The Joe Rogan Experience - July 03, 2019


Joe Rogan Experience #1320 - Eric Weinstein

Topics
enforced downtime surfing and shark attacks resident orcas and salmon population internet manipulation portal story La Sagrada Familia DMT-inspired art and experiences C. elegans cell lineage map striking sports intersex oppression groups and IQ fringes equality of outcome geometric unity theory
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Eric Weinstein
Mentioned
Albert Einstein Brett Weinstein Jamie Dave Rubin Brian Callen William Randolph Hearst Charles Murray Mel Brooks Eric Weinstein Donald Trump Sam Harris Jordan Peterson Laird Hamilton Phil Demers Kanye Jocko Willink Sean Thornton Sean Carroll David Bowie Jackie Chan and 104 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1319 - Joey Diaz Joe Rogan Experience #1321 - Robert Oberst

Episode Stats


Length

3 hours and 27 minutes

Words per minute

163.15

Word count

33,928

Sentence count

3,310

Harmful content

Misogyny

63

sentences flagged

Toxicity

352

sentences flagged

Hate speech

66

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Recreate, but without bullshit. 0.98
00:00:02.000 It's very important when you recreate, you have no bullshit. 0.96
00:00:05.000 So, it's Eric Weinstein. 0.87
00:00:08.000 Weinstein, not Weinstein.
00:00:11.000 Yeah, I think it was originally Weinstein.
00:00:14.000 Weinstein?
00:00:15.000 Weinstein.
00:00:16.000 Oh, Weinstein.
00:00:17.000 Yeah.
00:00:17.000 German.
00:00:18.000 Yeah, but we came from a town between Odessa and Kiev called Umein, and that's where the Weinstein family came from.
00:00:31.000 We talked about how many people mispronounce Weinstein instead of Weinstein.
00:00:38.000 It's epidemic, and yet nobody ever says Albert Einstein.
00:00:43.000 Yes.
00:00:45.000 Strange, right?
00:00:46.000 That is a weird one.
00:00:47.000 The Einstein is...
00:00:48.000 Is there a guy named Mike Einstein?
00:00:51.000 Oh, Mike Einstein.
00:00:52.000 No, no, no.
00:00:52.000 Einstein.
00:00:53.000 Is there a guy like that?
00:00:55.000 Do you remember the old...
00:00:57.000 It was Blazing Saddles with...
00:00:59.000 Sure.
00:00:59.000 Mel Brooks.
00:01:00.000 Yeah, Mel Brooks.
00:01:01.000 And Harvey Korman's character was Hedley Lamar, and everyone would call him Hedy Lamar.
00:01:07.000 That was like the running joke in the picture.
00:01:10.000 That's right. 0.99
00:01:11.000 I fucking loved Mel Brooks' movies. 0.98
00:01:13.000 Do you remember the Yiddish-speaking Indians? 0.99
00:01:14.000 That had to be the best.
00:01:15.000 Oh, yeah, that's right.
00:01:17.000 He had some great movies, man. 0.99
00:01:20.000 There's fun fucking movies, man. 1.00
00:01:22.000 Just silly, fun, outrageous movies. 1.00
00:01:26.000 Yeah, I mean, he was transitional, right? 0.94
00:01:28.000 I guess it was the Borscht Belt being updated for the modern era.
00:01:31.000 Yeah, into film.
00:01:33.000 Yeah, but it was also...
00:01:35.000 It was...
00:01:37.000 You know, for the time, much more contemporary, but with that sort of borscht belt, sort of sticky, sort of...
00:01:43.000 Right.
00:01:44.000 And 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.
00:01:54.000 I think he came out of that with Carl Reiner.
00:01:57.000 Oh, that makes sense.
00:01:59.000 How old is Mel Brooks now?
00:02:01.000 I don't want to ask the question because maybe something will happen.
00:02:04.000 I know, right?
00:02:05.000 I think I saw recently that he turned 93. And I thought, shit, is he dead? 0.99
00:02:12.000 Because they were saying all these great things. 1.00
00:02:15.000 Mel Brooks. 1.00
00:02:15.000 I'm like, fuck! 1.00
00:02:16.000 Did we lose Mel Brooks? 1.00
00:02:18.000 But it's like one of those things where it's going to happen.
00:02:23.000 I mean, he's 93. I know, but every time it does...
00:02:26.000 I know.
00:02:27.000 I mean...
00:02:29.000 I guess Betty White is another one of these people. 1.00
00:02:32.000 Right.
00:02:33.000 Right?
00:02:33.000 And so we need these very exotic links to our past.
00:02:38.000 And they become more important as time goes on if they're still vital.
00:02:41.000 Because we want desperately to be connected to something before our current era.
00:02:47.000 Given that I think a lot of us sort of don't believe in anything that happened before Google.
00:02:52.000 Right.
00:02:53.000 Imagine kids today.
00:02:54.000 Imagine trying to describe...
00:02:57.000 To kids today what it was like to grow up without the internet.
00:03:00.000 Yeah, or not being able to reach people.
00:03:02.000 You have to make extensive plans.
00:03:04.000 Yeah.
00:03:04.000 You know, backup plans.
00:03:06.000 Well, if you're not there at this time.
00:03:08.000 Yeah, you used to have to yell.
00:03:10.000 Open out your window and yell for your friends.
00:03:13.000 I remember when I first got an answering machine.
00:03:15.000 I thought it was the most amazing thing ever.
00:03:17.000 When I was in high school, my family got an answering machine.
00:03:20.000 And I was like, this is incredible. 0.99
00:03:21.000 And you would leave stupid music to let everybody know you were cool. 0.99
00:03:26.000 You have some cool music. 1.00
00:03:27.000 Like, hey, it's Joe.
00:03:28.000 Not here right now, but if you leave a message, I'll get back to you.
00:03:31.000 Probably.
00:03:32.000 Probably.
00:03:34.000 And then you've got like old people who are... 1.00
00:03:36.000 I think someone in my family still has one of these cutesy messages from like the late 80s.
00:03:42.000 Really?
00:03:43.000 Yeah, on their voicemail.
00:03:44.000 But then who leaves voicemail?
00:03:45.000 And the thing that marks me as an old person is that I actually call people.
00:03:49.000 But that's...
00:03:50.000 I like that.
00:03:51.000 I've been doing that more lately.
00:03:52.000 Yeah.
00:03:53.000 I call a lot of people now.
00:03:54.000 I just feel like it's just...
00:03:57.000 It's better.
00:03:58.000 The 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.
00:04:16.000 The only thing that stops it is a podcast.
00:04:18.000 Podcast is my rest home.
00:04:21.000 For three hours, I'm not talking to anybody other than you.
00:04:24.000 So all those texts that come through, I'll get at the end of the podcast, I'll go and look at my phone, there'll be 40 texts sometimes.
00:04:30.000 Like, this is madness.
00:04:31.000 If I had to make 40 phone calls, it'd be impossible to manage.
00:04:37.000 Calls would constantly be coming in.
00:04:39.000 You'd never really be able to say anything.
00:04:41.000 So we're feeding into this weird loop where we just have these short form things.
00:04:46.000 Like, hey, dinner tomorrow?
00:04:48.000 Sure, what time?
00:04:49.000 How about nine?
00:04:50.000 I can do seven.
00:04:51.000 Okay, let's do it.
00:04:52.000 You know what I mean?
00:04:53.000 It's like these weird little bursts of information.
00:04:56.000 Remember this program, California?
00:04:59.000 What was it called?
00:05:00.000 Was it Californication?
00:05:02.000 That television show, yeah, with the X-Files.
00:05:04.000 David Duchovny, right. 0.95
00:05:05.000 So there's this scene where he's having some really hot intergenerational sex, and this gal says, like, LOL, and it kills it. 0.92
00:05:14.000 She said it out loud? 0.86
00:05:15.000 She says, LOL, and he loses total interest.
00:05:19.000 There's no amount of heat in the moment that can compensate for the fact that she's using, like, verbal emojis.
00:05:28.000 Hmm. 0.98
00:05:28.000 Well, he needs to fucking get over that. 0.98
00:05:30.000 Yeah. 0.99
00:05:31.000 It depends on how hot she is. 1.00
00:05:33.000 And it also depends on how you say it.
00:05:35.000 If she's really funny, she's like, LOL. You know, and she's like being silly. 0.99
00:05:39.000 You know who I learned that from? 0.97
00:05:40.000 I learned that from Jim Norton.
00:05:42.000 Jim Norton will always say, LOL. He'll say something really ridiculous and then say, LOL. But he's just mocking himself. 0.94
00:05:50.000 When you're over 50, it's intrinsically ironic.
00:05:52.000 Right, right.
00:05:53.000 But, you know, in terms of this weird thing about Islands of Time, one of the things that we do is we have Shabbat dinner.
00:05:58.000 And 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.
00:06:10.000 And so there's this thing about, like, people will pester me in all sorts of situations, but if I invoke something that is vaguely religious, even Sam Harris probably wouldn't call me during that period of time.
00:06:24.000 I find that very interesting.
00:06:26.000 Could you create a religion that was simply there to make sure that you had some time offline?
00:06:32.000 Yeah, I know if I text Ben Shapiro, I'm not getting a text back on Saturday until it's dark.
00:06:37.000 Yep.
00:06:38.000 But when it's dark, he texts you back.
00:06:40.000 No, as soon as there are three stars in the sky that has been on Twitter, it's like, what did I miss?
00:06:44.000 Yeah.
00:06:44.000 That's so weird!
00:06:45.000 It'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. 0.92
00:07:02.000 I think it's probably very good for you. 0.88
00:07:04.000 Or connect with yourself.
00:07:04.000 I had this experience.
00:07:05.000 I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years.
00:07:09.000 And we landed in this Orthodox-run hotel and on Friday night everything shut down, you know, like the textbook.
00:07:18.000 And I then moved into an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood right on the boundary of a place where the secular and the Orthodox met.
00:07:29.000 And 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.
00:07:38.000 But it's amazing that this is enforced downtime.
00:07:42.000 And about a month in, somebody said, oh, you're in the wrong place.
00:07:46.000 Of course you can go out on Friday night.
00:07:47.000 You just go to the Russian compound and everything's hopping and you can go dancing and drinking and all these things.
00:07:53.000 After I knew that, I went dancing and drinking, and I was much less happy than believing that somehow Israel actually shut down on Friday nights.
00:08:02.000 And so, very weirdly, I appreciated the constraint.
00:08:05.000 As soon as I knew you could break the constraint, I was less happy, and I would never actually obey it anymore.
00:08:11.000 Yeah, 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.
00:08:23.000 It 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.
00:08:30.000 Now we have the freedom to be relaxed.
00:08:32.000 Now we have the freedom to just talk to human beings.
00:08:35.000 You know, I think constraints, and it's like, you know who Jocko is, Jocko Willink?
00:08:41.000 Totally.
00:08:42.000 Everybody knows Jocko.
00:08:44.000 Discipline equals freedom.
00:08:45.000 Discipline equals freedom.
00:08:46.000 It doesn't seem like that makes sense. 0.99
00:08:48.000 Like, 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. 1.00
00:09:00.000 Takes a photo of his fucking watch at 4.30. 1.00
00:09:03.000 Hits the gym like a savage. 1.00
00:09:04.000 And then takes a photo sometimes of the sunrise.
00:09:07.000 Earning the sunrise.
00:09:08.000 But you would think, God, it's like a prison to force yourself into that.
00:09:12.000 But no, no.
00:09:13.000 There's freedom in that.
00:09:14.000 Because he knows.
00:09:15.000 He doesn't have to make any decisions.
00:09:17.000 At 4.30, he knows what he's going to do.
00:09:19.000 He knows what he's going to do.
00:09:20.000 You just go do it.
00:09:22.000 And that way, I mean, you look at the guy. 1.00
00:09:24.000 He's a fucking tank. 1.00
00:09:25.000 Why is he a tank? 1.00
00:09:26.000 Because Because he's always up at 4.30 fucking throwing weights around. 0.99
00:09:30.000 He never stops. 1.00
00:09:31.000 He never takes self-indulgent time to lay in bed and beat off and pick his nose and fucking check his text messages. 0.99
00:09:41.000 He's probably listening to this right now and thinking, yeah, I do a little bit of that. 0.99
00:09:44.000 I don't think he does.
00:09:46.000 Really?
00:09:46.000 No.
00:09:46.000 Total discipline?
00:09:47.000 Yeah.
00:09:48.000 Well, did you – I think I remember reading his inner dialogue about going to a birthday party and breaking down and having a scoop of ice cream or something or a slice of pie.
00:09:59.000 And it's like the drama of there it was.
00:10:04.000 Temptation.
00:10:04.000 I held out for 45 minutes.
00:10:06.000 But eventually I became weak.
00:10:09.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:10:09.000 Yeah, I don't fuck with that. 1.00
00:10:11.000 I just do it. 0.99
00:10:12.000 If I'm in a party, I just eat that cake.
00:10:14.000 I mean, I just feel like I do enough.
00:10:16.000 I'm alright.
00:10:17.000 I'll be fine.
00:10:18.000 There's this story about Jackie O, that she got this cancer diagnosis, and apparently her first words upon finding out that she had metastatic cancer was, then what did I do all those sit-ups for?
00:10:29.000 Isn't that an interesting comment?
00:10:30.000 That's an interesting comment.
00:10:32.000 She thought, if someone needs to talk to her...
00:10:34.000 JFK was keeping her in the dark.
00:10:36.000 Is that right?
00:10:37.000 Yeah, it must be.
00:10:39.000 What's happening over there, Jamie?
00:10:40.000 Something happened to DV? Yeah, like telling her that sit-ups, you want no cancer?
00:10:45.000 Sit-ups.
00:10:46.000 That's the way to do it.
00:10:46.000 I guess.
00:10:47.000 I don't know.
00:10:47.000 I mean, I think we all, we have so many days of our lives that we build this pattern that this is going to go on forever.
00:10:55.000 And there's some first moment.
00:10:57.000 I think I recall it.
00:10:59.000 Where the phrase popped into my head, I can see my death from here.
00:11:03.000 And 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.
00:11:12.000 Really?
00:11:13.000 Yeah.
00:11:13.000 I don't know.
00:11:14.000 When I turned 40, I found that – Yeah.
00:11:24.000 Yeah.
00:11:25.000 Yeah.
00:11:32.000 Yeah, you become a different thing.
00:11:34.000 Yeah.
00:11:34.000 Yeah, when your chemical composition changes, the way your body feels changes, the way you interface with the world changes.
00:11:40.000 Like, I wasn't feeling all that great yesterday, and I was sort of clowning around with the person behind the bar at Starbucks.
00:11:47.000 And she said, oh, why are you down?
00:11:48.000 I said, I don't know.
00:11:49.000 Just tell me something nice about my hair, you know?
00:11:52.000 And she says, she looks at me and she says...
00:11:55.000 Oh, I love salt and pepper. 0.99
00:11:58.000 I thought, damn. 0.99
00:11:59.000 Oh, really? 1.00
00:12:00.000 Worst.
00:12:01.000 You're barely salt and pepper.
00:12:02.000 I can barely see any salt in there.
00:12:03.000 Yeah, she's talking about the salt. 0.95
00:12:04.000 She's bullshitting you.
00:12:06.000 No, she just didn't want me flirting with her, so she just shut me down by saying, you want me to talk about your hair? 0.99
00:12:11.000 Okay, you crossed the threshold.
00:12:12.000 Here it comes.
00:12:13.000 That's all right.
00:12:14.000 Yeah, as soon as someone says, say something nice, that could get ugly for a girl. 1.00
00:12:18.000 Exactly.
00:12:18.000 Yeah.
00:12:19.000 Yeah, and she was in a captive situation.
00:12:20.000 It wasn't being fair to her.
00:12:22.000 Oh, yeah, right?
00:12:23.000 That was the worst, when someone was stuck behind a bar.
00:12:25.000 But we'd established a rapport before that.
00:12:27.000 I actually think she thought it was a kind and sensitive comment.
00:12:32.000 But I don't see any salt.
00:12:34.000 I'm looking.
00:12:36.000 Now I'm just fishing, John.
00:12:37.000 There might be a few in there, but not like...
00:12:41.000 Somebody's going to screenshot it and they're going to count all the hairs with arrows.
00:12:44.000 This 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.
00:12:53.000 Yeah, there's a lot of people in cubicles right now wasting their employer's time.
00:12:57.000 To those people, we salute you.
00:13:01.000 Cheers.
00:13:01.000 Cheers.
00:13:03.000 I should say for the folks at home, that before we started this, you asked me, did I want Laird Hamilton coffee?
00:13:09.000 And I said, Laird Hamilton coffee?
00:13:10.000 What's Laird Hamilton coffee?
00:13:12.000 And you gave me something laced with turmeric, which may turn our lips funny colors.
00:13:18.000 Nah, it doesn't.
00:13:18.000 No, I drink it every day.
00:13:20.000 It's fine.
00:13:21.000 It's really good, though.
00:13:22.000 But it does give you a little phlegm.
00:13:24.000 A little bit of that.
00:13:26.000 Because it's got all sorts of MCT oil and all sorts of great stuff in there.
00:13:30.000 Laird Hamilton's a real freak.
00:13:32.000 Really interesting guy.
00:13:33.000 What a pioneer.
00:13:34.000 Yeah.
00:13:35.000 Just talking to him and hanging out with him and seeing how his brain works.
00:13:39.000 You got to do that?
00:13:40.000 Yeah, I had him on the podcast.
00:13:41.000 Yeah.
00:13:42.000 It was really, really fun.
00:13:44.000 Okay, this is something I'm totally curious about.
00:13:47.000 I 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.
00:14:04.000 Well, the big one is that new type of surfboard.
00:14:06.000 What the hell is that called?
00:14:07.000 It's like a sail.
00:14:08.000 The foil?
00:14:08.000 Foil.
00:14:08.000 Yeah, foil.
00:14:09.000 That thing is amazing.
00:14:11.000 And it's so weird looking.
00:14:14.000 If you look at it, you're like, what are you standing on?
00:14:16.000 Why is it elevated?
00:14:18.000 What is that?
00:14:18.000 It's a magic carpet of the sea, let's be honest.
00:14:21.000 That's what it is.
00:14:22.000 And I am obsessed.
00:14:23.000 I was asking you before.
00:14:25.000 There'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.
00:14:41.000 And...
00:14:41.000 I'm just thinking, do you even know what you're doing or where you are?
00:14:45.000 He keeps saying this one phrase, which is, I'm just scratching – what blows my mind is I'm just scratching the surface.
00:14:51.000 He knows that he's making that discontinuous jump.
00:14:56.000 And 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,
00:15:12.000 you know, somebody jumps a foot more than anyone's ever jumped before, something like that.
00:15:15.000 So it's really interesting when somebody changes the game.
00:15:19.000 It is.
00:15:20.000 And when you find out that there's stuff that you can do in other sports...
00:15:25.000 Like skate sports, like different crazy flips and stuff, and someone figures out how to do that on a wave. 0.98
00:15:31.000 The consequences are so fucking grave. 1.00
00:15:33.000 If you make a mistake and you're on an 80-foot wave, and that bitch comes slamming down on you. 1.00
00:15:39.000 But part of the innovation is safety, right? 1.00
00:15:41.000 Right.
00:15:41.000 With these vests.
00:15:42.000 Inflatable vests, yeah.
00:15:43.000 And with these water safety courses for big wave surfers, I think that what's fascinating is...
00:15:53.000 You think the innovation is in the tricks, maybe, but maybe the innovation is actually in, hey, you can afford a two-wave hold-down in a way you couldn't before, or you're going to survive all sorts of things that might have been fatal.
00:16:06.000 Right, right.
00:16:07.000 So you have this open area to innovate.
00:16:11.000 Yeah.
00:16:12.000 I mean, surfing's fascinating to me.
00:16:14.000 I don't do it.
00:16:15.000 I haven't done it.
00:16:16.000 But I went snorkeling when I was in Hawaii a couple weeks ago. 0.99
00:16:20.000 And I'm such a pussy. 0.99
00:16:24.000 I'm snorkeling with my kids, right? 1.00
00:16:26.000 So, of course, I'm trying to figure out how to be the mama duck and corral everybody.
00:16:31.000 So if the shark's coming, it gets me.
00:16:34.000 I'm just looking around.
00:16:36.000 Because some guy, he got jacked, I think, snorkeling.
00:16:40.000 In Maui, just a couple months ago, like right off of a resort.
00:16:45.000 Tiger shark, probably.
00:16:46.000 Yeah, probably.
00:16:47.000 Yeah.
00:16:50.000 Some lady got it yesterday, not yesterday, a couple days ago in, was it the Bahamas? 0.96
00:16:57.000 Three sharks.
00:16:58.000 One took her arm off and the other two just ripped her apart in front of everybody. 0.94
00:17:04.000 College kid from California.
00:17:07.000 Well, I'm very interested in situations that change with sharks.
00:17:10.000 Like Reunion, for example, in the Indian Ocean off of Madagascar used to be a surfing hotspot.
00:17:16.000 And they had a bull shark problem where the bull sharks just sort of learned how to eat humans or attack humans.
00:17:23.000 But...
00:17:24.000 The great thing is we have got some weird thing going on with the true apex predator of the seas, which is the orca.
00:17:31.000 We have one recorded bite in the wild ever.
00:17:35.000 Now, how does this make any sense?
00:17:37.000 Like, great whites are not apex predators because orcas will just take them out.
00:17:42.000 And I had this poll on Twitter the other day, which is orcas, colon, best species ever was number one. 1.00
00:17:52.000 Then the other possibility was the dicks of the deep because they're such assholes. 1.00
00:17:56.000 Yeah. 0.99
00:17:56.000 I didn't know that there was a recorded bite of anyone in the wild. 0.99
00:17:59.000 I thought it was all in captivity.
00:18:01.000 No, there was a surfer who got a bite.
00:18:03.000 Really?
00:18:04.000 Yeah, but on the other hand, how are you going to make contact if you're an orca?
00:18:07.000 You don't have opposable thumbs.
00:18:09.000 It might be, for all I know.
00:18:11.000 Well, it has to be a joke, because otherwise the guy would be dead.
00:18:15.000 I mean, if an orca wanted to kill you and you're in the water, that's like if you let an ant go.
00:18:20.000 Okay, but why have orcas never attacked us?
00:18:22.000 There's so many recorded instances of swimmers, paddleboarders, surfers running into orcas.
00:18:29.000 Some weird thing is going on, and we have to work this out, Joe.
00:18:33.000 Yeah, let's try.
00:18:34.000 Because we've got... 1.00
00:18:35.000 Well, first of all, what assholes are we that we have those goddamn things in captivity? 1.00
00:18:40.000 And a big fucking shout out to Canada. 1.00
00:18:43.000 Because 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. 0.99
00:18:54.000 It's amazing.
00:18:55.000 And I hope the United States does it as well.
00:18:57.000 I hope it goes worldwide.
00:19:00.000 I think it's...
00:19:02.000 I think it's slavery.
00:19:03.000 I really do.
00:19:04.000 I think it's a different kind of slavery.
00:19:05.000 They're almost us.
00:19:07.000 They're like a cross between us and wolves in the ocean.
00:19:17.000 What is going on there?
00:19:18.000 Like the cerebral cortex, there's thinking happening there, like really complex, high-level thinking.
00:19:24.000 Well, am I right that they have menopause?
00:19:26.000 Like they're essentially the only other species with menopause.
00:19:29.000 And you're only going to get menopause likely if females are contributing some sort of intellectual labor past their reproductive system. 1.00
00:19:42.000 How is that?
00:19:44.000 Because, well, I thought menopause was just a shift in the hormonal balance of the female. 0.99
00:19:48.000 Well, what is the purpose evolutionarily of continuing life beyond...
00:19:56.000 That's a good point because that's not the case in mammals.
00:20:00.000 In mammals, deer in particular, can breed deep into their old, old age.
00:20:05.000 Well, 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.
00:20:17.000 I think it was Henry Ford who used to go to the dump to see what broke down on the cars and what was still working.
00:20:25.000 And 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.
00:20:37.000 And you see this like with salmon, where salmon disintegrate because it's a discretized product.
00:20:46.000 Right.
00:20:50.000 Yeah.
00:20:52.000 That's interesting.
00:20:53.000 They also have a massive infanticide.
00:20:57.000 That's the horrible thing about dolphins.
00:21:00.000 They're ruthless.
00:21:01.000 They kill their babies.
00:21:02.000 The male dolphins will kill female dolphins' babies in order to force them into estrus.
00:21:07.000 Yeah. 0.95
00:21:08.000 And the strategy that the female dolphins have acquired to mitigate that is that they become sluts. 1.00
00:21:16.000 Because the male dolphins don't know whether or not the female's baby is theirs because they don't have 23andMe under the ocean. 0.91
00:21:23.000 So what happens is the female will have sex with as many males as she can. 1.00
00:21:28.000 So that way she's protected and her child is protected because then all the males think it could possibly be their baby.
00:21:35.000 They don't want to kill their own baby, which is really interesting that they differentiate.
00:21:38.000 Because many mammals that also participate in this don't.
00:21:41.000 Like, bears don't differentiate between their babies and someone else's babies.
00:21:46.000 If 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.
00:21:57.000 But dolphins, who we think of as our beautiful, charming, wonderful little buddies in the water, they kill babies.
00:22:06.000 They kill baby dolphins.
00:22:07.000 And killer whales are, of course, dolphins.
00:22:09.000 Yes, they're a type of dolphin.
00:22:10.000 So, you know, the issue is, you know, I think about why do we not get attacked?
00:22:15.000 It's like professional courtesy. 1.00
00:22:17.000 Assholes recognize assholes. 0.99
00:22:20.000 I 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. 1.00
00:22:32.000 I've never done that.
00:22:33.000 Oh, dude.
00:22:33.000 Here, I'll show you a little video.
00:22:35.000 It's kind of wild.
00:22:36.000 Because what they do is they literally go and they hang out with the wave of your boat.
00:22:41.000 So as your boat is tuning along, they ride the wake.
00:22:48.000 They figure out a way how to do that.
00:22:50.000 They figure out a way to get in front of the boat.
00:22:52.000 And as the boat is pushing the water, it helps them along, almost like reverse drafting, because they're kind of in front of it.
00:22:58.000 So as you're pushing the water...
00:23:00.000 Let me find it here.
00:23:02.000 It's really interesting, man.
00:23:03.000 They're an incredible little animal.
