The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1453 - Eric Weinstein

00:00:01.000 What's up, brother?

00:00:01.000 How are you?

00:00:02.000 Hey, Joe, how are you?

00:00:03.000 Good?

00:00:03.000 You hanging in there?

00:00:03.000 I have not been off of my property more or less in two weeks, so it's crazy to see another human being.

00:00:10.000 Yeah, I don't think this is healthy for us.

00:00:11.000 I know. 1.00

00:00:12.000 This lockdown shit. 1.00

00:00:13.000 Everybody's so weirded out. 1.00

00:00:15.000 You want to run into people walking dogs like they don't want the dogs to get close to each other.

00:00:19.000 Like, hi.

00:00:19.000 Everyone's across the street.

00:00:21.000 Hi.

00:00:21.000 And I'm a hugger, right?

00:00:23.000 Me too.

00:00:23.000 And we're in California, so I'm a hugger in California and all of my instincts are wrong.

00:00:27.000 Everything's all messed up.

00:00:28.000 Everyone's confused.

00:00:29.000 Here's the big question.

00:00:30.000 How long does it take before we normalize and go back?

00:00:34.000 Like, let's say the end of July.

00:00:37.000 Everyone announces, we got this thing locked down.

00:00:41.000 We have a viable treatment.

00:00:42.000 It's no different than the flu.

00:00:45.000 It gets you this chloroquine with the Z-Pak or whatever the current treatment is.

00:00:51.000 Yeah.

00:00:52.000 When do people start hugging again?

00:00:53.000 What do you mean?

00:00:54.000 It's going to be crazy.

00:00:55.000 I mean, I think that the idea is we're all so starved for touch that, like, we're going to have a jubilee like you've never seen.

00:01:02.000 People are going to greet each other with tongues who are almost like just acquaintances.

00:01:05.000 Well, I don't think that's a good idea. 0.99

00:01:06.000 There's still colds and cooties and all that other shit. 0.99

00:01:09.000 I know, but I think everybody's losing their shit. 1.00

00:01:12.000 They definitely are. 0.99

00:01:13.000 I've been talking to a lot of friends that are on the extremely cautious side, let's say that, and they're not going anywhere, and they're wearing gloves and masks when they step outside their house to go do something in the backyard, and they put the glove and mask down, and they spray it with Lysol when they come inside.

00:01:31.000 It's not healthy, and it is also healthy.

00:01:34.000 I mean, the idea that we have not been tested in so long, it's good to remember also that this stuff is live and real, and it has always been live and real.

00:01:45.000 And, you know, if it was possible to live without this stuff, that would be one thing.

00:01:49.000 But this 75-year nap that we've been in since 1945 is itself the greatest threat to all of us.

00:01:56.000 And our preparedness is just a wonderful indicator of Where you actually get to see this is the quality of your experts.

00:02:04.000 This is the quality of your leadership.

00:02:05.000 This is what they look like when put under stress.

00:02:08.000 That's true, right?

00:02:10.000 That is a good thing.

00:02:11.000 And I'm impressed with the medical community.

00:02:14.000 I'm impressed with the people that are recognizing that this is a huge problem.

00:02:19.000 Not so impressed with the administration of a lot of these hospitals that haven't prepared in terms of like masks and ventilators and a lot of these other things.

00:02:28.000 Not so impressed with politicians, but also it just seems like everyone, like you said, was in this nap state and hadn't really been tested and really globally tested.

00:02:40.000 No one had been tested since the pandemic of 1918 like this, right?

00:02:44.000 68, which I had, I had the Hong Kong flu, and 57 were sort of the best parallels to this. 0.79

00:02:52.000 You got the Hong Kong flu in 68?

00:02:54.000 I had the Hong Kong flu and was sick as a dog in San Francisco.

00:02:58.000 I was like three, two, I mean three, four.

00:03:02.000 I think it went from 68 to 70. Do you remember it?

00:03:06.000 Oh yeah.

00:03:06.000 I was in San Francisco.

00:03:08.000 My grandma had to come up from LA to care for me. 0.94

00:03:11.000 It was bad.

00:03:14.000 This is like one of my earliest memories.

00:03:15.000 Yeah.

00:03:16.000 And so 68 and 57, I think, are the best comparables to this before we go back to 1918. And almost nobody remembers these things.

00:03:28.000 Like, it's very weird.

00:03:29.000 Many people had never heard of the Hong Kong flu when I started talking about the fact that I died.

00:03:33.000 Yeah, I vaguely remembered it until you just said it.

00:03:35.000 And then I'm like, ooh.

00:03:36.000 I'm slightly older than you, right?

00:03:38.000 Yeah, I'm 52. I'm 54. I'm 54. Yeah.

00:03:40.000 I don't remember the Hong Kong flu, but I do.

00:03:43.000 You know what I mean?

00:03:44.000 Like, I don't remember it personally.

00:03:45.000 No.

00:03:46.000 But you, as a health geek, are up on these sorts of things.

00:03:51.000 And so you understand the ways in which, you know, for example, you can have a flu where the, I guess, the cytokine storm, you know, the threat from your immune system is, like, bigger than the virus itself.

00:04:02.000 There are all these various weird things that happen.

00:04:04.000 But I think that, let's call it the big nap.

00:04:07.000 The big nap is itself...

00:04:09.000 The greatest threat to us.

00:04:10.000 And this is bad, but it is also a shot across our bow.

00:04:15.000 And this is what was happening in my mind when I was on here talking about the twin nuclei problem of cell and atom.

00:04:22.000 We didn't stop history.

00:04:23.000 It's not like we're past atomic war.

00:04:25.000 We figured that out.

00:04:26.000 We just hit the pause button for a little while and we hit snooze.

00:04:29.000 Yeah, the fear is also that nefarious players will take this opportunity to erode civil rights, to erode civil liberties, and then China to gain power in the US market, to gobble up a lot of stocks while everything is down, 0.54

00:04:46.000 and try to increase their stake in our economy, and try to push, you know...

00:04:52.000 China's got its hands lovingly around our throat because our elite have been moving into greater and greater states of China dependence, right? 0.87

00:05:01.000 And so I think this is what the BDSM community refers to as breath play, and I don't like it.

00:05:07.000 Breath play is like you kind of like half choke somebody?

00:05:10.000 Yeah.

00:05:11.000 How do you know that?

00:05:12.000 What?

00:05:12.000 I don't like the fact that you know that.

00:05:14.000 I went to MIT, and MIT is wildly into BDSM. Somebody asked, why are geeks and Aspies into BDSM? Somebody said, lots of rules.

00:05:25.000 What's an Aspie? 0.97

00:05:27.000 Asperger's people, right. 0.92

00:05:28.000 Lots of rules?

00:05:29.000 They like that?

00:05:29.000 They love rules.

00:05:31.000 Because to do all this stuff safely, you would have to have a huge hierarchy of rules.

00:05:36.000 And my claim is that China... 0.71

00:05:39.000 Is they supply so much of our stuff.

00:05:43.000 We've moved all of our manufacturing base into these crazy supply chains.

00:05:48.000 And we are completely dependent on a strategic rival.

00:05:53.000 And China is very careful.

00:05:55.000 If you remember when they hosted the Olympics to have these amazingly impressive displays that are always friendly. 0.99

00:06:02.000 But what they're really saying is we have our shit together and you don't. 0.99

00:06:08.000 We're good to go. 0.98

00:06:24.000 Then you can have a situation where a director has to move things to China because that is in the best interest of the shareholders, even if it's absolutely not in the best interest of the United States.

00:06:35.000 This is what Ralph Gomery, who used to head the Sloan Foundation, once said in an address I was at at the National Academy of Sciences.

00:06:42.000 He just said, as a director, I am incentivized to do exactly the wrong thing for the United States of America.

00:06:48.000 So I'm going to put one hat on and tell you, as an American, we must not move all of this over to China.

00:06:55.000 And then I'm going to put my director's hat on and I'm going to vote to move everything over to China because I have no choice. 0.93

00:07:01.000 And so, you know, in essence, the smart, good people, all 11 of them, were always fighting this thing about you cannot become China-dependent.

00:07:12.000 And during the big nap, I think we're good to go.

00:07:28.000 And that is really the problem is that there wasn't any ability to say we are way too dependent on a strategic rival.

00:07:36.000 You saw this at the beginning of the pandemic.

00:07:38.000 Everyone was afraid of what?

00:07:39.000 I don't want to appear xenophobic.

00:07:42.000 I don't want to appear like Chicken Little.

00:07:43.000 And so all of our friends, the nutcases, the marginal weirdos, the supposed grifters and gadflies are the people who most got this one right and early.

00:07:54.000 And all the respectable people, like Nancy Pelosi telling people, please go to Chinatown to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

00:08:00.000 Bill de Blasio of New York saying, despite coronavirus, get out there.

00:08:04.000 Lead your lives.

00:08:06.000 Don't let this thing hold you back.

00:08:08.000 These people need to resign.

00:08:11.000 Nancy Pelosi should resign.

00:08:13.000 It's one thing to say we don't have enough information about this.

00:08:16.000 It's another thing to say take the information that's coming in, disregard it, and get back in there and keep fueling the economy.

00:08:24.000 This is exactly our leadership class, their problem.

00:08:27.000 They think about this in short-term economics.

00:08:30.000 The long-term implications of us all sheltering in place, nobody can compute the consequences of this.

00:08:36.000 Not one person in the world knows what happens when you run this experiment.

00:08:40.000 Yeah, it's a new thing, right?

00:08:41.000 The Made in America argument was always like sort of frivolous, almost xenophobic.

00:08:47.000 Like, why do you want things made in America?

00:08:49.000 What do you care?

00:08:49.000 Do you not like people from other countries?

00:08:51.000 Do you not want to buy things from other countries?

00:08:53.000 It was like this Made in America thing was like...

00:08:56.000 People disregarded it in a lot of ways.

00:08:58.000 But when you realize that all of our medical supplies, like so much of our electronics, so much of all the stuff that you need to kind of keep things exactly the way they are, it's cheaper to make it over there.

00:09:12.000 Because they will, like what we saw with Foxconn, where they put nets around the building to keep people from jumping off.

00:09:19.000 The weirdest thing was people trying to argue that the suicide rate at Foxconn was essentially the same as the suicide rate in the general population.

00:09:31.000 Well...

00:09:31.000 Have you ever heard that argument?

00:09:33.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:09:33.000 Like, what the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

00:09:35.000 That's where they work. 1.00

00:09:36.000 There's nets around where they work because so many people where they work jump off the building to end their life because their life sucks that bad. 0.95

00:09:43.000 That they kill themselves at work.

00:09:45.000 Do you know how rare it is to kill yourself at work? 0.99

00:09:47.000 Probably pretty fucking rare. 0.96

00:09:48.000 You know how common it is where you have to put nets around the building? 0.99

00:09:52.000 You're like, look, we're getting really tired of people going to the roof and jumping off because it's the easiest way to kill yourself.

00:09:57.000 They're going to get more creative.

00:09:59.000 Yeah.

00:10:00.000 The problem is we are all hooked up to this need for cheap products, profits, when we can't figure out how to innovate enough to actually create the juice in our own system.

00:10:11.000 And therefore, we have to rationally.

00:10:13.000 You were going to say?

00:10:13.000 I was just going to say, I mean, also, we've gotten into this idea of every year we have to have a newer, better piece of electronics.

00:10:19.000 Like, if you had to go the rest of your life with an iPhone 11, how much would you suffer?

00:10:25.000 Not that much, although I would say that many of us are not that excited about the next phone.

00:10:31.000 That itself is an antiquated thing.

00:10:33.000 Right, but what I'm saying is, like, why can't they make it so that you can just fix this?

00:10:38.000 Yeah.

00:10:39.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

00:10:39.000 Like, who the fuck fixes their phone? 0.99

00:10:42.000 You don't fix your phone. 0.99

00:10:43.000 You bring it in, and they're like, oh, you can get a new one.

00:10:45.000 Oh, you're going back to, like, depression-era thinking.

00:10:46.000 Well, not depression-era thinking.

00:10:48.000 It's like, why can't things be sustainable?

00:10:51.000 Right.

00:10:51.000 No, no.

00:10:52.000 The plan's obsolescence and the need to constantly update so that you never – it's a tricky problem.

00:11:00.000 If you need growth to power your system, then in a weird way – Right.

00:11:09.000 Right.

00:11:10.000 Right.

00:11:26.000 Now you're stuck with either having to learn to live in steady state, which none of us – Americans have no program for living in steady state.

00:11:33.000 We need growth.

00:11:34.000 That was the whole point of the embedded growth obligation idea, that it's suffused throughout every institution.

00:11:39.000 Every pension plan assumes growth, right?

00:11:41.000 Right.

00:11:43.000 All right, so now we have this problem where we don't have the growth and we need the growth.

00:11:48.000 And then in a weird way, the planned obsolescence is like fake growth.

00:11:52.000 It means that we're going to rebuy our phones as if they were now highly innovative.

00:11:58.000 So there's like a weird way in which we become dependent on nonsense.

00:12:03.000 Yeah, dependent on nonsense is a great way to put it.

00:12:07.000 This is really highlighting that for a lot of people.

00:12:09.000 When people are home and they're with their families and they're not traveling, especially people like me and my peers, like a lot of my comedian friends who travel constantly, we're like, it's kind of nice to be home.

00:12:21.000 You know, everyone's sort of re-looking at this.

00:12:23.000 Is this life that we've sort of accepted as this is the way things are?

00:12:29.000 Is this really the way things should be?

00:12:32.000 Or is this just we just got caught in a pattern and we're operating on momentum?

00:12:36.000 If our comedian force becomes non-dysfunctional, we are screwed.

00:12:42.000 Well, that's not going to happen.

00:12:44.000 That would require so many psychedelic trips.

00:12:47.000 There's almost no group that is as far away from normal as comedians.

00:12:52.000 I know.

00:12:53.000 That's why I get along with them so well.

00:12:55.000 It's so hard for me to hang out with regular folk.

00:12:58.000 You know, that would be rough.

00:12:59.000 Like, if I had to live in a community of regular people that just work every day.

00:13:03.000 What if you had, like, a community of only comedians?

00:13:05.000 What would that look like?

00:13:06.000 Oh, that'd be fun.

00:13:07.000 Really?

00:13:08.000 Yeah, yeah, we'd be fun.

00:13:09.000 We have that.

00:13:10.000 That's the comedy store.

00:13:11.000 Oh, the comedy store.

00:13:11.000 Yeah.

00:13:11.000 If the comedy store was just locked down on, like, a 500-acre piece of property and there's a bunch of houses on there, we would just entertain each other.

00:13:18.000 We would just entertain each other.

00:13:20.000 Well, half the fun of comedians is just us hanging out.

00:13:51.000 We would just get together and laugh.

00:13:53.000 To the Comedy Store's Oxford of Comedy.

00:13:56.000 Yeah.

00:13:57.000 Yeah, you've been to the back bar.

00:14:00.000 That's the best!

00:14:02.000 That's the spot.

00:14:03.000 You got me hammered two times ago and I was just – I stumbled out of that thinking that was the best time and I couldn't remember anything.

00:14:11.000 Well, you know what's great, too?

00:14:13.000 Even when non-comedians like yourself and Melissa and Matt and some of their friends and all these other people come there and they're around these people, they act freer.

00:14:25.000 They're laughing louder.

00:14:26.000 They're making more off-color jokes and everyone's just laughing, having fun.

00:14:32.000 Melissa's the worst.

00:14:33.000 You have to be very careful.

00:14:35.000 Oh, she's hilarious. 1.00

00:14:36.000 She's very funny.

00:14:37.000 Melissa Chen, by the way.

00:14:38.000 Shout out.

00:14:39.000 Shout out to Melissa. 0.95

00:14:40.000 By the way, what great stuff she's doing on masks.

00:14:43.000 Yeah, explain that.

00:14:46.000 Well, she just takes it on herself to ask the question, why don't our doctors and nurses have masks? 0.66

00:14:55.000 And so she's running around trying to figure out how to connect donors, flights, product. 0.99

00:15:02.000 Yeah.

