive impairment of someone who's affected by a disease and that could possibly help fund research, help fund preventative measures?
02:21:21.000What if there's a correlation with smaller heads and cognitive impairment?
02:21:29.000Mosaic Down Syndrome doesn't have the same profile as regular Down Syndrome.
02:21:33.000You get much higher functioning people.
02:21:36.000I 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.
02:21:46.000But does examining impairment, does that really mean that it's a prejudice?
02:21:53.000Like, what about examining impairment from people who've been injured?
02:21:56.000Should we avoid doing that because we don't want to be ableist?
02:22:08.000If 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, is examining that in some way some sort of prejudice?
02:22:21.000Should we avoid examining their cognitive impairment?
02:22:23.000Well, if we avoid examining it, we might do some damage.
02:22:26.000If we examine it and publish the findings, we might do damage.
02:22:30.000So you might say you might do damage to the people that are infected or afflicted?
02:22:34.000Look, 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.
02:22:50.000Like, we have to start, I mean, as hippy-dippy as this sounds, we have to start from a place of love and decency.
02:22:56.000I certainly agree, but I don't think that we should avoid reality.
02:23:01.000So now I have this other thing, which is reality is compassionate in and of itself.
02:23:07.000Remember when HIV was an equal opportunity disease and it just started in the gay community and it's going to jump the fire road and it's going to be as much a heterosexual problem as it was a homosexual problem?
02:23:19.000It was an ideological statement that didn't look at the differences between different kinds of epithelium and different sexual practices between gays and straights.
02:23:28.000It was an activist position that started to compete With a epidemiological position or a biological position.
02:23:38.000And so historically what we did is we had private expert communication.
02:23:45.000And it's not always clear that you can trust your experts.
02:23:48.000It's not always clear that you should start with the data.
02:23:50.000What if the data says terrible things?
02:23:52.000Like 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.
02:24:03.000We haven't taken up the challenge of our time, which is, okay, 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.
02:24:12.000We know that we have got bigotry as part of our makeup, and we know that we're not really good at certain ways of integrating information and not becoming triumphalist and jerkish about it and taking victory lapses if it's a competition.
02:24:29.000Like, my group's better than your group.
02:24:33.000Now, I want to be struggling with other people who are saying, look, I don't know what the answers are.
02:24:39.000I don't think, as I brought up before, I don't think East Africans are cheating on the Boston Marathon because they've come to dominate it.
02:24:47.000Just because suddenly you had a diverse group of people replaced by a very tiny group from Ethiopia and Kenya.
02:25:17.000It's not about, I don't want a better planet or a more inclusive planet.
02:25:23.000It'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 truths, because those aren't true.
02:25:39.000And it's not going to work in the long term.
02:25:42.000I mean, I guess maybe the idea is we're competing with social justice for the rights to try to come up with a better, more equitable future.
02:25:53.000And the complaint about it isn't you guys are trying to come up with a better, more equitable future.
02:25:58.000It's what if you're going to make the same mistake when we said, well, the heterosexuals are as much at risk as the homosexuals.
02:26:06.000We needed to devote resources to our homosexual community.
02:26:10.000And we did need to get the heterosexual community interested and we had a problem and we needed to think about, you know, very thoughtfully, we've got an epidemic that's killing people.
02:26:20.000I think when we're talking about this, I think everything you're saying resonates and everything you're saying makes sense.
02:26:26.000And I think when we're talking about compassionate human beings looking out for each other and that this should be something that we all This is like one of our primary concerns whenever we address any issue.
02:26:45.000I think our problem in this country, there's many problems, but one of our problems is the loudest voices on the fringes.
02:26:53.000And this is one of the things that I want to discuss with you is what's going on in Portland.
02:26:57.000And I think what's going on in Portland is the loudest voices on the fringes that...
02:27:02.000The people on the right and on the far right are recognizing as emblematic of the left.