00:23:06.000 I mean, it's so...
00:23:07.000 Here it goes.
00:23:09.000 See, that's us in the boat.
00:23:12.000 That's way cool.
00:23:13.000 Yeah.
00:23:15.000 Isn't that wild?
00:23:16.000 Yeah.
00:23:17.000 It's just wild.
00:23:18.000 They just hang out with you. 1.00
00:23:19.000 I mean, wild fucking dolphins, middle of the ocean. 1.00
00:23:22.000 They don't know you. 1.00
00:23:23.000 You could be an asshole. 1.00
00:23:24.000 They trust you enough to... 1.00
00:23:25.000 They're trying to get our technology, Joe.
00:23:27.000 They want the boats.
00:23:28.000 I don't think so.
00:23:29.000 You don't think so? 1.00
00:23:30.000 They think we're trapped by that shit. 1.00
00:23:32.000 They're laughing at us. 1.00
00:23:33.000 Hey, watch this.
00:23:34.000 We can do this.
00:23:35.000 Yeah, they don't have to carry anything.
00:23:36.000 We're carrying everything. 0.86
00:23:37.000 By ourselves, we're almost useless. 1.00
00:23:39.000 Naked, useless. 0.99
00:23:41.000 We have to have clothes. 0.99
00:23:42.000 You have to carry the clothes.
00:23:43.000 You have to have shoes.
00:23:44.000 That's how we roll, man.
00:23:45.000 We're extended phenotype guys.
00:23:46.000 Yes. 0.99
00:23:47.000 They think we're fools. 1.00
00:23:49.000 They think we're fools. 1.00
00:23:50.000 Yeah, they're out there with free food. 0.99
00:23:51.000 They don't have to worry about carrying credit cards, Bitcoin, all that nonsense.
00:23:55.000 They're out there in the ocean.
00:23:57.000 I bet they have Bitcoin.
00:23:58.000 You think so?
00:23:59.000 Bitcoin of the deep ash.
00:24:00.000 I don't think they do.
00:24:02.000 I think they're probably pretty pissed that we've killed all the fish, though.
00:24:05.000 Yeah?
00:24:05.000 I think that they're actually, you know, the orcas figured out how to use our fishing boats and just wait for us to get stuff on the line.
00:24:15.000 And then they're like, oh, cool, thank you for organizing my dinner.
00:24:18.000 Yeah.
00:24:19.000 Well, some orcas are not that smart because they're not adapting.
00:24:23.000 Like, there's a particular pod in the Pacific Northwest that relies on Chinook salmon.
00:24:28.000 Oh, yeah.
00:24:29.000 And they're trying to figure out...
00:24:31.000 Because the salmon population is...
00:24:36.000 We're good to go.
00:24:57.000 And the migratory pod is doing great.
00:24:59.000 They're doing great.
00:25:00.000 They're eating all the seals, and they're having a good old time.
00:25:02.000 But for whatever reason, the pod that stays in that area doesn't want to eat marine mammals. 0.97
00:25:07.000 They only want to eat Chinook salmon, so they're fucking literally starving to death.
00:25:11.000 You know, I think they read this book on fixed versus growth mindset, and the transient pods are like, hey, every day is a new day. 0.93
00:25:18.000 We could do something different.
00:25:19.000 And the other ones are like, no, I'm kind of a creature of habit.
00:25:22.000 Maybe the salmon are coming back.
00:25:24.000 They just have a very specific diet that they just won't deviate from, which I find to be really weird.
00:25:30.000 What is it?
00:25:31.000 That pod's missing right now.
00:25:32.000 They're probably all dead.
00:25:34.000 They haven't been seen in over three weeks, which is the longest they have been gone for.
00:25:38.000 Oh, Washington's resident orcas go missing.
00:25:41.000 Oh yeah, I remember that no new babies had been born in the Puget Sound area.
00:25:45.000 Yeah, it's really bad.
00:25:46.000 I hope they're not dead.
00:25:48.000 Man, that's horrible.
00:25:51.000 It's just sad because they can't figure out a way how to teach them to eat marine animals.
00:25:56.000 There's all these different strategies.
00:25:58.000 They've tried to figure out a way to teach them to eat seals, but they're not interested.
00:26:02.000 And they've also decided to try to figure out a way to farm-raise Chinook salmon and reintroduce them to that area.
00:26:09.000 But then again, you don't have to, like, how do you designate those salmon specifically for the orcas and not for fishermen?
00:26:17.000 Like, what do you do when people, you know, they catch fish?
00:26:20.000 What do you do?
00:26:21.000 Do you tell them, put it back, it's for the orca?
00:26:26.000 Yeah.
00:26:27.000 Joe, I don't have any actual expertise in this area.
00:26:30.000 Me neither.
00:26:30.000 I'm just talking.
00:26:32.000 Well, you know, we went down to Hearst Castle, and there's this elephant seal colony there.
00:26:39.000 And my family decided that this is the worst species ever of mammal.
00:26:43.000 Elephant seals?
00:26:43.000 Oh, man, they're horrible.
00:26:45.000 Like, 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. 0.99
00:26:57.000 Like, not too much, but...
00:26:58.000 Just enough to keep them happy.
00:27:00.000 Yeah, right.
00:27:01.000 And then the beach masters have to fight each other and they're all these dead babies all over the beach because the giant bulls just trample them on their way to fights.
00:27:14.000 Oh.
00:27:15.000 Right?
00:27:15.000 And so then you have like the females, if they lose the pup, they've got to get rid of their milk so they steal somebody else's baby.
00:27:23.000 So the whole thing, if you transpose like human, if you anthropomorphize, you just think, these people are horrible.
00:27:30.000 This is a crack house on the beach and there's no way. 0.70
00:27:33.000 How do we get some great whites in and remove these mammals immediately? 0.98
00:27:36.000 They're making the family look bad.
00:27:38.000 Yeah, maybe we could get the orcas to start eating them.
00:27:40.000 That's right.
00:27:41.000 Yeah.
00:27:41.000 Because orcas are...
00:27:43.000 We have a deal.
00:27:44.000 Yeah, and it's a big animal, so it's a good meal.
00:27:46.000 Look at those dead babies. 1.00
00:27:47.000 That is so fucked up. 1.00
00:27:49.000 I don't know if they're all dead, but they might be. 1.00
00:27:51.000 Yeah, and they are lazy. 0.53
00:27:53.000 They are not an industrious...
00:27:54.000 I mean, they are when they're in the sea, but when they're just on land...
00:27:58.000 Oh, they're just laying there?
00:28:00.000 Oh, they're not dead.
00:28:00.000 They're just chilling.
00:28:01.000 Yeah, they're chilling.
00:28:02.000 Look how many of them there are.
00:28:04.000 Well, you've seen when orcas do beach themselves to get those things, right?
00:28:08.000 It's wild.
00:28:08.000 Yeah.
00:28:09.000 It's wild.
00:28:10.000 It's right on the edge.
00:28:11.000 They hydroplane onto...
00:28:14.000 And then they waddle back in.
00:28:15.000 Look how, like, scratched up they are from the ground and everything.
00:28:18.000 It's a weird-looking animal, too. 0.99
00:28:20.000 What a weird fucking thing that is. 1.00
00:28:23.000 William Randolph Hearst was a real piece of shit. 1.00
00:28:25.000 He really was. 1.00
00:28:26.000 You know, he's the reason why we have wild pigs in California. 0.99
00:28:30.000 That dipshit imported wild boars and released them on his property so he could hunt them. 0.99
00:28:35.000 Okay, so we're driving down the highway, and my son says... 1.00
00:28:40.000 Look, Dad, wild zebras!
00:28:41.000 I said, haha, son, that's very cute.
00:28:43.000 He says, no, no, no, really!
00:28:45.000 And I look up, and there's a herd of wild zebras.
00:28:51.000 What?!
00:28:52.000 Hearst Castle has wild zebras.
00:28:54.000 They closed down the zoo.
00:28:55.000 They let the zebras out.
00:28:56.000 We have a herd of wild zebras in California that no one told me about. 1.00
00:29:00.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00
00:29:01.000 Are you serious? 1.00
00:29:03.000 I've won the Joe Rogan experience.
00:29:04.000 I finally told you something you don't know anything about.
00:29:07.000 Especially about invasive wildlife species.
00:29:09.000 That's crazy.
00:29:11.000 Zebras in California. 1.00
00:29:12.000 Does that change your mind a little bit on Mr. Hearst? 1.00
00:29:14.000 No, he's a piece of shit. 1.00
00:29:17.000 He's one of the main reasons why marijuana became illegal. 1.00
00:29:20.000 Was he smoking too much?
00:29:22.000 Well, it's all conspiracy theory and conjecture, but the story is, the traditional told by stoners with some education story is, that William Randolph Hearst along with Harry Anslinger conspired to make marijuana illegal when DuPont It came up with a chemical composition for nylon and when it was a combination of several factors and the decorticator was invented.
00:29:47.000 The decorticator was a way that they could effectively process hemp fiber without the use of slavery. 0.95
00:29:52.000 See the reason why they switched over from Hemp clothing and hemp sales and canvas.
00:29:58.000 Canvas, which actually comes from the word cannabis.
00:30:01.000 All canvas was made from hemp.
00:30:03.000 All that stuff is made from hemp.
00:30:05.000 It's far superior to cotton.
00:30:08.000 Far superior in terms of strength, in terms of its durability.
00:30:14.000 Better than jute?
00:30:15.000 I don't know what jute is.
00:30:16.000 Jude is what burlap bag...
00:30:18.000 Oh, yeah.
00:30:18.000 It's way better than that stuff.
00:30:20.000 No, hemp is an alien plant.
00:30:22.000 If 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.
00:30:33.000 It's incredibly strange.
00:30:35.000 I... I've seen the actual stalk of a hemp tree when it gets really big.
00:30:42.000 And you'll have it thick around like a man's shoulder, right?
00:30:46.000 But it weighs like nothing.
00:30:48.000 It's really strange.
00:30:49.000 It's a strange, strange plant.
00:30:51.000 Not like any other plant.
00:30:52.000 It has all the essential amino acids.
00:30:54.000 It contains protein.
00:30:56.000 You can cook with the oil.
00:30:59.000 The oil can sustain you.
00:31:00.000 It's got essential fatty acids in the oil.
00:31:02.000 No wonder we have to ban it. 0.99
00:31:03.000 Oh, it's a fucking amazing, amazing plant. 0.98
00:31:05.000 But anyway, they came out with this decorticator. 0.96
00:31:09.000 And 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.
00:31:18.000 So, 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.
00:31:29.000 And because they had this decorticator, right?
00:31:32.000 So...
00:31:33.000 William Randolph Hearst, on top of having Hearst Publications, he also had paper mills.
00:31:40.000 Because, you know, he wanted to make his own paper.
00:31:43.000 So he had these forests, and he had paper, and he would make paper out of wood.
00:31:47.000 There it is.
00:31:48.000 Well, there's a cover of it, though, that says hemp.
00:31:52.000 Hemp the new billion dollar crop.
00:31:54.000 That's just the inside part of it.
00:31:56.000 Let's see if you can find it.
00:31:57.000 Anyway...
00:31:58.000 So, William Randolph Hearst would have had to shift over, because hemp paper, I don't know if you've ever played with it?
00:32:04.000 No.
00:32:04.000 It's incredibly durable.
00:32:06.000 It's crazy.
00:32:07.000 It's hard to tear. 0.99
00:32:08.000 It's really fucking strong. 1.00
00:32:10.000 Like, it's a fucking alien plant. 1.00
00:32:12.000 There's nothing like it. 1.00
00:32:13.000 It's so weird.
00:32:14.000 Like, you see a piece of paper, you think, oh, look at this light piece of paper, I could tear it.
00:32:17.000 No, no, no. 0.98
00:32:18.000 Fucking really durable. 0.99
00:32:20.000 So, 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. 1.00
00:32:30.000 So he starts putting together all these stories about Mexicans and blacks that are smoking this drug called marijuana, and they're raping white women. 1.00
00:32:43.000 When Congress made marijuana illegal, they probably didn't even understand that it was hemp, because it was the same goddamn thing. 1.00
00:32:51.000 Marijuana was a Mexican slang for tobacco, for a wild tobacco. 0.98
00:32:56.000 So they repurposed this name and called it this plant, called this marijuana. 1.00
00:33:02.000 Like, it was this gigantic conspiracy so that this fucking piece of shit could save money. 1.00
00:33:07.000 All right. 1.00
00:33:08.000 That's really what it was.
00:33:09.000 Because he had access.
00:33:11.000 He was like the YouTube and the Google of, you know...
00:33:14.000 He belonged with those elephants.
00:33:16.000 The 1930s, man.
00:33:16.000 He did belong with those...
00:33:17.000 He had access.
00:33:19.000 He was the one who could decide what gets distributed. 0.98
00:33:24.000 And that was a big part of the whole Reefer Madness film campaign and all that shit. 0.97
00:33:29.000 All that stuff was all about economics. 0.96
00:33:32.000 The whole thing was about economics.
00:33:33.000 American 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.
00:33:54.000 Coolie labor. 1.00
00:33:55.000 Wow, what does that mean?
00:33:56.000 I don't even know what that means.
00:33:58.000 Let's not talk about it.
00:33:59.000 Do you know what it means?
00:34:00.000 Nope.
00:34:00.000 Nope.
00:34:00.000 It will provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land.
00:34:03.000 So this was all in February 1938. They thought they were going to change the world with this shit. 1.00
00:34:09.000 And then you had all these people that were a part of the whole prohibition for alcohol. 1.00
00:34:14.000 They just shifted those motherfuckers over to hemp. 1.00
00:34:17.000 I mean, think about it. 1.00
00:34:18.000 It's like over the period of, you know, 10, 15 years.
00:34:21.000 If you had 10, 15 years ago, you know, we're talking about like 2004. You know, you had a bunch of people from the Bush administration that 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. 0.75
00:34:36.000 What the fuck's his name? 1.00
00:34:37.000 That little weasel? 1.00
00:34:38.000 The little weasel that Trump got rid of?
00:34:40.000 Sessions? 1.00
00:34:40.000 That piece of shit? 1.00
00:34:42.000 That guy? 1.00
00:34:43.000 Same thing.
00:34:43.000 Same thing.
00:34:44.000 These little weasels.
00:34:45.000 Good people don't smoke marijuana.
00:34:47.000 Well, then you know he's a viper.
00:34:49.000 He's a viper?
00:34:50.000 Isn't that what they used to call people who smoked weed back in the old days?
00:34:53.000 Yeah, he's not smoking any weed.
00:34:55.000 Look, anytime I see somebody who's really against homosexuality, I set a clock.
00:35:00.000 Yeah.
00:35:01.000 Right?
00:35:02.000 Yeah.
00:35:02.000 And you have to ask yourself, who in the modern era...
00:35:07.000 I found it astounding that when Elon came on this program and had a blunt, that it was an issue.
00:35:14.000 Yeah.
00:35:15.000 And can you imagine if Elon had a glass of Chardonnay?
00:35:19.000 Well, he did.
00:35:20.000 I know, but just the fact that our language and our thought process around this.
00:35:27.000 Right.
00:35:28.000 I see what you're saying.
00:35:28.000 I 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.
00:35:44.000 Yeah.
00:35:45.000 And we asked a question.
00:35:47.000 Of the interesting substances, what are the three that you find were most informative in terms of self-revelation, changing your understanding for the better, etc.?
00:35:59.000 I was astounded that of the people who seemed to be very knowledgeable about mind-altering substances, almost everyone put cannabis in the top three.
00:36:10.000 Trevor Burrus Well, I thought it would be sort of commonplace.
00:36:13.000 I wouldn't have guessed.
00:36:16.000 Somebody would say 5-MeO-DMT. Somebody else would say ketamine.
00:36:19.000 Somebody else would say LSD or DMT or ayahuasca.
00:36:26.000 But the common thread throughout all of these people, many of them were researchers, was that they felt that cannabis was a miraculous substance.
00:36:37.000 Well, it certainly is.
00:36:38.000 The deal is it has two different forms, right?
00:36:41.000 It has a smokable form, which, you know, you can get really fucking high, or it has the edible form, which is like a psychedelic.
00:36:50.000 Yeah, but it's like a psychedelic.
00:36:51.000 It's very much so.
00:36:53.000 It actually is more psychoactive.
00:36:55.000 There's something called 11-hydroxy metabolite that is only present when you eat it.
00:37:01.000 It's processed by the liver.
00:37:03.000 There's something called a one-pass.
00:37:05.000 And 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.
00:37:16.000 Like, a lot of times when people eat edibles, they're like, oh my god, this isn't pot.
00:37:20.000 Something's in there.
00:37:20.000 Well, it's just the 11-hydroxymetabolite.
00:37:23.000 That's what it is.
00:37:23.000 You know about it.
00:37:24.000 Yeah, it's way different.
00:37:25.000 It's way different.
00:37:27.000 Like, that's why it's confusing to people. 0.99
00:37:29.000 Like, oh, I can't fuck with edibles. 0.98
00:37:30.000 It's a different drug. 1.00
00:37:32.000 It's a different drug.
00:37:33.000 Because 11-hydroxymetabolite is not present in psychoactive form when you smoke it. 0.92
00:37:39.000 So when you eat it, that's when you get that really fucking weird body high and interdimensional relationship. 0.88
00:37:47.000 Is it better? 0.98
00:37:47.000 Worse? 0.98
00:37:48.000 Is it more interesting?
00:37:49.000 Well, for the tank, it's bueno.
00:37:51.000 It's the best for the isolation tank.
00:37:54.000 That's my favorite.
00:37:55.000 My favorite is a good stiff dose of an edible and then wait about 45 minutes and then get in the tank.
00:38:03.000 Because 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.
00:38:17.000 Especially 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. 0.83
00:38:28.000 You start seeing these strange dancing cartoons and weird, weird shit. 0.60
00:38:35.000 Unrelated to other substances? 0.99
00:38:38.000 Well...
00:38:38.000 You can get similar situations on other psychedelics, especially in the tank.
00:38:44.000 The tank is a really unique way to experience anything.
00:38:48.000 Even normal state of consciousness that you have without any drugs at all.
00:38:58.000 Inside the tank, it transforms, right?
00:39:01.000 Because in the absence of any sensory input, and you don't have anything coming your way, you don't feel your skin, your brain starts really getting free and loose.
00:39:09.000 And you start...
00:39:11.000 It gets very confusing as to what's reality and what's not.
00:39:15.000 What are the boundaries of vision and interpretation and just creativity?
00:39:22.000 Like, how much of this is your imagination?
00:39:23.000 How much of this is not...
00:39:25.000 When you add any sort of psychedelic to that tank experience, everything gets ramped up.
00:39:30.000 It's like you add some drugs, when you mix them with other drugs, they become way more potent.
00:39:37.000 That's what happens in the tank.
00:39:39.000 The tank, in and of itself, is some kind of a drug, or it produces some kind of profound drug-like effects.
00:39:47.000 Can it be banned?
00:39:48.000 The tank?
00:39:49.000 No, I don't think it can.
00:39:50.000 How much experience do you have with the tank?
00:39:52.000 Not much.
00:39:53.000 How many times have you done it?
00:39:55.000 I've been in once, and it was when I was a teenager.
00:39:57.000 God, man, you should have one.
00:39:59.000 You really should.
00:39:59.000 It's just a great way to relax, too.
00:40:01.000 It's a great way to...
00:40:02.000 And 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.
00:40:16.000 Yeah, although I actually have a kind of ambient level of distraction, which is most helpful for...
00:40:23.000 Look, when I get out there, I get way the hell out there.
00:40:26.000 So you like an ambient level of distraction?
00:40:28.000 Sometimes, for example, I'll go to an all-night cafe at like 2 in the morning, and there'll be just enough human...
00:40:36.000 I mean, I have very ambiguous feelings about humans.
00:40:41.000 Don't worry, I don't consider you one.
00:40:43.000 What are you?
00:40:45.000 What do you consider yourself?
00:40:46.000 We'll talk about this one off the air.
00:40:49.000 No, I really think in many ways I've left this planet.
00:40:52.000 Really?
00:40:53.000 Yeah.
00:40:53.000 I think that there's a way in which I've checked out.
00:40:55.000 How so?
00:41:00.000 I think that when you get deep enough into your own mind and you start dealing with abstractions and you find that the real world – I wasn't planning on going here, but we can try it.
00:41:11.000 When you find that the real world is often a kind of noisy place to think and that you actually prefer really powerful abstractions and then you check in with the real world to say, does that abstraction actually govern the world that I'm in?
00:41:29.000 You start to prefer living in the abstractions.
00:41:33.000 That's interesting.
00:41:34.000 Do you feel the same way about a crowded nightclub?
00:41:38.000 If you go to a bar, do you find that that stimulates thinking?
00:41:42.000 Well, it depends.
00:41:43.000 If I'm in a stimulating conversation, I'm very present.
00:41:47.000 If I'm in an unstimulating conversation, I have to make my own fun.
00:41:52.000 And so I will start to sort of...
00:41:55.000 Play.
00:41:55.000 I mean, you know, at times I'll just make up a story and see how it flies, you know, if I don't think I'm hurting anybody.
00:42:03.000 And sometimes I'll sort of experiment with people.
00:42:06.000 I think we're all doing it.
00:42:09.000 You experiment with people?
00:42:10.000 Well, sure.
00:42:11.000 Like you say something to someone to see if they bite?
00:42:13.000 Well, you know, it's like – let's imagine, for example, you were going to move to Austin.
00:42:17.000 Okay.
00:42:18.000 Are you going to just be the same old you?
00:42:21.000 You're not going to take the opportunity to perhaps reinvent yourself?
00:42:24.000 So, for example, you know, if I suddenly change – if I start wearing glasses – And I wear like a really fashion-forward pair of spectacles.
00:42:35.000 You should wear aviators with yellow lenses like Hunter S. Thompson.
00:42:39.000 I would like that.
00:42:40.000 I'd like that with you. 0.77
00:42:41.000 With your crazy hair? 0.58
00:42:41.000 Yeah. 0.58
00:42:43.000 You with some yellow aviators and don't even address it.
00:42:45.000 Wear them in public.
00:42:46.000 Yeah.
00:42:47.000 Wear them indoors.
00:42:47.000 But if I do any sort of alteration, like maybe I've never seen what I look like with a bald head.
00:42:53.000 So if I were to move cities, when's the best time to try it?
00:42:57.000 Try something new.
00:42:59.000 Right.
00:42:59.000 And so, you know, at our age, Joe.
00:43:02.000 Yes.
00:43:03.000 How old are you?
00:43:04.000 53. Yeah, that's our age.
00:43:06.000 I'm 51. Almost 52. So the great danger is complacency.
00:43:12.000 And so I'm terrified about becoming complacent.
00:43:15.000 So I always want to experiment, change, like what is it that I can continue to do to grow?
00:43:21.000 And if you can't play and experiment, imagine you wanted to go by Joseph just to see whether it worked.
00:43:33.000 Yeah.
00:43:34.000 Whatever it is, we get so locked in and if we change anything, people get angry.
00:43:40.000 I've always looked at Madonna and David Bowie as like genius squared.
00:43:47.000 Not only did each iteration of them do something that was kind of artistically interesting, but they habituated their audience.
00:43:56.000 For change.
00:43:56.000 And so the idea is that every time you met a different David Bowie, he would effectively say, do you like this incarnation of me?
00:44:04.000 Because it's only here for one year.
00:44:07.000 And then I'm going to do something new the next time.
00:44:10.000 I just had a conversation with Sean Lennon.
00:44:21.000 Right.
00:44:25.000 Right.
00:44:42.000 Maybe new information came in.
00:44:44.000 Yeah, that is a weird thing about pulling up thoughts that you had from a decade or more ago and trying to put them on you today.
00:44:53.000 Yeah.
00:44:54.000 And if you say, I don't think that way anymore.
00:44:57.000 People don't want to accept that.
00:45:00.000 Because it's a disingenuous conversation.
00:45:02.000 They're not really trying to find out what you think.
00:45:05.000 They're trying to get you.
00:45:07.000 It's more interesting.
00:45:08.000 For example...
00:45:11.000 There's been a ton of pressure – we can get to this in a second – for me to address the question of the IDW. Is it still alive?
00:45:18.000 Is it in trouble?
00:45:18.000 What's going on?
00:45:19.000 The international dork web? 0.92
00:45:20.000 Yeah. 0.74
00:45:21.000 Is that what it is?
00:45:21.000 The intentional dirtbag web.
00:45:27.000 Let's come back to that.
00:45:28.000 When 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.
00:45:44.000 Right?
00:45:45.000 Now, the problem is, somebody had that as their wedding song.
00:45:50.000 With Beavis and Butthead?
00:45:51.000 No, no, no.
00:45:51.000 The other one?
00:45:52.000 Yeah.
00:45:52.000 Oh.
00:45:53.000 I mean, somebody probably did it with Beavis and Butthead, but they're so punk, they don't care.
00:45:56.000 People from Florida that use that one.
00:45:59.000 Florida man uses...
00:46:03.000 The problem when you change things is that other people wed themselves to where you were.
00:46:08.000 So when you pull up and you say, yeah, I don't think that, that's just wrong.
00:46:13.000 I was confused.
00:46:14.000 Man, I was going through a dark time and I probably was saying stuff I should.
00:46:17.000 If you do that, then anybody who sort of invested in that version of you, And integrated that into their lives is now angry.
00:46:26.000 They're upset.
00:46:27.000 Wait a minute.
00:46:28.000 You pulled the rug out from under me.
00:46:29.000 And so, you know, in part what Bowie and Madonna did is they said, look, these are stages.
00:46:36.000 And if you like that stage, that stage is yours.
00:46:39.000 But I'm not staying there.
00:46:41.000 And 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.
00:46:53.000 And I like the idea of doing things.
00:46:54.000 Or just do it.
00:46:55.000 Just do it.
00:46:56.000 Yeah, don't try to explain yourself constantly.
00:46:59.000 Well, they didn't explain themselves.
00:47:00.000 Right.
00:47:01.000 They just – they did it in a clear enough way that people could understand the pattern.
00:47:05.000 And 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.
00:47:25.000 Like all of these weird pressures – The ideas behind the intellectual dark web that you coined.