00:15:04.000 Whatever she's doing, she's heroically taking a ton of this on her shoulders and not...

00:15:12.000 I'm hesitating because I don't even know what I'm allowed to say.

00:15:15.000 Right.

00:15:15.000 Yeah, we don't have to talk anymore.

00:15:17.000 You should.

00:15:17.000 She's a very interesting person.

00:15:19.000 I'm really glad you introduced me to her.

00:15:21.000 She's fascinating.

00:15:22.000 This is a great time to see what people are actually made out of.

00:15:28.000 Yeah, who's heroic?

00:15:29.000 The heroic impulse.

00:15:30.000 Sure. 0.99

00:15:30.000 And who can keep their shit together when things go sideways, when things get Western, as it were. 0.99

00:15:37.000 Well, let me ask you a question. 0.98

00:15:38.000 Of all of the presidential candidates that were in the race, like everybody's dropped out as well, which of them would you want in a COVID situation?

00:15:47.000 Tulsi.

00:15:48.000 Tulsi.

00:15:49.000 By the way, that was my answer as well.

00:15:51.000 Instantly.

00:15:52.000 I didn't want her foreign policy.

00:15:54.000 That's one of the reasons I wasn't like gung-ho on Tulsi.

00:15:57.000 I didn't like some of the stuff about...

00:16:00.000 In India, there's some issues about Modi and I don't want to get into that.

00:16:04.000 But if you ask like who would you want to like – who has that kind of locked down military?

00:16:11.000 We have to make sense. 0.99

00:16:12.000 The bullshit needs to leave the room. 1.00

00:16:14.000 The odd thing is it's a millennial female of color that I would immediately want to subordinate to. 1.00

00:16:22.000 Well, she's— Because she would also be no bullshit. 0.99

00:16:25.000 She had the strength to call out all of the nonsense. 0.99

00:16:29.000 I'm positive she would just say, this is unacceptable.

00:16:31.000 What are we doing?

00:16:32.000 This is emergency time.

00:16:33.000 We've got to suspend these issues.

00:16:35.000 We have to get these things to our doctors, nurses, emergency technicians.

00:16:39.000 I mean, look, I should say that I'm trying to be, like, smiley and positive, but I am just burning with rage.

00:16:47.000 I cannot believe— That things weren't set up correctly?

00:16:51.000 The scale of the screw-up and trying to even understand a government that I cannot trust as far as I can throw it.

00:16:58.000 To feel contempt for the Surgeon General of the United States.

00:17:04.000 To say that the World Health Organization is a danger to world health.

00:17:08.000 To say that the CDC is lying.

00:17:12.000 I hate being in a position where I believe these things.

00:17:16.000 Yeah.

00:17:17.000 What about Tulsi?

00:17:18.000 She's a person of real character.

00:17:21.000 You know, I don't see her like I see a lot of these people that are running for president.

00:17:25.000 I see them wearing masks. 0.79

00:17:28.000 You know, I mean, I don't even need to name names, but they're doing their best impression of a politician, like a shitty comedian will do their best impression of Dave Attell. 0.79

00:17:39.000 That's the best example that someone gave me of the comparison.

00:17:44.000 There's a style of communicating that a lot of them have adopted to try to appear.

00:17:50.000 And you can tell that they're coached.

00:17:51.000 They're trying to appear presidential.

00:17:54.000 That's who she is, man.

00:17:56.000 I've hung out with her off camera, on camera.

00:18:00.000 I've seen her, just the way she communicates with people. 0.92

00:18:03.000 I don't know her down to the bone, but what I see, I'm very impressed with.

00:18:08.000 And she's developed her character over two tours of duty overseas.

00:18:13.000 Again, who volunteers?

00:18:15.000 Who takes this stuff on?

00:18:16.000 This is the weird thing because really before COVID, I was in this Bernie Yang Tulsi mindset, which is just what is the furball that I can shove down the throat of the DNC to make the party fall apart under that Hillary Clinton overhang?

00:18:34.000 Mm-hmm.

00:18:35.000 The weird thing is, in an actual pandemic, I am almost positive that she has the stuff.

00:18:44.000 Yeah.

00:18:45.000 It may not be her year.

00:18:46.000 Right.

00:18:46.000 She's only 38. She's only 38. Yeah.

00:18:49.000 It might not be her year, but she'll get there. 0.98

00:18:51.000 But how interesting that when the shit hits the fan, the person with the highest number of intersectional points... 0.99

00:19:01.000 Maybe. 0.99

00:19:02.000 Is actually the person that you want to lead on merit.

00:19:05.000 Right, but they don't want her, which is even more hilarious.

00:19:08.000 They don't want her because she can't be bought and sold. 1.00

00:19:10.000 It's really simple.

00:19:12.000 I think that we need to revisit some stuff, which All of this anger and ferocity that we were using to stand up to social engineering invading the mainstream conversation,

00:19:29.000 I believe that COVID proves that it is deadly.

00:19:33.000 That if your top concern is not appearing xenophobic, people will die because you are functionally incompetent. 0.98

00:19:40.000 You've just lost 40 IQ points for nothing. 0.97

00:19:43.000 Well, that was the initial response to Trump's...

00:19:46.000 The idea of shutting down flights from China, people were furious and they were calling it racist. 1.00

00:19:52.000 Well, the idea that you can put a negative sign in front of Donald Trump and form an opinion that if he's stupid, then whatever the reverse of what he does is smart, is itself moronic. 1.00

00:20:02.000 It's dangerous. 1.00

00:20:03.000 It's completely irresponsible.

00:20:05.000 And here's the weird thing.

00:20:07.000 I said this to you on the phone the other day when we were talking.

00:20:09.000 The weird thing, Joe, is that we are the actual adults in the room.

00:20:14.000 Tulsi, you, me.

00:20:16.000 I don't know.

00:20:17.000 That's a huge problem if you're lumping me in with – Well, that's what I'm trying to say.

00:20:21.000 But this is the problem which – I think I get this actually better than you, which is you have a beautiful life and you recognize that part of it comes with humility of not thinking too much of yourself, being self-deprecating, all these things.

00:20:36.000 I think that those are all to your credit.

00:20:38.000 It is also time to lead.

00:20:39.000 And if you believe that you having to break out of whatever mindset you're in could be the difference between saving physicians' lives and nurses' lives, you'd do it.

00:20:49.000 You would do it.

00:20:51.000 For sure.

00:20:52.000 Okay, well, this thing is the flagship Of pirate radio.

00:20:57.000 I mean, this is Samizdat for the world. 0.86

00:21:00.000 And the concept of Samizdat, that you would have truth that would circulate underground in the Soviet Union, that would not be – like you are seldom rebroadcast inside of like MSNBC or CNN, except when they're like going after you.

00:21:15.000 Well, what's weird is Fox News rebroadcasts me all the time.

00:21:19.000 Well, because Fox – there are two sort of dominant narratives.

00:21:22.000 Fox News is the flagship inside the right of center gated institutional narrative and then you have all the other organs like MSNBC, CNN, NPR, BuzzFeed, whatever these things are in the left of center gated institutional narrative.

00:21:40.000 Very often Fox will pick up on things that we do if they stick it in the eye of the left.

00:21:46.000 Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

00:21:48.000 And so the point is that they selectively amplify us and that process of selective amplification is itself dangerous.

00:21:55.000 Like I get invited more frequently by Fox and people and I turn them down because the narrative inside of like the New York Times is, well, he's – It's part of that right-wing thing.

00:22:10.000 Frequent Fox News contributor, Eric Weinstein.

00:22:13.000 Oh, that's the adjective occupation name.

00:22:16.000 Yes.

00:22:16.000 Frequent adjective.

00:22:18.000 Fox News contributor, my occupation.

00:22:21.000 And then my name.

00:22:23.000 That game...

00:22:26.000 Like, if NPR would call and put me on, I would go on Fox.

00:22:31.000 But their very clever game is to make it sound like, oh, well, you're choosing to go.

00:22:36.000 No, you guys are choosing to ignore a lot of what's changing the culture.

00:22:40.000 And therefore, the only people who are willing to ask us on and rebroadcast us are the people who are angry at the NPR, CNN, MSNBCs.

00:22:50.000 Well, I think they realize the limitations of their medium.

00:22:53.000 I really do.

00:22:53.000 I think that CNBC and MSNBC and CBS and NBC and ABC, they all realize that they're in this really weird situation where they have to do these seven-minute segments interrupted by commercials.

00:23:07.000 They have a restriction.

00:23:09.000 They can only air at whatever time of night the show is supposed to be scheduled.

00:23:14.000 And they rely on these internet clips to sort of carry the show.

00:23:18.000 I mean, the YouTube clips are probably far more popular than anything they ever released that's on the air. 0.99

00:23:24.000 I mean, their distribution thing is fucked. 0.98

00:23:27.000 It's very bizarre. 0.99

00:23:29.000 And it was very interesting watching Bill Maher sit down here.

00:23:33.000 He's like...

00:23:34.000 I guess this is it.

00:23:35.000 The man cave.

00:23:37.000 You're like, yeah, good to see you, Bill.

00:23:39.000 He's like, I'm here to grovel and ask whether you'll come on my show.

00:23:42.000 No, he was trying to force me on his show.

00:23:44.000 I know.

00:23:45.000 Very little groveling.

00:23:46.000 He's not a growler.

00:23:47.000 No, but he's...

00:23:48.000 He's a strong armor.

00:23:49.000 Well, what he is is he's caught between two tectonic plates.

00:23:53.000 He is the closest thing we have inside of the beast, in some sense, to what we're doing, maybe.

00:23:59.000 Yeah, he's a comic.

00:24:01.000 He is a comic, but he's also...

00:24:04.000 You know, he's a guy with real courage.

00:24:07.000 Yes.

00:24:07.000 And he's in a very tough...

00:24:09.000 I think he's in, weirdly, the toughest spot of us all.

00:24:12.000 Well, he's a guy who's on the left also, who thinks that a lot of the stuff, as I do and as you do as well, a lot of the stuff that's perpetrated by the people on the left is not just dangerous, but it's...

00:24:25.000 It empowers the right.

00:24:27.000 It empowers Trump supporters.

00:24:29.000 It gets people on the fence to give up and jump right and get welcomed.

00:24:34.000 Yeah, I've stopped being nice to these people.

00:24:37.000 You can't be.

00:24:38.000 No, it's just...

00:24:39.000 Too much buffoonery.

00:24:40.000 And it's psychotically dangerous to watch people continue the buffoonery in life and death situations.

00:24:48.000 Yeah.

00:24:49.000 Yeah.

00:24:50.000 No, I agree.

00:24:51.000 And Bill's there on the right side.

00:24:53.000 Are you going to do a show?

00:24:54.000 Have you done a show?

00:24:54.000 I'll do it eventually, I'm sure.

00:24:55.000 Yeah.

00:24:56.000 The only options that he gave me, I already had gigs booked.

00:24:58.000 I see.

00:24:59.000 I think that it's really important to use...

00:25:03.000 I mean, I don't know him at all, but...

00:25:06.000 To the extent that that was a beachhead to connect these two universes, my model of this is that we've got this traditional legacy world and we've got this sort of internet world that hovers above it.

00:25:18.000 And in general, the insulating layer between them is astounding at this late date.

00:25:23.000 The number of things that happen on the internet that don't really have any echo inside of the mainstream is astounding in 2020. And then you get these arcs that happen between the two.

00:25:33.000 So, for example, the famous Sam Harris interaction with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher's show was an arcing between these two universes.

00:25:40.000 Well, it was also a guy on steroids that was roid raging at a guy who actually knows what he's talking about.

00:25:46.000 That's what was going on.

00:25:47.000 I mean, he was preparing for Batman.

00:25:48.000 We did the math on that.

00:25:50.000 That's why he was so angry.

00:25:51.000 But then Kathy Newman and Jordan Peterson was another arcing where Kathy was playing the role of Ben Affleck, Jordan Peterson.

00:25:57.000 Not really.

00:25:58.000 No.

00:25:59.000 What she was doing, she was trying to get away with this same strategy that she has lazily employed before.

00:26:06.000 This sort of general...

00:26:10.000 Boxing and categorizing of someone's opinions that don't really represent their actual opinions.

00:26:16.000 So what you're trying to say...

00:26:17.000 So what you're saying to me, Joe, is that I have absolutely no point in that I'm a worthless human being.

00:26:20.000 I should never visit your show.

00:26:21.000 Is that what you're saying, Joe?

00:26:22.000 What you're trying to say...

00:26:24.000 So what I am trying to say is that in a generalized sense, she was just doing that same old, same old thing with a person who is not participating.

00:26:34.000 I sort of liken the...

00:26:35.000 Go ahead.

00:26:35.000 It's also that these people that they would victimize by putting them into these narratives, right?

00:26:41.000 And they're accustomed to using these patterns.

00:26:44.000 These people traditionally did not have any other way to respond.

00:26:48.000 Right.

00:26:49.000 There was no internet clips that were released.

00:26:51.000 You could write a letter to the editor.

00:26:53.000 Well, yeah, right.

00:26:54.000 Or page 27. Right.

00:26:54.000 And maybe they would print a retraction and no one would pay attention to it.

00:26:58.000 I mean, this is standard behavior for some newspapers and some journalists, right?

00:27:04.000 The unscrupulous ones, unfortunately.

00:27:06.000 But this model doesn't work anymore because anyone can go on YouTube and instantly say, my time on the Kathy Newman show.

00:27:15.000 This is what went wrong.

00:27:16.000 This is why she did this.

00:27:17.000 And this is what they told me in the green room.

00:27:19.000 And this is what blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:27:20.000 And then you lay it out.

00:27:22.000 Sort of.

00:27:23.000 Now, here's – I mean let's play with it.

00:27:25.000 Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong.

00:27:26.000 I don't know.

00:27:27.000 My take on it is that the great thing about – we have an ability to do almost anything we want on YouTube so long as we don't get shut down.

00:27:39.000 Let's say that.

00:27:40.000 However, you also have this concern that as long as this world remains gated – If, for example, you have a closed world of people who are pretending to have conversations amongst themselves discussing the issues, and then you have the institution saying,

00:27:57.000 we're only going to deal with the authoritative sources.

00:28:00.000 Then the problem is that if you have a state of pretend LARPing or kayfabe, whatever you want to call it, that's taking place inside the gated institutional narrative, the institutions are going to predicate their actions on the official nonsense.

00:28:14.000 And whatever we do on YouTube, as long as there is an insulating layer, unless we can actually lob something over the walls of the citadel, They will continue to actually act as if we'd never said anything.

00:28:27.000 We never pointed it out.

00:28:28.000 It's like you're at this kid's magic show, which the magician is completely incompetent and the lights are on and you can see all the wires and trap doors and the magic show continues to go on. 0.99

00:28:38.000 And so you may make the point, well, everybody can see that it's bullshit. 0.99

00:28:42.000 But as long as the institutions agree to pretend that they believe the bullshit, we have a real problem. 0.98

00:28:48.000 And the internet didn't solve that. 0.98

00:28:50.000 The internet might not have solved it.

00:28:52.000 Sorry to interrupt you.

00:28:53.000 I think what it has done is severely erode the foundation of it to the point where the trust in it is just...

00:29:03.000 There's no real mainstream anymore.

00:29:05.000 Like this idea that the mainstream news is the mainstream.

00:29:09.000 Well, how is that real if YouTube videos get more views?

00:29:12.000 Like if you make a YouTube video and it gets 5 million views, but then something goes on MSNBC and it gets 500,000 views, what's mainstream?

00:29:22.000 What is mainstream now?

00:29:23.000 What we're talking about is instead of mainstream media, I think the term traditional media is the best way.

00:29:29.000 The same way the term I like legacy, but keep going.

00:29:32.000 Legacy's good.

00:29:33.000 Okay.

00:29:34.000 Well, look, for the longest time, people had to use Morse code, right? 0.96

00:29:38.000 And then they figured out phones, and those Morse code guys were fucked, right? 0.91

00:29:42.000 What did you do? 0.93

00:29:44.000 And then phones were attached to cords.