02:27:19.000It's a symptom of, first of all, terrible government, of someone who's allowing this to flourish inside the mayor of Portland, who seems to be supporting this in some sort of a weird way.
02:27:31.000And ideologically believes that Antifa, just because of a name, stands for anti-fascist.
02:27:37.000If you had no name, what you would have is a bunch of hood-wearing, mask-wearing, violent thugs who are beating people who disagree with them.
02:28:06.000What I've seen of him, what they've tried to describe, that he supports neo-Nazis, that he supports the Proud Boys, I've seen none of this.
02:28:14.000I'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.
02:29:21.000When you're seeing in Portland, there was one of them where an old guy got hit in the head with a fucking crowbar by some masked kid because the old guy apparently disagreed or they all disagree on things.
02:29:32.000My guess is that the old guy is not exactly as portrayed.
02:29:38.000I believe that the old guy may have been there with a telescoping baton.
02:30:16.000I thought he was left of center, but I was told that he was a conservative journalist.
02:30:21.000Well, I've been told I'm a fucking alt-right guy, so it's very confusing.
02:30:25.000He's also diminutive in physical form.
02:30:29.000He's not threatening physically, right?
02:30:32.000And they've chosen this guy as an example, and One of the more disturbing things were how many people saw the video and were justifying it.
02:30:41.000Saying things like, get another hobby.
02:30:44.000The anti-fascists will not stand for your bigotry and your hate.
02:31:31.000The first thing that we have to understand is that there's a division.
02:31:36.000I want to lay this out super carefully.
02:31:38.000The first division is between the, what you're calling the loudest voices, and I'm going to call the most courageous, well, I don't want to call it courageous, the most willing to accept loss.
02:31:55.000The voices most willing to accept loss.
02:31:58.000Most of the left Does not want to be dragged to the extreme left.
02:32:03.000So you hear this thing about why are you focusing on a fringe?
02:32:06.000And the answer is because the fringe is running the show, in my opinion.
02:32:10.000What do you mean by willing to accept loss?
02:32:13.000If you go into an Antifa versus Proud Boys melee, You're willing...
02:32:20.000You accept that you may get clocked with a bike lock.
02:32:51.000So you think you're going to get into a Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner kind of a thing where both of them always survive to the next cartoon.
02:33:50.000I'm not necessarily – you are going to trigger so many times on this explanation that I probably just need a little place in the table to start building this up, and then you can tear it the hell down.
02:34:01.000The first 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.
02:35:06.000So, there is a cowardly center and a very terrifying fringe, and the fringe is going around the whole thing, right, left and right.
02:35:17.000The next thing is that people are secretly weirdly sympathetic with the violent fringe to their extreme, rather than making common cause across the center.
02:35:29.000So, for example, You imagine that you run a laundromat and you're being visited by a member of organized crime every week.
02:35:39.000And he comes into your laundromat and he kind of plays with your stuff.
02:35:43.000And he says, oh, it'd be a shame if anything happened to your business.
02:35:56.000Then some sort of violent vigilante element that's operating extrajudicially after you've gone to the police over and over again breaks this guy's kneecaps.
02:36:08.000You're weirdly sympathetic with the vigilante because you're being terrified by a group that is not being taken care of.
02:36:16.000I think that this is in part why some elements of the left that should be more responsible, that have institutional positions, that have platforms that they can broadcast, are weirdly sympathetic to Antifa.
02:36:29.000And why country club Republicans are weirdly sympathetic to some of these far-right groups is that they view them as this is the dangerous group that's kind of taking care of the problem that I can't stand up to.
02:36:44.000So 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.
02:36:55.000Like in my case, I view myself as a progressive or at least a liberal.
02:36:59.000I 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?
02:37:15.000Now, the group that wants to play this out using these sort of proxy groups to handle the problems is saying, look, we're going to sound an air horn before one of these things so that all reasonable people can get the hell out of the way.
02:37:31.000And if you don't respond, then you're collateral damage and that's on you.