00:47:31.000 This concept of having a bunch of people that have different ideologies but yet share this common theme of wanting to have real honest communication and honest conversations and try to figure out, instead of looking at things from an ideological perspective, look at things from an honest,
00:47:46.000 objective point and try to see the way the other people view things.
00:47:50.000 Open-hearted, not trying to destroy each other.
00:47:53.000 Yes, yes, yes.
00:47:54.000 And effectively trying to become the adults in the room as we watch the kids run riot.
00:47:59.000 Right.
00:48:00.000 And not always achieving that.
00:48:02.000 Now, because I refused to actually say what it was or who was in it because there was a lot of pressure to codify it.
00:48:08.000 I knew that if I codified it, it would die.
00:48:11.000 I want a membership card.
00:48:12.000 You have one.
00:48:13.000 But if I don't get one.
00:48:15.000 You have one.
00:48:15.000 There's a clubhouse.
00:48:16.000 There's a clubhouse.
00:48:17.000 We just don't tell the members where it is.
00:48:19.000 Every time there's an article about the IDW that doesn't mention me, I'm like, yes, I'm sneaking away.
00:48:25.000 I'm slipping away.
00:48:26.000 You're like Pacino in 3. They're always going to drag you back.
00:48:31.000 There's been some discussion about certain members and certain people that are losing their fucking marbles. 0.99
00:48:36.000 I think it's pressure. 0.98
00:48:38.000 And 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.
00:48:49.000 Especially if you're reading comments and articles that are written about you, which I do not recommend.
00:48:55.000 I'm doing that.
00:48:56.000 Don't do that!
00:48:58.000 If you're doing that, you are subject to a massive amount of pressure.
00:49:02.000 Yeah.
00:49:02.000 It's a lot of pressure.
00:49:03.000 And sometimes people, they apply that.
00:49:07.000 That 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.
00:49:27.000 That's great.
00:49:28.000 But there's a lot of people that are bending to the will of the masses and they also are responding to the pressure of the masses.
00:49:35.000 I don't even think it's the masses.
00:49:37.000 I think one of the reasons I read my comments is because I want to know what Russia is thinking.
00:49:42.000 No, I'm not kidding.
00:49:43.000 Listen to me, Joe.
00:49:44.000 Here we go.
00:49:45.000 Let's go down the rabbit hole together.
00:49:46.000 Well, for sure.
00:49:47.000 And we talked about this recently.
00:49:49.000 Let me just say this before you get going.
00:49:50.000 We knew that something was going on years ago.
00:49:53.000 I used to have a message board.
00:49:55.000 And on my message board on my website, it became problematic for legal reasons. 0.89
00:50:01.000 People were putting a bunch of illegal shit up there, and I was kind of responsible for it. 0.64
00:50:04.000 And a few issues came up where I was like, oh, Jesus. 0.98
00:50:06.000 I'm going to get in real trouble.
00:50:08.000 We had an influx.
00:50:10.000 And by an influx, I mean thousands and thousands of Russian emails signing up from my message board.
00:50:18.000 I mean thousands with really similar email addresses. 0.99
00:50:22.000 And they would post and pretend they're from fucking Cleveland or post and be mad that we don't have enough Nazis on or whatever the fuck it would be. 0.99
00:50:32.000 It would just be... 0.99
00:50:33.000 It's the same thing that the IRA was doing, the Internet Research Agency was doing with Facebook and Google.
00:50:39.000 We were seeing this like four or five years ago, that this stuff was kind of happening, where they were recognizing that there's these large portals of discussion.
00:50:48.000 And 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.
00:51:01.000 Well, this is the thing.
00:51:02.000 I keep seeing the same message modified a hundred different ways from a bunch of accounts that have suspicious similarity.
00:51:11.000 Not one of these accounts usually is followed by anyone I care about.
00:51:14.000 And 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,
00:51:30.000 that account.
00:51:30.000 Yeah.
00:51:30.000 But how do you know that that's what that is?
00:51:33.000 And how do you know it's not just some person with schizophrenia that really is really interested in Eric Weinstein?
00:51:38.000 Well, a couple times I've tried to, like, talk to the person.
00:51:41.000 Oh.
00:51:42.000 And suddenly the thing vanishes. 0.99
00:51:44.000 It's like, you're so disgusting, I would never talk to you. 0.99
00:51:46.000 It's like, goodbye. 1.00
00:51:47.000 Click.
00:51:48.000 Well, maybe they just panicked.
00:51:49.000 Could be just a person.
00:51:51.000 Well, that's the thing.
00:51:52.000 You never know.
00:51:53.000 On the other hand, you remember when we took that photograph at that dinner?
00:51:58.000 Yes.
00:52:00.000 There 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.
00:52:11.000 I was just thinking like, well, I could imagine a little bit of this.
00:52:16.000 But it's way too many.
00:52:19.000 And this is part of what I believe.
00:52:22.000 I believe that we are in a new world in which a lot of the grassroots stuff is astroturf.
00:52:29.000 And if you start to listen to it, you start to get pushed.
00:52:33.000 And I start to watch certain tactics.
00:52:34.000 And I make models of the tactics.
00:52:36.000 You know, like one of the tactics is, gosh, Eric, I once thought that you had a lot of integrity.
00:52:41.000 And now I know that X... If you don't address this situation, I'm done following you.
00:52:49.000 Oh, really?
00:52:50.000 Goodbye.
00:52:52.000 But I believe that there are sophisticated players who are engaged in trying to Either boost our signal or start to alter the signal.
00:53:06.000 Somebody will be up, somebody will be down.
00:53:09.000 And then there's like really weird dynamics.
00:53:13.000 I think that there's a very strange thing going on, not with Dave Rubin, but with the crowd of people that is just trying to eat Dave Rubin and blind him and confuse him.
00:53:24.000 And there's this guy, Sam Seder, who- Do you think he's a Russian?
00:53:30.000 I hope he is.
00:53:31.000 Well, I don't know.
00:53:32.000 I don't think he's Russian, but I do think that his – I think he has a grassroots following.
00:53:37.000 I don't think this is inauthentic.
00:53:39.000 That just loves to harass – Well, dunk, drag. 1.00
00:53:46.000 I hate this language.
00:53:48.000 I just can't – I like dunking.
00:53:48.000 I like the word dunking.
00:53:49.000 Oh, really?
00:53:50.000 Yeah, it's fun.
00:53:51.000 No.
00:53:51.000 I'm not a fan.
00:53:52.000 No?
00:53:53.000 No.
00:53:54.000 No, because it cheapens all conversation.
00:53:56.000 Oh, you got dunked on.
00:53:57.000 You got dragged.
00:53:58.000 It's just like, oh, this is that thing in third grade that I never figured out. 0.92
00:54:02.000 Well, 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.
00:54:25.000 Like, one of the things that comes up on this show, like, you know, we were talking before we were going to go on there, what were we going to talk about? 0.61
00:54:31.000 I'm like, come on!
00:54:31.000 Let's just talk.
00:54:33.000 And 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. 0.71
00:54:46.000 Yeah, that's what I've done in my two previous appearances. 0.93
00:54:48.000 Well, no, you have not, but it seems, you know, it's easy to think that you did that.
00:54:53.000 But with Dave...
00:54:57.000 You know, there's enough moments where he's misstepped where they just feel like, okay, we got a wounded antelope.
00:55:06.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:55:06.000 They're trying to pick him off.
00:55:07.000 And, you know, I think there was probably a move to do Shapiro and there was a period where you were seemingly in the crosshairs, but you're hard to kill.
00:55:16.000 I was in the crosshairs?
00:55:18.000 I wasn't even noticing.
00:55:19.000 See, that's the benefit of not paying attention.
00:55:22.000 And this is something that I've been pretty rigorous about over the last six months, a year or so.
00:55:27.000 You, Sam Harris, and Dave Rubin have all given me versions of this advice.
00:55:31.000 And I worry about it because I'm not large enough yet that I've been the target of a steady campaign.
00:55:41.000 But what happens is You see people's feedback loops interrupted.
00:55:46.000 And in part, to course correct, you kind of want to know, was I too harsh with that guy?
00:55:52.000 Like 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.
00:56:01.000 And I come from an ethnic family.
00:56:04.000 We interrupt each other.
00:56:05.000 That's normal.
00:56:06.000 And Jordan...
00:56:27.000 Is an interrupter.
00:56:31.000 There's an issue always with more than one person.
00:56:34.000 There's a reason why I do one-on-ones almost exclusively.
00:56:37.000 Even when I had Bob Lazar with Jeremy Corbell, just having a third person that wants to chime in oftentimes interrupts the flow of conversation.
00:56:47.000 In that case, it was because I wanted to lock in on Bob Lazar.
00:56:51.000 I wanted to get all my feedback. 1.00
00:56:53.000 I want to find out, is this guy full of shit? 1.00
00:56:55.000 I want to lock in with him. 1.00
00:56:57.000 There's another And also, there's another person, even if they have a good thing to say, it's a distraction.
00:57:04.000 It becomes a problem.
00:57:05.000 Well, you never know when one of these is going to work.
00:57:06.000 When it works, it can be magical.
00:57:09.000 Yes.
00:57:09.000 And when it doesn't, you know, it's a little bit like jazz guys...
00:57:14.000 If that group is meant to be, then they don't trip over each other's solos and they're trying to come up with something.
00:57:18.000 But even with three great friends, I have this issue.
00:57:21.000 I've seen great stuff with multiple people on your show.
00:57:24.000 And I've seen stuff that doesn't work.
00:57:25.000 And the other night we had...
00:57:28.000 Brian Callen is fast becoming one of my favorite people in the world.
00:57:32.000 And he had us over.
00:57:35.000 And it was really fascinating.
00:57:37.000 It was all... 0.91
00:57:38.000 Guys who could rip your head off. 0.95
00:57:40.000 Not your head off. 1.00
00:57:40.000 They could certainly rip my head off. 1.00
00:57:42.000 And very thoughtful ones at that.
00:57:44.000 There were people from all different ethnicities.
00:57:47.000 My wife was the only female. 0.89
00:57:49.000 And one of the things I found astounding was that everybody was taking the piss out of each other.
00:57:55.000 And it was the most intimate, positive, loving kind of an environment you could imagine where people are joking about each other's ethnicity, their religion.
00:58:04.000 And I had to remind myself About how men actually manage intimacy and closeness.
00:58:13.000 And it's not the way women do it. 1.00
00:58:16.000 No, we shit on each other. 1.00
00:58:17.000 We shit on each other. 1.00
00:58:18.000 And it's friggin' important to how we do business. 1.00
00:58:23.000 And increasingly, I have this idea that...
00:58:25.000 I need that in my life.
00:58:27.000 Well, we have to check each other to see if each other is taking each other seriously.
00:58:31.000 You have to make sure you're not taking yourself too seriously.
00:58:34.000 I didn't feel like lots of jokes were made at my expense.
00:58:37.000 I was probably the only guy there who wasn't, you know, some form of a combat sport veteran.
00:58:43.000 And, you know, there were a couple of jokes at my expense on that.
00:58:46.000 There were a couple of Jewish jokes.
00:58:48.000 I felt terrific leaving that place.
00:58:50.000 There was no part of me that felt like...
00:58:53.000 Wow, I really got hazed, but I hope I got through it. 0.99
00:58:55.000 I mean, these guys were just so positive and generous of spirit.
00:58:59.000 Well, Brian is one of the best at that. 0.99
00:59:00.000 He's so silly.
00:59:02.000 Like, most of his podcasts that he does, other than with me and him have pretty cool podcasts, we've known each other forever. 0.95
00:59:10.000 We've been best friends since 1994. Is that right?
00:59:13.000 Yeah.
00:59:14.000 I mean, that guy is smart.
00:59:17.000 I love him so much that I broke up with this girl, and Brian, she was calling me because she was horny. 0.99
00:59:26.000 And I was like, look, I have a new girlfriend, but I have a friend who'll fuck you, and he's just like me. 1.00
00:59:32.000 And so I sicked Brian on my ex-girlfriend, and he fucked her. 1.00
00:59:36.000 One of the funniest conversations I ever had with an ex-girlfriend, she calls me up, she goes, your friend came inside me. 1.00
00:59:43.000 And I went, what? 1.00
00:59:44.000 She goes, yeah, your fucking friend came inside me. 1.00
00:59:47.000 And I was like, well, did you tell him that you were on the pill? 1.00
00:59:49.000 She goes, no! 1.00
00:59:50.000 No, I'm not on the pill!
00:59:52.000 And I was like, well, I don't know what to tell you.
00:59:54.000 You know, that's Brian.
00:59:55.000 You guys should have worked that out. 1.00
00:59:58.000 My damn ex-girlfriend call you up mad because your friend ejaculated inside of her. 1.00
01:00:05.000 It was one of the most... 1.00
01:00:06.000 I hung up the phone.
01:00:07.000 I literally fell to the ground laughing.
01:00:09.000 I was lying on my back on the floor of my house going, ah! 0.98
01:00:15.000 Like, it's just so ridiculous. 0.97
01:00:17.000 That's Brian Callen. 0.95
01:00:19.000 Brian Callen, everybody.
01:00:20.000 So I called him up, and I said, what happened?
01:00:22.000 And he's like, whoops! 0.97
01:00:26.000 It was just such a ridiculous conversation. 0.90
01:00:30.000 But I've been friends with that guy forever. 0.94
01:00:31.000 So all of our conversations are like that.
01:00:33.000 I see. 0.74
01:00:34.000 All of our conversations are like jokes and hazing and shitting on each other, but it's all hugs and love. 0.80
01:00:40.000 I mean, I love that guy to death.
01:00:41.000 Yeah, he's so positive and generous.
01:00:43.000 And, you know, one funny thing, I was looking at his Instagram, and he's seated next to, I don't know, I can't remember, was it Cheetah?
01:00:53.000 He's sitting next to a wild cheetah in Africa.
01:00:55.000 Yeah, and he's talking about how he hunts with it.
01:01:00.000 I like to get up in the morning.
01:01:01.000 Perhaps we will hunt together.
01:01:03.000 I smell antelope nearby.
01:01:05.000 Just like he's clowning and there's an actual...
01:01:08.000 A real cheetah.
01:01:09.000 Yeah, but those cheetahs are interesting, man.
01:01:11.000 You can actually pet them.
01:01:12.000 It's weird.
01:01:13.000 I didn't know that.
01:01:13.000 I think it was a game reserve.
01:01:15.000 I see.
01:01:15.000 Like one of those safar reserves where you can...
01:01:18.000 Don't ruin the image.
01:01:18.000 No, no, no.
01:01:19.000 I mean, a lot of that is in Africa.
01:01:21.000 Not in terms of like they're...
01:01:23.000 They'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.
01:01:31.000 But cheetahs, in particular, a lot of people keep them as pets. 0.89
01:01:35.000 You 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. 1.00
01:01:43.000 A cheetah on a leash. 0.99
01:01:44.000 And the cheetah's just cool with it. 0.96
01:01:46.000 See, nobody does that with hippos.
01:01:48.000 I think if you wanted to go next level...
01:01:49.000 Yeah, that wouldn't work out. 1.00
01:01:52.000 Hippos just decide to fuck you up. 1.00
01:01:54.000 Yeah, what is with us in the hippos? 1.00
01:01:56.000 Hippos are like, they're a cousin to pigs. 0.76
01:01:59.000 Are they right? 1.00
01:02:00.000 Yeah, they're a ruthless fucking animal. 1.00
01:02:02.000 Oh, now I see it. 1.00
01:02:03.000 They don't play any games.
01:02:05.000 Yeah, and for vegetarians, it's not even like they were their food.
01:02:08.000 They are vegetarians, but they do eat meat.
01:02:11.000 I know.
01:02:12.000 Well, so do deer.
01:02:14.000 You know, deer and cows, they'll eat birds. 0.91
01:02:16.000 Okay, we're not going back into that vampire deer thing.
01:02:18.000 No, no, no.
01:02:19.000 That freaked me out last time.
01:02:20.000 But deer oftentimes eat birds.
01:02:22.000 They eat ground-nesting birds.
01:02:24.000 There's a lot of video of it.
01:02:25.000 People don't want to believe it.
01:02:26.000 They think they just eat grass.
01:02:28.000 Most of the time they do, but they will eat a bird if they get a chance.
01:02:32.000 They know it's food.
01:02:34.000 Yeah.
01:02:35.000 It's weird.
01:02:36.000 And they have an herbivore's digestive tract, but they'll still eat a bird. 0.97
01:02:40.000 There's a lot of videos of deer and birds.
01:02:42.000 I guess I've been really fascinated by the number of species in which some human, like totally deadly species, where some human has decided, I'm going to dedicate my life to hanging out and not getting eaten.
01:02:53.000 Hyenas! 0.99
01:02:54.000 There's some asshole that is hanging out with hyenas on the internet and petting them. 1.00
01:02:59.000 They seem really playful and friendly. 1.00
01:03:02.000 Real sweet.
01:03:03.000 It's real weird.
01:03:04.000 This guy's like nuzzling these hyenas.
01:03:06.000 Can you imagine choosing the hyena?
01:03:07.000 That's your system? 1.00
01:03:10.000 That is an animal that bites so fucking hard. 0.99
01:03:13.000 They 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. 0.98
01:03:23.000 So they're all just about crushing bones.
01:03:26.000 So their whole face is designed to smash bones.
01:03:29.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:03:30.000 And, you know, they're fucking rude. 0.99
01:03:33.000 See, here's the guy. 0.99
01:03:34.000 He's hanging out with these hyenas.
01:03:35.000 He plays with them. 1.00
01:03:36.000 Look at this asshole. 1.00
01:03:37.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:03:39.000 But they're playing with him.
01:03:40.000 They seem to think he's like their buddy.
01:03:43.000 Look, they're biting him, but they're gentle.
01:03:46.000 I mean, they could rip his arm clean off, but they're biting his leg.
01:03:50.000 And, you know, he's nuzzling with them.
01:03:52.000 Did he raise them? 0.60
01:03:53.000 He's letting them bite his face.
01:03:53.000 I do not know.
01:03:54.000 I do not know.
01:03:55.000 Because I think a lot of these have to do with imprinting.
01:03:57.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.
01:03:59.000 Yeah.
01:03:59.000 Well, that was the thing with my friend Phil Demers, who worked at Marine Land.
01:04:03.000 One 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.
01:04:11.000 The walrus thinks that's his mom.
01:04:12.000 Okay.
01:04:13.000 That he's rather the walrus's mom. 0.99
01:04:15.000 So he's just on this fucking furious quest to get this walrus released and to shut down this shithole known as Marine Land. 0.99
01:04:27.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:04:27.000 He's been sued forever. 0.99
01:04:28.000 He's been involved in lawsuits as long as I've known him.
01:04:31.000 And he's been coming on this podcast for years.
01:04:33.000 For years we've been, you know, trying to boost his signal and trying to get the word out.
01:04:37.000 And then when Blackfish came out, that sort of really turned the tide.
01:04:42.000 Right.
01:04:42.000 Where people got a chance to see what orca captivity is really like.
01:04:45.000 And they were like, holy shit, this is horrific. 0.99
01:04:48.000 It is absolutely barbaric. 0.99
01:04:51.000 But anyway, this walrus came from him.
01:04:57.000 He gave me that.
01:04:58.000 That is cool.
01:04:59.000 Yeah, that sits there for Phil.
01:05:02.000 That sits on the desk for Phil.
01:05:04.000 Who is the Hall of Fame here on the desk?
01:05:07.000 Is there a camera over there?
01:05:08.000 Oh, this is...
01:05:09.000 These are all little...
01:05:14.000 Little statuettes from a company called PlastiCell.
01:05:18.000 And PlastiCell is...
01:05:20.000 How do you say Fong's name?
01:05:21.000 Fong Tran? 0.97
01:05:23.000 He's an amazing artist who's created all of these little figurines.
01:05:29.000 This is Rory McDonald, who's an elite UFC fighter.
01:05:32.000 Bruce Lee.
01:05:34.000 Notorious B.I.G. That's my dog, Marshall.
01:05:36.000 Marshall has one.
01:05:37.000 That's me.
01:05:38.000 Tupac.
01:05:39.000 Conor McGregor.
01:05:40.000 Kanye.
01:05:40.000 And then that is a different one.
01:05:42.000 The bobblehead one... 0.55
01:05:43.000 That's Rich Rebuilds.
01:05:45.000 He's got this really dope website or YouTube channel where he's the only guy that I know of that's ever rebuilt a Tesla.
01:05:55.000 He bought a wrecked Tesla and then bought another one and put the parts together and figured out how to make it work.
01:06:02.000 And the Tesla people do not like him.
01:06:04.000 They don't like that he's doing that.
01:06:05.000 Now he's made a place called the Electrified Garage in Massachusetts where He is working on Teslas and electric vehicles outside of their ecosystem.
01:06:15.000 So he's doing it on his own, like an independent Tesla.
01:06:18.000 Where?
01:06:18.000 Massachusetts.
01:06:19.000 You think he's going to hybridize with Boston Dynamics?
01:06:22.000 No, he's an independent guy.
01:06:24.000 That would be cool.
01:06:25.000 How do you say his last name?
01:06:27.000 Benoit, right?
01:06:28.000 It looks like Benoit, but it's Benoit.
01:06:31.000 Very cool guy.
01:06:31.000 He was on the podcast recently.
01:06:33.000 Hey, what happened?
01:06:34.000 What do we know about the Kanye situation where he was going to talk about mental health?
01:06:38.000 I was kind of excited about that.
01:06:40.000 You know, if he wants to, he can do it.
01:06:44.000 He's his own thing.
01:06:46.000 He is a brilliant artist, but oftentimes a brilliant artist, this is not the best format for them to just talk.
01:06:56.000 Sometimes it's better for them to express themselves through their work.
01:06:59.000 Maybe, although I found...
01:07:01.000 I spent two days with him, and I found that when he's in a relaxed frame, his flow state is just...
01:07:11.000 It's beautiful.
01:07:12.000 Well, I enjoyed talking to him.
01:07:14.000 I talked to him on the phone.
01:07:15.000 I really enjoyed our conversation.
01:07:16.000 We had a nice conversation.
01:07:17.000 I think he's a very good dude.
01:07:18.000 Very sensitive human being.
01:07:20.000 Yeah, very cool guy.
01:07:21.000 But...
01:07:22.000 This is not a relaxed environment.
01:07:25.000 You know, this right here, everybody knows how many people are listening. 0.97
01:07:28.000 It just fucks people's head up. 0.94
01:07:30.000 Really? 0.71
01:07:30.000 Because the illusion that I have is just you and me talking, and then I come out of here and people are like, what did you say? 0.71
01:07:38.000 Well, you and I are friends, so that illusion is more maintained.
01:07:43.000 When you don't know me and you come in, I mean, I would have to be friends with him.
01:07:46.000 That's one of the things he wanted me to come to his church.
01:07:49.000 You know, he's running a cult.
01:07:50.000 Essentially.
01:07:51.000 Everybody's wearing white.
01:07:52.000 They're all dancing and doing religious stuff.
01:07:53.000 I'd do that.
01:07:54.000 Yeah.
01:07:55.000 I'm busy, man.
01:07:56.000 You're busy.
01:07:57.000 Sundays are family time.
01:07:58.000 Sundays are family time.
01:07:59.000 Well...
01:08:00.000 I'm not into...
01:08:00.000 I just...
01:08:01.000 I get it.
01:08:01.000 I think it's beautiful.
01:08:03.000 But I'm not...
01:08:04.000 He 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.
01:08:14.000 It was a little bit of a tense situation.
01:08:15.000 So we're walking along the road and like people were hanging out of the windows of their car.
01:08:22.000 You're like, Kanye!
01:08:23.000 And I think it was just like positive, you know, like wanting to make contact.
01:08:26.000 But it was very disconcerting and this guy was preternaturally calm.
01:08:31.000 You know, he was just like, I was nervous.
01:08:35.000 How long ago was this?
01:08:36.000 This was...
01:08:38.000 You remember when he went on TMZ? Were you talking a year or less?
01:08:43.000 I think it was probably a year ago.
01:08:45.000 It was probably medicated.
01:08:46.000 Not anymore.
01:08:47.000 Oh, is that right?
01:08:48.000 Yeah.
01:08:49.000 He talked openly about the fact that the last six months or so he's been off of his medication. 0.87
01:08:54.000 And whatever they had him on was fucking with him creatively.
01:09:00.000 Well, do you remember Oliver Sacks had this chapter in The Man Who Stook His Wife for a Hat about a drummer with Tourette's Syndrome? 0.91
01:09:09.000 No.
01:09:10.000 And 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.
01:09:19.000 Yeah, look, what that guy's got inside of him, he's so prolific. 0.99
01:09:24.000 I mean, you listen to his music, it's so interesting and eclectic and prolific, and he's just constantly churning out more great shit. 0.99
01:09:31.000 He doesn't have any flops. 0.99
01:09:32.000 I mean, his music is pretty fucking amazing. 1.00
01:09:35.000 And he's just, that's his shit, man. 1.00
01:09:37.000 He knows how to just get in there and create, and he's got this whirlwind going on in his mind. 1.00
01:09:42.000 He's fearless.
01:09:43.000 He is exploring, I don't want to get into the details, but one of the things that really impressed me, Yeah.
01:10:10.000 I'm going to mine that as a source of art because I bet it's in everyone.
01:10:14.000 And by exploring these contradictions and these false fronts and – he's got a level of internal access.
01:10:23.000 I'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.
01:10:37.000 I do think that there's something about the artistic process that seems to be very informed by states that we call unhealth.
01:10:43.000 Yeah.
01:10:44.000 Well, we require people to stay inside these rigid boundaries.
01:10:48.000 And 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.
01:11:00.000 But that's not for the creative process.
01:11:03.000 If you look at true outliers, if you want to discuss true outliers, like people that are really capable of producing extraordinary art or architecture or works, different interesting things that are part of the creative process,
01:11:18.000 those people are all unwell, every single one of them.