00:29:46.000 Yeah, but I'm saying that there's still a function.

00:29:48.000 No, there is.

00:29:49.000 There's still a phone.

00:29:50.000 But there's still a function, unfortunately, to the...

00:29:54.000 So I love the point that you're making.

00:29:56.000 I'm just trying to figure out how to play with it.

00:29:59.000 Let's assume that there is no mainstream left.

00:30:01.000 What we're really talking about is legacy institutional media.

00:30:05.000 And the great danger is that – assume that the mainstream completely exits the building and it's only 10,000 people trading bullshit amongst themselves but they also control all the institutions.

00:30:17.000 So like you, the world, gets to keep reality.

00:30:21.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:30:22.000 And we, the institutions, agree to traffic and bullshit.

00:30:25.000 You can make lots of jokes at our expense, but we're also going to be figuring out whether we're going to stock masks or what our farming policy is or how the U.S. military should be deployed and where we should send troops to protect oil fields and all these kind of things. 1.00

00:30:40.000 And that's what's concerning me, is that a lot of us are settling for being right and having them look like idiots. 0.98

00:30:46.000 And their point is, okay, fine, we'll continue on. 1.00

00:30:49.000 We'll look like idiots, but we also still control the levers. 0.97

00:30:52.000 So with legacy media, your assertion is that legacy media has a much more impactful presence in terms of foreign policy, in terms of dealing with the pandemic, the response, things along those lines? 0.98

00:31:08.000 Let's play with it and see where it goes.

00:31:09.000 Okay.

00:31:10.000 I think?

00:31:32.000 But is MSNBC, if someone just goes on the air and talks about something, is that an authoritative source?

00:31:40.000 Or wouldn't it be like an expert in health, like someone who's gone over peer-reviewed studies, someone who is well-educated?

00:31:49.000 Who's the Surgeon General right now?

00:31:50.000 I don't know.

00:31:50.000 Or CDC, is that Redfield?

00:31:53.000 I don't know.

00:31:53.000 I'm sure he's a competent physician.

00:31:54.000 I also think that there's a whole thing about pretending that masks don't work.

00:32:01.000 Masks don't work in the general population.

00:32:03.000 Please don't buy them.

00:32:04.000 Our healthcare people need them.

00:32:05.000 Is that what they're saying?

00:32:06.000 Well, that's what they've been saying, right?

00:32:08.000 And so the issue is that you have some piece of nonsense.

00:32:12.000 That is a piece of nonsense because California is now changing their recommendation and saying, if you're going out in public, you should wear a mask.

00:32:18.000 It's not just nonsense. 0.95

00:32:18.000 It's deadly nonsense. 0.95

00:32:20.000 It's deadly physician-killing nonsense. 0.98

00:32:24.000 I mean, I'm trying...

00:32:26.000 Smiles, everyone.

00:32:27.000 Yeah.

00:32:30.000 Yeah.

00:32:30.000 I mean, what we have is a situation in which we knew that the mask and personal protective equipment supplies are wildly off to say nothing of ventilators and ICU beds.

00:32:41.000 And now what do we do about it?

00:32:44.000 So we have rules like, please don't bring masks to work because it scares the patients, or please don't wear homemade masks because they might actually be more germ-filled or virus-filled.

00:33:00.000 So you're back-propagating masks.

00:33:03.000 What you wish to be true to get the action that you're looking for.

00:33:08.000 What we have is a prisoner's dilemma, where if everybody runs and buys up masks, the people we need to be protected most are the heroes who are actually dealing with multiple COVID patients and taking huge amounts of viral load.

00:33:21.000 So there's no question in my mind that those are the people that, as a society, if you would level with us.

00:33:27.000 There is a speech to give.

00:33:29.000 Which would go like this.

00:33:31.000 You know, my fellow Americans, as readiness are, I am forced to tender my resignation effective Friday this week.

00:33:39.000 I have failed to heed many of the warnings in our academic literature.

00:33:44.000 Because our reserves are severely depleted, it is imperative that we not suffer further loss of life, and therefore I am forced to make an unusual request.

00:33:54.000 Having failed you, I'm asking everyone who stockpiled masks for personal use to think about doing something sacrificial for the good of us all.

00:34:03.000 Our heroes are currently exposed to the coronavirus and taking huge amounts of viral load, and I'm asking you to donate any unused masks that you have to this population as we are desperately trying to replenish our stocks.

00:34:19.000 Please continue to shelter in place and recognize that the benefit to you is minor and the benefit to us all is major.

00:34:25.000 And this will be following your heroic impulse to bring us back together as a nation.

00:34:30.000 First of all, is there a readiness czar?

00:34:31.000 No.

00:34:32.000 Okay.

00:34:32.000 Second of all, no one's going to say that.

00:34:34.000 They're never going to admit – they're going to say we are adjusting our – we're adjusting our recommendations based on the new – No.

00:34:43.000 Joe, I'm going to be completely unreasonable.

00:34:45.000 I know I have this mode where I just – I become completely unreasonable.

00:34:48.000 Go ahead.

00:34:49.000 This is – if that's where we are, then it's time to revolt.

00:34:52.000 Revolt how?

00:34:53.000 I don't know.

00:34:54.000 Civil disobedience.

00:34:57.000 To put our healthcare people...

00:35:00.000 I have not been off my property for weeks.

00:35:03.000 The reason I'm here, in part, is to do what little I can, and very little, to support the people who are our literal heroes, our life and death, putting themselves in harm's way.

00:35:17.000 The idea of hospital administrators, Abusing our physicians and nurses makes me apoplectic with rage.

00:35:25.000 The fact that these people are told that they can't talk to the press and they write to me and their family and their children write to me.

00:35:30.000 My mother was asked to do this.

00:35:32.000 My uncle works in a prison.

00:35:34.000 He's not allowed to wear a mask.

00:35:35.000 He's not allowed to bring a mask.

00:35:37.000 I sent a mask, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:35:38.000 Yeah, there's a lot of those stories.

00:35:40.000 Okay.

00:35:40.000 What the hell is wrong?

00:35:42.000 It is time for these people to resign and it is time for us to remember that we have the ability to turn over our own government.

00:35:49.000 This is – we are so unprepared as a nation and we have been sold out for so long by our self-appointed leadership class who nobody wants.

00:36:02.000 That we either remember who we are and how this game is played.

00:36:06.000 I mean this is like – this is a pre-war footing and this can easily lead to war.

00:36:11.000 The transmission mechanism is you have everybody stay indoors.

00:36:27.000 Yeah, this is what you were saying on the phone.

00:36:30.000 You think that's really what's bothering them.

00:36:32.000 Yes.

00:36:33.000 But if we all have to stay home while they replenish our supplies, then the economy goes into recession.

00:36:38.000 Recession can become depression.

00:36:39.000 Depressions lead to armed conflict and armed conflict leads to war. 1.00

00:36:42.000 That would be a transmission mechanism from these stupid masks to something that nobody can handle. 1.00

00:36:51.000 Here's the thing. 1.00

00:36:52.000 We're coming up on Passover. 0.99

00:36:54.000 And we Jews have a tradition that I wish everybody had, which is that we read one stupid story every goddamn year, just to drill it into your head to make sure it's always fresh. 0.99

00:37:03.000 And this is, when it's time to leave, when it's time to change, don't wait for the bread to rise. 0.99

00:37:10.000 This is what I say to every Jewish person, like, you're sitting around waiting for the bread to rise, because they all know the story, which is, you eat the goddamn matzah, because the people who waited for the bread to rise are no longer with us, and their descendants are no longer with us. 0.98

00:37:24.000 And it is time to revolt. 0.99

00:37:27.000 This leadership class is unworkable.

00:37:29.000 The reason that you and I both came to the word Tulsi instantly – I don't think you took much deliberation – is because Tulsi would know what to do.

00:37:39.000 Well, she's also the least encumbered. 1.00

00:37:43.000 She's the least burdened by the ties to the system.

00:37:46.000 Everybody in the system hates her.

00:37:48.000 And the whole point is she would put heads on pikes. 1.00

00:37:51.000 This is the moment for heads on pikes. 0.86

00:37:55.000 And it's important.

00:37:56.000 It's not a vengeance thing.

00:37:58.000 The importance is, what is the cost to you killing people by failing to heed the academic literature?

00:38:05.000 If a supply was depleted and you didn't replenish it, what is the cost to you?

00:38:11.000 Well, there's lessons in how other countries have viewed this and how they chose to act, particularly South Korea, right?

00:38:18.000 South Korea acted quicker.

00:38:21.000 Smaller population than us, but a much smaller impact to the virus.

00:38:24.000 They shut things down very quickly.

00:38:26.000 Yeah.

00:38:27.000 Singapore?

00:38:28.000 I don't know how Singapore...

00:38:30.000 Very, very aggressive.

00:38:30.000 Same thing?

00:38:31.000 I think that they used surveillance and tracking and making sure that they visited anybody who was known.

00:38:37.000 I mean, they had a different system.

00:38:40.000 And as people like you and me who love our civil liberties, I believe that in part, Singapore's draconian society lives off of things that only we can do due to our freedom.

00:38:52.000 So you have to realize that freedom is itself an export.

00:38:55.000 And one of the great dangers is that China... 1.00

00:38:58.000 Has been exporting the benefits of freedom from the United States into an authoritarian system so that they get the benefits of both worlds.

00:39:06.000 They get the benefits of our middle finger, which I think is the secret of American innovation.

00:39:11.000 And they get the benefits of authoritarianism where they can do things that we can't because they can order people to do the unconscionable.

00:39:18.000 So my feeling is I'm on team civil liberties and team civil liberties has to be Somewhat nationalistic, more militaristic, more command and control.

00:39:31.000 Who would you take orders from?

00:39:33.000 So in a lot of fields, I'd take orders from you.

00:39:35.000 You're the big dog in this space.

00:39:37.000 And to the extent that you wanted to coordinate something, I would use my channel.

00:39:41.000 I would subordinate to you.

00:39:42.000 And I would want sometimes people to subordinate to me if I was taking a lead on something important.

00:39:47.000 When we have this fear of leadership, because we're all so individualistic that we never want to take an order, Whenever I'm training a new assistant or something, one of my always best practices is, can I get you coffee?

00:40:02.000 It's very important to show that the ability to serve somebody else and the ability to lead are tied.

00:40:11.000 You have to be a follower to be a leader and a leader to be a follower.

00:40:14.000 You shouldn't be one or the other.

00:40:17.000 We need right now a more...

00:40:21.000 We need more of a war footing.

00:40:23.000 We need a war president. 1.00

00:40:24.000 We need war senators. 1.00

00:40:27.000 We need people of this mentality because the nap is coming to an end.

00:40:30.000 And I do think Nancy Pelosi needs to resign and Bill de Blasio needs to resign.

00:40:36.000 I think that this administration made some good moves and fumbled the ball.

00:40:42.000 And I believe that past administrations made some good moves and fumbled the ball.

00:40:45.000 And the imperative is to stop backpropagating what you want us to do, like defeat a prisoner's dilemma.

00:40:55.000 And come up with a lie that would cause us to act selfishly, rationally.

00:41:00.000 Like if you tell me that a mask is actually more dangerous in my hands because it becomes germ-filled, then the idea is like, oh, okay, so I guess I won't use the mask.

00:41:09.000 Well, yeah, because you lied to me and the idea is that that's what you're trying to do.

00:41:13.000 You're trying to say, what would need to be true to get you to do what I want?

00:41:16.000 I don't understand what you're saying about these masks.

00:41:18.000 What are you saying?

00:41:19.000 So if I say, for example, let's imagine that I don't want to put seatbelts in cars.

00:41:24.000 Okay.

00:41:25.000 And I say, you know, Joe, a seatbelt could trap you.

00:41:28.000 Should your car go into the water off of a bridge, you could in fact die from the seatbelt because you'd become entangled and would not be able to save yourself.

00:41:35.000 Right.

00:41:35.000 But the problem with that analogy is seatbelts actually do save lives.

00:41:38.000 On balance.

00:41:39.000 But is it possible that they're just acting poorly with this mask thing, but that masks actually can contain a lot of viruses and they can hold on to viruses?

00:41:49.000 Seatbelts can kill you, but do you believe – that's what I'm trying to do.

00:41:52.000 I'm trying to say it as a related rate problem.

00:41:54.000 Let's talk about everybody who gets sick and dies from contaminated masks.

00:41:57.000 Everybody who gets sick and dies from a false feeling of safety.

00:42:01.000 Let's just go through a huge list of every bad thing.

00:42:04.000 I see the analogy.

00:42:05.000 And now the idea is think about all the lives saved because of masks, both in terms of transmission, which I don't cough on you, I cough into the mask, or in terms of I don't breathe in, either aerosolized or droplets, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

00:42:17.000 And now the two are real, but you're focusing on the seatbelt deaths of entanglement because you actually have a...

00:42:30.000 What do you think their covert agenda is?

00:42:32.000 Oh, I don't know exactly.

00:42:33.000 But if I had to speculate, I'd go like this.

00:42:36.000 One, we're terrified of triage deaths, deaths that occurred simply because we didn't have enough resources that were mandated to be stockpiled or talked about in the literature.

00:42:45.000 That's one thing.

00:42:46.000 Because there's liability.

00:42:47.000 Then there's liability, which is, oh, we were following the Surgeon General's recommendation at the time.

00:42:53.000 Now, if somebody suddenly found, you know, like all the masks in the world, I think that the Surgeon General would suddenly say the science has become conclusive.

00:43:03.000 Because there would no longer be a worry about liability.

00:43:06.000 You would just get those masks to the people.

00:43:08.000 You'd get the masks to the people who need them, and then you'd stop transmission.

00:43:11.000 You'd slow transitions, transmissions by...

00:43:14.000 Don't you think there's also a lot of just figuring it out as they go along?

00:43:17.000 No.

00:43:17.000 You don't think that's a lot of what's going on with that?

00:43:19.000 No?

00:43:19.000 There is figuring this out as it goes along.

00:43:21.000 As regards to the masks, I believe that everybody knows that masks save lives on balance.

00:43:27.000 They know that the people who need them most have very weird rules.

00:43:33.000 There's this whole thing about the states versus the federal government.

00:43:36.000 There's this issue about price gouging and price mechanisms.

00:43:40.000 There are all sorts of things stopping the mask problem from being sorted out, one of which is the number of masks that are produced in China and the fact that we may have sent masks and personal protective equipment to China.

00:43:56.000 So there's a huge issue of accountability and responsibility and that we're backpropagating our response.

00:44:03.000 How much are we quarantined and how much are we locked down?

00:44:05.000 What are we saying about why the physicians are being told not to wear masks when they're seeing patients?

00:44:15.000 I mean, I'm talking about deadly nonsense, deadly structural nonsense.

00:44:19.000 And if people like you and me don't call this out using...

00:44:24.000 Like these crazy channels that we have.

00:44:27.000 Then the narrative just stands.

00:44:30.000 And so partially what we're doing is a parallel sense-making operation to the standard media, which is Twitter said, we will now be removing tweets if you contradict official authoritative health sources.

00:44:44.000 So that's just what I did.

00:44:46.000 Surgeon General is lying.

00:44:47.000 CDC is lying.

00:44:49.000 WHO is lying.

00:44:50.000 Come at me. 0.99

00:44:50.000 Do you think they're lying? 0.99

00:44:52.000 Yes.

00:44:53.000 Why do you think they're lying?

00:44:54.000 Give me a specific example of why you feel like they're lying.

00:44:58.000 Well, for example, you saw this interaction with the Hong Kong TV asking about the WHO about Taiwan.

00:45:06.000 Yeah, that was insane. 0.99

00:45:07.000 Well, explain that because it's fucking insane. 0.99

00:45:10.000 It was insane to watch. 0.98

00:45:11.000 First of all, he pretended that the head of the WHO pretended he didn't hear them.

00:45:17.000 And then he had them say it again.

00:45:19.000 First of all, he moves like you can see his hand go to cut off the connection.