02:37:38.000So in other words, I think Andy Ngo is the guy who doesn't listen to the air horn.
02:37:42.000Brett Weinstein doesn't listen to the air horn.
02:37:44.000Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris don't listen to the air horn.
02:37:50.000I think that's very accurate in your description of these fringe people doing the work of the people that are more reasonable but are happy to have these bad people do their work to fight this battle for them because they think that ultimately it's for good.
02:38:06.000Yeah, I need my organized crime group to get rid of your organized crime group.
02:38:10.000And so the idea is that the law and order people are like, I really don't want anybody's organized crime group, and I'm going to actually stand up to the mob, and I'm actually not going to pay you your goddamn protection money, because I'm going to own a laundromat, and this is the United States of America, and fuck off.
02:39:15.000They'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.
02:39:22.000They were the ones that laughed about clubbing the baby seals.
02:39:34.000And we always had this thing where the Democrats, we had most of the smart people.
02:39:40.000And so in a tiny fraction of time, we have seen this giant evaporation of intelligence, if not Actually, through a lack of courage.
02:39:53.000The 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,
02:40:08.000that we take our responsibilities but not our guilt as the reason for trying to make a better world.
02:40:14.000I'm not paying reparations for slavery.
02:40:18.000I mean, my family came over here in like, what, the 19-teens or 20s?
02:40:33.000Do we just want to open up, tear off every Band-Aid for the purpose of trying to make everybody as uncomfortable in their skin as possible?
02:40:42.000What we have is a situation in which we don't have courageous people willing to fight for what works.
02:40:52.000We have a tiny number of people who are animated by this.
02:40:55.000The reason I'm animated by this is that I'm trying to keep the pipeline open for science.
02:41:00.000It's really what happened to my brother.
02:41:06.000My 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 competing claims.
02:41:19.000And when you start politicizing everything and you choose activism over thought and reason and civility and comity, you consign yourself to becoming a less great nation and a You're no longer able to lead.
02:41:36.000You can't build a world on angry activism that's trying to go back to a lily white nation.
02:42:15.000We need to create a world in which people are excited and animated about keeping the pipeline of decent thought, compassionate thought, open-hearted thought, and rigorous and unforgiving thought Both on the table at all times and not adulterating one to serve the other.
02:42:40.000I don't want to see science abused to oppress anybody.
02:42:43.000And I don't want to see somebody's dime-storn concept of utopia infecting our ability to make sense of the world.
02:42:58.000We need to get the world excited We need to get the world excited about cross-pollinations of ideas between different groups.
02:43:08.000We need to get the world excited about every group that is sort of marginalized contains neurons that we are not accessing, right?
02:43:19.000And 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.
02:43:26.000We should be getting greedy about how do we get those Asian female brains into our STEM labs so that we can have the fruits of their discoveries.
02:43:38.000People can't hear this because they've settled on very cheap versions of progress.
02:43:45.000It's time to get back to real progress, not fake progress.
02:45:52.000So our biological intelligence, what our minds are capable of, has not – it's been surpassed by our intellectual achievements in terms of our technological innovation.
02:46:10.000These things, which while complicated – Succumb to our intellects, right?
02:46:19.000They're much simpler than we ever imagined.
02:46:22.000To be able to create something that normally happens in the sun on an island in the Pacific, or to be able to rewrite a cell the way Craig Venter did, you know, synthetic biology.
02:47:36.000Everybody believes that should work on that problem.
02:47:39.000But 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 maybe a few hundred years tops, because sooner or later you're going to have Putin-like or Trump-like people.
02:47:56.000I mean, I'm sorry, I would have a very deep antipathy towards Donald Trump.
02:48:03.000He's not temperamentally fit to have the secrets of theoretical physics at his fingertips.
02:48:11.000And it's imperative to me that he not be elected in 2020 and that the Democratic Party wake up and get rid of its crazy fringe so that we can buy some time.
02:48:22.000And it's nice if Elon thinks we can go to Mars.