01:11:22.000 I mean, in terms of like, if you made him do what a normal person has to do every day, I think normal life is unwell.
01:11:28.000 In terms of this...
01:11:31.000 This requirement of showing up five minutes early, working all day long, getting off, maybe bringing some of your work home, getting some sleep, getting up in the morning and doing it all over again, all while raising a family and trying to enjoy your time, your limited, finite time on this planet?
01:11:47.000 Well, this is why I said I've left.
01:11:48.000 Oh, so you left.
01:11:49.000 Is that it's not healthy here.
01:11:51.000 So where are you?
01:11:53.000 Well, maybe this is a good segue.
01:11:57.000 I hadn't thought about it this way, but...
01:12:01.000 So, can we use this format to announce that I am, in fact, starting the podcast?
01:12:08.000 I've recorded a couple episodes already that are in the canon.
01:12:14.000 It is called The Portal.
01:12:16.000 The Portal.
01:12:16.000 Yeah.
01:12:17.000 So, The Portal refers to this...
01:12:25.000 This very interesting thing that I thought everyone was aware of, but very often people wouldn't react to it.
01:12:33.000 When I was a kid, I read all of these stories that I thought were known to be the same story, but different versions of it.
01:12:41.000 And I called it the portal story.
01:12:43.000 And it was always the same.
01:12:45.000 Somebody is trapped in a humdrum existence in an ordinary world until some sort of magical portal Accidentally or on purpose enters their life.
01:12:57.000 And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, looking glass, platform nine and three quarters.
01:13:05.000 Or 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.
01:13:15.000 Oh, that's right.
01:13:15.000 And 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.
01:13:26.000 Was that the first time ever in a movie?
01:13:27.000 I believe so.
01:13:28.000 Wow!
01:13:29.000 And so the question is...
01:13:33.000 Where's the portal?
01:13:34.000 Like, why do we tell the same story over and over and over again with different protagonists, but it's always the same formula?
01:13:42.000 It's somebody is trapped in an ordinary world.
01:13:44.000 They're sort of, they're around normies.
01:13:47.000 They find the portal and the portal becomes the call to adventure and they spend time in the alternate universe.
01:13:55.000 And then somehow they're able to live.
01:13:57.000 Very often they return.
01:14:00.000 If you remember the Phantom Tollbooth, Milo gets this present of a car in a tollbooth and he goes through the tollbooth.
01:14:07.000 What is that from?
01:14:09.000 Norton Jester was the author and Jules Pfeiffer did the illustrations.
01:14:14.000 It was just this brilliant book where there's like the land of letters and the land of numbers.
01:14:19.000 So it's arts and sciences.
01:14:21.000 And, you know, like there's a...
01:14:24.000 There'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.
01:14:51.000 I mean, it's all very clever wordplay and stuff.
01:15:01.000 The toll booth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it, you know?
01:15:07.000 And so my question was always, why on earth would we tell the same story over and over and over and over and over again?
01:15:14.000 It has the same format and it's always a different context.
01:15:17.000 And I came to believe that this story is actually this unkept promise for most people, that in their adult lives, they don't find these portals.
01:15:28.000 So, for example...
01:15:30.000 Have you ever been to Barcelona, Spain?
01:15:32.000 No.
01:15:33.000 There is a church in Barcelona, Spain, which is plenty impressive from the outside.
01:15:38.000 When you go inside, I've been looking at pictures of it my entire life called La Sagrada Familia.
01:15:43.000 It is a psychedelic drug trip and a half like you've never seen.
01:15:47.000 It is the most bizarre interior space I've ever seen in my life.
01:15:51.000 Can you bring up the interior of this thing?
01:15:54.000 And on the one hand, it induces like a hallucinogenic state.
01:16:00.000 On the other hand, it's an idea of what this architect, Gaudi...
01:16:05.000 Now, Gaudi's very famous.
01:16:06.000 He did a lot of buildings around Barcelona.
01:16:08.000 There is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet.
01:16:12.000 And...
01:16:13.000 Whoa! 1.00
01:16:16.000 Fuck, that's beautiful. 1.00
01:16:18.000 And if you look up at the roof... 1.00
01:16:24.000 And 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.
01:16:32.000 I'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.
01:16:44.000 The 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.
01:16:51.000 Wow!
01:16:53.000 Are they doing work on it there?
01:16:55.000 They haven't finished it yet.
01:16:56.000 And in fact, he's such a genius that they can't finish it in the style that he started it.
01:17:01.000 Because nobody knows.
01:17:02.000 It's like an unfinished symphony.
01:17:04.000 What would you do?
01:17:04.000 Nobody's smart enough to finish this church.
01:17:06.000 Wow, look at the roof on that place.
01:17:09.000 Okay, now that is a portal.
01:17:10.000 That is a portal.
01:17:12.000 Right?
01:17:13.000 And...
01:17:16.000 When 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?
01:17:29.000 And we pushed out the Hopf vibration.
01:17:31.000 And suddenly, if you recall, I said to people, this is the most important object in the universe.
01:17:36.000 Not the Hopf vibration in particular, but the class called Principal Bundle, which people have no idea it's out there.
01:17:43.000 And it is the basis of the construct in which we live.
01:17:47.000 So, 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?
01:18:03.000 And What I hope to do with the podcast is to have amazing guests and interesting conversations.
01:18:14.000 Oh, thank you for that, Jamie.
01:18:15.000 That guy was on drugs.
01:18:16.000 That guy was...
01:18:18.000 He was drugs.
01:18:19.000 Remember, that's what Dolly said. 0.76
01:18:21.000 Somebody said, Dolly, do you take drugs?
01:18:22.000 He said, I am drugs.
01:18:24.000 Right? 0.66
01:18:24.000 Another Spaniard. 0.66
01:18:25.000 Spaniards are really something...
01:18:27.000 But that is very similar to psychedelic states.
01:18:32.000 Well, maybe some people have access to them all the time, right?
01:18:35.000 In part.
01:18:36.000 Well, there's actually an illustration that sits above our sink out there from a guy who has a tumor in his pituitary gland.
01:18:48.000 What is the one that they think produces DMT? What the fuck is it called? 0.99
01:18:55.000 Not the pituitary gland. 1.00
01:18:56.000 No.
01:18:57.000 Pineal?
01:18:58.000 Pineal.
01:18:58.000 Thank you.
01:18:59.000 He has a tumor in his pineal gland.
01:19:02.000 And so he accesses these states all the time.
01:19:06.000 So this guy has...
01:19:07.000 It's 100% DMT-inspired artwork.
01:19:10.000 I mean, if you look at it, it's like what you see when you do DMT trips.
01:19:13.000 It's like...
01:19:13.000 It's a version, you know, in his style of art, but you can see the...
01:19:20.000 You can see the signature of DMT? There it is.
01:19:22.000 There's his artwork.
01:19:23.000 What is his name?
01:19:24.000 Sean Thornton.
01:19:25.000 Sean Thornton.
01:19:26.000 Thank you, Sean.
01:19:26.000 Thanks for the artwork.
01:19:27.000 It's fucking awesome, and it sits in our kitchen. 0.85
01:19:29.000 I'll take a picture of it later and put it online. 0.97
01:19:31.000 But that's his stuff.
01:19:33.000 That's super DMT-like.
01:19:35.000 Oh, that's amazing.
01:19:36.000 I mean, that's a tryptamine-type experience.
01:19:41.000 You could say, like Alex Gray.
01:19:44.000 Is 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.
01:19:56.000 And so, if you think about psychoactive chemicals, some of them are stupefying, but some of them are portals.
01:20:06.000 And this concept of, if you look at a wall, How do you know that the wall doesn't have a door?
01:20:13.000 How do you know that there isn't a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book?
01:20:18.000 We learn to stop looking for the portal.
01:20:22.000 And I think what I do differently than other people is that I became obsessed with exits.
01:20:30.000 That there are other worlds and they're real.
01:20:33.000 That this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole and the matrix Is metaphor for very real things.
01:20:41.000 And 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.
01:20:59.000 We're not playing with superfluid helium.
01:21:01.000 We're not understanding just how bizarre olfaction is or whether there's some sort of quantum aspect of biology.
01:21:13.000 And what you see people doing is that they start grasping for everything.
01:21:18.000 I'm not saying that there's nothing to ancient aliens or UFOs or whatever, but a lot of that is just...
01:21:25.000 People want something richer and more amazing for their lives.
01:21:30.000 And 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.
01:21:44.000 People need more meaning.
01:21:46.000 With 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.
01:21:54.000 When you say, put a ton of it back in, how are you going to put it back in?
01:21:59.000 Well, 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.
01:22:11.000 I can show you all sorts of bizarre stuff involving the Octonians. 0.61
01:22:14.000 What is the Octonians?
01:22:15.000 Well, that's my point.
01:22:16.000 You 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.
01:22:27.000 Maybe during some kind of a trip, a friend of you mentioned the quaternions to you.
01:22:33.000 And then there's this one system of numbers Which is like the crazy relative nobody discusses.
01:22:38.000 And that's called the Octonians.
01:22:40.000 And the Octonians are so weird that mathematicians don't even really understand why they're there.
01:22:46.000 That's an Octonian? 0.70
01:22:47.000 That thing? 0.97
01:22:47.000 Well, my guess is that that's probably back to the root lattice of E8, which we discussed last time, which has this kind of Mandela pattern to it. 0.97
01:22:56.000 But I could show you their multiplication table.
01:23:01.000 I could describe their symmetries.
01:23:02.000 There's a symmetry group called G2, which involves these strange numbers.
01:23:06.000 But it's a mystery.
01:23:07.000 Like, if I got to – I probably know more about the Actonians than most mathematicians.
01:23:13.000 If 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.
01:23:20.000 Nobody knows.
01:23:21.000 I promise you that.
01:23:24.000 That's a real mystery.
01:23:26.000 Now, we could talk about, like, you know, my friend said that that event that happened in Siberia in the early, you know, 20th century was actually an alien visitation.
01:23:34.000 Well, maybe, yes, maybe no, I don't know anything about it.
01:23:37.000 If 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.
01:23:50.000 If you're looking for a hero's journey, I'll show you a ton of these things.
01:23:56.000 And it's empowering.
01:23:57.000 It's just incredibly empowering to know that you're a hair's breadth away from superpowers.
01:24:08.000 So I want to help people explore that.
01:24:10.000 So what is that?
01:24:11.000 Like when you're explaining this, when you're saying this is bizarre series of numbers, what is it doing?
01:24:17.000 How do we interface with it?
01:24:20.000 Well, so for example, let's take an easier system that we feel a little bit more confident with.
01:24:27.000 There's this thing called the quaternions, which are based on the number one, The complex number i, if you remember that from some distant math class, and then there's something called j and k.
01:24:40.000 So i times j equals k, j times k equals i, j times i is equal to the negative of i times j, so negative k.
01:24:50.000 There's a multiplication table for these objects.
01:24:54.000 And these objects help with computer vision, computer simulation 3D projections.
01:25:03.000 They're used all the time in probably video games.
01:25:07.000 They may come up in nature.
01:25:09.000 I mean, we know that nature uses complex numbers, and most people never found out why they were being told about complex numbers or imaginary numbers, because they never got to the point Where you're actually looking at wave functions that describe photons and electrons and all of that good stuff that you read about in physics.
01:25:26.000 So, in essence, the Octonians are a system where IJK keeps going effectively through elemental PQR, you know, until you've got eight different objects.
01:25:37.000 And they're not even associative, which is one of these rules that you learn about, you know...
01:25:42.000 Well, multiplication is associative.
01:25:44.000 And you think, well, what isn't associative?
01:25:46.000 So 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.
01:25:56.000 But if you put on your underwear in a different order than you put on your pants, it'll become immediately obvious which order you did it in.
01:26:01.000 Right?
01:26:02.000 Okay, well, there's another thing called associativity.
01:26:05.000 And it's almost everything that we deal with in, you know, elementary mathematics is associative.
01:26:09.000 So you're like, why do I learn about associativity?
01:26:11.000 I've never met anything that isn't associative.
01:26:12.000 Well, the Octonians ain't associative.
01:26:14.000 They're a number system that is responsible for most of the platypi of mathematics, if you will, things that just occur anomalously.
01:26:25.000 So that's an example of an invitation out of this planet, you know?
01:26:31.000 If you start to think about the Octonians and care about them and say, are they a message?
01:26:35.000 Do they have meaning?
01:26:37.000 We can prove that they're there.
01:26:38.000 I can construct them for you.
01:26:40.000 But they generate so much bizarreness in some sort of abstract space.
01:26:45.000 How were they recognized?
01:26:46.000 Like, how was it?
01:26:47.000 How did it come to be that this was a point of discussion?
01:26:49.000 Well, there's a process.
01:26:51.000 In fact, there are two processes where you can build these number systems up from each other.
01:26:55.000 So 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.
01:27:10.000 And by the time you get to the Octonians, you're exhausted.
01:27:12.000 When you say giving up a magical power.
01:27:14.000 Well, like, for example, it's very hard to think about the square root of negative one.
01:27:19.000 So, like, what does it mean for something squared to be negative one?
01:27:23.000 So that's like the complex numbers gave up that kind of sensibility.
01:27:27.000 And then the complex numbers are at least commutative.
01:27:30.000 A times B equals B times A. But the quaternions don't have that property.
01:27:34.000 Right.
01:27:34.000 So then you have a further property called associativity.
01:27:36.000 So to build the next system, you're giving up properties that sort of make sense to us.
01:27:42.000 And by the time you've gotten to the Actonians, you've given everything away.
01:27:45.000 There's no way you're going to build the next system.
01:27:47.000 But yet it's real.
01:27:48.000 Yes, yet it's real in a very real mathematical sense.
01:27:52.000 So does it just highlight our lack of understanding?
01:27:55.000 Yeah, and it is a call to adventure.
01:27:57.000 It's like a message from something that isn't human.
01:28:00.000 I'm not going to say that it's God.
01:28:02.000 I'm not going to say that it's logic or design.
01:28:04.000 But it's a more complex system of the universe.
01:28:07.000 That's right.
01:28:07.000 And you have to uncover that these things are there.
01:28:10.000 Or, for example, C. elegans.
01:28:13.000 I don't know if you've played with...
01:28:15.000 Do you know about C. elegans?
01:28:16.000 No.
01:28:17.000 All right.
01:28:17.000 C. elegans.
01:28:18.000 You say elegans?
01:28:19.000 C. The letter.
01:28:20.000 C. Uh-huh.
01:28:21.000 Elegans.
01:28:23.000 Elegans.
01:28:24.000 Elegans.
01:28:24.000 I think it's E. Okay.
01:28:26.000 So it's this worm.
01:28:27.000 That was chosen by this guy, Sidney Brenner, who just died.
01:28:30.000 And it's a shame because he would have been a great podcast guest.
01:28:33.000 Just like one of the most brilliant biologists that we didn't focus on.
01:28:36.000 And he said, you know what?
01:28:38.000 We're missing a species that we can completely describe.
01:28:43.000 Soup to nuts.
01:28:44.000 Here's the one that's about the simplest thing with a brain.
01:28:48.000 It's only got a thousand cells.
01:28:50.000 And 300 of those cells make up a very primitive neural system. 0.87
01:28:55.000 And 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.
01:29:08.000 So this will be the first of two images. 0.95
01:29:10.000 Well, that is a complete map of how one fertilized egg becomes a tiny microscopic worm for every possible division. 0.98
01:29:23.000 What in the fuck am I looking at? 0.99
01:29:27.000 I love when you say that. 1.00
01:29:29.000 That is so wild.
01:29:31.000 Yeah.
01:29:31.000 Right?
01:29:32.000 Now, here's the thing.
01:29:33.000 Everyone in biology knows how cool this thing is.
01:29:38.000 And very few people, not enough people outside of biology, know that we have completely mapped how one cell – like, if you're 30 trillion cells around – It's too big to write a diagram.
01:29:52.000 It's only possible because there are only a thousand cells and this thing has locomotion, it has sexual reproduction, you know, it eats. 0.92
01:29:59.000 So you're looking at the architectural plans for an actual organism.
01:30:05.000 And Jamie, when we're done with that, if I could trouble you for the...
01:30:12.000 For 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.
01:30:22.000 The letter C. It's not C like the Ocean Sea.
01:30:26.000 Elegance and then the cell lineage.
01:30:27.000 It looks like a really long basketball bracket.
01:30:31.000 Yes.
01:30:31.000 Kind of pushed out forever.
01:30:32.000 That's a good way to describe it.
01:30:34.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:30:35.000 It's fucking wild. 0.99
01:30:37.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:30:37.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:30:38.000 Talk about March Madness.
01:30:42.000 April Madness, June Madness.
01:30:44.000 February.
01:30:45.000 It just doesn't stop.
01:30:47.000 If we could bring up the wiring diagram or adjacency matrix.
01:30:54.000 Yeah, let's see how it gets wired.
01:30:56.000 Yeah, perfect.
01:30:57.000 That is a complete map of the 300 neurons in the C. elegans worm how they are wired to each other like that is a map of the mind of the worm Wow Okay.
01:31:14.000 So that's the portal.
01:31:15.000 That's another portal.
01:31:17.000 Here's an organism which is completely mapped and has complex behaviors.
01:31:22.000 It has, I think, about half the number of adult cell types that you and I have.
01:31:27.000 So maybe we have like 250, like only 250 different kinds of adult cells, more or less.
01:31:33.000 I don't want to get too precise about that.
01:31:35.000 And yet we are like 10 trillion or 30 trillion copies of those tiny number of different types of cells.
01:31:43.000 Well, 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.
01:31:54.000 We move around.
01:31:55.000 We eat. 0.97
01:31:55.000 We have sex. 0.97
01:31:57.000 Pretty simple life.
01:31:59.000 Do you think it's ever possible, well, I'm sure it's probably possible, but do you think in our lifetime we'll ever see a map like that of a human organism?
01:32:07.000 I don't think so, but the cool thing is we have this map and we still don't understand it.
01:32:11.000 Like, we've got this thing dead to rights.
01:32:13.000 We've got it boxed in.
01:32:14.000 It can't.
01:32:15.000 We know every single cell what it does.
01:32:17.000 We have all the wirings between the neurons, and we still don't get it.
01:32:23.000 Right.
01:32:23.000 Right?
01:32:24.000 So, like, imagine that you're eight years— What the hell is that?
01:32:28.000 Well— What a genius this guy Sidney Brenner was for choosing this organism, right?
01:32:35.000 Because this organism is the simplest place to look at complex life.
01:32:44.000 This image of the reconstructed biological neural network, it's like, what?
01:32:50.000 Like you're looking at...
01:32:53.000 Now, we could have a discussion about some weird Peruvian structure and whether we've been visited.
01:33:00.000 And I'd be up for that.
01:33:01.000 I'm not going to pretend that I'm too good for it.
01:33:05.000 But I know that this is real.
01:33:07.000 I don't have any doubt.
01:33:08.000 I'm not going to sit around asking, well, do you believe that aliens talk to the federal government in the 40s?
01:33:14.000 Right.
01:33:15.000 That might as well be an alien.
01:33:17.000 Yeah.
01:33:18.000 And it's an invitation to adventure.
01:33:20.000 And 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,
01:33:37.000 right?
01:33:37.000 It's really the design...
01:33:40.000 Jason Kuznicki Yeah, I mean, like, the ability to say no.
01:33:43.000 You know, you come with an experiment that failed.
01:33:46.000 And you say, I think it succeeded.
01:33:48.000 And I say, no, it didn't.
01:33:50.000 It failed.
01:33:50.000 And you say, well, I actually am Cambodian, and I think you're discriminating against me because I'm Cambodian.
01:33:58.000 Look, your experiment failed.
01:34:01.000 It has nothing to do with you being Cambodian.
01:34:04.000 I see what you're saying.
01:34:05.000 And you keep that stuff out of my lab.
01:34:09.000 I mean, if you want...
01:34:10.000 Culture war stuff.
01:34:11.000 Yeah.
01:34:12.000 Really what I'm animated by is... 1.00
01:34:15.000 Get your fucking social engineering out of my laboratory. 1.00
01:34:18.000 You've got 10 minutes and I'm calling security. 1.00
01:34:20.000 That's my issue.
01:34:21.000 It's not telling people how to behave or that I have all the answers or that we need to be objective in our lives and that we just want to have sensible discussions.
01:34:31.000 You're coming after core reality and our ability to make sense of the world.
01:34:36.000 And so I'm happy to entertain all sorts of things.
01:34:39.000 You take one foot...
01:34:41.000 Step one foot in my lab and I'm calling security. 0.82
01:34:44.000 And 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.
01:34:57.000 And there is a distinction.
01:34:58.000 This distinction needs to be made.
01:35:00.000 There is a distinction between hard science and gender studies.
01:35:04.000 If you could pull up, Jamie, Let's do the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron.
01:35:17.000 Oh, you can do that?
01:35:18.000 Yeah.
01:35:19.000 You went all Sean Connery on me.
01:35:20.000 Raise the eyebrow?
01:35:21.000 Yeah, one eyebrow.
01:35:22.000 Isn't that like a genetic thing, like you can curl your tongue?
01:35:25.000 Yeah, I could do that.
01:35:26.000 Some people can't do that, apparently.
01:35:27.000 Can you turn it over?
01:35:28.000 Mm-hmm.
01:35:31.000 What do you mean, turn upside down?
01:35:32.000 Oh, no, I can't do that.
01:35:34.000 All right.
01:35:34.000 You got one thing, I got another.
01:35:37.000 This is very mature, Joe.
01:35:43.000 What is going on here?
01:35:47.000 I'm looking for a number with like 10 or 11 significant digits.
01:35:55.000 We are able to do calculations in quantum electrodynamics, let's say, or quantum field theory.
01:36:02.000 In which we can figure out the precision of something, we can predict it to like 10 or 11 decimal places of accuracy.
01:36:11.000 And when I look at the achievement that was necessary to have theory agree with experiment to that level, And then I listened to some of the discussions about, well, just take these hoaxes about,
01:36:27.000 you know, somebody who submitted parts of Mein Kampf to, you know, with Jews rewritten as men to a feminine. 0.54
01:36:34.000 Peter Boghossian, yeah.
01:36:36.000 Those two subjects are taking place in the same institution.
01:36:40.000 One is incredibly rigorous and demanding and completely unforgiving.
01:36:45.000 And the other thing is just like, Frivolous and nonsense.
01:36:48.000 Well, 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.
01:36:56.000 But the core of it, whether or not it makes sense, the real problem is the motivation for doing it in the first place.
01:37:02.000 Well, 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.
01:37:14.000 I want beautiful – I mean, like, you know, nature.
01:37:17.000 You spend time in nature.
01:37:19.000 You want to think, you know, like, nature's a community and the forest is a bunch of different organisms all working together.
01:37:25.000 No.
01:37:25.000 It's red of tooth and claw.
01:37:27.000 Everything that you think about the universe that is purely beautiful and aspirational is contradicted by some system in nature.
01:37:36.000 And that's why evolutionary theory was the first thing on the chopping block.
01:37:41.000 It's just like, well, this contradicts everything we want to claim about organisms.
01:37:45.000 Well, tough luck.
01:37:46.000 I feel like there's a way to define this clearly that makes people understand it better.
01:37:50.000 Okay.
01:37:58.000 This is an incredibly complex issue, right?
01:38:01.000 Where you're dealing with emotions and feelings and people who feel like there's injustice in the world and inequality and they focus on those things to the point where they're almost participating in social engineering by ignoring reality and focusing on what they want to be true in sort of this Yeah.
01:38:45.000 A deep understanding of complex mathematics in order to achieve these results and to be able to verify them.
01:38:51.000 And they're unforgiving.
01:38:52.000 Unforgiving.
01:38:54.000 They're two totally different things.
01:38:56.000 And 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.
01:39:11.000 Right.
01:39:12.000 Where they want a certain amount of diverse people on the staff.
01:39:15.000 I am not even saying that it's frivolous.
01:39:18.000 I'm not even saying it's not scholarship.
01:39:20.000 I'm saying that whatever it is, I don't care.
01:39:25.000 Maybe it's some beautiful social thing.
01:39:28.000 But then they'll hit you with, you don't care because you're a white male and you have white male privilege.