00:45:24.000 He hung up.

00:45:24.000 He said, I couldn't hear.

00:45:25.000 She said, oh, I'll repeat the question.

00:45:27.000 He's like, no, let's go on to the next one.

00:45:29.000 Well, why would he want to go to the next one if he didn't hear it?

00:45:30.000 Come on.

00:45:31.000 I don't even have...

00:45:32.000 Here's the point.

00:45:33.000 We are so afraid...

00:45:34.000 Explain what he did to people that don't know because people are listening here and they're a little confused.

00:45:38.000 He was asked about the Taiwanese response to the COVID epidemic.

00:45:42.000 And he didn't want to say Taiwan, because China claims that Taiwan is part of China.

00:45:50.000 And because China exercises so much influence over the WHO, he wanted to say some very general thing, which is like, I think all provinces of China have been doing an excellent job, meaning a different country, Taiwan, because there's a dispute.

00:46:06.000 So what do you think China's most interested in?

00:46:08.000 The People's Republic of China, the Communist Chinese want no recognition of their existing something called Taiwan.

00:46:20.000 Trevor Burrus And why does the World Health Organization give into that?

00:46:26.000 Well, how do different nations get control of things?

00:46:30.000 You know, we have influence at the UN, and we've caused the UN to do things that are America-centric.

00:46:37.000 You know, other countries have influence, and you do this by being on particular committees, rotating directorships, who pays the cost.

00:46:46.000 I don't know how the WHO seems to be so enmeshed with China.

00:46:51.000 And I don't want to opine about these things because I want to keep my voice...

00:46:55.000 Right.

00:46:56.000 But it spoke volumes to watch that guy do that little dance, try to avoid saying Taiwan.

00:47:02.000 My entire life looks like that interview.

00:47:04.000 I hate to say it this way, but my relationship with authority and my big critique is that this is the generic expectation across almost all institutions now.

00:47:16.000 They are all serving bizarre goals because growth is what gave us our independence.

00:47:22.000 And when we became less innovative and we – or the innovation dried up and we couldn't grow our way into new things, the number of people who could use their middle finger effectively and say, I'm steering this organization to do the right thing and this is my bet and we're going to go forward.

00:47:41.000 Those people as a class were removed.

00:47:43.000 If you think about like what do you do with Churchill when there isn't a World War II to win?

00:47:48.000 It's very uncomfortable.

00:47:49.000 Would he open a dry cleaner?

00:47:51.000 We don't know.

00:47:54.000 You have special people who really only shine when there's an emergency.

00:47:58.000 There's a guy named Jaiprakash Narayan in India who's very important.

00:48:04.000 He was one of the sort of founding fathers of modern India.

00:48:07.000 And after Indian independence was achieved, lots of the people who had been founding fathers went to the next phase where they became like – they enriched themselves.

00:48:18.000 They did standard political things to gain power in the system.

00:48:25.000 Yeah.

00:48:28.000 Yeah.

00:48:39.000 I guess Prakash means light.

00:48:41.000 So there's this phrase, like, in the darkness there is one light, Jaiprakash, Jaiprakash, Jaiprakash.

00:48:46.000 They turned to the one guy who'd become the patron saint of lost causes because he never broke faith with the revolutionary spirit.

00:48:54.000 And he gets called up once, but he's incredibly important because everybody knows in a dark time who they can trust.

00:49:01.000 Right?

00:49:04.000 That's a very important parallel to where we are now.

00:49:07.000 Who are the break glass in case of emergency people?

00:49:12.000 Yeah, when you watch the people that are talking in these presidential addresses, there's none of those.

00:49:19.000 I don't see any break glass.

00:49:21.000 I mean, this Fauci guy is obviously an expert in diseases, and he's a doctor, and he's trying to do his best to lay out the ground rules of what we need to do and what this looks like over the next couple of months.

00:49:32.000 But it's like Jocko Willink, you know?

00:49:36.000 Jocko is not telling you, don't worry.

00:49:38.000 You don't have to change your routine.

00:49:40.000 You can get up at 9.30.

00:49:42.000 Just do a little bit.

00:49:43.000 Just a little bit.

00:49:45.000 Discipline equals freedom.

00:49:47.000 I'm up at 4.30.

00:49:48.000 What are you doing in bed?

00:49:49.000 It's time for discipline. 0.99

00:49:51.000 Well, because he's a military guy and military people don't have any room for bullshit. 0.99

00:49:57.000 They don't have any room for fluff. 0.98

00:49:59.000 Some military people do.

00:49:59.000 Right, but people like SEALs, they don't have any room for fluff because you have to be able to perform.

00:50:05.000 Well, okay.

00:50:05.000 So then in that situation...

00:50:06.000 So fuck your feelings. 1.00

00:50:08.000 Get up at 4.30. 1.00

00:50:10.000 That's how they feel.

00:50:11.000 That's what I'm trying to say.

00:50:12.000 But those, you can just do a little bit, and that's great.

00:50:16.000 That's great.

00:50:17.000 You guys are enforcing mediocrity.

00:50:18.000 Congratulations.

00:50:19.000 And that's what I'm trying to get at, which is we have a situation where we know, if you have two trainers and one of them is doing the don't worry, and the other one is saying, I'm not going to lie to you.

00:50:29.000 You're going to be sore.

00:50:30.000 You're going to be miserable.

00:50:31.000 This isn't going to be fun. 0.75

00:50:32.000 Which do you choose?

00:50:33.000 Some people will go with the former.

00:50:35.000 Yeah.

00:50:36.000 They like to stay fat.

00:50:38.000 There's a lot of that out there.

00:50:39.000 Okay.

00:50:40.000 Mediocrity is a very comforting thing.

00:50:42.000 I hear you.

00:50:43.000 Yeah, it's hard.

00:50:45.000 It's hard to be that 4.30 in the morning guy. 1.00

00:50:48.000 There's some days that alarm goes off, he's got to be like, fuck this, man. 0.99

00:50:51.000 Well, you know that Jocko doesn't live that 24-7. 1.00

00:50:54.000 Yes, he does.

00:50:55.000 No, he may live at 18-6.

00:50:59.000 Well, he goes to sleep.

00:51:00.000 Remember that thing he did about the cake?

00:51:02.000 I was at a birthday party.

00:51:04.000 There was a delicious piece of cake in front of me.

00:51:06.000 I struggled.

00:51:07.000 Eventually, I succumbed to temptation.

00:51:10.000 Yeah, but I'm telling you, man, that doesn't even mean anything. 0.99

00:51:12.000 That goes through that fucking blast furnace of a body he has. 0.99

00:51:15.000 But I'm saying... 0.99

00:51:16.000 Nobody's 24-7 on this stuff, Joe.

00:51:18.000 But that is a fake weakness.

00:51:20.000 Yeah.

00:51:20.000 He'll give in to it to appear.

00:51:22.000 Performative weakness.

00:51:23.000 Yes.

00:51:23.000 He just wants to appear mortal like the rest of us.

00:51:24.000 He's appearing to make you sort of commiserate with him.

00:51:27.000 He's appearing that, oh, I have some failings too.

00:51:31.000 I ate cake. 0.99

00:51:32.000 Yeah, what he doesn't tell you is he probably went down to his fucking dungeon basement after he ate cake and did squats for an hour. 0.99

00:51:40.000 I believe that. 0.99

00:51:41.000 There's people that are really that guy.

00:51:43.000 Yeah.

00:51:43.000 And he's one of those people.

00:51:45.000 He's really that guy.

00:51:46.000 He's that guy all the time.

00:51:47.000 I spent a lot of time with Jocko.

00:51:48.000 Okay.

00:51:49.000 He's that guy.

00:51:50.000 But that's because he's a Navy SEAL commander.

00:51:54.000 I want one of those people right now.

00:51:55.000 Those guys are important.

00:51:56.000 Right now.

00:51:56.000 Yeah, those guys are important.

00:51:58.000 And we have to clean out this class of people that put up with each other.

00:52:01.000 It's like the reason they put up with each other and they don't like indict each other or sue each other or report each other is that they're all the same.

00:52:08.000 And that was the key skill for between 35 and 50 years, which is knowing what not to say to upset the institutional apple cart.

00:52:19.000 Well, that is politics, and that's one of the things that disgusts people about it.

00:52:23.000 That's one of the reasons why Donald Trump actually got into office.

00:52:28.000 Because people looked at him as an antidote.

00:52:30.000 That's right.

00:52:31.000 Clean up the swamp.

00:52:32.000 Drain the swamp.

00:52:33.000 That's him.

00:52:34.000 That's what they thought.

00:52:35.000 They thought this was a solution.

00:52:37.000 He might bring in his own swamp, but he was against their swamp.

00:52:39.000 Exactly.

00:52:40.000 And then Bernie Sanders has his own kind of swamp.

00:52:43.000 He's got a different kind of swamp.

00:52:45.000 Everyone's got their own swamp.

00:52:47.000 It's like, what is your particular pattern that you would like to push?

00:52:53.000 You know, what has got you to the dance?

00:52:56.000 You know?

00:52:57.000 Sorry, I'm laughing, but Barry Weiss was sitting here and she's just like, so Joe, who do you think you'll vote for?

00:53:02.000 And then he's like, and then you called me up.

00:53:06.000 He's like, Eric, what did I just do?

00:53:09.000 I think you might have just swung the election.

00:53:11.000 Well, the wrong way or the right way.

00:53:13.000 It's the whole thing.

00:53:14.000 Look, Joe Biden being the main guy is the only reason why they went after Bernie Sanders and went after me. 0.89

00:53:19.000 I mean, the whole idea was just to reinforce the idea that Bernie Sanders is making poor choices by connecting to him to someone who says fucked up things when he's trying to be funny. 0.89

00:53:28.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:53:28.000 You know, and you put it in print with some quotations behind it and like, wow, this guy's awful. 0.99

00:53:33.000 You know, everything out of context is awful.

00:53:36.000 And what they're trying to do, without a doubt, is the same thing we're talking about.

00:53:40.000 The guy who's willing to dance with them, which is Joe Biden.

00:53:44.000 The guy who's the professional politician. 0.99

00:53:47.000 They don't give a fuck if he can barely talk. 0.99

00:53:49.000 They don't give a fuck if he forgets what he's saying halfway into conversations. 0.99

00:53:52.000 But this is the whole thing about the gated institutional narrative. 0.98

00:53:55.000 The key issue, and I learned this when I used to do immigration stuff in Washington during the 90s.

00:54:01.000 I learned this concept of steady hands.

00:54:04.000 This is like one of the most terrifying phrases ever.

00:54:06.000 So I told you, I think at some point, that in New York, whenever people are deciding to do a bad thing to screw people over, they always use the phrase, it's a beautiful thing, meaning that you can extract money from people who have no say in the matter.

00:54:18.000 In Washington...

00:54:19.000 Is this financial circles you're talking about?

00:54:21.000 Yeah, New York finance. 0.88

00:54:22.000 So whenever you hear the phrase, it's a beautiful thing, it means somebody is being raped financially. 0.59

00:54:27.000 Yeah.

00:54:29.000 In Washington, the phrase that I learned to fear is steady hands.

00:54:33.000 He's a pair of steady hands.

00:54:35.000 That means you can count on him to do the wrong thing in an emergency to keep everybody on the inside okay.

00:54:41.000 And there's like a separate system for promoting the people who do the wrong thing and making sure because everybody inside is super dependent on somebody burning all of their credibility in public.

00:54:53.000 Steady hands.

00:54:54.000 Yeah.

00:54:56.000 Yeah, I mean, that's the main hope of this free information society, that all of these disgusting practices, these legacy practices get exposed.

00:55:09.000 Well, here's the weird thing.

00:55:11.000 When Amy Klobuchar dropped out, who was like a baby boomer born in the, I'm going to say 61, something like that.

00:55:18.000 Everyone remaining was born in the 1940s.

00:55:22.000 Elizabeth Warren was the youngest.

00:55:24.000 Then you had, like, Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump.

00:55:30.000 So everyone was, like, born between 41 and 49. Now, all of those people would be the oldest president, all of them, the oldest president at inauguration.

00:55:41.000 Like, we've lost our mind.

00:55:43.000 This is normal to us.

00:55:44.000 This isn't really commented upon, that you would have five for five, It's pretty crazy.

00:55:59.000 The evidence is the clearest with Joe Biden, right?

00:56:03.000 Yeah.

00:56:03.000 Because he's showing actual real deterioration.

00:56:05.000 But we've seen deterioration from Trump, particularly earlier.

00:56:09.000 In the first year or two of his term, there's some spectacular videos.

00:56:15.000 Of him falling apart where he couldn't enunciate words.

00:56:20.000 He couldn't say words correctly while he's speaking to the country.

00:56:24.000 His tongue was like swollen in his throat.

00:56:26.000 It was very strange, right?

00:56:29.000 But people think of that as maybe a substance issue.

00:56:32.000 Like he goes up and he goes down and sometimes he catches it on the wrong part of the wave and that's when he's in front of the camera and he struggles through it but he literally can't pronounce words.

00:56:43.000 But then he'll bounce back and he'll be fine.

00:56:45.000 Joe Biden's not bouncing back.

00:56:47.000 Whether he has an aversion to the same sort of supplements that Donald's using, I don't know.

00:56:52.000 I don't know what's going on.

00:56:54.000 Yes, he's inconsistent.

00:56:56.000 Sometimes he seems fine, and then sometimes he seems like he's completely lost.

00:57:00.000 And I learned about this.

00:57:01.000 It was very uncomfortable for me.

00:57:03.000 I was watching Stefan Molyneux and Mike Cernovich going on and on about Hillary's health.

00:57:10.000 Mm-hmm.

00:57:11.000 And I was just thinking, these guys are actually weirdly making sense on this topic.

00:57:15.000 And I've never really interacted with Stefan Molyneux at all, and it sort of scares me, and I don't really want him in my life.

00:57:25.000 But didn't mean that he wasn't right and he wasn't being courageous in saying it.

00:57:29.000 And then when Donna Brazile, I think, came out later and said, yeah, there were real concerns about Hillary's health all along. 0.64

00:57:35.000 Well, she was fainting. 0.98

00:57:36.000 Yes.

00:57:37.000 Whenever you lose consciousness, that's a bad sign.

00:57:39.000 We don't know what it was that she was doing.

00:57:41.000 But what I'm trying to get at would be that...

00:57:44.000 We are dependent on these people that we are told are trolls as the free people.

00:57:49.000 And I remember Orwell talking about the proletariat, where the proletariat was weirdly free and the central people were the ones who had no freedom.

00:57:59.000 I saw this also in the fall of the Soviet Union.

00:58:01.000 I had family in Moscow and Kiev and in Chernoff Sea that we discovered right at the end of the Soviet Union.

00:58:09.000 And I went over to visit.

00:58:11.000 And I remember preparing for that visit, I called up these people in Chernofci, right near Moldova, in the extreme west of the Ukraine.

00:58:20.000 And I said, you know, like, hello?

00:58:23.000 And I hear the voice on the other end of the phone.

00:58:25.000 It was like a time when long-distance phone calls were still romantic.

00:58:28.000 And I hear, Shalom Aleichem!

00:58:31.000 And I'm realizing that these are young people who are still speaking Yiddish. 0.99

00:58:34.000 They don't give a shit about anything because they're not important. 0.98

00:58:38.000 They're not in Moscow. 0.99

00:58:39.000 They're not in St. Petersburg.

00:58:41.000 I think?

00:59:02.000 He's free of Fox.

00:59:04.000 He's able to go against Fox.

00:59:06.000 I'm looking at Greg Gutfeld.

00:59:08.000 I don't know what Greg has been saying.

00:59:09.000 But there are a small number of interesting people who are still housed inside of the belly of the beast.

00:59:17.000 And I don't know if you heard my theory about the rebel end of corporate and the corporate end of rebel.

00:59:22.000 So you and I, I think, would be sort of – well, at least I'm wearing a jacket.

00:59:27.000 I would be the corporate end of rebel.

00:59:29.000 Okay.