02:48:24.000Maybe that will allow a small number of us to diversify in case we do something really dumb to the planet.
02:48:31.000But if human beings are to continue, and we are to continue evolving, we need to spread out.
02:48:36.000And there are three rocks that are inhabitable.
02:48:38.000There's the Earth, there's the Moon, and there's Mars.
02:50:55.000What I'm going to try to do with this podcast is gain the courage to share whatever ideas I've had about breaking the speed limit.
02:51:09.000In 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.
02:51:24.000And that was the plan, which is, what is this place?
02:51:32.000Now, what was the response from the physicist that you found appalling?
02:51:41.000There 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.
02:51:55.000So these were the special Simone lectures by Richard Dawkins' successor, Marcus de Sotoy, 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,
02:52:11.000I was working on this theory I called geometric unity.
02:52:20.000I hadn't really told anybody that I was working on this theory for all those years because it's a crazy – there's certain stories that you find in theoretical physics, which is kind of the precursor to madness, where somebody thinks that they've solved – Some big problem and they're working in secret.
02:52:38.000This is 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.
02:52:48.000So he announced a proof that he had solved this most famous problem in mathematics and he didn't have a proof.
02:52:54.000And then bizarrely he was under such pressure that he found another proof.
02:53:09.000But he was a professor at Princeton and very highly regarded.
02:53:13.000And 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 in some sense.
02:53:25.000And so this is what I was trying to do.
02:53:26.000I 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.
02:53:37.000In 1984, they had what they thought was a revolution.
02:53:40.000And the math community doesn't think in these terms.
02:53:44.000Like, both of these are very conservative communities historically and very focused on following the leadership of the top people unless there's a revolution.
02:53:54.000And 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 others.
02:54:07.000And your main motivation was to do this, to try to figure out a more advanced version of space travel?
02:54:16.000Like, it might be safer to go further once you've unlocked nuclear fusion.
02:54:24.000You're pretty much as screwed as you need to be.
02:54:27.000So then the issue is, okay, I'm pretty sure that Einstein's theory is not final.
02:54:37.000Because you get these singularities which I don't associate with ultimate equations.
02:54:42.000So the black hole singularity called the Schwarzschild singularity or the initial singularity that we associate with the Big Bang in like the Friedman Roberts and Walker space times.
02:54:55.000Are signs to me that these equations are incomplete.
02:54:58.000But the big problem with Einstein is that Einstein's work was so fundamental that it's like you can't get in under the ground floor of Einstein.
02:55:08.000You begin a physics seminar and you're already immediately in his world.
02:55:12.000You say, let X be a space-time manifold.
02:55:17.000So it's almost impossible to figure out a way to get in at a deeper level of physics than Einstein's theory.
02:55:26.000And we know that we have to recover Einstein's theory because that's been proven to work in all sorts of situations.
02:55:32.000And the same thing with quantum field theory, which is why I talked about the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron.
02:55:39.000So my idea was that only since the 1970s have we known that particle theory was based on geometry.
02:55:48.000We knew that Einstein's theory, Einstein used geometry to develop his theory.
02:55:52.000It was the language of relativity called Riemannian geometry.
02:55:56.000But many years later, we found out that Bohr's sort of quantum and Planck's quantum and Einstein's quantum as well was based on a different geometry of this guy Charles Erisman.
02:56:07.000He was an Alsatian geometer who worked with Cartan.
02:56:12.000And that geometry was figured out At Stony Brook in New York by Jim Simons, who became the world's greatest hedge fund manager, and C.N. Yang, who's arguably number one or number two greatest living theoretical physicist.
02:56:30.000And they figured out that the secret language of particle theory was also geometry, but a different geometry.
02:56:36.000And so geometric unity is simply the idea that it's not a fight between Einstein and Bohr.
02:56:44.000It's the two parents, Riemann on whose work, Einstein-based relativity, and Charles Erismann with this gauge-theoretic stuff that we did in the time before this, which in fact empowers particle theory.