01:39:33.000 And what I realize is that as important as inclusion is, exclusion is equally important.
01:39:40.000 And the instant you say that, I don't owe you the time of day.
01:39:43.000 What does that mean by exclusion is equally important?
01:39:46.000 We keep talking about diversity and inclusion, diversity, inclusion, diversity, inclusion.
01:39:50.000 And there's an implicit threat in that, which is what makes it really juicy and interesting, which is like, well, let's look at us.
01:39:58.000 We've got three white guys in here.
01:40:00.000 There's Jamie, you, and me.
01:40:01.000 Speak to yourself.
01:40:02.000 I'm 1.6% African.
01:40:04.000 I'd like you to recognize that.
01:40:05.000 I knew he was going to play that card.
01:40:09.000 But you, sir, can pass as white, right? 0.94
01:40:11.000 Yes.
01:40:12.000 Okay.
01:40:13.000 Now...
01:40:15.000 In order to have the objection, like, there's some little bit of guilt, which is like, well, why aren't there any people from Cambodia in here?
01:40:23.000 Is it that we're really anti-Cambodian?
01:40:29.000 Right.
01:40:33.000 Right.
01:40:45.000 I don't have to listen to that voice.
01:40:47.000 And I think this is really important.
01:40:49.000 That is not a voice that needs to be answered.
01:40:53.000 It's not a voice that needs to be taken seriously or paid attention to unless there's some serious allegation that there has been some kind of discrimination or inclusion.
01:41:05.000 The burden of proof is on you for saying why that's interesting in a particular conversation.
01:41:14.000 The burden is on you to explain why that's interesting.
01:41:19.000 Right.
01:41:19.000 Well, for them, they're trying to engineer a more fair and balanced society.
01:41:24.000 If I was going to take their perspective, they would say that the reason why there aren't more women in science or trans people in science or, you know... 0.99
01:41:32.000 But I'm also trying to engineer a world where there are more women in science. 1.00
01:41:36.000 How are you doing that?
01:41:37.000 By trying to figure out what is it that's selecting against women. 0.79
01:41:41.000 For example, that we need to get women more money, as I said on this program, earlier in their lives so they can hire help to help raise their children so they can spend more time on their careers and balance... 0.99
01:41:55.000 Yeah, but a lot of women don't find that attractive. 1.00
01:41:58.000 They don't want to do that.
01:42:00.000 Maybe, but my point is that there are lots of reasons that men and women are different, right?
01:42:07.000 So, for example, I saw a beautiful video of a guy who jumps down an enormous flight of stairs on a skateboard, and he just nails the landing, and it's just a thing of art.
01:42:19.000 And then it shows you 150 attempts where this guy just abused his body.
01:42:27.000 And 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,
01:42:42.000 and he's actually one of the world's falling champions, right?
01:42:46.000 Okay.
01:42:47.000 Well, 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...
01:42:57.000 I 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.
01:43:08.000 I'd be furious with him.
01:43:10.000 There are things that are happening that result in imbalances that aren't about some kind of unfairness.
01:43:17.000 And 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.
01:43:42.000 We want more of that kind of person that's interested in something when they might not necessarily naturally gravitate towards it.
01:43:50.000 And 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.
01:43:58.000 And it might be more that they're just not that interested in that.
01:44:02.000 Which is biologically that's been proven in studies.
01:44:07.000 But I'm trying to make it a different point.
01:44:09.000 To me, what I'm trying to say is I made a mistake years ago, I think, of engaging and answering this point, which is, you know, let's take piano competitions.
01:44:22.000 Why are piano competitions historically disproportionately, you know, let's say entered in one by Russians or chess or who knows what? 0.70
01:44:30.000 Well, Russians are beasts in the way that they destroy children on their way to the concert stage. 1.00
01:44:37.000 They will do things that most American families will not do to produce a concert pianist. 0.95
01:44:43.000 That's not an unfairness for the rest of us.
01:44:46.000 I mean, I play the piano.
01:44:47.000 I can't get on stage with these guys because they're just amazing.
01:44:51.000 It's not an unfairness that I'm not represented on that stage.
01:44:57.000 You know, if I told you that my intention is to become the world's greatest jujitsu expert at age 53, being overweight and not having any history in combat sports, you know and I know that it's not going to happen.
01:45:11.000 With the right amount of drugs...
01:45:15.000 Come on, Joe.
01:45:16.000 And engineering.
01:45:17.000 We can do miraculous things.
01:45:19.000 That's true.
01:45:19.000 We can make him better than he was.
01:45:21.000 Yeah, we need daily stem cells.
01:45:24.000 We're going to have to do some real—we're going to take a chance on cancer and all sorts of other diseases.
01:45:29.000 Right.
01:45:29.000 We can achieve some things.
01:45:31.000 Okay, but the previous conversation that we were trying...
01:45:34.000 No, you need to develop.
01:45:35.000 You need to develop.
01:45:36.000 It needs to be a part of your...
01:45:38.000 Well, here's the thing that I always say about striking sports.
01:45:42.000 Striking 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.
01:45:51.000 And it's a gigantic advantage over someone who learns once they're past puberty.
01:45:58.000 When you get someone who's learning how to strike and they're in their 20s, it takes a real outlier to become super successful.
01:46:05.000 It's very, very rare.
01:46:07.000 But I remember being in a fist fight and throwing a punch and not connecting and hurting my arm.
01:46:13.000 Yeah, it happens all the time.
01:46:15.000 I didn't understand.
01:46:16.000 It's not free.
01:46:19.000 Now all you've got is your left arm and you've got a really pissed off person across from you.
01:46:24.000 What I was getting back to is I wanted to talk about, in part, the portal and how it relates to the whole sort of weird social justice thing.
01:46:35.000 The key point is I'm not that interested in In the culture wars.
01:46:40.000 I'm interested in the pipeline of amazing stuff that is unforgiving.
01:46:46.000 Right, but don't you think that along the way you have to kind of address that the culture wars are a thing, try to figure out why they're a thing, 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?
01:47:05.000 Well, 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. 1.00
01:47:17.000 Why?
01:47:17.000 Because we're not being honest about what it actually, what is involved in selecting against people.
01:47:23.000 So you brought up the issue of interests.
01:47:25.000 So like the Google memo, the James Damore issue.
01:47:29.000 Right.
01:47:29.000 Which is a great example publicly.
01:47:31.000 Okay, but my wife went on Dave Rubin's show. 1.00
01:47:35.000 Look, this is a woman who brought techniques of gauge field theory into economics.
01:47:42.000 So she's no slouch when it comes to analytic thinking.
01:47:46.000 Is gauge field theory similar to gauge symmetry?
01:47:49.000 Yeah, gauge theory.
01:47:50.000 Okay, same thing.
01:47:51.000 Just call it gauge theory.
01:47:53.000 She 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,
01:48:09.000 without any alteration, was a mature geometric system in a gauge-theoretic idiom.
01:48:21.000 So we collaborated on showing that you can't accommodate changing preferences in economics without gauge theory.
01:48:32.000 So that was kind of pretty amazing.
01:48:34.000 It was really great fun.
01:48:38.000 Her point was, I didn't enjoy the unpleasantness of focusing on these things because they were so abstract.
01:48:50.000 I was interested in people.
01:48:52.000 I was interested in making sure that our models could capture human dynamics better.
01:49:00.000 And, 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.
01:49:11.000 So she went on to Dave Rubin and said, look, it's not about abilities.
01:49:14.000 Women are as smart as men. 1.00
01:49:16.000 It's interests.
01:49:17.000 We're not interested in the same things necessarily.
01:49:20.000 And that should be okay.
01:49:21.000 But when she said it on Dave Rubin's show, it didn't register anywhere.
01:49:25.000 Then James Damore said it.
01:49:28.000 And like, the world freaks out.
01:49:30.000 How dare you?
01:49:31.000 But that's also because he said it within the environment of Google.
01:49:34.000 He just wasn't on a podcast.
01:49:35.000 But 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...
01:49:43.000 I don't think it would have created nearly as much of an issue.
01:49:45.000 Well, 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.
01:49:54.000 That's what I care about.
01:49:56.000 I really enjoy doing isolated things in the absence of other people that have a very technical nature to them.
01:50:03.000 And, you know, my experience in general is that I've had female collaborators in very technical subjects.
01:50:13.000 Fewer women are interested in things that involve isolation and technical things removed from human interaction. 0.96
01:50:24.000 And so that statement will undoubtedly cause a flurry of activity.
01:50:30.000 And if a person says it who's not suspected of trying to keep women out of something – my point is I want – A much more equal world.
01:50:42.000 But we have a very different diagnosis as to why the world is as unequal as it is.
01:50:48.000 And your diagnosis is that it's unequal because people have varied interests. 0.98
01:50:52.000 But also like something as dumb as kin work. 0.99
01:50:56.000 Ken work. 1.00
01:50:57.000 Women take care of sick relatives, children, and the elderly at a level that most men can't be bothered with. 0.99
01:51:04.000 It's just like, eh, I don't care.
01:51:06.000 So 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.
01:51:16.000 Maybe it's not healthy.
01:51:18.000 And then you've got another group of people who are saying, I want to have children.
01:51:22.000 I want to stay home with the kids for a couple of years because it's really important in terms of their development and bonding and all these things.
01:51:28.000 And I say, absolutely.
01:51:30.000 How do we create a financial product that gets you money early in your life when you need it?
01:51:36.000 And then maybe you pay something out.
01:51:38.000 It's just a different diagnosis as to what the problem is.
01:51:41.000 It's not all oppression.
01:51:43.000 Part of it is resources and financial products.
01:51:46.000 Part of it is interests.
01:51:48.000 Part of it is the fields being set up in a way that is biased.
01:51:51.000 I do believe in structural oppression.
01:51:53.000 I just don't believe in the level of structural oppression or the remedies for structural oppression.
01:52:00.000 We are losing many of the best minds that are on female shoulders. 1.00
01:52:04.000 We just are.
01:52:05.000 There's no question about it in my mind.
01:52:07.000 And rather than saying- What do you mean by we're losing them?
01:52:11.000 Well, they exit the system.
01:52:12.000 They get through the, let's say, BAs and STEM subjects.
01:52:17.000 A lot of them enter PhD programs.
01:52:19.000 Let me give a very simple example from the Harvard Math Department from years ago.
01:52:24.000 I think Harvard had this weird thing where it would very often allow one woman in a year to the PhD program in mathematics. 0.54
01:52:31.000 And that person usually felt isolated and would often kind of leave the program.
01:52:36.000 And then one year, a female who was admitted deferred.
01:52:41.000 So that meant that there were two women starting the next year. 0.99
01:52:44.000 I think?
01:53:01.000 Okay, I'm totally up for that kind of a remediation up until we can build up enough female experience so that women have role models. 1.00
01:53:12.000 It's really helpful to be able to look at a senior female researcher and go to her and say, how did you do it?
01:53:19.000 You got married, you had kids, you had a very successful career.
01:53:22.000 How did you come back?
01:53:24.000 One of the things I found, I used to be interested in this problem and I found that a lot of the Women in the 1950s were very successful in STEM subjects, had a lot of money, or their husbands had stable jobs that allowed them to use nannies and housekeeping in order to free themselves from drudgery.
01:53:44.000 Well, that was an unadvertised feature of the system because that's not available to everyone.
01:53:48.000 It's a feature where financial privilege actually enabled somebody to stay in science.
01:53:55.000 So, you know, the issue isn't a question of inclusion or exclusion of groups.
01:54:01.000 It's a question of, how are you so sure that everything is structural oppression?
01:54:05.000 That's a really weird thing.
01:54:07.000 And 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?
01:54:15.000 Now I've got to spend 30 minutes explaining that?
01:54:19.000 Right.
01:54:19.000 I don't want to do it.
01:54:21.000 It's not a good enough objection.
01:54:22.000 Like, if we're going to make progress, let's actually make progress that matters rather than making ourselves feel good.
01:54:30.000 How social justice movement has reached such hysterical levels over the last decade?
01:54:37.000 Well, a couple things.
01:54:38.000 One, I think that certain positions became – like the failing business of traditional media meant that you couldn't actually employ people at the same level that you could employ them before.
01:54:54.000 So a lot of people who – Didn't have huge opportunity costs entered journalism.
01:55:02.000 What does that mean by huge opportunity costs?
01:55:04.000 Well, let's imagine for example that you're very ideological and somebody offers you a $50,000 a year job which allows you to be ideological or you could take $150,000 a year job and ideology isn't a large part of the offer.
01:55:24.000 Only the ideological people are going to give up $100,000 a year for the privilege of activism.
01:55:32.000 So 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.
01:55:40.000 So that's one of the things that's going on is that you have very economically frustrated people because the silent generation started a problem. 1.00
01:55:49.000 The baby boomers amplified the hell out of it. 1.00
01:55:51.000 And Gen X is still waiting to take its place in society, and the millennials just don't even see a path through standard careers. 0.82
01:56:01.000 Nobody's putting a glass of scotch in their hand and a cigar in their mouth and saying, come with me, kid.
01:56:06.000 Let me show you how it's done.
01:56:07.000 Well, isn't it also...
01:56:09.000 Partly because the discussion is out there and the discussion is a very attractive one.
01:56:14.000 The discussion of one of the reasons why you haven't gotten by in this world is because of inequality and because of some sort of systemic racism or systemic sexism or systemic homophobia or transphobia.
01:56:26.000 And it becomes, when you give people an option to find an excuse, they gravitate towards that excuse.
01:56:34.000 You create safe spaces and you coddle and you make, I mean, all these pieces are in place.
01:56:39.000 There's many, many moving parts, right?
01:56:41.000 And I think all these little pieces are in place where we also have these massive echo chambers because of social media.
01:56:48.000 We have these people that, you know, they find ideologically similar human beings and they bounce off of each other.
01:56:53.000 But these are all real problems.
01:56:56.000 Like, I have an intersex friend who I haven't seen.
01:56:58.000 What does that mean?
01:56:59.000 Somebody who's indeterminate between male and female physiologically.
01:57:04.000 So, okay.
01:57:06.000 Let's imagine that they have some karyotype XY profile and that the developmental process did not produce unambiguous genitalia.
01:57:13.000 Okay.
01:57:14.000 Okay.
01:57:15.000 Is that a hermaphrodite?
01:57:16.000 I don't want to just intersect.
01:57:18.000 Okay.
01:57:19.000 This is a person I think is pretty terrific.
01:57:22.000 And I look at all the forms that say male, female.
01:57:26.000 And I just, you know, my heart sinks.
01:57:28.000 Like we're not even in trans here.
01:57:30.000 We're talking about somebody whose biological card that they were dealt.
01:57:33.000 Could have been you, could have been me.
01:57:34.000 Right.
01:57:35.000 And through no choices at all, this person is being shoehorned into a paradigm that Which puts them in an increased risk of suicide.
01:57:46.000 And it breaks my heart, and we should change it.
01:57:48.000 We should break the male-female dichotomy.
01:57:51.000 Absolutely.
01:57:52.000 Now, I have a different feeling about trans, but if we solve the issue of intersex, which is not pressuring, just accepting that some tiny percentage of the population, which is not vanishingly small, just not large, is neither unambiguously male and female in terms of genotype-phenotype concordance.
01:58:11.000 We will do most of the work necessary to take care of our trans folks who are suffering, too.
01:58:17.000 Right?
01:58:17.000 Now, trans is a much more rich world because there are a million different issues taking place in trans.
01:58:25.000 And they're all conflated.
01:58:26.000 You know, part of it because of developmental biology, part of it because gender really, in some sense, is socially constructed in a way that like when people say mathematics is socially constructed, I have to reject it.
01:58:39.000 You know, and I give this example of like kilts and lunges from Scotland and India are skirts. 0.91
01:58:47.000 But they're not female in those places. 1.00
01:58:49.000 So you have to learn about male and female relative to the codification in your society.
01:58:54.000 And 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.
01:59:07.000 All of these things are conflated.
01:59:09.000 And I was really hoping that if we used intersex as the test case, To break the binary because the binary is an oppression. 0.98
01:59:18.000 There's no question in my mind about it.
01:59:20.000 Well, how is it an oppression?
01:59:21.000 Because let's imagine that I – let's say I have persistent Mullerian duct syndrome.
01:59:26.000 So I'm phenotypically on the outside male and I go to my doctor and he says, hey, you've got a uterus. 0.72
01:59:32.000 What?
01:59:32.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:59:33.000 You have a uterus. 0.94
01:59:34.000 Okay.
01:59:35.000 That's an exotic situation.
01:59:38.000 Maybe I want to identify male, you know, because the outside equipment looks male.
01:59:44.000 It's a weird situation.
01:59:46.000 Maybe the idea is that… We're talking about extremely rare circumstances.
01:59:49.000 So does that really define it as being oppressive?
01:59:52.000 Like what is… For a friend of mine who is in neither situation, yeah, it's oppressive.
02:00:00.000 Some people are born paralyzed, right?
02:00:02.000 Some people are born with serious neurological diseases that don't allow them to be motile.
02:00:07.000 That's right.
02:00:08.000 Is it oppressive if people are just recognized, like most people, recognized as being able to walk and move around?
02:00:16.000 What if there was no category called disabled, right?
02:00:23.000 Or in a wheelchair. 0.91
02:00:24.000 Okay, no category.
02:00:25.000 All right, yeah.
02:00:26.000 So you've got somebody who's got a spinal cord injury, and you have people saying, all right, everybody, walk this way.
02:00:32.000 What do you mean you can't walk?
02:00:34.000 Get up!
02:00:35.000 Why are you lazy?
02:00:37.000 That's what it sounds like to me.
02:00:40.000 It's one thing to recognize that not everybody is in the standard category, but it's another thing to hard code.
02:00:47.000 Hard code where?
02:00:48.000 You're talking about job applications?
02:00:50.000 Forms, yeah.
02:00:51.000 The federal government gives me a form.
02:00:52.000 There's a binary.
02:00:53.000 It says male or female.
02:00:55.000 Let's imagine it doesn't say other or prefer not to say.
02:00:58.000 Okay, so we're just talking about filling out forms, which is how often does that take place in your life?
02:01:04.000 Often enough that it represents oppression?
02:01:07.000 Where you have to be defined as male or female?
02:01:10.000 Emotionally?
02:01:10.000 Emotionally.
02:01:11.000 I think this is oppression.
02:01:13.000 Oppression?
02:01:14.000 Yeah.
02:01:16.000 But isn't it done under the interests of defining people simply?
02:01:21.000 Because for the most part, you're dealing with males and females.
02:01:25.000 And for the most part, they're just trying to figure out what's what for their statistics.
02:01:50.000 There's no society that's so conservative that they've sorted the world into male and female.
02:01:58.000 You know, the famous example in Iran of the Ayatollah making a fatwa that said it's fine to have gender reassignment.
02:02:10.000 We have to recognize that every single population produces gender sexual ambiguity.
02:02:17.000 But isn't that also to get around the idea of homosexuality being a grievous crime?
02:02:22.000 Because I believe in Iran it's illegal to have homosexual activity, but you can have gender reassignment. 0.92
02:02:30.000 So if you're a gay man, you can choose to become a female.
02:02:35.000 It's true, but there's also a thriving gay scene in Tehran.
02:02:40.000 Do they have to recognize this female? 1.00
02:02:42.000 There was a situation in India where I have more experience where you would say, oh, those two people are confirmed bachelors.
02:02:52.000 You know, that they're so dedicated to their professions that there's no room for family and they live together.
02:02:57.000 Right?
02:02:59.000 So, like, traditional societies have – everybody accommodates homosexuality and failures of simple gender binaries. 0.71
02:03:06.000 And, you know, I always bring up the example of Turkish, where Turkish doesn't hard-code the third-person singular pronoun as male or female.
02:03:15.000 It just has one pronoun for both.
02:03:17.000 So, Thank you for giving me the opportunity to show where my heart actually has been this entire time, which is...
02:03:26.000 I believe this is oppressive.
02:03:27.000 And I don't think that it oppresses that many people.
02:03:31.000 But I believe that it's an important oppression that we have to realize that we hard-coded.
02:03:35.000 And that's what generated a lot of the feelings.
02:03:38.000 Before we get to trans, you can simply say from the position of intersex that the world is a richer place than male and female. 1.00
02:03:46.000 And people say, oh, it's XX versus XY. It's like, no, it isn't.
02:03:49.000 It just isn't.
02:03:50.000 It for the most part is.
02:03:52.000 For the most part it is.
02:03:54.000 So in terms of – it has been an edge case to deal with.
02:03:58.000 But that edge case is important to me.
02:04:00.000 Right.
02:04:01.000 Because the edge case are – they are human beings that are – Not only that.
02:04:05.000 I actually – look, I like people who are outside of the norms.
02:04:11.000 I think that probably a larger percentage of those people are going to be more interesting people because they're forged in the fire.
02:04:17.000 Right.
02:04:18.000 So it's not just a case that, you know, do you want to chase a couple of edge cases?
02:04:22.000 Everybody with a really different experience is more important to me than everyone with a standard experience.
02:04:27.000 I think we have to take care of the standard case, but I'm absolutely interested in outliers and edge cases.
02:04:36.000 To get back to the line of thought.
02:04:39.000 Well, that's an important distinction.
02:04:40.000 And what you're saying is very important because you are, in one way, someone could pigeonhole you from your earlier statement that you're not interested in a lot of these different studies, grievance studies,
02:04:55.000 a lot of these gender studies.
02:04:57.000 Because they're sending it...
02:04:58.000 If they interfere with hard science, which you are getting, particularly with evolutionary biology, you're getting a lot of interference.
02:05:07.000 Right?
02:05:08.000 And you're not interested in that.
02:05:10.000 But that does not mean that you're an insensitive person that's uninterested in human beings.
02:05:14.000 You're just not interested in the disruption of the acquiring of data and the analysis of said data.
02:05:23.000 I don't think that activism Makes for good advancement.
02:05:30.000 Well, 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?
02:05:41.000 How formed is their mind?
02:05:44.000 How narrow is their view of what the world is or should be, and their impact, what's significant about their impact?
02:05:51.000 But 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?
02:06:03.000 Just a Fisherian equivalence.
02:06:06.000 Can I say LOL? Then what would you be?
02:06:14.000 You'd be fascinated as to why you don't have males and females in an intellectually – in equal numbers in a demanding occupation.
02:06:23.000 So you'd start saying, huh, if I already assume that males and females are equally intelligent, I care about different categories.
02:06:30.000 How much of this is about fertility?
02:06:31.000 How much of this is about kin work?
02:06:33.000 How much of this is about structural oppression?
02:06:36.000 How much of this is about path dependence?
02:06:38.000 You do some very careful thing in order to understand your problem.
02:06:43.000 And only when you finally understood your problem Would you say, okay, now I have an idea of how to remediate it.
02:06:49.000 We 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. 1.00
02:07:01.000 Bingo!
02:07:02.000 Now you're working in a totally different idiom.
02:07:13.000 Sean 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.
02:07:36.000 Well, certainly there is in terms of height, the ability to radiate heat, melanin content of the skin, the ability to absorb sunlight.
02:07:43.000 It doesn't pass the smell test that you could be able to say that a priori.