00:59:30.000 What am I? You might be the rebel end of rebel.

00:59:33.000 I don't know.

00:59:35.000 You're faking being the rebel end of rebel.

00:59:37.000 What am I faking?

00:59:40.000 What?

00:59:40.000 I'm faking being the rebel end of rebel?

00:59:42.000 Those tattoos obviously wash after you.

00:59:44.000 You just apply them every day.

00:59:45.000 But the rebel end of corporate would be like Barry Weiss.

00:59:49.000 Right?

00:59:50.000 So she's in the belly of the beast, but she's pushing the edge.

00:59:53.000 Bill Maher would straddle corporate end of rebel, rebel end of corporate.

00:59:58.000 Unclear.

00:59:59.000 Right?

01:00:00.000 And so there is an important partnership across this.

01:00:03.000 If you think about – You remember the film Inglorious Bastards?

01:00:07.000 Did you like that one?

01:00:08.000 Sure.

01:00:08.000 Loved it.

01:00:09.000 Okay. 0.99

01:00:09.000 Lieutenant Aldo Rey is this interface between regular army and the psychotic Jews who will kill Nazis given any opportunity. 0.99

01:00:16.000 And you need people who interface between, like, the bad boys and the regular units.

01:00:25.000 And these are incredibly important.

01:00:27.000 What is the plural of nexus?

01:00:29.000 Nexi?

01:00:30.000 I don't know.

01:00:31.000 We got into trouble the first time with Octopus.

01:00:36.000 Octopi.

01:00:36.000 No, it's actually...

01:00:37.000 It's not octopuses?

01:00:38.000 The recommended one is octopodes, spelled octopodes.

01:00:42.000 Really?

01:00:43.000 Yeah.

01:00:43.000 Whoa, but I've seen octopi.

01:00:45.000 Yeah.

01:00:46.000 Well, people use octopuses, octopi.

01:00:51.000 There it is.

01:00:51.000 Plural form of nexus is nexuses or nexus.

01:00:55.000 Okay.

01:00:56.000 Oh, boy.

01:00:57.000 Jamie with the win.

01:00:59.000 Thank you.

01:00:59.000 How weird that it's either or, that it could just be nexus, the plural form of nexus.

01:01:05.000 That makes sense, I guess.

01:01:06.000 So these nexus...

01:01:07.000 Yes.

01:01:08.000 Sounds good.

01:01:10.000 I'll get used to it.

01:01:12.000 ...are incredibly important, and we have to keep them up.

01:01:16.000 And I'm worried about the...

01:01:20.000 The rebel end of corporate, because these corporations are starting to realize that their need for kayfabe is just far exceeding...

01:01:29.000 Kayfabe? 0.75

01:01:30.000 Kayfabe.

01:01:31.000 Kayfabe is carnival speak for the word fake, and when catch wrestling devolved into professional wrestling...

01:01:38.000 You know about all that!

01:01:43.000 That's very interesting.

01:01:44.000 Yeah.

01:01:45.000 That's a weird one.

01:01:46.000 That's obscure.

01:01:47.000 The catch wrestling, carnival wrestling.

01:01:49.000 Actually, Jamie, could you bring up the word kayfabe and Weinstein?

01:01:53.000 Can you name any people that were involved in catch wrestling, the real catch wrestling?

01:01:57.000 How far do you go with this?

01:01:59.000 You know who Farmer Burns was?

01:02:00.000 Farmer Burns?

01:02:01.000 Farmer Burns.

01:02:02.000 No.

01:02:03.000 Famous catch wrestling guy.

01:02:04.000 Used to do a hangman's drop.

01:02:06.000 His neck was so strong, he could tie a noose around it and drop six feet and hang there.

01:02:14.000 By the way, if you want to read a great book on professional wrestling, I would highly recommend the book Ringside, which talks about the evolution.

01:02:22.000 So what I call K-fabrication is the transition of something that usually has twin attributes, is very dangerous and very boring.

01:02:33.000 So old-style wrestling was incredibly dangerous and people would be crippled from about.

01:02:40.000 So as a result, they would often just like circle each other and not really engage.

01:02:44.000 And like war is like this.

01:02:45.000 Mostly war is extremely boring and then obviously can be quite deadly.

01:02:50.000 So in order to routinize these things, we create kayfabe, which is the system of stratified lies that professional wrestling is undergirded by.

01:03:02.000 Okay.

01:03:03.000 So, do you know what a worked shoot is?

01:03:05.000 Yes.

01:03:06.000 Okay.

01:03:06.000 What's a worked shoot?

01:03:07.000 Well, a shoot is an actual fight.

01:03:10.000 And a worked shoot, like a work is a fake fight.

01:03:13.000 Right.

01:03:13.000 So, like, if two guys were pretending to fight, and there was, there's actually, there was an issue, I should, so just to lay this all out, in Japan, there's an extreme admiration for professional wrestling.

01:03:31.000 Some of them would get into mixed martial arts and have fake fights Is this like Pride?

01:03:42.000 Yes, exactly Pride.

01:03:44.000 And Pride actually was founded by Hickson Gracie, who was as legit as a man has ever lived, and Takata, who was a famous professional wrestler.

01:03:55.000 And Hickson fucked up Takata in a real fight.

01:03:58.000 He only would have real fights. 0.94

01:03:59.000 Who was the Gracie killer who came out of Japan? 0.98

01:04:01.000 That's Sakuraba. 0.99

01:04:02.000 Oh, sorry about that.

01:04:03.000 Yeah, Sakuraba, he, well, he's a phenomenal catch wrestler, by the way.

01:04:08.000 I don't want to blow you off course.

01:04:09.000 He came from, I believe, Carl Gotch and Billy Costello, and I think that's the name of the gentleman.

01:04:17.000 There was a bunch of people who taught him Catch wrestling.

01:04:21.000 So his style was submission-oriented catch wrestling.

01:04:26.000 He had both.

01:04:28.000 He was involved in professional wrestling as well, but he was a legit fighter.

01:04:33.000 Anyway, the point was there was a weird blurring of the lines.

01:04:38.000 And there were some fights, like Mark Coleman had a fight with Takata, where it was really clear that Mark Coleman got paid to take a dive, because Mark Coleman should have smashed that dude.

01:04:47.000 And he gets caught in his heel hook, and he doesn't tap, and he's gonna tap, then he winds up tapping, and everyone's like, whoa! 0.70

01:04:53.000 But everyone watching that knows fighting was like, get the fuck out of here! 0.88

01:04:58.000 What is happening here? 0.97

01:05:00.000 Oh my god, it's a fake fight!

01:05:01.000 It could have been a contender.

01:05:02.000 So there was fake fights mixed in with real fights.

01:05:05.000 Right.

01:05:05.000 It was pretty common.

01:05:06.000 Pretty common in Pride.

01:05:07.000 And this is what happened in the transition in the early 20th century between catch wrestling and professional wrestling.

01:05:12.000 Yeah.

01:05:13.000 Is that you start doping reality with fakeness.

01:05:17.000 And the thing I was asking about at the work shoot, it has to do with the layering of nonsense and reality.

01:05:24.000 So the idea is that you have something which is ostensibly fake.

01:05:36.000 Right.

01:05:44.000 It's a fake fight that appears real.

01:05:46.000 It's a fake, real fight that appears to break out of a fake thing that is pretending to...

01:05:51.000 Maybe it's quaternary.

01:05:53.000 The brain can't go much beyond four levels of lies, right?

01:05:57.000 And so you had a famous storyline...

01:05:59.000 I can't remember who it was...

01:06:01.000 Where a wrestler was apparently supposedly having an affair with another wrestler's wife.

01:06:07.000 And that was the storyline.

01:06:10.000 So the people who write these things are called bookers.

01:06:13.000 So the bookers had come up with this storyline.

01:06:16.000 And then the affair became real.

01:06:18.000 Because the brain couldn't sort of manage all of the deception.

01:06:23.000 So the two people actually got together.

01:06:25.000 Right.

01:06:26.000 Because they were supposed to hang out and pretend.

01:06:29.000 Right. 1.00

01:06:30.000 And they're like, let's just do this shit. 1.00

01:06:32.000 Right. 1.00

01:06:32.000 And so, oddly, I was fascinated by the moment where Vince McMahon declared, I think, to the New Jersey Sporting Commission... 1.00

01:06:42.000 He made this unbelievable – it was like one of the great moments in the 20th century, I think.

01:06:47.000 He realized that he was going to be taxed into oblivion.

01:06:50.000 And so he had a choice.

01:06:52.000 Should he pay this tax or do something really bold?

01:06:55.000 And he went in front of them and he said, you realize that everything we do is fake.

01:07:00.000 Now, that could have completely toppled the wrestling world.

01:07:03.000 The admission that there was no reality to this was a potential death blow.

01:07:09.000 Mm-hmm.

01:07:10.000 So he said, this is all staged.

01:07:12.000 All the fights, the winners are known in advance.

01:07:14.000 You can't tax us because we aren't actually a sport and you don't have any jurisdiction over us.

01:07:19.000 And then it turned out nobody cared.

01:07:24.000 Right?

01:07:24.000 And so the interesting thing is that you used to have this concept of a smark.

01:07:28.000 A mark is somebody who doesn't know they're being conned.

01:07:31.000 A smart mark or smark is somebody who knows that they're being conned and still continues to play.

01:07:37.000 So in some sense, it was the bet that you could take all the marks and turn them into smarks and the business empire would continue and you wouldn't have to pay the tax.

01:07:45.000 So I was hanging out as one does with Hulk Hogan and I was trying to check whether or not this was true and he said to me, Eric, you realize who came up with that strategy?

01:07:55.000 Me!

01:07:57.000 So I was like, what?

01:07:58.000 So he said, yeah, I was the one who said that we should...

01:08:01.000 Do you believe him?

01:08:02.000 I don't know.

01:08:03.000 It's hard to tell.

01:08:04.000 Well, that's the whole point about kayfabe.

01:08:05.000 Yeah, that's where it gets weird.

01:08:07.000 Did you ever see the interview where John Stossel is accusing a professional wrestler of it being fake, so he decided to smack him in the head and ask him if that was fake?

01:08:15.000 It's really horrific, because he dropped, he ruptured his eardrum.

01:08:18.000 I mean, this is an enormous man.

01:08:20.000 I forget the guy.

01:08:21.000 It ruined the guy's career.

01:08:23.000 The guy who was a wrestler.

01:08:24.000 But he hits him with an open hand.

01:08:27.000 I mean, this is an enormous guy.

01:08:29.000 Full blast. 0.97

01:08:30.000 Hits him on the head with this open hand and drops him. 0.88

01:08:32.000 He goes, was that fake? 0.99

01:08:34.000 Was that fake? 1.00

01:08:35.000 Get up, pussy! 1.00

01:08:36.000 And he goes, was that fake? 1.00

01:08:37.000 And he hits him again and drops him again.

01:08:38.000 Was that fake?

01:08:39.000 Well, okay, let's talk about this.

01:08:42.000 I don't think professional wrestling is fake. 0.99

01:08:44.000 What the fuck are you saying? 0.99

01:08:47.000 Well... 1.00

01:08:47.000 I know what you're saying. 1.00

01:08:48.000 Yeah.

01:08:48.000 Yeah, I mean, here it is.

01:08:50.000 This is the guy.

01:08:52.000 We'll play it so we can hear what he's saying.

01:08:55.000 Okay, we'll get into trouble here with you two.

01:08:57.000 But he hits him in the side of the head, and then he hits him again.

01:09:02.000 It's Dr. D, I think.

01:09:03.000 Dr. Death or something. 0.98

01:09:04.000 That fucked him up, right? 0.98

01:09:06.000 Is that him right there? 0.98

01:09:08.000 Is that the guy now? 1.00

01:09:09.000 Jesus Christ, time is a cruel bitch. 1.00

01:09:11.000 Is that the same guy? 1.00

01:09:14.000 Is that him?

01:09:15.000 Jesus Christ.

01:09:17.000 Yeah.

01:09:18.000 Legendary wrestler, bounty hunter, and author of Don't Call Me Fake.

01:09:23.000 Dr. David Schultz goes into detail about the infamous 2020 incident where he slapped John Stossel.

01:09:28.000 Look, he's got a t-shirt on about it and everything.

01:09:31.000 Jesus Christ, it's his whole life now.

01:09:32.000 Yeah, well, that's his moment.

01:09:35.000 Wow.

01:09:36.000 It's not fake.

01:09:37.000 No, it's orchestrated.

01:09:39.000 The results are known in advance.

01:09:42.000 The death rate of those guys is like nothing else.

01:09:46.000 You'd have to look to like wingsuit flyers to see people who die at the level that professional wrestlers do.

01:09:51.000 The punishment that they take.

01:09:53.000 And weirdly, the skill level.

01:09:56.000 Hulk Hogan put me in a headlock.

01:09:58.000 Why did you let him do that?

01:10:00.000 Did you ever see what he did to Richard Belzer?

01:10:02.000 I'm sorry.

01:10:03.000 I know that he's said and done bad things, but there's so much love that comes pouring out of Hulk Hogan.

01:10:09.000 I agree, brother.

01:10:10.000 Yeah.

01:10:12.000 He's a great guy, but he put Belzer asleep on his television show and Belzer fell and bounced his head off the ground.

01:10:17.000 Hulk had me in a headlock.

01:10:19.000 And I know that if that guy had so much as sneezed, my head would have just popped off of my trunk. 0.82

01:10:26.000 I mean, that guy's a beast.

01:10:28.000 He's a huge man.

01:10:29.000 He's a huge man.

01:10:30.000 You know, he's lost like four inches of height because of all his back surgeries.

01:10:34.000 Yeah.

01:10:35.000 Is that true?

01:10:35.000 Yeah.

01:10:36.000 I first met him like way, way, way back in the day.

01:10:40.000 I ran into him.

01:10:41.000 I didn't meet him, meet him.

01:10:42.000 I just ran into him on the street in Beverly Hills. 1.00

01:10:44.000 I was like, holy fuck! 0.99

01:10:47.000 And then I interviewed him for Spike TV back in the day when Spike TV was... 0.99

01:10:52.000 They were doing professional wrestling on Spike TV and they wanted me to interview him while I was doing the UFC. So I interviewed him.

01:10:59.000 We had a fun time together.

01:11:00.000 But he was considerably smaller.

01:11:01.000 It was really interesting.

01:11:03.000 It's like, that was just, oh, there's Belser.

01:11:05.000 So you put Belser in what we would call like a power guillotine.

01:11:07.000 And look, Belser's out cold right here.

01:11:09.000 Watch the left arm.

01:11:11.000 There it is, out cold.

01:11:12.000 So watch, he just drops him.

01:11:13.000 That could have killed him.

01:11:14.000 That part right there where he falls and he bangs his head off the ground, like, he just dropped him like he was on a padded mat or something like that.

01:11:23.000 You really should never do that to someone.

01:11:26.000 But they don't worry about their self because they put themselves into so much danger.

01:11:30.000 This is the thing.

01:11:31.000 Yeah.

01:11:31.000 I mean these guys are the punishment kings of the world.

01:11:34.000 Yeah.

01:11:35.000 And they're extremophiles in that sense.

01:11:37.000 Now what my belief is is that we are – It's real in the sense that the injuries, the death rate, the skill levels, and most of those guys could really fight.

01:11:50.000 They may not be UFC-level fighters, but a lot of them come out of wrestling backgrounds, like legitimate.

01:11:58.000 A lot of them are very, very tough guys.

01:11:59.000 So I think, what was it, in 2013 or 11, John Brockman asked the question, what's the scientific theory that nobody knows that would make the biggest impact in people's cognitive toolkit?

01:12:12.000 And I'd just been allowed to answer this question along with like actual legitimate people.

01:12:16.000 And so I was kind of like being very protective.

01:12:19.000 And my wife said, you know, you could give a lot of answers to that question, but that's not the one you want to give.

01:12:25.000 Do kayfabe.

01:12:26.000 Like I had this theory that kayfabe was the most important psychological theory ever.