02:57:05.000And so when do those two geometries unify?
02:57:08.000It's two different geometric theories.
02:57:10.000And I've found that in general they don't unify in a way that you want.
02:57:14.000You don't have the ability to do Einsteinian tensor analysis where you compress something called the Riemann curvature tensor and the gauge stuff where you do this gauge symmetry that we were talking about.
02:57:26.000Because gauge symmetry ruins the ability to compress the Einstein tensor.
02:57:41.000And so partially what the purpose of the Portal podcast is, is to use...
02:57:46.000I'll just sort of tear the mask off a little bit.
02:57:51.000We'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.
02:58:05.000And I think it's been partially a success and partially a failure.
02:58:09.000But what I'm trying to do is to gain the courage to talk about what these ideas are.
02:58:59.000And his wife wrote this amazing article in Scientific American called, Dear Guardian, You've Been Played.
02:59:07.000Now, she's not a physicist, but she has access to Sean's brain and she writes on physics.
02:59:13.000And then there was this whole thing where the new scientist said, okay, this guy claimed to give this lecture in the physics department, but he hasn't written a paper and he didn't tell the physicist.
02:59:29.000I stayed in England, and I gave the talk once more, and then a final time a week later.
02:59:36.000And 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.
02:59:56.000To 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.
03:00:03.000And to be blunt about it, I don't think that the string theorists are very focused on the real physical world either.
03:00:08.000They've been playing with toy models for nearly 40 years.
03:00:16.000So a lot of it was playing out in the press, and the new scientists had to retract.
03:00:21.000They said, no, what we wrote wasn't true.
03:00:23.000They did publicize the talk, and then there was an article.
03:00:27.000They sent a reporter to the final talk that I gave, and the reporter did not know any physics.
03:00:34.000So I spent the morning with this person, teaching him what the Dirac equation was, like a very fundamental thing.
03:00:39.000A question came up in the talk about, is your model anomaly-free?
03:00:46.000And my model has a property called nonchirality.
03:00:50.000Chirality, which is the difference between left-right asymmetric models are called chiral and left-right symmetric models are called nonchiral.
03:01:01.000So my model is nonchiral, but the chiral nature of the universe is supposed to emerge from it.
03:01:07.000And I was asked questions that didn't seem to make sense, which is you can't have a chiral anomaly in a nonchiral model.
03:01:14.000And the person, the reporter picked up on this and didn't really get it.
03:01:17.000So there was like a flurry of activity with a big WTF. And if you ask me, by the time I gave the second lecture, people weren't laughing.
03:02:20.000But 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 was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense.
03:03:10.000One 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 To help you get a job or to expel you becomes very contentious,
03:03:32.000So I got into a very contentious situation.
03:03:34.000But there was no explanation of why it was so contentious?
03:03:37.000We can talk about it on another podcast.
03:03:40.000But I was in a very low trust situation with Harvard and with the standard community.
03:03:49.000And 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.
03:04:18.000Where a guy named David Kajdan, who I very much admire, the person who had been my advisor, I don't want to name names, had given a seminar saying, all of gauge theory has been revolutionized.
03:08:42.000I can screw this thing up just fine by myself.
03:08:45.000But the opportunity to take me into a quiet corner and make something disappear or to hand the credit to somebody else is going to be a lot harder to do.
03:09:14.000I mean, look, it's only like the future of...
03:09:17.000A number of people have been privately asking me about the recent Guardian article and accompanying an op-ed by Oxford mathematician Marcos de Sotoy.
03:09:36.000As 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...
03:09:47.000All these are capital letters, that's why I'm saying it this way.
03:10:39.000Well, she's a physics – look, she comes from – I think she's a protege of Casey Cole, the great physics writer who's not a physicist.
03:10:49.000In her defense, do you feel that she felt this honestly and that this was problematic in her eyes, that you were entering into this field that you had not written a paper in, you had left academia 20 years ago?