02:07:48.000 It's not a scientific type statement.
02:07:50.000 It's something you'd have to investigate.
02:07:53.000 So, in that situation, Am I interested in some finding that says that one group is smarter and other groups are not as smart?
02:08:02.000 Do I believe that IQ equals smartness?
02:08:04.000 No, I don't believe IQ equals smartness.
02:08:06.000 Do I believe that there's no cultural bias? 1.00
02:08:08.000 I think there is cultural bias.
02:08:10.000 I'm definitely on record of saying there are ways in which groups that are said to fare less well in terms of IQ demonstrate actual intellectual dominance.
02:08:22.000 This is some rich, weird area I've never cared about before.
02:08:27.000 And the only reason that it becomes interesting to me is that suddenly we're making these incredible proclamations with certainty.
02:08:38.000 Like, you know, you can't say this word, or this is absolutely true. 1.00
02:08:42.000 And, like, life doesn't work like that.
02:08:44.000 There's no word in the English language.
02:08:46.000 George Carlin made this point all the time.
02:08:48.000 There are no bad words.
02:08:49.000 There's bad intent.
02:08:50.000 There are bad people.
02:08:53.000 Well, isn't it also the issue being a part of a group?
02:08:56.000 Say more.
02:08:58.000 The IDW is too interested in race and IQ. I'm not.
02:09:03.000 I'm not.
02:09:04.000 Who is?
02:09:04.000 I mean, I'm really not.
02:09:05.000 I don't discuss that at all.
02:09:07.000 I understand.
02:09:07.000 But who is interested?
02:09:08.000 Sam Harris has discussed it before, but he discussed it with someone who was studying it.
02:09:12.000 I don't think Sam cared.
02:09:13.000 I think that Sam felt that Charles Murray had been railroaded by him, by he, Sam Harris.
02:09:20.000 And then as Sam came to understand what it is like to have a mob turn on you, Sam said, maybe I'm wrong about Charles Murray.
02:09:28.000 And then Ezra Klein made this really interesting point in a really unfair way against Sam, which was basically like, hey, you don't know what Charles Murray is.
02:09:37.000 He's a hybrid.
02:09:38.000 He's not just a social scientist.
02:09:39.000 He's also got an agenda.
02:09:42.000 Right.
02:09:42.000 Is that accurate?
02:09:43.000 I think so.
02:09:44.000 I've never read Murray's work.
02:09:46.000 I don't know enough to say either.
02:09:47.000 Deeply polarizing.
02:09:50.000 The bell curve, the whole idea about being able to recognize the differences in race and IQ. It's a very contentious subject.
02:10:02.000 First of all, I mean, look, I have to admit that I don't score that well on certain tests.
02:10:09.000 So I have a built-in total skepticism.
02:10:14.000 Of IQ tests, SAT tests, ACT tests, any kind of test.
02:10:19.000 Because it's an unnatural examination.
02:10:22.000 It's not intelligence.
02:10:22.000 It just isn't.
02:10:24.000 What is it?
02:10:24.000 It's a proxy.
02:10:26.000 Like, there are people who think, oh, it's a really good proxy.
02:10:29.000 I've never met someone who has a really high IQ, though, that I deem to be intellectually inferior.
02:10:36.000 Yeah, but I've met people who don't have very high IQs who just blow me away.
02:10:40.000 Yes.
02:10:42.000 Absolutely, there's a type of intelligence that certain people possess, particularly creative intelligence.
02:10:48.000 There'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.
02:11:01.000 They can make things.
02:11:02.000 They can do things.
02:11:03.000 They have a genius in their ability.
02:11:05.000 And that requires some intelligence.
02:11:08.000 It requires some immeasurable – something that you can't put on a scale.
02:11:13.000 Well, this is what I said to Jordan Peterson.
02:11:15.000 I said, I don't think I have an IQ. Because the conceit – we have to remember that a priori we would always have guessed that intelligence was many different things.
02:11:25.000 It was a composite of like lots of different types of intelligence.
02:11:29.000 The conceit around IQ is you'd think that was true, but guess again.
02:11:33.000 There's essentially one kind of intelligence.
02:11:36.000 There's one scale.
02:11:38.000 It's a surprise.
02:11:40.000 Oh, that's really surprising.
02:11:42.000 Tell me something.
02:11:43.000 Of the various forms of intelligence, is one of the things that you call intelligence processing?
02:11:48.000 Yes.
02:11:48.000 Yes, processing is very important.
02:11:50.000 Okay.
02:11:51.000 I don't score well on processing.
02:11:53.000 In fact, I don't think anyone in my family has ever scored well on processing.
02:11:55.000 What do you mean by processing?
02:11:57.000 I don't know.
02:11:57.000 Some kind of… Yeah.
02:12:24.000 Okay.
02:12:24.000 That's your level of thought.
02:12:26.000 Do you know how many brilliant people can't spell, can't write?
02:12:30.000 Well, also, you're not even thinking.
02:12:32.000 You're just trying to get the word out, and you misstep.
02:12:34.000 Yeah, but like my mind, you know, at some point I got sent home, I think, because I was asked to draw a chicken in school, and I put two wings and four feet on it.
02:12:43.000 I'm so non-observant.
02:12:45.000 My handwriting...
02:12:46.000 You got sent home?
02:12:47.000 Yeah, something like this.
02:12:48.000 They sent you home?
02:12:49.000 I was like aberrant or, you know, I was making fun of the teacher.
02:12:52.000 Because it was four-legged chicken?
02:12:54.000 Well, 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.
02:13:02.000 She sent you out of the class?
02:13:03.000 Yeah, because I was...
02:13:04.000 Well, you're correct.
02:13:05.000 In that case, I was.
02:13:06.000 In the case of a chicken, I wasn't. 0.99
02:13:09.000 Well, maybe you saw some weird fucking Chernobyl chicken somewhere. 0.99
02:13:12.000 Yeah, man. 0.99
02:13:13.000 Chernobyl chicken Kiev.
02:13:15.000 That's good.
02:13:16.000 That's comedy gold.
02:13:17.000 My point being that if you don't have a high confidence in net normal metrics, the race and IQ discussion doesn't land.
02:13:27.000 So, to get back to Charles Murray.
02:13:29.000 So, Charles Murray, it is...
02:13:33.000 It's hard to say.
02:13:36.000 He 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,
02:13:51.000 as measurable proof that certain races are superior.
02:13:55.000 And, 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.
02:14:07.000 And that smacks of racism.
02:14:10.000 Well, this is the issue, which is you have a situation in which...
02:14:15.000 I think we're good to go.
02:14:37.000 Who are actually racist.
02:14:39.000 Alright, but let me pause you there.
02:14:40.000 But then there's the actual data.
02:14:42.000 Now, in examining the actual data, if you just look at the actual data, Is it racist to look at the real numbers?
02:14:53.000 Like 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.
02:15:03.000 If you wanted to look at Nigerians in terms of like, if you wanted to, if all... 0.85
02:15:10.000 If you wanted to look at them particularly as a group, it would be very difficult to be racist.
02:15:14.000 You'd have to say, well, these are superior.
02:15:17.000 A lot of superior intellects come from Nigeria.
02:15:19.000 They also trot out the Asian one. 0.99
02:15:21.000 This is one of the weird things that people like to show that they're not racist.
02:15:26.000 Like, look, it shows Asians are of a superior IQ. I puzzle on that one. 1.00
02:15:33.000 That one's puzzling to me.
02:15:34.000 Say more.
02:15:35.000 Because I think with certain people, With certain males.
02:15:41.000 Let's just go with males. 1.00
02:15:42.000 They look at African Americans and they see superiority in certain ways.
02:15:50.000 They see superiority athletically, artistically, musically.
02:15:55.000 If you look at the contributions of African Americans culturally across the board in terms of the Jimi Hendrix, the Miles Davis...
02:16:05.000 Speed of thought and creativity.
02:16:07.000 Like analytic...
02:16:08.000 Well, not just that.
02:16:09.000 Also, athletically. 0.99
02:16:11.000 Like, the fucking outliers are just so many. 0.99
02:16:15.000 There's so many Michael Jordans, Mike Tysons, Sugar Ray Leonards. 0.99
02:16:18.000 There's so many African American outliers who are just extraordinary in terms of their accomplishments.
02:16:24.000 But not that many Asian Americans in that regard.
02:16:28.000 So, it's almost like they'll concede.
02:16:30.000 Like, they're not doing the things that make me jealous.
02:16:34.000 Do you see what I'm saying?
02:16:35.000 They're not creating this insane music, although there are a few, right?
02:16:40.000 But overall, they're not creating these insane athletic accomplishments that these white Americans can't keep up with.
02:16:48.000 So we'll say, but look, they're superior intellectually, so I can't be racist.
02:16:51.000 I'm pointing out these Asians who I'm not jealous of because they don't do the things that I wish that I could do. 1.00
02:16:58.000 But 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.
02:17:07.000 Well, this is proven.
02:17:08.000 I'm not racist.
02:17:09.000 I don't want this to be true, but it seems to be true.
02:17:12.000 I see.
02:17:12.000 You see what I'm saying?
02:17:13.000 It's like a way of – it's a way of suppressing accomplishment.
02:17:19.000 Right.
02:17:19.000 While, like, almost mitigating the impact of the jealousy that they feel.
02:17:25.000 So if you think about, for example – Does that make sense?
02:17:27.000 I think so.
02:17:29.000 Right.
02:17:30.000 First of all, I just, I hate this topic.
02:17:34.000 Yeah, me too.
02:17:35.000 It's a weird topic.
02:17:36.000 It's a weird topic.
02:17:37.000 It feels greasy, even touching it.
02:17:39.000 Well, but now we have to, right?
02:17:41.000 Like this, I feel like...
02:17:44.000 My wrong view of it is if you'd never brought this thing up, we would never have had to deal with it.
02:17:50.000 I no longer believe that's true because we have so much inadvertent data.
02:17:54.000 I don't want the data on chess.
02:17:59.000 We have an idea of how many grandmasters there are and which groups like male, female, Asian, black, various portions of Europe.
02:18:08.000 I don't know what that data means.
02:18:10.000 But I can't stop the data because it's going to be generated even if nobody comes up with a standardized test because it's a game and it's scored and it has something to do with intellectual abilities.
02:18:20.000 On the other hand, I mean, I'm a competitive guy.
02:18:24.000 You do comedy.
02:18:25.000 I do some amount of music. 0.99
02:18:28.000 I can guarantee you that both of us have had our ass kicked at some point by African Americans who excel in both of these areas. 0.99
02:18:35.000 And I don't mean... 0.99
02:18:37.000 You know, all God's children got rhythm.
02:18:39.000 I mean, getting out thunk in a competitive situation.
02:18:44.000 You 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.
02:18:52.000 Right? 0.99
02:18:53.000 So, therefore, I never had a lot of fear about it because, you know, I'm in close proximity with somebody who's just kicking my ass. 1.00
02:19:01.000 And... 0.98
02:19:05.000 Therefore, I thought I could leave these topics alone.
02:19:07.000 I would never have to deal with it.
02:19:09.000 The 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?
02:19:19.000 And which doesn't allow for trade-offs between groups like Finns.
02:19:24.000 Finns are good at some things.
02:19:25.000 They're not good at others.
02:19:26.000 Nobody believes in like anti-Finish prejudice.
02:19:29.000 So we don't think about it, right?
02:19:32.000 It's just not a big issue for us.
02:19:35.000 Finnish humor.
02:19:36.000 How many Finnish comedians are there?
02:19:39.000 I have no idea.
02:19:40.000 How many do you run into at the comedy store?
02:19:42.000 That's a bad example because you're dealing with America in American comedy and you're also dealing with the highest level of the game.
02:19:52.000 The comedy store is essentially like the It's like the Harvard research labs of stand-up comedy.
02:19:59.000 Yeah, but nobody's worried about anti-Finnish behavior.
02:20:05.000 We're worried that we're prejudiced against certain groups.
02:20:08.000 We're worried that we're prejudiced against Jews. 0.86
02:20:10.000 We're worried that we're prejudiced against Mexicans, against blacks.
02:20:13.000 We have a pretty clean idea of what bigotry we really still need to worry about.
02:20:19.000 And we feel guilty about it.
02:20:21.000 And that's why you say it has this kind of lubricious quality.
02:20:24.000 What are you really up to over there?
02:20:25.000 Why are you looking at that data set?
02:20:28.000 And what my comment is, is I don't know how to stop this thing.
02:20:33.000 I'm not excited about it.
02:20:34.000 I'm not interested in it.
02:20:35.000 I definitely think that we have to actually think about the social implications of all these things.
02:20:40.000 But if your idea is that we're going to stop this at the level of data and analysis, I can't afford that.
02:20:47.000 I just can't afford that.
02:20:48.000 We need to have somebody who's able, like for example, microcephaly.
02:20:53.000 You've got people with smaller heads than the rest of us, maybe because of the Zika virus.
02:20:57.000 Well, is it unethical to study what the cognitive impairment due to microcephaly is?
02:21:04.000 I don't know.
02:21:05.000 I don't know what to do, but I know that I want to have a very thoughtful conversation.
02:21:09.000 Well, how can it be?
02:21:09.000 How 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?
02:21:21.000 What if there's a correlation with smaller heads and cognitive impairment?
02:21:26.000 Let's take Mosaic Down Syndrome. 0.98
02:21:29.000 Mosaic Down Syndrome doesn't have the same profile as regular Down Syndrome.
02:21:33.000 You get much higher functioning people.
02:21:36.000 I mean, ultimately, we're all souls, and we have to figure out dignity, and we have to figure out some system by which we can live with this increased level of knowledge.
02:21:46.000 But does examining impairment, does that really mean that it's a prejudice?
02:21:53.000 Like, what about examining impairment from people who've been injured?
02:21:56.000 Should we avoid doing that because we don't want to be ableist?
02:22:03.000 Do you see what I'm saying?
02:22:04.000 Not quite.
02:22:05.000 Because we're talking about reality, right?
02:22:06.000 We're talking about issues.
02:22:08.000 If you're examining someone who contracted the Zika virus and it led to them developing a smaller head, which is one of the horrible side effects of that, is examining that in some way some sort of prejudice?
02:22:21.000 Should we avoid examining their cognitive impairment?
02:22:23.000 Well, if we avoid examining it, we might do some damage.
02:22:26.000 If we examine it and publish the findings, we might do damage.
02:22:30.000 So you might say you might do damage to the people that are infected or afflicted?
02:22:34.000 Look, 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.
02:22:50.000 Like, we have to start, I mean, as hippy-dippy as this sounds, we have to start from a place of love and decency.
02:22:56.000 I certainly agree, but I don't think that we should avoid reality.
02:22:59.000 Well, this is the thing, right?
02:23:00.000 Yeah.
02:23:01.000 So now I have this other thing, which is reality is compassionate in and of itself.
02:23:07.000 Remember when HIV was an equal opportunity disease and it just started in the gay community and it's going to jump the fire road and it's going to be as much a heterosexual problem as it was a homosexual problem? 0.86
02:23:16.000 That turned out not to be true.
02:23:19.000 It was an ideological statement that didn't look at the differences between different kinds of epithelium and different sexual practices between gays and straights.
02:23:28.000 It was an activist position that started to compete With a epidemiological position or a biological position.
02:23:38.000 And so historically what we did is we had private expert communication.
02:23:45.000 And it's not always clear that you can trust your experts.
02:23:48.000 It's not always clear that you should start with the data.
02:23:50.000 What if the data says terrible things?
02:23:52.000 Like maybe the data on people with microcephaly says something and you have got a person who's going to be judged by the size of their head which is visibly off from the rest of their body.
02:24:03.000 We 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.
02:24:12.000 We know that we have got bigotry as part of our makeup, and we know that we're not really good at certain ways of integrating information and not becoming triumphalist and jerkish about it and taking victory lapses if it's a competition.
02:24:29.000 Like, my group's better than your group.
02:24:30.000 Right.
02:24:31.000 So, that's where we're stuck.
02:24:33.000 Now, I want to be struggling with other people who are saying, look, I don't know what the answers are.
02:24:39.000 I 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. 0.99
02:24:47.000 Just because suddenly you had a diverse group of people replaced by a very tiny group from Ethiopia and Kenya.
02:24:54.000 We are behaving...
02:24:57.000 I think?
02:25:17.000 It's not about, I don't want a better planet or a more inclusive planet.
02:25:23.000 It's like, stop crowding out the really difficult, interesting, open-hearted, and hard-headed conversation with this dime-store nonsense about simple answers and simple truths, because those aren't true.
02:25:39.000 And it's not going to work in the long term.
02:25:42.000 I 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.
02:25:53.000 And the complaint about it isn't you guys are trying to come up with a better, more equitable future.
02:25:58.000 It's what if you're going to make the same mistake when we said, well, the heterosexuals are as much at risk as the homosexuals. 0.96
02:26:05.000 Well, that wasn't true.
02:26:06.000 We needed to devote resources to our homosexual community. 0.90
02:26:10.000 And 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. 0.68
02:26:20.000 I think when we're talking about this, I think everything you're saying resonates and everything you're saying makes sense.
02:26:26.000 And 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.
02:26:45.000 I think our problem in this country, there's many problems, but one of our problems is the loudest voices on the fringes.
02:26:53.000 And this is one of the things that I want to discuss with you is what's going on in Portland.
02:26:57.000 And I think what's going on in Portland is the loudest voices on the fringes that...
02:27:02.000 The people on the right and on the far right are recognizing as emblematic of the left.
02:27:11.000 They think it defines the left.
02:27:13.000 And I don't think it does.
02:27:14.000 And I think it's a symptom of...
02:27:19.000 It'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.
02:27:30.000 Weird way.
02:27:31.000 And ideologically believes that Antifa, just because of a name, stands for anti-fascist.
02:27:37.000 If 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.
02:27:46.000 Because that's what we saw with that.
02:27:48.000 How do you say his name?
02:27:49.000 Go?
02:27:49.000 I think it's Andy No.
02:27:51.000 No.
02:27:52.000 It's N-G-O, right? 0.99
02:27:54.000 I treat the G as silent until somebody corrects me.
02:27:56.000 I think you're right.
02:27:58.000 What you saw from that video, that anyone could support that.
02:28:03.000 With a person who's just talking.
02:28:06.000 What 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.
02:28:14.000 I've seen no evidence of this, but I've seen the narrative trotted out over and over again as a justification for violence against him.
02:28:23.000 We're good to go.
02:28:38.000 I think this is a horrible precedent to set, and it's a terrible move.
02:28:46.000 If you're playing a game, it's a terrible first move.
02:28:49.000 Because things only escalate.
02:28:51.000 They don't de-escalate. 0.98
02:28:52.000 No one says, wow, you beat the shit out of Andy, no. 0.51
02:28:54.000 So this is a mystery. 0.97
02:28:55.000 Right.
02:28:55.000 Like, what the hell is going on right now?
02:28:57.000 Well, you're allowing people to wear masks and carry backpacks with weapons.
02:29:01.000 And there's a natural human inclination when someone gets hit to jump in and hit them, too.
02:29:06.000 You see it all the time.
02:29:07.000 Watch WorldStar.
02:29:08.000 Go to worldstarhiphop.com and watch someone gets hit, a bunch of people just jump in and hit them. 0.99
02:29:13.000 It happens at truck stops and fucking high schools. 0.99
02:29:16.000 It happens... 1.00
02:29:17.000 Brain damage, people die.
02:29:18.000 People punch each other all the time.
02:29:19.000 Yeah, permanent injury. 0.98
02:29:21.000 When you're seeing in Portland, there was one of them where an old guy got hit in the head with a fucking crowbar by some masked kid because the old guy apparently disagreed or they all disagree on things. 0.89
02:29:32.000 My guess is that the old guy is not exactly as portrayed. 0.95
02:29:38.000 I believe that the old guy may have been there with a telescoping baton.
02:29:45.000 Oh, so he was hitting people.
02:29:47.000 I think this is so worthwhile, but let's do it right, because I think this is so mysterious.
02:29:52.000 What the hell are people doing supporting Andy Ngo being beaten up on video? 0.71
02:29:57.000 So let's stay with him, because that's the best, clearest example of someone who's a tiny little gay man. 0.98
02:30:04.000 He's tiny.
02:30:05.000 I mean, he represents so many different maligned populations, right?
02:30:09.000 He's pretty intersectional.
02:30:10.000 Yes, he's Asian.
02:30:11.000 He's an immigrant.
02:30:12.000 He's an immigrant. 0.99
02:30:12.000 He's gay. 0.99
02:30:14.000 Is he a Republican? 0.97
02:30:16.000 I thought he was left of center, but I was told that he was a conservative journalist. 0.91
02:30:21.000 Well, I've been told I'm a fucking alt-right guy, so it's very confusing. 0.95
02:30:25.000 He's also diminutive in physical form. 0.97
02:30:29.000 He's not threatening physically, right?
02:30:32.000 And they've chosen this guy as an example, and One of the more disturbing things were how many people saw the video and were justifying it.
02:30:41.000 Saying things like, get another hobby.
02:30:44.000 The anti-fascists will not stand for your bigotry and your hate.
02:30:49.000 What are you talking about? 0.98
02:30:51.000 You think it's okay to punch this guy?
02:30:53.000 The fact that you guys all piled on and punched him and threw milkshakes at him?
02:30:56.000 This is so subtle.
02:30:57.000 I've been thinking a lot about it.
02:30:59.000 I have a model.
02:31:00.000 I'm happy to hear yours because there is a mystery.
02:31:02.000 Can we both agree at the beginning?
02:31:04.000 That you would imagine that that video would have shocked people and to find so many people sort of excusing it is really shocking.
02:31:12.000 And given that he's also clearly intersectional, you wouldn't predict this from first principles.
02:31:17.000 Right.
02:31:17.000 No, you wouldn't.
02:31:18.000 If you looked at it on paper, you definitely wouldn't, especially if you allowed him to self-identify as left to center.
02:31:23.000 Okay.
02:31:23.000 So here's how I think the model goes.
02:31:25.000 Okay.
02:31:26.000 Unless you want to give yours first.
02:31:28.000 No, go ahead.
02:31:28.000 All right.
02:31:31.000 The first thing that we have to understand is that there's a division.
02:31:36.000 I want to lay this out super carefully.
02:31:38.000 The 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.
02:31:55.000 The voices most willing to accept loss.
02:31:58.000 Most of the left Does not want to be dragged to the extreme left.
02:32:03.000 So you hear this thing about why are you focusing on a fringe?
02:32:06.000 And the answer is because the fringe is running the show, in my opinion.
02:32:10.000 What do you mean by willing to accept loss?
02:32:13.000 If you go into an Antifa versus Proud Boys melee, You're willing...
02:32:20.000 You accept that you may get clocked with a bike lock.
02:32:25.000 I don't think that's correct.
02:32:26.000 Or a baton.
02:32:26.000 I don't think that's correct.
02:32:27.000 I think you're dealing with people that have no concept of real violence, no experience of real violence.
02:32:33.000 They're LARPing.
02:32:34.000 Yes. 1.00
02:32:35.000 It's fucking cosplay. 1.00
02:32:36.000 It's cosplay LARPing. 1.00
02:32:37.000 Have you seen the image of the guy who's the suspect? 0.99
02:32:40.000 Looks like he's never worked out a day in his fucking life. 0.99
02:32:42.000 Looks like he's never been outside. 1.00
02:32:43.000 And I think these people are playing a fucking game. 1.00
02:32:47.000 We've agreed on this. 1.00
02:32:47.000 Yes. 1.00
02:32:48.000 Okay.
02:32:48.000 But you are willing.
02:32:51.000 So 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.
02:32:58.000 They have no idea what they're doing.
02:33:00.000 Have you ever seen a fight between people that have no idea how to fight?
02:33:02.000 Yes.
02:33:03.000 Yeah, okay.
02:33:04.000 I've been one of those.
02:33:05.000 Okay, that stuns me.
02:33:06.000 As a martial arts expert, it stuns me that people are willing to participate in that.
02:33:10.000 It's like me not knowing how to get in a motorcycle and getting in a race.
02:33:13.000 I don't know how anyone's willing to do that.
02:33:17.000 But they're willing to do that.
02:33:18.000 And they're willing to do that because they're delusional.
02:33:20.000 They're delusional.
02:33:21.000 And they're supported in their delusional perspective by the giant numbers of them.
02:33:24.000 They all get together.
02:33:25.000 And then they wear masks, which further emphasizes this illusion that they're a part of the game.
02:33:31.000 But Joe, look.
02:33:32.000 Assume that you are not even in a physical situation.
02:33:36.000 You're willing to be very loud on social media about very simplistic perspectives.
02:33:41.000 And you're willing to become a pariah at some level.
02:33:44.000 Are you, though?
02:33:46.000 I think mostly you're supported.
02:33:47.000 There's far more support.