01:12:30.000 That nobody really appreciated that in some sense professional wrestling is light years ahead and understanding how the human mind actually works because of the issues of that deception.

01:12:41.000 And so I wrote up kayfabe which is going to determine wars and presidential elections and then sure enough Donald Trump comes directly out of WWE. Like he really understands.

01:12:51.000 If you look at that fight with Vince McMahon.

01:12:54.000 Yeah.

01:12:56.000 Donald Trump intuits professional wrestling and it is a superpower.

01:13:03.000 Jamie, can I ask you to bring up Weinstein and kayfabe and see if...

01:13:07.000 2011. What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

01:13:14.000 Eric Weinstein.

01:13:15.000 So I thought it was going to be thrown out.

01:13:17.000 And in fact, that turned out to be a very prophetic essay.

01:13:21.000 Well, for sure, once Trump got into office.

01:13:24.000 I mean, that is an excellent point of what he does is that there's a part of his appeal is that he's speaking in... 0.99

01:13:32.000 He's hitting a certain frequency that provides comfort and it narrows the boundaries of what's possible and puts things into some very digestible form that morons love. 0.99

01:13:49.000 You know what I'm talking about? 1.00

01:13:50.000 I'm not saying that all people that are Trump supporters are morons. 0.99

01:13:52.000 There's people that support him economically. 1.00

01:13:54.000 But there's a lot of people that are morons that like him because he's talking in this frequency. 0.99

01:14:00.000 There's a narrow band. 0.99

01:14:02.000 He's not going to say anything crazy that's self-deprecating or introspective or he's not going to prepare you for the great beyond or include you in his Concerns for the demise of civilization and Western values,

01:14:21.000 that's not in him, right?

01:14:23.000 He's got a bandwidth.

01:14:24.000 He's got a very narrow band.

01:14:26.000 And inside that band, he's the king.

01:14:29.000 Ratings are tremendous, tremendous.

01:14:31.000 Everyone's doing a great job.

01:14:32.000 We're doing a great job.

01:14:34.000 He says these things that they reinforce this sort of pro wrestling sort of vibration.

01:14:40.000 Somewhat. 1.00

01:14:41.000 I have to admit that I don't meet many morons At all. 1.00

01:14:47.000 Just come to Comedy Store more often. 0.99

01:14:50.000 Let's back up! 1.00

01:14:52.000 I'll bring you around some morons. 1.00

01:14:53.000 No! 1.00

01:14:54.000 Sure.

01:14:54.000 Joe, you don't even believe that.

01:14:56.000 I think that in general, people, when they are given no choice at all, express themselves moronically. 0.97

01:15:03.000 When they're given no choice at all, how so? 0.68

01:15:05.000 I want a choice of an actual president that's viable.

01:15:07.000 I don't have one.

01:15:09.000 So then you're going to ask me, well, which of the non-viable people do you like best?

01:15:12.000 Well, this is the real issue with the Democratic Party. 0.99

01:15:16.000 They've essentially made us all morons with this Joe Biden thing. 0.99

01:15:20.000 They really have. 1.00

01:15:21.000 They made us all morons. 1.00

01:15:23.000 Who do we need? 1.00

01:15:25.000 I can't vote for that guy.

01:15:27.000 I can't vote for him.

01:15:28.000 I can't vote for him.

01:15:29.000 I can't vote for Trump.

01:15:31.000 I'd rather vote for Trump than him.

01:15:32.000 I don't think he could handle anything.

01:15:34.000 I mean, you're relying entirely on his cabinet.

01:15:36.000 If you want to talk about an individual leader that can communicate, he can't do that. 0.98

01:15:41.000 And we don't even know what the fuck he's going to be like after a year in office. 0.95

01:15:44.000 The pressure of being the President of the United States is something that no one has ever prepared for. 0.98

01:15:50.000 The only one who seems to be fine with it is Trump, oddly enough.

01:15:54.000 I mean, he doesn't seem to be aging at all or in any sort of decline.

01:15:59.000 You know, Obama almost immediately started looking older.

01:16:03.000 George W. almost immediately started looking older.

01:16:05.000 I think that this is not a change in Trump.

01:16:07.000 Like, Trump, in a weird way, has just always been this performative, you know, like a fake alpha.

01:16:15.000 Right, and he still plays golf all the time.

01:16:17.000 Like, he hasn't switched up much.

01:16:19.000 I mean, I'm sure he switched it up a little bit because of the pandemic, because he's apparently a germaphobe, which is hilarious, that this could be his demise.

01:16:27.000 You know?

01:16:28.000 I mean, isn't that kind of hilarious?

01:16:30.000 Yeah.

01:16:30.000 That might be what does him in?

01:16:31.000 The guy's always been worried about germs, apparently.

01:16:34.000 How does that work with his...

01:16:37.000 Active extracurricular life.

01:16:39.000 I don't know.

01:16:40.000 I guess he wears condoms.

01:16:41.000 I wouldn't have imagined Stormy Daniels would be the person that he would have chosen first then.

01:16:46.000 It's very strange.

01:16:47.000 She was a hot lady back in the day. 1.00

01:16:48.000 Well, it's not a question of that.

01:16:49.000 It's just that she was also an active one.

01:16:51.000 Yeah, that's true.

01:16:51.000 If your key issue is transmission.

01:16:53.000 I mean, I'm not judging anybody.

01:16:54.000 I'm just saying as a vector of communication.

01:16:58.000 Yeah, that's true.

01:16:59.000 That's a good question.

01:17:00.000 And of course, the porn industry weirdly has very high health standards at one level because it would have to.

01:17:06.000 Right.

01:17:06.000 Maybe that's his rationale that they're tested.

01:17:09.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

01:17:10.000 So I had Ashley Matthews on my program, and she was talking to me about the woman behind Riley Reid.

01:17:19.000 Oh, okay.

01:17:21.000 How hilarious is that?

01:17:22.000 That's her pro wrestling name.

01:17:24.000 Yeah.

01:17:25.000 And I don't know that she'd used her name fully until we were talking, and I said that I didn't want to interview Riley Reid.

01:17:34.000 I wanted to interview Ashley Matthews.

01:17:36.000 Whoa.

01:17:37.000 How'd that go?

01:17:38.000 She was good.

01:17:39.000 I mean, it was a bit of a mismatch, but she is polite and sweet to a fault.

01:17:48.000 She's trying to be thoughtful.

01:17:52.000 I really admire her courage. 0.93

01:17:55.000 She doesn't want body augmentation, so she's got a non-classical porn body. 1.00

01:18:02.000 She chose to do a trans scene because it was erotically interesting to her, even though she was told that it would kill her brand.

01:18:14.000 Sometimes she shaves her body hair, sometimes she doesn't. 0.99

01:18:18.000 So there's a lot of what she does that I think is incredibly admirable.

01:18:24.000 And I got to know of her because she came to a show that I did with Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris in San Francisco and she was tweeting out that she was a huge Sam Harris fan.

01:18:37.000 And then I saw something she did where she was talking about it was impossible for her to get banking and regular services as a pornographic actress. 1.00

01:18:47.000 Banking?

01:18:48.000 Yeah, there's like, remember Operation Chokepoint?

01:18:51.000 No.

01:18:52.000 Operation Choke Point was, I think, an Obama-era Department of Justice initiative to try to make it very difficult to engage in legal occupations like payday lending and things or porn.

01:19:06.000 Porn?

01:19:07.000 Yeah.

01:19:07.000 I think they used the FDIC to harass credit card companies and banks into not making it easy for these people to gain access to ordinary services.

01:19:19.000 So I've been very concerned about the ways in which the authoritarians attempt to regulate who can do what, who can say what, say what, where, get banking.

01:19:32.000 So that's still going on to this day?

01:19:34.000 Yeah, to an extent.

01:19:34.000 She has a difficulty getting banking?

01:19:36.000 She can't get – I think MailChimp won't work with her because she's a pornographic actress. 1.00

01:19:42.000 Oh, in terms of mailing lists.

01:19:44.000 And then there's like chargeback issues where marginal businesses – People will cancel their credit cards, but in fact, if you're doing a business where very few people are canceling the credit cards, they'll still claim that they won't work with you because of the risk of cancellation.

01:20:00.000 So there's this whole thing where we harass and tax.

01:20:05.000 PayPal payouts no longer supported.

01:20:08.000 What is this, Jamie?

01:20:08.000 What's this from?

01:20:09.000 This is from Pornhub's blog, yeah.

01:20:11.000 We're all devastated by PayPal's decision to stop payouts to over 100,000 performers who rely on them for their livelihoods.

01:20:18.000 If you have PayPal as your payout option, please select a new method and update your information in your model settings tab.

01:20:25.000 If you have a pending payment for October, blah, blah, blah.

01:20:28.000 So this is because of porn.

01:20:31.000 Okay, but hold on a second. 0.98

01:20:33.000 Is this prostitution? 1.00

01:20:34.000 Is that why this payout thing?

01:20:37.000 I believe that once upon a time, the San Fernando Valley was the head of prostitution, head of pornographic acting and movie production because it couldn't be charged as prosecution.

01:20:50.000 Now, Ashley makes the point that she's comfortable being called a commercial sex worker. 1.00

01:20:55.000 So in some sense, prostitution adjacent, but not prostitution. 0.98

01:20:59.000 And to your question about how did that go? 0.61

01:21:02.000 I was quite nervous about having a pornographic actress as a guest. 0.92

01:21:09.000 I did it, in fact, right after Sir Roger Penrose.

01:21:12.000 So it was one of the better transitions.

01:21:15.000 I like it.

01:21:16.000 Thank you for my next trick.

01:21:21.000 I think it's important that we talk about porn.

01:21:23.000 And I think it's important that if this is going to have a huge effect, like dark matter, you know, you feel its gravitational effect, but nobody can actually see it because we can't talk about it.

01:21:32.000 I think that it's absolutely imperative that we make more connection to planet porn and talk about what's going on, what does it say about us, and the ways in which, you know, they've got great data, the way OkCupid has great data on what's going on in the world of courtship.

01:21:51.000 Porn has great data on what's going on in the world of kink and eroticism. 0.92

01:21:57.000 And for example, she pointed out that incest porn surges around the holidays when people are spending time with their families.

01:22:05.000 What?

01:22:07.000 Wow. 0.93

01:22:08.000 And incest porn is a cancer that I don't think we're even talking about that's gotten really, really pronounced. 0.94

01:22:15.000 Yeah. 0.91

01:22:15.000 Well, all taboo porns. 0.91

01:22:17.000 Stepmom porn, you know, that kind of stuff. 0.99

01:22:19.000 Stepsister. 0.99

01:22:20.000 Yeah.

01:22:21.000 There's something about...

01:22:23.000 I hear.

01:22:23.000 Yeah.

01:22:24.000 But there's something about those things that for people, it's like there's so much porn that this is the last taboo.

01:22:32.000 The last taboo is your dad marries this hot lady. 1.00

01:22:35.000 Oh, God.

01:22:36.000 And then your dad's like, son...

01:22:37.000 Can't we have one taboo?

01:22:38.000 I want you to have a good time with your mom.

01:22:40.000 I'm going to go off golfing and dad leaves and stuff.

01:22:43.000 Yeah.

01:22:44.000 You know, I think it was your line.

01:22:47.000 You could do One Eye Rail, right?

01:22:49.000 You just did two at me. 1.00

01:22:50.000 What's that?

01:22:51.000 The Sean Connery One Eye Rail Lift.

01:22:53.000 Yeah, I can do One Eye Rail.

01:22:56.000 Where was I? Something about a line?

01:23:00.000 Porn?

01:23:04.000 Crossing of lines.

01:23:06.000 Don't remember. 1.00

01:23:07.000 Damn! 0.99

01:23:08.000 Sorry! 1.00

01:23:09.000 It's that neuron.

01:23:10.000 You don't even smoke pot.

01:23:11.000 What?

01:23:12.000 I said you don't even smoke pot, Harley.

01:23:14.000 I wanted to talk to you about one of your podcasts I listened to at least recently.

01:23:17.000 You listened to a podcast?

01:23:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:18.000 I didn't know that.

01:23:18.000 It's controversial.

01:23:20.000 The O'Keefe podcast.

01:23:21.000 The Project Veritas guy.

01:23:23.000 That's an interesting one because you had a really good point in that people, when they hear that this is a Project Veritas thing and for people who don't know who he is, James O'Keefe from Project Veritas, they've done a lot of work exposing some biases that are held by some of the people that work in these social media groups,

01:23:44.000 social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook and things like that.

01:23:48.000 But the way they've done it is all through hidden camera type stuff.

01:23:51.000 And there's a narrative that people love to use where they go, oh, that guy, he uses selective editing or that guy, you can't believe anything they say.

01:24:01.000 Everything he says is wrong.

01:24:02.000 But that is impossible.

01:24:05.000 Impossible.

01:24:05.000 Because you're listening to these people talking, and they're talking about how they marginalize right-wing viewpoints.

01:24:12.000 They look for people who have, like, manga in their headline, and they put them in certain categories where it makes it very difficult for people to get their stuff.

01:24:21.000 That the algorithm supports, you know, that they know how to marginalize these perspectives and these points of view.

01:24:29.000 And...

01:24:31.000 It's really weird.

01:24:32.000 That no one, they've found this strange way of describing it, where even though you see it on video, you hear people say things that should be outrageous to anyone who believes in objective reality. 1.00

01:24:51.000 And yet, people love to say, that's just a Project Veritas thing, that guy's full of shit. 1.00

01:24:58.000 And they go, oh, he's full of shit, good. 1.00

01:24:59.000 And then they cast it aside. 1.00

01:25:01.000 Well, thank you for bringing that up.

01:25:06.000 Look, I want to take risk.

01:25:08.000 And that was a huge risk.

01:25:09.000 Yeah, it's a risky one.

01:25:10.000 Because part of the thing is that if you touch these worlds...

01:25:13.000 By the way, can I try one of these CBD things?

01:25:15.000 Yeah, well, they're not in the fridge.

01:25:18.000 This is the last one.

01:25:19.000 Can you get one?

01:25:21.000 Tell Jeff to get some of the CBD Kill Cliffs.

01:25:25.000 They're very addictive.

01:25:26.000 I'm going to warn you right now.

01:25:27.000 All right.

01:25:27.000 25 milligrams of CBD. Okay.

01:25:30.000 I have a friend who cannot come to the United States ever because he attempted to come in with some CBD, which is not psychoactive. 1.00

01:25:36.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

01:25:37.000 From the UK. Come on. 1.00

01:25:39.000 He can't come in the US ever?

01:25:40.000 I believe.

01:25:41.000 They can't appeal that?

01:25:42.000 I mean, now that CBD is legal here?

01:25:43.000 Well, his mom is Amanda Fielding.

01:25:46.000 Do you know who Amanda Fielding is?

01:25:47.000 Yes.

01:25:48.000 Do you love Amanda Fielding?

01:25:49.000 No.

01:25:50.000 Oh.

01:25:51.000 Explain who Amanda Fielding is.

01:25:53.000 Amanda Fielding, Countess Amanda Fielding, is the head of the Beckley Foundation for the scientific study of psychedelic and related substances in the UK, who I think works with Imperial College.

01:26:09.000 She's an older lady, right? 1.00

01:26:10.000 Oh, yeah.

01:26:11.000 And she's self-trapanned.

01:26:14.000 Right.

01:26:15.000 That's right.

01:26:15.000 You told me about this.

01:26:16.000 Yeah, she's put two holes in her skull and her husband, Lord Jamie... 0.98

01:26:25.000 Is he Earl Jamie?

01:26:26.000 Maybe he's Earl Jamie.

01:26:28.000 I'm sorry, I don't know these things.

01:26:30.000 Okay.

01:26:31.000 He's trepanned as well.

01:26:33.000 Oh, great.

01:26:33.000 And they are two of the most lovely, learned, wonderful people in the world.

01:26:39.000 What's the benefit of self-trepanation or trepanation in general?

01:26:42.000 Oh, Jesus Christ, there's a video of her doing it?

01:26:44.000 Yeah, I think it's called something like a hole in my head.