03:11:47.000He's on the one hand talking total nonsense about Boltzmann brains and thought experiments, which is what I associate with desperation physics.
03:11:55.000On the other hand, he's kind of this rigorous...
03:11:59.000Rationalist thinker who's a prominent atheist.
03:12:47.000And to the extent that I've been delusional before.
03:12:51.000I'm about the only person in the U.S. who's against high-skilled immigration because people think, why should we keep out the best and the brightest?
03:13:31.000And if you're not trying, here's the clear thing.
03:13:36.000We know what nuclear weapons look like in the fusion era.
03:13:40.000If we aren't 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, at least I'm trying.
03:14:00.000I think I'm doing a damn sight better than trying, but assume that I fail completely.
03:14:06.000How crazy is it that we're not trying to take arms against our new sea of troubles?
03:15:13.000I have come to understand that Trump – I thought people would understand the Trump danger and that the Democratic Party would reevaluate their situation, but they didn't.
03:15:24.000They tripled and quadrupled down, and that is alarming.
03:15:27.000And so that's something I very much got wrong about Trump, is that even Trump wasn't enough of a message.
03:17:07.000I worry much more about if it's right.
03:17:10.000The two things that can go wrong if it's right is, one, that it could be weaponized before it becomes useful, and two, is that there's no solution in it.
03:17:18.000Maybe we actually are stuck in this place.
03:17:41.000We are in so much danger and we haven't had almost anything happen since 1945 at the scale of World War II. And so we've got magical thinking between our ears where we think it can't happen here.
03:17:53.000You know, this is the thing that makes me so fucking furious about screwing around with Europeans and sovereignty, which is Europe is a dangerous place.
03:18:07.000Europe is historically a dangerous place.
03:18:09.000It's been a place for years where college students can go and take in the sights.
03:19:23.000Maybe we use this podcast and some crazy-ass differential geometry to at least make a go of it, to at least, at the minimum, excite somebody to think maybe it's possible to make progress.
03:19:35.000Well, what's interesting about that is what you've said is reaching an astonishing number of ears and eyes.
03:20:01.000There's nothing irresponsible about your thoughts.
03:20:03.000Well, 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 of the type I mean since the early 70s, it's pretty galling.
03:20:18.000It's pretty galling to hear somebody talking like this who has the luxury of an invite to this podcast with no vetting, with nothing behind him other than the hope that maybe he's done something that's interesting.
03:23:27.000But wouldn't you guys want to know ahead of schedule?
03:23:30.000I never was able to get anybody interested.
03:23:33.000I went through graduate school on the Office of Naval Research's top grant for graduate study.
03:23:40.000And I always thought they would check in with me, but they never have.
03:23:44.000So, 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.
03:23:53.000Nobody believes that anything is possible, which is the really interesting part.
03:23:56.000What do you mean by that, nobody believes that anything is possible?
03:23:58.000You mean really astronomical breakthroughs?
03:25:55.000One, you, along with Sam and my brother, really encouraged me to do this.
03:26:07.000So I'm holding you personally responsible for whatever goes wrong.
03:26:11.000The second thing is, I really just, I have such a positive feeling about what you've done in terms of empowering people.
03:26:21.000Like, it really touched me that when my brother was shit out of luck, you did a bunch of shows with him and helped him get to a safe place.
03:26:30.000And I just want to say that there is like an aspect, we keep talking about, is there any use for men whatsoever?
03:26:36.000And standing up in a situation in which you can take a fair amount of guff, you can take a lot of heat, You said this thing to me that was really amazing, which is that this is a golden age of comedy.
03:26:46.000And my interpretation was that there was a period of time where nobody could figure out how to tell a joke on a college campus.
03:26:52.000And our best comedians have figured out how to be compassionate enough and kind enough.
03:27:17.000It was always funny, but it got better and better and better.
03:27:20.000And the idea that that could be told in a way that you'd be totally comfortable with your gay friend or lover right next to you laughing your ass off taught me a lot about the power of just radiating decency.