02:33:50.000 I'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.
02:34:00.000 Okay.
02:34:01.000 The 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.
02:34:12.000 That the fringes are scary.
02:34:14.000 Fringes are willing to go places the rest of us aren't.
02:34:17.000 I agree with you.
02:34:17.000 On both sides.
02:34:18.000 Left and right.
02:34:19.000 Left and right.
02:34:20.000 So I spend a lot of time focused on the fringes because the fringes have become terrifying and the middle has become cowardly.
02:34:28.000 And the whole principle about the whole IDW thing was about creating a non-cowardly That's part of my
02:35:03.000 irritation when people come after it.
02:35:06.000 So, there is a cowardly center and a very terrifying fringe, and the fringe is going around the whole thing, right, left and right.
02:35:17.000 The next thing is that people are secretly weirdly sympathetic with the violent fringe to their extreme, rather than making common cause across the center.
02:35:29.000 So, for example, You imagine that you run a laundromat and you're being visited by a member of organized crime every week.
02:35:39.000 And he comes into your laundromat and he kind of plays with your stuff.
02:35:43.000 And he says, oh, it'd be a shame if anything happened to your business.
02:35:46.000 And he shakes you down.
02:35:48.000 Starts saying, oh, you know, I noticed that you have a daughter.
02:35:50.000 I would love to date her.
02:35:52.000 Perhaps we'll go out sometime.
02:35:54.000 You hate this guy.
02:35:56.000 Then 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.
02:36:08.000 You're weirdly sympathetic with the vigilante because you're being terrified by a group that is not being taken care of.
02:36:16.000 I 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.
02:36:29.000 And why country club Republicans are weirdly sympathetic to some of these far-right groups is that they view them as this is the dangerous group that's kind of taking care of the problem that I can't stand up to.
02:36:44.000 So you've got this bizarre, cowardly sympathy from the center who won't actually stand up and say, I have more in common with a country club Republican.
02:36:55.000 Like in my case, I view myself as a progressive or at least a liberal.
02:36:59.000 I have more in common with a country club Republican than somebody who's got a bike lock who's looking for trouble in a street demonstration trying to smash up a Starbucks, right?
02:37:10.000 I don't want the help from my left.
02:37:15.000 Now, 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.
02:37:31.000 And if you don't respond, then you're collateral damage and that's on you.
02:37:35.000 That's how they see this.
02:37:37.000 I think that's very accurate.
02:37:38.000 So in other words, I think Andy Ngo is the guy who doesn't listen to the air horn.
02:37:42.000 Brett Weinstein doesn't listen to the air horn.
02:37:44.000 Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris don't listen to the air horn.
02:37:50.000 I 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.
02:38:06.000 Yeah, I need my organized crime group to get rid of your organized crime group. 0.99
02:38:10.000 And 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. 0.99
02:38:25.000 That's the view that I represent. 0.99
02:38:27.000 Thank you, Antifa, I don't need your help.
02:38:32.000 Yeah, you know what?
02:38:33.000 I actually am much more afraid of the far right.
02:38:35.000 And the reason I concentrate my negative energy on the far left is what are you trying to do?
02:38:39.000 You're trying to get the genie out of the bottle on the far right?
02:38:42.000 That is the danger.
02:38:43.000 Yeah, you want to see more tiki torches?
02:38:45.000 It's not tiki torches that you need to worry about.
02:38:47.000 It's armed people who come and they're not bringing bike locks.
02:38:52.000 We're pushing ordinary human beings to the extremes.
02:38:56.000 Yeah.
02:38:56.000 Right?
02:38:57.000 And the thing that I get is that I believe that the Republican Party – I never get a chance to say this stuff.
02:39:05.000 I have never gotten along with the Republican Party.
02:39:09.000 I just don't like it.
02:39:10.000 I view it as the thing that wants to exclude me from their country clubs.
02:39:13.000 I have an older model.
02:39:15.000 They're the group that wanted to put in condo developments in Yosemite Valley because they couldn't figure out why we would want to preserve the national parks.
02:39:22.000 They were the ones that laughed about clubbing the baby seals.
02:39:26.000 Ha ha ha. 1.00
02:39:27.000 I just always had this attitude, fuck these people. 1.00
02:39:29.000 This is my emotional cadence. 1.00
02:39:34.000 And we always had this thing where the Democrats, we had most of the smart people.
02:39:40.000 And so in a tiny fraction of time, we have seen this giant evaporation of intelligence, if not Actually, through a lack of courage.
02:39:53.000 The people who represent responsible left-wing thinking, who believe in structural oppression but don't believe in the extent claimed, you know, who want to keep making progress, who want to make sure that traditionally marginalized groups are taken care of,
02:40:08.000 that we take our responsibilities but not our guilt as the reason for trying to make a better world.
02:40:14.000 I'm not paying reparations for slavery.
02:40:18.000 I mean, my family came over here in like, what, the 19-teens or 20s?
02:40:23.000 We came from pogroms.
02:40:24.000 Is anybody going to be paying Jews for the pogroms?
02:40:27.000 Am I going to be getting Ukrainian reparations? 0.98
02:40:29.000 Let's not be ridiculous. 0.68
02:40:31.000 Do we want civil war?
02:40:33.000 Do 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?
02:40:42.000 What we have is a situation in which we don't have courageous people willing to fight for what works.
02:40:52.000 We have a tiny number of people who are animated by this.
02:40:55.000 The reason I'm animated by this is that I'm trying to keep the pipeline open for science.
02:41:00.000 It's really what happened to my brother.
02:41:05.000 Before it ever happened to him.
02:41:06.000 My brother and I were in this discussion about what are we going to do to make sure that there's always a place to do biology, to do mathematics, to be able to weigh competing claims.
02:41:19.000 And 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.
02:41:36.000 You can't build a world on angry activism that's trying to go back to a lily white nation.
02:41:42.000 It will never happen.
02:41:44.000 And you can't enforce equality of outcome.
02:41:47.000 We don't even want that. 0.54
02:41:49.000 People who work their ass off deserve some of the pleasures of working your ass off.
02:41:55.000 And I don't always want to work my ass off.
02:41:56.000 And Jackie Chan is the one I always look at.
02:41:58.000 That blooper reel at the end of every Jackie Chan film tells me he deserves his money.
02:42:04.000 I'm never going to do that to my body.
02:42:06.000 Ever.
02:42:07.000 I don't want an equality of outcome with Jackie Chan if I make some little film and this guy risks his life for every scene.
02:42:13.000 It's insane.
02:42:15.000 We need to create a world in which people are excited and animated about keeping the pipeline of decent thought, compassionate thought, open-hearted thought, and rigorous and unforgiving thought Both on the table at all times and not adulterating one to serve the other.
02:42:40.000 I don't want to see science abused to oppress anybody.
02:42:43.000 And I don't want to see somebody's dime-storn concept of utopia infecting our ability to make sense of the world.
02:42:51.000 Those are twin directives.
02:42:56.000 And this is what I'm excited about.
02:42:58.000 We need to get the world excited We need to get the world excited about cross-pollinations of ideas between different groups.
02:43:08.000 We need to get the world excited about every group that is sort of marginalized contains neurons that we are not accessing, right?
02:43:19.000 And so, you know, for example, Asian females make up about a quarter of the world's population and very few of the world's Nobel Prizes.
02:43:26.000 We 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. 1.00
02:43:38.000 People can't hear this because they've settled on very cheap versions of progress.
02:43:45.000 It's time to get back to real progress, not fake progress.
02:43:48.000 How do we do that?
02:43:49.000 I agree with everything you just said, but how do we do that?
02:43:55.000 Honestly, this is my third time on perhaps the biggest podcast in the world.
02:43:59.000 I don't know.
02:44:00.000 Maybe that's giving you a little bit too much credit.
02:44:02.000 It's not very far off.
02:44:04.000 We're doing that.
02:44:05.000 We're trying to stand up.
02:44:06.000 And if people respond, and you've given me courage to start a podcast.
02:44:11.000 I've got to tell you, I did not want to do this.
02:44:13.000 I brought my producer Jesse Michaels here. 0.99
02:44:16.000 I was a pain in the ass to this guy. 0.97
02:44:19.000 I did not return his phone calls. 0.99
02:44:20.000 He tried to get me to sign contracts.
02:44:22.000 I wouldn't look at them.
02:44:24.000 I've started with this turnkey podcast company called Cast Media.
02:44:28.000 They put up with me for like eight or nine months where I dragged my heels.
02:44:32.000 I don't want to be famous.
02:44:33.000 I don't want to be well known.
02:44:35.000 Too late.
02:44:36.000 I know.
02:44:36.000 Well, I'm sort of well known.
02:44:38.000 Well, it's time.
02:44:39.000 Look, so this is the crazy thing. 0.57
02:44:41.000 You want to get really nuts? 0.79
02:44:42.000 Yes.
02:44:42.000 It's time to leave.
02:44:44.000 Time to leave what?
02:44:44.000 This planet.
02:44:45.000 Oh, boy.
02:44:48.000 Listen, we can leave this planet.
02:44:49.000 I got something right here.
02:44:50.000 No, no, no.
02:44:52.000 Take you to another planet right now.
02:44:53.000 He's joking, federal agents.
02:44:58.000 Let me give you my argument.
02:44:59.000 Where are we going?
02:45:01.000 Well, we don't know that we can leave this planet.
02:45:03.000 I love this planet.
02:45:04.000 I love this planet.
02:45:05.000 I have a good time here.
02:45:06.000 This is my favorite planet.
02:45:07.000 Mine, too.
02:45:07.000 I know.
02:45:09.000 But here's the real reasoning.
02:45:12.000 We started a clock.
02:45:15.000 Around 1953, which is when we had the explosion at Bikini, the first hydrogen bomb, and when we figured out the double helix.
02:45:27.000 And I call this the twin nuclei problem, and it began in 1953. In 1953, we started a clock.
02:45:33.000 It was also the height of the McCarthy era.
02:45:36.000 We do not have the wisdom to be able to fuse nuclei.
02:45:40.000 We don't have the wisdom to be able to investigate the cell.
02:45:43.000 It's too much power.
02:45:46.000 So our wisdom may have increased slightly.
02:45:49.000 Maybe it didn't.
02:45:50.000 I don't know.
02:45:50.000 But our power is now godlike.
02:45:52.000 So our biological intelligence, what our minds are capable of, has not – it's been surpassed by our intellectual achievements in terms of our technological innovation.
02:46:10.000 These things, which while complicated – Succumb to our intellects, right?
02:46:19.000 They're much simpler than we ever imagined.
02:46:22.000 To be able to create something that normally happens in the sun on an island in the Pacific, or to be able to rewrite a cell the way Craig Venter did, you know, synthetic biology.
02:46:34.000 We are now gods but for the wisdom.
02:46:41.000 That's a great quote.
02:46:43.000 We are now gods but for the wisdom.
02:46:46.000 Should be a meme.
02:46:47.000 Picture you.
02:46:48.000 Picture you.
02:46:49.000 We are now gods before the wisdom.
02:46:51.000 That's going to be up there.
02:46:52.000 Someone's doing that right now.
02:46:53.000 I know.
02:46:53.000 Focus.
02:46:54.000 Focus.
02:46:55.000 Sorry.
02:46:55.000 Okay.
02:46:56.000 So that started this clock.
02:46:59.000 And the world's most serious human beings should be working on the twin nuclei problem.
02:47:05.000 What do we do with new godlike powers given our history of conflict, our history of envy, our history of madness?
02:47:13.000 Because we succumb regularly.
02:47:16.000 I was born 20 years after the end of World War II and we all know what really happened there. 0.67
02:47:21.000 I mean, we're nuts.
02:47:22.000 We're absolutely not capable of this level of responsibility.
02:47:27.000 And so the question that we have is, do we believe that we have a long-term solution in terms of increasing our wisdom?
02:47:35.000 We should definitely try it.
02:47:36.000 Everybody believes that should work on that problem.
02:47:39.000 But if we don't think that we have the wisdom to live like this, we don't know how much time we have left, but it's probably maybe a few hundred years tops, because sooner or later you're going to have Putin-like or Trump-like people.
02:47:56.000 I mean, I'm sorry, I would have a very deep antipathy towards Donald Trump.
02:48:03.000 He's not temperamentally fit to have the secrets of theoretical physics at his fingertips.
02:48:09.000 He just isn't.
02:48:11.000 And 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.
02:48:22.000 And it's nice if Elon thinks we can go to Mars.
02:48:24.000 Maybe that will allow a small number of us to diversify in case we do something really dumb to the planet.
02:48:31.000 But if human beings are to continue, and we are to continue evolving, we need to spread out.
02:48:36.000 And there are three rocks that are inhabitable.
02:48:38.000 There's the Earth, there's the Moon, and there's Mars.
02:48:41.000 And the Moon has nothing there.
02:48:44.000 Mars is pretty uninteresting, to be blunt.
02:48:46.000 I know that it's beautiful that we send back these pictures.
02:48:48.000 And we've got this one gorgeous planet that we are clearly not smart enough to steward. 0.99
02:48:53.000 We're still having idiotic climate change debates. 0.98
02:48:56.000 Even if climate science is somewhat junkified, we should still be taking climate super seriously because we don't know what we're doing. 0.99
02:49:03.000 It's such a complicated nonlinear system and we're not even capable of focusing.
02:49:08.000 Two seconds later, I'll be watching the Kardashians for sure.
02:49:12.000 So what is the answer?
02:49:13.000 Well, in my opinion, we've got to increase the number of possible places we can go beyond three.
02:49:21.000 To say nothing of space stations, because that's not realistic.
02:49:23.000 None of these things make sense.
02:49:25.000 So the first place that you have to get to is, we're really deeply screwed, and not because of apocalyptic cult-like reasons.
02:49:33.000 Just because of science.
02:49:35.000 Just because of 1953. So the only opportunity is if we can break the Einsteinian speed limit, so far as I know.
02:49:44.000 Or we can upload into silicon, or we can reboot from tardigrades. 0.99
02:49:48.000 Like, none of these answers are good.
02:49:53.000 So, what I've been toying with since I was 19 was, what is the theory beyond Einstein?
02:50:03.000 And that's the thing that I've been most uncomfortable talking about, although I've been talking about it more.
02:50:09.000 I gave these lectures in May of 2013 in Oxford, and I was appalled by the way in which the world's physics community responded.
02:50:19.000 I mean, I was very scared.
02:50:20.000 I'm not a physicist.
02:50:23.000 I don't claim to be.
02:50:25.000 But I felt like I tried to present what I hoped was a path forward, given that the field was completely stalled out.
02:50:35.000 And this is it.
02:50:36.000 Physics and biology led us into the valley of death.
02:50:40.000 And it's now time to try to get out.
02:50:43.000 And people...
02:50:44.000 Go ahead.
02:50:45.000 No, please.
02:50:47.000 So what is my responsibility in terms of the portal?
02:50:53.000 Um...
02:50:55.000 What 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.
02:51:09.000 In the form of, I don't think I have the wisdom to figure out what it means, but at least I have a hope of trying to write the fundamental rules to figure out our source code.
02:51:24.000 And that was the plan, which is, what is this place?
02:51:29.000 What is the source code for reality?
02:51:32.000 Now, what was the response from the physicist that you found appalling?
02:51:41.000 There were two articles that appeared in the Guardian newspaper or website that talked breathlessly about what I had done or what I might have done to call attention to the lectures that I was giving.
02:51:55.000 So 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,
02:52:11.000 I was working on this theory I called geometric unity.
02:52:17.000 And I was very uncomfortable.
02:52:20.000 I 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.
02:52:38.000 This 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.
02:52:48.000 So he announced a proof that he had solved this most famous problem in mathematics and he didn't have a proof.
02:52:54.000 And then bizarrely he was under such pressure that he found another proof.
02:52:59.000 And actually pulled it off.
02:53:00.000 So it's like, you know, hats off to him.
02:53:02.000 It's one of the craziest stories.
02:53:03.000 But he was working in secret for seven years and nobody knew what he was doing.
02:53:07.000 So sometimes these stories work out.
02:53:09.000 But he was a professor at Princeton and very highly regarded.
02:53:13.000 And he had sort of husbanded seven years worth of work to pretend that he was releasing papers when he was actually secretly doing this thing that would have made him a madman in some sense.
02:53:25.000 And so this is what I was trying to do.
02:53:26.000 I was not able to work on these issues in the string theory community because the string theory community was possessed of this belief that they had found the answer back in the 80s.
02:53:37.000 In 1984, they had what they thought was a revolution.
02:53:40.000 And the math community doesn't think in these terms.
02:53:44.000 Like, both of these are very conservative communities historically and very focused on following the leadership of the top people unless there's a revolution.
02:53:54.000 And so I started working on a different idea to unify the two branches of physics that appear to be incompatible, that was different than the string theory idea and different than the loop quantum gravity idea or any of the others.
02:54:07.000 And your main motivation was to do this, to try to figure out a more advanced version of space travel?
02:54:12.000 Well, it wasn't space travel.
02:54:14.000 It was, we need the source code.
02:54:16.000 Like, it might be safer to go further once you've unlocked nuclear fusion. 0.96
02:54:24.000 You're pretty much as screwed as you need to be.
02:54:27.000 So then the issue is, okay, I'm pretty sure that Einstein's theory is not final. 0.98
02:54:37.000 Because you get these singularities which I don't associate with ultimate equations.
02:54:42.000 So 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.
02:54:55.000 Are signs to me that these equations are incomplete.
02:54:58.000 But 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.
02:55:08.000 You begin a physics seminar and you're already immediately in his world.
02:55:12.000 You say, let X be a space-time manifold.
02:55:14.000 Boom.
02:55:14.000 You're already in relativity.
02:55:17.000 So it's almost impossible to figure out a way to get in at a deeper level of physics than Einstein's theory.
02:55:26.000 And we know that we have to recover Einstein's theory because that's been proven to work in all sorts of situations.
02:55:32.000 And the same thing with quantum field theory, which is why I talked about the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron.
02:55:39.000 So my idea was that only since the 1970s have we known that particle theory was based on geometry.
02:55:48.000 We knew that Einstein's theory, Einstein used geometry to develop his theory.
02:55:52.000 It was the language of relativity called Riemannian geometry.
02:55:56.000 But 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.
02:56:07.000 He was an Alsatian geometer who worked with Cartan.
02:56:12.000 And that geometry was figured out At Stony Brook in New York by Jim Simons, who became the world's greatest hedge fund manager, and C.N. Yang, who's arguably number one or number two greatest living theoretical physicist.
02:56:28.000 He's now in his 90s.
02:56:30.000 And they figured out that the secret language of particle theory was also geometry, but a different geometry.
02:56:36.000 And so geometric unity is simply the idea that it's not a fight between Einstein and Bohr.
02:56:44.000 It'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.
02:57:05.000 And so when do those two geometries unify?
02:57:08.000 It's two different geometric theories.
02:57:10.000 And I've found that in general they don't unify in a way that you want.
02:57:14.000 You don't have the ability to do Einsteinian tensor analysis where you compress something called the Riemann curvature tensor and the gauge stuff where you do this gauge symmetry that we were talking about.
02:57:26.000 Because gauge symmetry ruins the ability to compress the Einstein tensor.
02:57:31.000 Never mind what that means.
02:57:33.000 But in one or two rare circumstances, you can actually combine the two geometries.
02:57:38.000 And that's where I think we are.
02:57:41.000 And so partially what the purpose of the Portal podcast is, is to use...
02:57:46.000 I'll just sort of tear the mask off a little bit.
02:57:51.000 We've been talking about lots of interesting things, about social justice, about mathematics, about wonder, about psychedelics, and trying to be decent human beings to each other and to set an example.
02:58:05.000 And I think it's been partially a success and partially a failure.
02:58:09.000 But what I'm trying to do is to gain the courage to talk about what these ideas are.
02:58:15.000 And the worst comes to worst.
02:58:17.000 Is that I wasted a lot of my life on a crazy theory that turned out not to be true.
02:58:24.000 What was the response, though?
02:58:25.000 Like, how did the physicist react?
02:58:27.000 And what was disappointing about it?
02:58:32.000 So, the articles engendered an immune reaction.
02:58:37.000 Immune.
02:58:38.000 Yeah, it's an immune response.
02:58:40.000 Okay.
02:58:40.000 Okay, so somebody's giving a lecture, and now, how many times have we heard before the next Einstein, yada, yada, yada, yada?
02:58:46.000 And I totally understand this.
02:58:48.000 It's a reasonable reaction.
02:58:49.000 Like, Sean Carroll had this reaction.
02:58:51.000 He referred to me as a backyard Einstein.
02:58:55.000 And his wife- You referenced him twice today.
02:58:57.000 Yeah.
02:58:57.000 He's on my mind.
02:58:59.000 And his wife wrote this amazing article in Scientific American called, Dear Guardian, You've Been Played.
02:59:07.000 Now, she's not a physicist, but she has access to Sean's brain and she writes on physics.
02:59:13.000 And then there was this whole thing where the new scientist said, okay, this guy claimed to give this lecture in the physics department, but he hasn't written a paper and he didn't tell the physicist.
02:59:22.000 It was a sneak attack.
02:59:24.000 Well, of course, that wasn't true.
02:59:25.000 There was announcement of the talk.
02:59:29.000 I stayed in England, and I gave the talk once more, and then a final time a week later.
02:59:36.000 And by that point, all sorts of people from Cambridge and Oxford came to the talk because it was a worldwide topic of discussion, what the hell's going on.
02:59:45.000 And I gave a two-hour talk.
02:59:48.000 Consider that nobody outside of theoretical physics gives talks on physics.
02:59:53.000 It's like North Korea. 0.92
02:59:54.000 They don't get many visitors.
02:59:55.000 Right.
02:59:56.000 To the extent that they get visitors, they do get visitors from mathematics, but in general, mathematicians don't take an interest in the real physical world.
03:00:03.000 And to be blunt about it, I don't think that the string theorists are very focused on the real physical world either.
03:00:08.000 They've been playing with toy models for nearly 40 years.
03:00:16.000 So a lot of it was playing out in the press, and the new scientists had to retract.
03:00:21.000 They said, no, what we wrote wasn't true.
03:00:23.000 They did publicize the talk, and then there was an article.
03:00:27.000 They sent a reporter to the final talk that I gave, and the reporter did not know any physics.
03:00:34.000 So I spent the morning with this person, teaching him what the Dirac equation was, like a very fundamental thing.
03:00:39.000 A question came up in the talk about, is your model anomaly-free?
03:00:46.000 And my model has a property called nonchirality.
03:00:50.000 Chirality, which is the difference between left-right asymmetric models are called chiral and left-right symmetric models are called nonchiral.
03:01:01.000 So my model is nonchiral, but the chiral nature of the universe is supposed to emerge from it.
03:01:07.000 And I was asked questions that didn't seem to make sense, which is you can't have a chiral anomaly in a nonchiral model.
03:01:14.000 And the person, the reporter picked up on this and didn't really get it.
03:01:17.000 So there was like a flurry of activity with a big WTF. And if you ask me, by the time I gave the second lecture, people weren't laughing.
03:01:28.000 It was a serious lecture.
03:01:30.000 People heard that it wasn't like somebody come up with their own language and their own...
03:01:38.000 You know, written in crayon in some indecipherable thing.
03:01:42.000 It was written in the normal language, but I hadn't written a paper.
03:01:45.000 And papers are very much the stock and trade of that community.
03:01:50.000 So I would say that the community settled on a rubric, which is paper or it didn't happen.
03:01:57.000 In other words, put up or shut up.
03:01:59.000 Give us a paper. 0.95
03:02:00.000 I had written something.
03:02:03.000 But because my trajectory through math and physics was very unusual, I have a very low trust of the academic community.
03:02:13.000 I support them, as you can tell.
03:02:15.000 I'm extolling the virtues of science.