01:26:46.000 What is that?

01:26:47.000 It looks like she did it with a stick.

01:26:48.000 Yeah, or something.

01:26:49.000 She did it herself.

01:26:50.000 She had her own tools.

01:26:52.000 Why did she do that? 1.00

01:26:53.000 First of all, when you are British aristocracy, this is what you do.

01:26:59.000 No, you don't.

01:27:00.000 Yes, you do.

01:27:01.000 Sometimes you go on vacation.

01:27:02.000 No, no, no, no. 0.98

01:27:02.000 This lady's crazy. 0.98

01:27:03.000 This is crazy. 1.00

01:27:04.000 Look at that fucking hole she put in her head. 1.00

01:27:06.000 So she drilled right through her skull. 1.00

01:27:08.000 Yeah.

01:27:09.000 All right.

01:27:10.000 Now, the reason she did it, and I think it's an interesting one.

01:27:12.000 Please.

01:27:15.000 Joe, come on.

01:27:17.000 Don't be judgmental.

01:27:19.000 The belief that she had was that her brain – your brain expands to fill your brain case and that when it runs into a hard stop, That the blood circulation has changed and that when the blood circulation changes, you lose that sparkling clarity that comes from your sort of childhood.

01:27:37.000 And so if you remember how clear the world was when you were a kid, her belief was by relieving the pressure from the brain case that you actually get a kind of permanent upgrade in your cognition and the level at which you're experiencing all of reality.

01:27:54.000 Is that true?

01:27:55.000 I don't know.

01:27:56.000 I'm not self-Japan.

01:27:57.000 I have not drilled a hole in my head.

01:27:59.000 Did she say that this was an effective method?

01:28:02.000 I think both she and Jamie say that it's been very positive. 0.99

01:28:07.000 Get the fuck out of here with that. 1.00

01:28:09.000 This is a different flavor. 0.99

01:28:11.000 We've got a great flavor here.

01:28:12.000 25 milligrams of CBD. That's crazy, though.

01:28:15.000 So this guy is permanently barred.

01:28:18.000 Cheers, sir.

01:28:19.000 Without having anything in there.

01:28:21.000 Yeah.

01:28:21.000 Permanently barred from the United States because of that?

01:28:24.000 Yeah.

01:28:24.000 From CBD. Yeah.

01:28:25.000 Non-psychoactive.

01:28:27.000 Right. 1.00

01:28:27.000 Maybe they just knew his mom was a nutjob that drills holes in her head. 1.00

01:28:29.000 She's not a nutjob. 1.00

01:28:31.000 Well...

01:28:31.000 She was, in fact, the one who changed my mind about psychedelics.

01:28:34.000 She changed them? 0.99

01:28:35.000 Yeah.

01:28:36.000 I was totally opposed to them.

01:28:38.000 Wish I was there.

01:28:39.000 To show you, it could be done without having a hole in your head.

01:28:43.000 I said, Amanda, you've been taking LSD regularly since the late 60s.

01:28:51.000 I said, well, how is it that you seem to be completely all there?

01:28:56.000 She said, oh, it really doesn't have any negative effects.

01:29:00.000 Well, it can.

01:29:01.000 Wait, wait, wait.

01:29:03.000 I'm trying to race through the story rather than being perfectly accurate.

01:29:06.000 I said, then what did we get wrong in the 60s?

01:29:09.000 And she said, oh, dosages.

01:29:11.000 I said, what do you mean? 0.99

01:29:12.000 Those dosages were moronic. 0.97

01:29:15.000 And so people were just putting huge amounts of LSD in things and having terrible experiences. 0.98

01:29:20.000 And I thought, well, okay, this is completely – she's crazy because I know it's acid. 0.97

01:29:25.000 And so I just had this image that you pour acid on a brain and it turns it into Emmental or cheese with lots of holes.

01:29:31.000 And sure enough, like we don't even know what the lethal dosage of LSD is.

01:29:36.000 Right.

01:29:38.000 At a physiological rather than at a software level, it seems to be incredibly well-tolerated because it's the only thing that has this effect in such tiny trace amounts.

01:29:46.000 Yeah, it's the same as psilocybin.

01:29:48.000 The LD50 is outrageous.

01:29:50.000 You'd have to eat pounds of it.

01:29:51.000 And so she changed my mind where I realized that I'd been thoroughly propagandized and that I had never examined my beliefs around these chemicals.

01:30:02.000 And that, in fact, many of the most powerful appear to be very well-tolerated.

01:30:07.000 Yes.

01:30:08.000 Yeah.

01:30:08.000 The most powerful ones, in fact.

01:30:10.000 But they're also the ones that most closely resemble human neurochemistry, which is weird, too.

01:30:16.000 So I think that...

01:30:17.000 Look, I'm a fan of eccentrics, as are you.

01:30:20.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:30:21.000 And I don't think Amanda's crazy. 0.95

01:30:23.000 Oh, she's definitely crazy. 1.00

01:30:25.000 She drilled holes in her head. 1.00

01:30:26.000 Oh, it gets weirder than that.

01:30:27.000 What else?

01:30:30.000 She had a pet bird called Birdie, and she built a mausoleum to her pet bird in the form of some sort of a conical earth outcropping that in order to reach it, I think you have to Walk over Doric columns that cross,

01:30:51.000 like, you know, these old columns from Greek temples.

01:30:55.000 Oh, okay.

01:30:56.000 And so the tops of them form steps across a moat, and it's guarded by attack swans.

01:31:02.000 You can take nothing at all psychoactive, and then you're visiting this woman, visiting her bird's mausoleum, being attacked by swans, walking over Greek columns to cross a moat.

01:31:13.000 Yeah, but that's just fun.

01:31:15.000 Drilling holes in your head is really where I draw the line. 0.90

01:31:18.000 Cheers to that. 0.99

01:31:20.000 That just seems... 1.00

01:31:22.000 I mean, I don't think there's any real science to relieving pressure by drilling a fucking hole in your head. 1.00

01:31:27.000 I think you're just relieved by the fact that you've taken this really radical step outside the norm and decided you're going to be the person who drills a fucking hole in your head. 1.00

01:31:38.000 I'm sorry. 0.99

01:31:38.000 I'm team Amanda Fielding. 0.99

01:31:39.000 She may have made a crazy decision in her life.

01:31:43.000 Does she keep doing it? 0.88

01:31:45.000 Every now and then?

01:31:45.000 No.

01:31:45.000 Drill a new hole?

01:31:47.000 It's like plastic surgery.

01:31:49.000 You get addicted to it.

01:31:50.000 Pretty soon there's nothing but the dirt.

01:31:51.000 Right.

01:31:51.000 Just holes.

01:31:52.000 Yeah.

01:31:52.000 Swiss cheese head.

01:31:53.000 No.

01:31:53.000 These are two of the most lovely and cerebral people around.

01:31:59.000 Was she on acid when she drilled the hole?

01:32:01.000 I doubt it.

01:32:03.000 I mean, I don't think she's – sorry, I just – I think she's as eccentric as the day is long.

01:32:09.000 But I'm such an admirer of people who are willing to try to cross the adaptive valley and do it – and fund their own expedition.

01:32:20.000 Right?

01:32:21.000 So this is like a giant risk.

01:32:23.000 It's just crazy that...

01:32:24.000 So it was her son that was barred from coming into this country?

01:32:27.000 The filmmaker.

01:32:28.000 Just imagine if you had a can of this 25 milligram CBD Kill Cliff. 1.00

01:32:33.000 And they're like, you fucking criminal. 1.00

01:32:35.000 Get out of our country. 1.00

01:32:36.000 Forever.

01:32:37.000 But we're using these things as excuses.

01:32:40.000 Yeah.

01:32:40.000 Like I desperately need to have Douglas Murray come to the US. But people don't like Douglas because of some of his opinions.

01:32:47.000 But he's been here.

01:32:49.000 I don't think he can come now.

01:32:50.000 What?

01:32:51.000 I don't know.

01:32:51.000 There's some issue.

01:32:52.000 Was this recent?

01:32:53.000 He was on the podcast.

01:32:54.000 When was he last year?

01:32:56.000 A few years ago, I bet.

01:32:58.000 Two?

01:32:58.000 Maybe two years ago?

01:32:59.000 Was he here in the old spot or the new spot?

01:33:01.000 I feel like it was the new spot.

01:33:02.000 It was here.

01:33:03.000 Yeah.

01:33:04.000 So it's within two years?

01:33:08.000 He can't come to the United States?

01:33:09.000 I think he can't come to the United States, and I'm very angry about that.

01:33:12.000 And I'll tell you another one that I'm really angry about is Alex Green, the CEO of Symmetry Labs, Do you want to bring up the tree of Tenere, T-E-N-E-R-E, from Burning Man?

01:33:26.000 Oh boy.

01:33:28.000 You said Burning Man.

01:33:29.000 What's wrong with Burning Man?

01:33:30.000 Have you been?

01:33:30.000 No.

01:33:32.000 Too many feet.

01:33:33.000 Too many what?

01:33:34.000 Too many feet. 0.99

01:33:35.000 Too many dirty people. 0.78

01:33:36.000 Okay, if you can find a video of this thing. 0.92

01:33:38.000 There's where all the masks are. 0.97

01:33:40.000 They're fucking hoarding them for Burning Man. 0.93

01:33:41.000 So, like maybe the third one? 0.98

01:33:46.000 2017?

01:33:48.000 Okay, so the guy...

01:33:50.000 Oh, that's beautiful.

01:33:51.000 So this is a tree in Burning Man.

01:33:54.000 They've got all these LED lights.

01:33:56.000 Yeah, and the guy who came up with this is rotting right now in federal prison.

01:34:00.000 The guy who came up with this tree?

01:34:02.000 Yeah.

01:34:02.000 For what?

01:34:03.000 He's a physicist, musician, a very good friend of mine, somebody I leave my children with.

01:34:09.000 Great family friend, wonderful Passover and Shabbat dinner guest, and currently in jail for weed.

01:34:17.000 What?!

01:34:18.000 Weed.

01:34:19.000 Yeah, but like I want you to think about – and there are much better videos than this where these giant waves and things go through.

01:34:26.000 The people who are bringing transcendence and grace and beauty to our lives when they're hounded because of like what language they've used – Things like self-experimentation, advocacy for psychedelics.

01:34:43.000 It's very important that we have rule breakers, mavericks, people that you might call crazy or lunatics, and that we be very gentle and celebratory.

01:34:54.000 What is this gentleman's name again?

01:34:55.000 Alex Green.

01:34:57.000 Alex Green.

01:34:57.000 And Alex Green, was he arrested for distribution?

01:35:01.000 Yep, I think so.

01:35:02.000 How much did he have?

01:35:03.000 Don't know.

01:35:04.000 Where was he arrested?

01:35:05.000 I think it was New York.

01:35:06.000 New York is still illegal, as weird as that seems.

01:35:08.000 It may well be, but my point is...

01:35:11.000 So he's in federal prison?

01:35:13.000 Yeah, he's in federal prison.

01:35:14.000 I don't know.

01:35:15.000 A few years, I don't know, with parole, he's in a treatment facility.

01:35:19.000 But, you know, I just...

01:35:20.000 I get a call from my...

01:35:22.000 The person I leave my children with when I go out of town, sitting in federal prison.

01:35:27.000 You know, it's like, this call originates from the U.S. Correctional...

01:35:30.000 Jesus Christ.

01:35:32.000 And...

01:35:35.000 This guy's a genius CEO of a beautiful mathematical art company and I just feel so powerless to figure out how to move people along. 0.77

01:35:49.000 Was he targeted or did he just fuck up and try to buy a large number of it, a large quantity of it so that he didn't have to go out and get it?

01:35:57.000 I imagine that he was involved in some – I don't know the specifics of his plea and I don't want to say anything that could screw him up. 0.95

01:36:05.000 But I imagine that the issue was something to do with a large cannabis business.

01:36:12.000 Okay, so he had some sort of distribution business in New York State.

01:36:15.000 I'm not opining that he didn't break the law, but I also think at some level when you go back – I mean when you see cannabis being advertised everywhere and you grew up in a world in which like only bad people did that, it's pretty infuriating.

01:36:33.000 Yeah, it is.

01:36:34.000 At some point, I was so angry about Alex that I started talking about coffee and wine as drugs.

01:36:43.000 Would you like red drugs or white drugs today?

01:36:46.000 Yeah.

01:36:46.000 Hey, should we go get some drugs down at Starbucks?

01:36:49.000 And people would be very weirded out.

01:36:51.000 But tell me those things aren't drugs.

01:36:54.000 They're drugs.

01:36:55.000 They're drugs.

01:36:55.000 Always have been.

01:36:56.000 I only smoked cigarettes for one weekend in Turkey years ago.

01:37:01.000 Man, did I not know.

01:37:04.000 Cigarettes are a drug.

01:37:05.000 I was flying.

01:37:06.000 Dude, I don't smoke, but I have smoked before shows.

01:37:11.000 Okay.

01:37:11.000 With Chappelle, he's giving me cigarettes, and Tony Hinchcliffe, he's giving me cigarettes before shows, and I've smoked a cigarette, and then I've gone on stage, and it's like, you're on a drug.

01:37:21.000 It's a cognitive-enhancing drug, by the way.

01:37:24.000 It fires your brain up.

01:37:25.000 And then you're, I'm so jittery, I can't even behave.

01:37:28.000 Yes, you definitely can do that.

01:37:29.000 I can't even think.

01:37:30.000 Yeah, if you do a bunch of them. 1.00

01:37:33.000 Society has accepted a bunch of drugs and a lot of them that'll fucking kill you. 0.94

01:37:37.000 And then they've made some drugs that are some of the most powerful drugs in terms of their force on creativity. 0.97

01:37:46.000 Cannabis is one of the most amazing drugs ever in terms of creativity.

01:37:50.000 Do you believe that's as true of indica as it is of sativa?

01:37:54.000 Yeah, Indica definitely gives you some pretty wild thoughts.

01:37:59.000 It's really, it perturbs normal consciousness, right?

01:38:02.000 And in that perturbation, if that's a word, is that a word?

01:38:06.000 That's a word, right?

01:38:07.000 In that adjusting of your normal perceptions, that's where these new ideas come in.

01:38:15.000 That's where these new, it's almost like you get a little chance to pop your head off the top of the clouds and look around and go, oh, this is not what I think it is.

01:38:23.000 This is some weird thing.

01:38:25.000 I got really high the other day and I made a post on Instagram about Joe Exotic and Donald Trump and then this thing.

01:38:36.000 And I was saying, here's what's weird.

01:38:39.000 The thing that keeps coming to me when I get high is not...

01:38:44.000 It's the idea that one day things are going to get back to normal.

01:38:48.000 And the idea is that there never really was a normal.

01:38:51.000 That it was just an attractive illusion.

01:38:53.000 And that it's a comforting and attractive illusion.

01:38:56.000 And I used a photo of Joe Exotic in one of Donald Trump's most ridiculous tweets where he was talking about the coronavirus and how he's a huge hit.

01:39:03.000 What is Joe Exotic?

01:39:05.000 Joe Exotic from the new Netflix documentary series called Tiger King, which must be a part of your life.

01:39:13.000 Get on board right away.

01:39:15.000 I don't know anything about it.

01:39:16.000 And then the other one is, look at this.

01:39:18.000 That's Joe Exotic.

01:39:20.000 It's amazing.

01:39:21.000 He's a guy who smokes meth.

01:39:23.000 He's married to two different guys at the same time.

01:39:25.000 They all live together.

01:39:26.000 It's great.

01:39:27.000 I don't want to tell you anymore.

01:39:28.000 Spoiler alert.

01:39:29.000 But, Jamie, go to my Instagram so you can see the Trump tweet that I also included.

01:39:36.000 In this post with this image of Joe Exotic, because these two things together, I was stunned.

01:39:44.000 And Tim Dillon actually had sent me this tweet by Trump.

01:39:49.000 It's the second image of the Joe Exotic.

01:39:51.000 It's like a double post.