03:02:20.000 But I was subjected to a situation in graduate school where I had – I'm probably the only person you've ever met with a PhD who was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense.
03:02:32.000 Why is that?
03:02:34.000 I don't know.
03:02:34.000 What was your thesis?
03:02:36.000 It was on self-dual equations not being as peculiar to Dimension 4 as was claimed.
03:02:43.000 But – I had a situation in which the thesis when I had entered grad school was something that you would present to the world.
03:02:54.000 And by the time I was trying to leave, it was a closed-door affair where the department would appoint the person for you.
03:03:04.000 And I was in the unusual position of not having a thesis advisor.
03:03:08.000 So there's some very fraught story.
03:03:10.000 One thing you'll find is that graduate school for some subclass of people becomes an extremely fraught experience where the power of a department not to grant you a degree or not to To help you get a job or to expel you becomes very contentious,
03:03:30.000 right?
03:03:31.000 And that was the situation.
03:03:32.000 So I got into a very contentious situation.
03:03:34.000 But there was no explanation of why it was so contentious?
03:03:37.000 We can talk about it on another podcast.
03:03:40.000 But I was in a very low trust situation with Harvard and with the standard community.
03:03:49.000 And so when work that I had done that was rejected for my thesis was discovered by others in 1994 and revolutionized topological gauge theory, I became very sort of sullen and angry and withdrawn because my department knew that I had put forward the same equations that became revolutionary in mathematical gauge theory.
03:04:15.000 Did you revisit it with them?
03:04:18.000 Where 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.
03:04:33.000 Old gauge theory is dead.
03:04:35.000 There's a new gauge theory.
03:04:37.000 And David Kajdan, who I will name, said – I was in the back center row.
03:04:49.000 I think I was picking my nose, actually.
03:04:52.000 And he said, didn't we have a student who told us to look at these equations?
03:04:58.000 And suddenly the whole room turned around and looked at me.
03:05:01.000 I think this is in room 507 of the Harvard Science Center.
03:05:05.000 And it's just like, you know, try to imagine you're an anonymous person in a lecture and suddenly everyone is staring at you.
03:05:12.000 And your fingers and your nose.
03:05:14.000 And...
03:05:16.000 That was the moment.
03:05:17.000 And I think I mumbled something just to get out of it.
03:05:22.000 But I was angry.
03:05:23.000 I was angry that they'd taken away my agency.
03:05:26.000 Better not to give me a PhD.
03:05:29.000 Better just to say, look, we're going to go short you.
03:05:32.000 Screw off.
03:05:33.000 You don't get a PhD. 1.00
03:05:34.000 And then if I end up doing something, screw you. 0.99
03:05:37.000 That would have been a better outcome.
03:05:40.000 So instead, I got a PhD through a very tortuous situation, and I came to give up on academics.
03:05:48.000 I don't think that they're a fair system.
03:05:50.000 I don't think that it's open-minded.
03:05:52.000 I don't think that they welcome all sorts of different belief structures which are capable of producing innovations.
03:06:00.000 So for my money, I've been very vocal about this.
03:06:04.000 I've written articles on edge.org, and I've said theoretical physics is stalled.
03:06:10.000 And you've been claiming that you're going to ship string theory since 1984. Well, where is it?
03:06:17.000 And it's always, you know, N years away.
03:06:21.000 Now, what was the premise of Sean Carroll's wife's article that they got played?
03:06:27.000 Well, Jamie, can you bring it up?
03:06:32.000 I had broken the rules.
03:06:35.000 The rules?
03:06:36.000 Yeah.
03:06:37.000 You're supposed to submit a paper.
03:06:39.000 The paper is supposed to be reviewed.
03:06:40.000 It's supposed to appear in a journal.
03:06:42.000 You're not supposed to be doing this from mathematics.
03:06:44.000 You don't have training as a physicist.
03:06:47.000 This is a hoax.
03:06:49.000 But it's not a hoax.
03:06:51.000 Well, I don't know.
03:06:52.000 I mean, if it is a hoax, it's on me.
03:06:54.000 It's clearly not a hoax.
03:06:55.000 You're not hoaxing anyone.
03:06:57.000 I'm not trying to.
03:06:58.000 So why the attack?
03:06:59.000 I don't understand the motivation for the attack.
03:07:01.000 Okay.
03:07:02.000 Okay.
03:07:02.000 Imagine that you're the Princeton physics department.
03:07:06.000 You probably have a cork board on the wall called the crank board.
03:07:12.000 And every week somebody writes to you and says, I figured out perpetual motion.
03:07:17.000 I have a laser transport device.
03:07:20.000 And so everybody is concerned and frightened that their time is going to be wasted by lunatics.
03:07:29.000 Right. 0.94
03:07:30.000 Now, I both fit the lunatic profile and don't fit the lunatic profile.
03:07:36.000 On the lunatic side, I'm outside of the system.
03:07:39.000 I haven't kept up.
03:07:41.000 I'm not particularly mathematically minded.
03:07:45.000 I mean, in fact, I'm sort of a B math student from high school, so I'm the only person I know with my profile with a PhD in math.
03:07:54.000 And on the non-lunatic side, I mean, look, you've been listening to my crazy ideas for a while, and they're all over the world.
03:08:02.000 I have lots of heterodox ideas.
03:08:04.000 I don't think that they're taken as being insane.
03:08:06.000 And I don't think this is insane.
03:08:08.000 It's been looked at by enough people to say, until you actually write it down very cleanly, and clearly we can't fully evaluate it.
03:08:15.000 But it's a gamble.
03:08:17.000 And the worst thing that can happen Is that I have something that looks like a final theory that turns out not to be.
03:08:25.000 Are you going to write it out?
03:08:26.000 It's already mostly written up.
03:08:30.000 I'm in a different phase.
03:08:31.000 I felt that I got rolled in an alley.
03:08:34.000 So here's the big reveal.
03:08:38.000 It's going to be a lot harder to roll me.
03:08:40.000 I can roll myself.
03:08:42.000 I can screw this thing up just fine by myself.
03:08:45.000 But 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.
03:08:53.000 It's not going to happen.
03:08:57.000 Dear Guardian, you've been played.
03:08:59.000 I love when they use contemporary slang. 0.92
03:09:03.000 It's so bitchy. 1.00
03:09:04.000 It's so bitchy. 1.00
03:09:05.000 It's so bitchy. 1.00
03:09:06.000 Are you allowed to say bitchy when it's a girl? 1.00
03:09:08.000 What?
03:09:09.000 When a girl writes it? 0.99
03:09:12.000 I don't care, I think.
03:09:14.000 I mean, look, it's only like the future of...
03:09:17.000 A number of people have been privately asking me about the recent Guardian article and accompanying an op-ed by Oxford mathematician Marcos de Sotoy.
03:09:24.000 How do you say it?
03:09:25.000 Sotoy?
03:09:25.000 Marcos de Sotoy.
03:09:26.000 De Sotoy.
03:09:27.000 Gushing over supposedly revolutionary new unified theory of physics by a man who officially left academia 20 years ago.
03:09:35.000 Or...
03:09:36.000 As I've taken to calling it the Eric Weinstein's amazing new theory that solves everything puzzling conundrum in theoretical physics, only he hasn't written an actual...
03:09:47.000 All these are capital letters, that's why I'm saying it this way.
03:09:49.000 Capital letters.
03:09:50.000 An actual paper yet, so physicists can't check all those hard mathematical details, but trust us, it's gonna be awesome.
03:09:58.000 Wow, that's super bitchy. 1.00
03:10:00.000 Ahem. 0.84
03:10:00.000 Are you allowed to say that? 0.84
03:10:01.000 Yeah, I can say it. 0.99
03:10:02.000 I can say whatever the fuck I want. 0.99
03:10:04.000 Ahem with a period. 0.98
03:10:06.000 First, a couple of caveats.
03:10:08.000 I've met Weinstein.
03:10:09.000 He's a nice guy.
03:10:11.000 He's wicked smart. 1.00
03:10:12.000 This is a stupid article. 1.00
03:10:15.000 Because you know better. 1.00
03:10:16.000 Well, it's just the way it's written.
03:10:18.000 It's just, it's...
03:10:19.000 It's catty.
03:10:20.000 Yeah.
03:10:21.000 It's for clear.
03:10:22.000 Yeah.
03:10:22.000 Clearly.
03:10:23.000 Yeah.
03:10:24.000 Okay.
03:10:25.000 Well, we could go deep into this.
03:10:27.000 But she's playing enforcer. 1.00
03:10:29.000 Yes.
03:10:29.000 You broke the rules.
03:10:30.000 Yes.
03:10:30.000 We know why you broke the rules.
03:10:32.000 There's fame and fortune for you in this.
03:10:33.000 You think that's what it is?
03:10:34.000 Yeah.
03:10:34.000 Well, or you're delusional.
03:10:36.000 Right.
03:10:36.000 Well, what's her motivation for writing this article, though?
03:10:38.000 That's what's weird.
03:10:39.000 Well, 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.
03:10:49.000 In 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?
03:11:04.000 Yep.
03:11:04.000 And that she was like, well, this is all nonsense.
03:11:07.000 Okay, I'm going to put a stop to this nonsense.
03:11:09.000 And I'm going to do it with sort of contemporary language and slang.
03:11:13.000 I don't like the bitchiness, but I understand the motivation.
03:11:18.000 Look, I think the bitchiness is to make the article more entertaining and more absorbable. 0.91
03:11:25.000 It was part of her style as a writer.
03:11:27.000 Okay.
03:11:28.000 Now, I actually met her, as she says, And I had a very high and positive impression of her.
03:11:34.000 So why do you think she wrote this without discussing it?
03:11:37.000 You know, look, Sean is also one of these people who's trying to enforce the rules.
03:11:41.000 He didn't have the easiest time.
03:11:42.000 I think he didn't get tenure at Caltech.
03:11:45.000 He's kind of a stickler for reality.
03:11:47.000 He's on the one hand talking total nonsense about Boltzmann brains and thought experiments, which is what I associate with desperation physics.
03:11:55.000 On the other hand, he's kind of this rigorous...
03:11:59.000 Rationalist thinker who's a prominent atheist.
03:12:02.000 So he's a complicated guy.
03:12:04.000 He's a great explainer.
03:12:06.000 He's got his own sort of economic incentives that he's one of the very few people who's sort of a voice of physics to the world.
03:12:14.000 And they operate in some sense as a couple.
03:12:17.000 And there's a richness to this.
03:12:21.000 My point isn't to run them down or to boost them up.
03:12:26.000 It's just...
03:12:27.000 People are playing out their roles.
03:12:29.000 Whenever anyone has a sentence that consists of one word and that word is ahem, Yeah, I did not enjoy that article.
03:12:38.000 But look, yeah, but she's trying to throw me a bone. 1.00
03:12:42.000 He's wicked smart.
03:12:43.000 He's a nice guy.
03:12:44.000 But he's delusional. 0.53
03:12:46.000 He's delusional.
03:12:47.000 And to the extent that I've been delusional before.
03:12:51.000 I'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?
03:12:57.000 That's a complicated story.
03:12:59.000 Before the financial crisis, I was saying mortgage-backed securities may blow up the world.
03:13:03.000 People are like, are you kidding?
03:13:04.000 It's the great moderation.
03:13:05.000 We've banished volatility.
03:13:09.000 People have a chance to know me now.
03:13:11.000 They know that I can get way out there.
03:13:13.000 I said this at the beginning.
03:13:14.000 I get way out there.
03:13:16.000 Okay.
03:13:17.000 I think Elon Musk is totally wrong about going to Mars.
03:13:21.000 Mars is not going to save us.
03:13:22.000 And maybe going to the stars isn't going to save us.
03:13:25.000 Maybe the AI will follow us there, yada, yada, yada.
03:13:27.000 But I'm not going to take this lying down.
03:13:29.000 We're in a desperate situation.
03:13:31.000 And if you're not trying, here's the clear thing.
03:13:36.000 We know what nuclear weapons look like in the fusion era.
03:13:40.000 If 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.
03:14:00.000 I think I'm doing a damn sight better than trying, but assume that I fail completely.
03:14:06.000 How crazy is it that we're not trying to take arms against our new sea of troubles?
03:14:14.000 It's time to rush the cockpit.
03:14:17.000 We've got to get Trump out of office.
03:14:19.000 We've got to restore sanity to our sense-making.
03:14:22.000 We need newspapers.
03:14:23.000 We need fact-checkers.
03:14:25.000 What is particularly problematic about Trump being in office?
03:14:29.000 That man has nuclear capabilities and I have zero confidence in his decision making.
03:14:34.000 And people imagine that I'm a Trump supporter after I've called him an existential risk.
03:14:39.000 And my boss and good friend Peter Thiel was a supporter of Trump in the last election.
03:14:45.000 I'm taking a huge risk in how much I love this guy Peter Thiel and how much he loves me.
03:14:52.000 Because I'm putting the employer-employee relationship at risk.
03:14:56.000 And people say, okay, you're just a Peter Thiel tool.
03:14:58.000 Well, nobody's going to take that kind of risk unless they have real faith in their friend.
03:15:03.000 And I work for a friend.
03:15:05.000 I mean a real friend.
03:15:06.000 A person who doesn't cut and run when trouble starts.
03:15:10.000 And I totally disagree with Peter.
03:15:13.000 I 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.
03:15:24.000 They tripled and quadrupled down, and that is alarming.
03:15:27.000 And so that's something I very much got wrong about Trump, is that even Trump wasn't enough of a message.
03:15:33.000 To let people know.
03:15:34.000 But Trump cannot have the nuclear codes because he's not a skilled and regular enough player.
03:15:41.000 He's going to accomplish a lot.
03:15:43.000 One of the things I said before the election is he might be the best and worst of presidents. 0.96
03:15:47.000 He might get us a North Korea deal because they're going to look at him and say, this guy is nuts. 0.62
03:15:52.000 Who knows what he would do?
03:15:55.000 But we, the technical community, created this problem.
03:16:00.000 And we're abdicating our responsibility by worrying about our egos, by worrying about our reputations.
03:16:06.000 I am abdicating.
03:16:08.000 I should have turned this theory over to the theoretical physics community years ago, even if they screwed me over.
03:16:12.000 And I'm too petty and egotistical to want to give up on it.
03:16:16.000 I watch them take credit for things that weren't, you know, an assigned credit.
03:16:20.000 I don't like the way they work.
03:16:23.000 The theoretical physics community is our most important community in the world, and it is also a very unpleasant community.
03:16:30.000 And we need to fund them, and we need to let them play.
03:16:34.000 They're dangerous boys, for the most part.
03:16:36.000 They are women, but in general, they're very unpleasant men. 1.00
03:16:41.000 They've been somewhat cowed.
03:16:43.000 They're not the same cowboys they used to be because they've been failing for 40 years.
03:16:47.000 I should be sharing stuff.
03:16:49.000 I should be writing things down.
03:16:50.000 I have not had the courage to do it.
03:16:52.000 And if I really have the courage of my convictions, I should share this and see what happens.
03:16:58.000 But one thing is I don't know if it could be weaponized.
03:17:00.000 Assume it's right.
03:17:01.000 I have this decision tree.
03:17:03.000 Assume it's wrong.
03:17:04.000 I've got egg on my face.
03:17:05.000 It's okay.
03:17:06.000 I'll be okay.
03:17:07.000 I worry much more about if it's right.
03:17:10.000 The 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.
03:17:18.000 Maybe we actually are stuck in this place.
03:17:20.000 We never get to go to the stars.
03:17:21.000 We can look at exoplanets and dream, but we're stuck here.
03:17:24.000 Until we change human behavior, isn't a trip to the stars just a relocation of our own problems?
03:17:30.000 Yeah, we're kicking the...
03:17:32.000 But we need time, man.
03:17:34.000 We need time.
03:17:35.000 We have not gotten to the point where we don't even feel...
03:17:40.000 The danger we're in.
03:17:41.000 We 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.
03:17:53.000 You 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. 0.94
03:18:07.000 Europe is historically a dangerous place. 0.98
03:18:09.000 It's been a place for years where college students can go and take in the sights.
03:18:13.000 But it's a dangerous ethnic cauldron. 1.00
03:18:16.000 And Jews know this better than anyone. 0.99
03:18:18.000 And the one thing that the far left and the far right agree on is Jews, and it's not in a good way.
03:18:27.000 So it is very important.
03:18:28.000 We are the canaries in the coal mine.
03:18:30.000 We feel the stuff early.
03:18:32.000 And things are coming apart.
03:18:34.000 The physical world, the world of commerce, the world of structural engineering and building permits is still okay so far.
03:18:42.000 But the intellectual world that sort of wraps that and keeps it in check is coming unglued.
03:18:48.000 And quite frankly, I don't want to go through that again.
03:18:52.000 We cannot afford another World War II because World War II won't look like World War II. World War III. Yeah, and I don't know. 0.69
03:19:00.000 Maybe it'll look like information warfare.
03:19:01.000 Maybe it won't look like anything like a war that we've seen before.
03:19:05.000 But, you know, the problem is, Joe, is that I've got some sort of wildly tattooed martial artist across from me.
03:19:12.000 I'm some sort of guy who dropped out of academics years ago and doesn't have a published paper in this area.
03:19:18.000 And I really literally think...
03:19:21.000 Maybe it comes down to you and me.
03:19:23.000 Maybe 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.
03:19:35.000 Well, what's interesting about that is what you've said is reaching an astonishing number of ears and eyes.
03:19:44.000 This is why I pushed out.
03:19:45.000 Look, I've been responsible about this up until now.
03:19:47.000 This is my first really irresponsible podcast.
03:19:50.000 Why is it irresponsible?
03:19:52.000 No, I don't know.
03:19:52.000 Maybe it's egotistical.
03:19:53.000 Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this.
03:19:55.000 I guarantee you there are going to be a lot of people in physics departments who are going to be pissed off when this hits.
03:19:59.000 Yeah, but it's your thoughts.
03:20:01.000 There's nothing irresponsible about your thoughts.
03:20:03.000 Well, you have to appreciate that when you're working as hard as these guys have, and these guys have been slogging in the salt mines for forever with no progress of the type I mean since the early 70s, it's pretty galling.
03:20:18.000 It'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.
03:20:33.000 And I've never spoken about this.
03:20:35.000 I have a recording, for example, of the lecture that I did at Oxford.
03:20:41.000 Which I chose not to release.
03:20:42.000 It was so unpleasant.
03:20:46.000 The cattiness, the bitchiness, the nastiness, the undercutting. 0.93
03:20:50.000 The idea that this came down to ego or fame.
03:20:53.000 I guarantee you the thing that I really like least about what I'm about to do with this podcast is fame.
03:21:00.000 I think fame is a bad deal.
03:21:03.000 You have to deal with this.
03:21:04.000 You don't want to say what your location is, where you're going to be.
03:21:09.000 All day long, people say, can you get me into Joe Rogan?
03:21:11.000 Can you connect me with Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan?
03:21:14.000 It's constant.
03:21:15.000 I get two to three requests a week.
03:21:18.000 I don't want it.
03:21:20.000 I've had a wonderful 53 years without being very well-known.
03:21:24.000 And if this doesn't work out, I'll go back to being not very well-known.
03:21:29.000 My greater fear is that maybe it will work.
03:21:33.000 And then the thing that I really care about is, does it help?
03:21:38.000 Does it buy us time?
03:21:40.000 Can we get off the planet?
03:21:41.000 Is there anything we can do if we actually know the source code?
03:21:44.000 John Brockman runs this thing called edge.org.
03:21:47.000 And every year he asked a question to like 200 scientists.
03:21:52.000 And finally, he got tired of asking the annual question.
03:21:56.000 So he said, okay, 20 years is enough.
03:21:58.000 The last question is, what is the final question?
03:22:01.000 And Jamie, could I ask you to bring up edge.org and my name and my answer on, must have been 2018?
03:22:20.000 And it's interesting because I kept putting stuff out in edge.
03:22:25.000 Like, for example, I was very worried about professional wrestling presaging an election.
03:22:31.000 So I did an article on kayfabe, which is the system of lies that undergirds wrestling.
03:22:37.000 And I did one on Bitcoin called Go Virtual, Young Man.
03:22:41.000 So nobody ever paid attention to my series of answers to the edge question.
03:22:44.000 So this is...
03:22:45.000 The last question.
03:22:46.000 The last question.
03:22:46.000 Did something unprecedented happen when we finally learn our own source code?
03:22:50.000 Nobody cared.
03:22:52.000 This is the question that obsesses me.
03:22:55.000 This is when I say I've left this planet.
03:22:57.000 This is what I'm focused on.
03:23:00.000 What happens if we actually figure out where we are, where this place is?
03:23:04.000 What are we doing?
03:23:05.000 Who are we?
03:23:08.000 What built this?
03:23:10.000 And who acts on that information once we do figure it out?
03:23:13.000 What steps are taken?
03:23:15.000 I don't know.
03:23:15.000 Whether or not the consequences of those steps are ever really fully thought out.
03:23:19.000 I always tried to talk to somebody like government or the intelligence services.
03:23:25.000 I don't know whether I have something.
03:23:26.000 Maybe I do, maybe I don't.
03:23:27.000 But wouldn't you guys want to know ahead of schedule?
03:23:30.000 I never was able to get anybody interested.
03:23:33.000 I went through graduate school on the Office of Naval Research's top grant for graduate study.
03:23:40.000 And I always thought they would check in with me, but they never have.
03:23:44.000 So, like, the federal government paid for my postdoc, and the military paid for my graduate education, and Harvard doesn't care, and they don't – nobody cares.
03:23:53.000 Nobody believes that anything is possible, which is the really interesting part.
03:23:56.000 What do you mean by that, nobody believes that anything is possible?
03:23:58.000 You mean really astronomical breakthroughs?
03:24:01.000 Yeah.
03:24:01.000 Like, we all know – we're waiting to see what Tim Cook is going to do for the next iPhone.
03:24:08.000 Will Elon get to Mars?
03:24:10.000 Does anyone actually care about Mars?
03:24:12.000 I was there for the moon landings.
03:24:16.000 And let me tell you, we were bored of the moon by the time we left.
03:24:21.000 It's a very weird thing to say, but that's something.
03:24:23.000 I was born in 1965. We were bored.
03:24:25.000 Well, my perception of the whole Mars thing is that it's the shittiest location that we can get to.
03:24:29.000 Yeah.
03:24:30.000 It's a bad neighborhood.
03:24:31.000 It's the best location that we can get to that isn't this one. 0.98
03:24:34.000 Well, yeah, but it's also like we have spots on Earth that suck. 0.96
03:24:38.000 Yeah. 0.92
03:24:39.000 We don't even go there.
03:24:40.000 We don't even go there.
03:24:41.000 But, like, at least, you know, hats off to Elon.
03:24:45.000 Yeah.
03:24:46.000 That he at least inspires people by – he followed up the scent when we gave up on progress.
03:24:54.000 So my point is, we're not – nobody thinks this is going to work.
03:24:58.000 I can say it on the show.
03:25:00.000 It can generate a little bit of flurry of activity.
03:25:02.000 It'll die down within a week.
03:25:03.000 We're going to go back to, you know, who got milkshaked.
03:25:07.000 Right.
03:25:08.000 And we're going to want to know, is Tulsi gaining on Andrew?
03:25:11.000 Right.
03:25:11.000 What about Biden?
03:25:13.000 Can the center hold?
03:25:14.000 Will the fringe come in?
03:25:15.000 We're just constantly distracted and at least this is going to be entertaining.
03:25:22.000 We are at three and a half hours.
03:25:28.000 See, last time we almost got to four hours.
03:25:32.000 I'm happy to end it.
03:25:33.000 If people will go to The Portal with Eric Weinstein on Apple, Spotify, and popular clients for podcasts.
03:25:45.000 I'm sure they will.
03:25:47.000 This is gonna be an interesting one.
03:25:49.000 I'm really curious to see what kind of blowback this one's gonna have.
03:25:53.000 Well, two things, Joe.
03:25:55.000 One, you, along with Sam and my brother, really encouraged me to do this.
03:26:07.000 So I'm holding you personally responsible for whatever goes wrong.
03:26:11.000 The second thing is, I really just, I have such a positive feeling about what you've done in terms of empowering people.
03:26:21.000 Like, 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.
03:26:30.000 And I just want to say that there is like an aspect, we keep talking about, is there any use for men whatsoever?
03:26:36.000 And 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.
03:26:46.000 And my interpretation was that there was a period of time where nobody could figure out how to tell a joke on a college campus.
03:26:52.000 And our best comedians have figured out how to be compassionate enough and kind enough.
03:26:58.000 I think?
03:27:02.000 I think?
03:27:16.000 I watched that.
03:27:17.000 It was always funny, but it got better and better and better. 0.59
03:27:20.000 And 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.
03:27:38.000 Together with analytic thought.
03:27:40.000 And it's a bit of a template.
03:27:41.000 I don't know that I have the skill to pull this off.
03:27:43.000 But you've been an inspiration.
03:27:45.000 I just want to say thank you for having me back on the program.
03:27:47.000 My pleasure, my friend.
03:27:48.000 It's always a pleasure.
03:27:49.000 Thank you.
03:27:50.000 Thank you.
03:27:51.000 Bye, everybody. 0.99
03:27:56.000 That was fucked up! 1.00