01:39:54.000 So if you click on the image, look at that.

01:39:56.000 President Trump is a ratings hit.

01:39:58.000 Since...

01:40:05.000 What am I reading, Joe?

01:40:19.000 This is Donald Trump, the President of the United States, makes a self-congratulatory tweet that his talking about a pandemic virus that could potentially kill as many as 200,000 Americans.

01:40:35.000 Joe, revolution.

01:40:36.000 Revolution, Joe.

01:40:37.000 Look at this.

01:40:37.000 I want to revolt.

01:40:38.000 I can't.

01:40:40.000 I can't.

01:40:41.000 I get your wanting to revolt.

01:40:44.000 I get that.

01:40:44.000 But me, as a high person in the valley, sitting on my back porch while my kids are asleep, looking at this tweet, I'm like, I don't even think there is a normal.

01:40:53.000 I don't think normal's real.

01:40:54.000 I don't think normal's real.

01:40:56.000 I think we've been hoodwinked.

01:40:58.000 Normal's not real.

01:41:00.000 I don't think it is.

01:41:01.000 I don't think it's real.

01:41:02.000 I think it's...

01:41:03.000 That's one of the things that I love about nature.

01:41:06.000 You know, we were watching a video yesterday of an owl eating the head off of a hawk because I was explaining there was sort of a hawk war that went on in my backyard at one point in time.

01:41:17.000 These owls killed these hawks and I would find these headless hawks. 1.00

01:41:21.000 Like, owls are mean motherfuckers, man. 1.00

01:41:23.000 Oh, man. 1.00

01:41:24.000 They're so mean.

01:41:24.000 They look wise and kind, but they are badass.

01:41:28.000 They're so mean.

01:41:28.000 I know.

01:41:29.000 But they eat the hawk's heads. 0.95

01:41:31.000 That's like the way they do it. 1.00

01:41:32.000 And I found this out by Googling, who the fuck eats hawk's heads? 1.00

01:41:35.000 I would find these hawks in the middle of my yard with no fucking head. 1.00

01:41:40.000 I'm like, what is this? 1.00

01:41:41.000 It's great.

01:41:42.000 It's owls, man.

01:41:43.000 They were these badass owls. 0.95

01:41:46.000 That would fuck up these hawks. 0.77

01:41:48.000 By the way, great recommendation from you. 0.98

01:41:50.000 What?

01:41:50.000 Bunny UFC. Bunny UFC? I had never seen rabbits fighting.

01:41:56.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:56.000 They're so mean.

01:41:57.000 Oh, my God.

01:41:58.000 They're so mean.

01:41:58.000 I tried to figure out which of the animals that I want to see fight the most.

01:42:02.000 Yeah.

01:42:02.000 So giraffes are way the hell up there.

01:42:05.000 Oh, yeah.

01:42:05.000 They fight wild.

01:42:06.000 Giraffe battles are the best.

01:42:08.000 Bunny UFC is so funny.

01:42:11.000 They're so mean.

01:42:12.000 It's like kangaroo fighting for sure.

01:42:13.000 Well, we didn't know how mean they were to each other until my daughters got two male bunnies, and we left them in a coop together. 1.00

01:42:20.000 And we're like, oh, well, this is not good.

01:42:22.000 And they grew up together.

01:42:23.000 I mean, these weren't like bunnies that didn't know each other, but they would fight to the death.

01:42:27.000 And they would fight all the time.

01:42:29.000 Their ears were all torn apart.

01:42:30.000 We had to separate them.

01:42:31.000 Yeah, so this is...

01:42:33.000 Yeah, they fight all the time.

01:42:34.000 They're rodents, man. 0.99

01:42:36.000 Now, have you seen penis fencing in flatworms? 0.99

01:42:41.000 No. 0.99

01:42:41.000 No, I have not. 0.99

01:42:43.000 Penis, fencing, and flatworms. 0.99

01:42:45.000 Okay. 0.99

01:42:46.000 Jamie?

01:42:47.000 I learned so much from you about bizarre animal sexual behavior, all the way back to the cuttlefish that pretend to be women.

01:42:53.000 Yeah.

01:42:54.000 That was a good one.

01:42:55.000 That's a really good one.

01:42:56.000 Okay.

01:42:56.000 Because there's a lot of men out there like that in society.

01:42:58.000 So this is penis fencing with flatworms. 0.95

01:43:02.000 So this is like in terms of why do people who like social engineering not like biology? 0.92

01:43:10.000 Flatworms have two different life cycles, a male and a female life cycle. 0.87

01:43:15.000 And they don't know when they encounter each other and romance calls whether or not they will be male or female.

01:43:24.000 And it's decided by a violent contest.

01:43:27.000 So they've got, I believe, two... 0.99

01:43:32.000 Plural of penis. 1.00

01:43:34.000 Peni? 1.00

01:43:35.000 Let's go with peni. 0.82

01:43:38.000 I only want to see one at any given moment. 1.00

01:43:41.000 They have two penises and they attempt to stab each other. 0.99

01:43:48.000 And whoever penetrates the other succeeds in what might be termed traumatic insemination. 0.99

01:43:55.000 And the loser is assigned the feminine gender. 0.75

01:43:59.000 Whew.

01:44:00.000 So the idea is that it's more costly to bear the young than it is to pierce the opponent.

01:44:07.000 So female is given to the loser. 0.99

01:44:12.000 Whoa. 0.99

01:44:13.000 So they just do battle until someone fucks the other one and that person becomes a chick. 1.00

01:44:18.000 Or that thing. 0.98

01:44:20.000 There's a worse species.

01:44:22.000 What?

01:44:23.000 Bedbugs. 0.99

01:44:25.000 Bedbugs have no vaginal opening. 0.68

01:44:28.000 The only way that a female can bear young is if a male attacks her thorax and breaks it open in an act which is definitely called traumatic insemination. 0.86

01:44:41.000 So, you know, you have a situation in which violent rape is the only method by which females can leave young. 0.56

01:44:50.000 So what they do to you when you stay in a hotel is just child's play compared to what they do to each other.

01:44:55.000 I mean, my point is, if you want to talk about eradicating bedbugs with DDT, I'm all for it.

01:44:59.000 They are the feminists' worst nightmare species. 1.00

01:45:06.000 You and I talk about the natural world.

01:45:08.000 Is that what they look like?

01:45:10.000 Well, they blow up like balloons, I think.

01:45:13.000 So if you see one that's flat, it hasn't really gorged.

01:45:17.000 So they're like ticks.

01:45:18.000 Yeah.

01:45:22.000 Anyway, we had them under control, I believe, due to DDT. But on my list of 10 nightmare species, bedbugs and flatworms for the twin traumatic inseminations would be way up at the top.

01:45:39.000 So it's like a needle.

01:45:40.000 So they literally puncture through the thorax with a needle. 0.94

01:45:44.000 Oh, there we go.

01:45:45.000 Oh, Christ.

01:45:47.000 Yeah.

01:45:47.000 Now, these are...

01:45:50.000 If there is a good lord, boy, does he or she have a lot to answer for.

01:45:56.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:45:56.000 What did you do, you fuck? 1.00

01:46:00.000 Why did you make bed bugs? 1.00

01:46:01.000 And why'd you make it like that? 0.97

01:46:03.000 Imagine what kind of natural selection takes place where the only way that you can reproduce is through violent rape.

01:46:09.000 Well, it's interesting.

01:46:10.000 There's a different system, which I think is fascinating, which is there's a conserved quantity In dung beetles, where they have weaponry on their heads in the form of antlers for fighting the males.

01:46:25.000 And it turns out that there's an inverse relationship.

01:46:28.000 So there's some resource that's allocated between the copulatory equipment and the...

01:46:38.000 Weaponry that the dung beetle has.

01:46:43.000 If they have a lot of weaponry...

01:46:44.000 Oh, there goes the Sean Connery.

01:46:45.000 That's good.

01:46:46.000 The eyebrow thing?

01:46:47.000 Yeah, I love it.

01:46:48.000 I've tried it for years and I can't do it.

01:46:49.000 You can't do it?

01:46:50.000 Is that a genetic thing, right?

01:46:51.000 I don't know if it's genetic.

01:46:52.000 I think it is. 0.75

01:46:52.000 I'm just a failure. 0.75

01:46:53.000 Okay.

01:46:55.000 The larger the weaponry, the smaller the copulatory apparatus.

01:46:59.000 Oh, so it's like a monster truck thing.

01:47:00.000 Yeah.

01:47:02.000 If you don't have it going on, you've got to go get yourself a monster truck.

01:47:06.000 Okay.

01:47:08.000 It was like that tiny little gun in Men in Black.

01:47:10.000 Remember that?

01:47:12.000 Anyway, so what happens is that the size of the copulatory apparatus may be the engine of speciation, that when a male's equipment no longer fits the female, that may be the cue that some dung beetles will speciate because they can't reproduce effectively.

01:47:33.000 And we don't know why The conserved quantity would be spread between fighting equipment, which is used only to displace rivals, and the size of the package.

01:47:45.000 When I went on a tour of the Vatican, I had a really great guide.

01:47:49.000 It was really cool.

01:47:50.000 He took my family through this thing, and he was a professor, and he was really happy that I was so curious about things.

01:48:00.000 And I was on an edible.

01:48:03.000 And so we're wandering around billions of dollars of stolen art. 0.99

01:48:08.000 And one of the things I kept saying, I go, why are their penises so small? 0.99

01:48:11.000 Like, what's going on with that? 0.98

01:48:12.000 And he was like, that's a really important question. 0.98

01:48:14.000 And he's like, back then, the thought was that bigger penises were brutish. 0.82

01:48:22.000 And that they were, that these, you know, you got to realize these are people that were fending off barbarians. 0.98

01:48:27.000 And the idea was that their gods would be beautifully proportioned, but they would have these small sort of less dangerous penises. 0.96

01:48:38.000 It's very interesting. 0.98

01:48:39.000 Or peni.

01:48:39.000 Yeah.

01:48:40.000 Yeah.

01:48:40.000 And that they would make them like that on purpose.

01:48:44.000 They were all, they all had little dicks, all of them. 0.99

01:48:47.000 And I'm like, these guys, like, if you looked at these guys, like, just the way they're built, the reality is most of them would have hogs, right? 1.00

01:48:56.000 These are heavily muscled, thick men with a lot of testosterone. 0.99

01:49:02.000 They would have big dicks, most likely. 1.00

01:49:04.000 That's the reason why women find that build attractive, probably, other than the fact that it's going to be the person who'd be more successful at protecting you from said barbarians. 0.99

01:49:14.000 Well, I think that...

01:49:15.000 Is it true that the castrati of Italy were sought after as lovers?

01:49:21.000 They could still perform.

01:49:22.000 Really?

01:49:23.000 Yeah, but then you didn't need to worry about pregnancy.

01:49:26.000 They could get erect when they were castrated? 0.93

01:49:29.000 That doesn't make any sense. 0.95

01:49:30.000 Is that wrong?

01:49:30.000 Yeah, I don't think that's correct.

01:49:31.000 I think they're eunuchs. 1.00

01:49:32.000 I think that's why they would do that to men who would work in castles.

01:49:38.000 They would have eunuchs that would work with the queens because they couldn't perform. 1.00

01:49:42.000 I don't know what operation was performed on the castrati.

01:49:47.000 They would lose all their testosterone.

01:49:49.000 But I believe that there was a way in which they were sought after as lovers. 1.00

01:49:54.000 Maybe they just ate a lot of pussy. 1.00

01:49:55.000 Maybe. 1.00

01:49:56.000 That's probably what it is.

01:49:57.000 What?

01:49:57.000 Just cunnilingus?

01:49:58.000 Yeah.

01:49:59.000 I actually think that they were able to...

01:50:01.000 I'm not sure what operation was done, but I believe that they were able to sexually perform in a conventional way. 0.99

01:50:06.000 Jamie, and if you could find the plural for penis, that would be great. 1.00

01:50:10.000 It's got a peni. 1.00

01:50:11.000 Yeah?

01:50:12.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:50:13.000 Penises just sound so fucking crude. 1.00

01:50:18.000 Dicks is normal. 1.00

01:50:19.000 At least there I know. 0.95

01:50:20.000 Well, dicks is real. 0.98

01:50:21.000 That's the right way to say it. 1.00

01:50:22.000 Cocks. 0.99

01:50:23.000 A lot of cocks. 1.00

01:50:24.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:50:24.000 You don't want to say cockey. 0.96

01:50:27.000 I might start.

01:50:29.000 Do you know the Michael Jackson story?

01:50:32.000 I know some.

01:50:33.000 This is one of the Michael Jackson stories that I was promoting before it actually was confirmed by his doctor.

01:50:40.000 The doctor that wound up killing him and went to jail.

01:50:43.000 I was like, the way that guy sings, because I was aware of Castrati's, I'm like, he sounds like one of them.

01:50:49.000 He sounds like he has this permanent female voice.

01:50:52.000 Well, the doctor that went to jail for sedating him when he wound up dying, Dr. Jackson, whatever the guy's name was, that guy confirmed that Michael Jackson was chemically castrated by his father to preserve his voice.

01:51:07.000 And they did it to him at a young age.

01:51:09.000 Wow.

01:51:09.000 It makes sense.

01:51:11.000 Well, in retrospect, it's like the end of the usual suspects.

01:51:14.000 It 100% makes sense.

01:51:15.000 If you look at the rest of his family, look at Tito or Jermaine, they look like men, right?

01:51:20.000 They're these thick men, like a normal man.

01:51:23.000 And then you look at him, he's incredibly slender.

01:51:26.000 Like, he has no muscle at all.

01:51:28.000 And he moves like he's got this dance style that is like quasi-feminine almost, right?

01:51:37.000 It's like...

01:51:40.000 He's singing like a woman. 1.00

01:51:42.000 Like, it's like, why, why?

01:51:46.000 Tell him that it's human nature.

01:51:48.000 Like, what is that?

01:51:49.000 That's not a male voice, right?

01:51:50.000 And hits incredible notes.

01:51:53.000 Well, the idea was that his father wanted to preserve what got them to the dance.

01:51:58.000 I mean, this is a performing, entertaining family, and he was the number one guy.

01:52:03.000 He was the genius of that family.

01:52:05.000 He was the genius of the family.

01:52:06.000 Yeah.

01:52:07.000 Well, you know what else?

01:52:09.000 Do you know that...

01:52:09.000 Okay, here's a weird one.

01:52:11.000 The rivalry between the Nicholas Brothers and I think the Berry Brothers?

01:52:16.000 Have you ever heard this story?

01:52:18.000 Who's the Berry Brothers?

01:52:20.000 They were two dancing groups.

01:52:23.000 And the Nicholas Brothers were, just in terms of riffing off this, Michael Jackson brought back the Nicholas Brothers.

01:52:30.000 The Nicholas Brothers, if you can find this, were maybe two of the greatest dancers ever.

01:52:38.000 What year was this?

01:52:39.000 They came out of probably like the 1930s and 40s.

01:52:43.000 And like Fred Astaire and Nereev and all these people just thought...

01:52:48.000 These are the guys?

01:52:49.000 Oh, yeah.

01:52:51.000 Oh, okay.

01:52:52.000 I am so...

01:52:56.000 I think that may be Cab Calloway even.

01:52:58.000 Yeah, I believe that is.

01:52:59.000 And just in terms of like the femininity, the elegant nature of these guys, and both of them geniuses, and they could do anything.

01:53:09.000 Yeah, they're incredible.

01:53:10.000 Look how great they dance.

01:53:11.000 My God.

01:53:13.000 Look at, oh my God, the way he's moving his hips back and forth and his legs go sideways.

01:53:18.000 Like, what incredible control.

01:53:20.000 Let me just say how much I love being an American.

01:53:24.000 I love all the stuff that comes out of this country, and we need to get back to being ourselves.

01:53:28.000 What are you talking about?

01:53:29.000 We're being ourselves right now.

01:53:30.000 No, we're not.

01:53:31.000 We're not?

01:53:32.000 No.

01:53:32.000 What are we doing?

01:53:33.000 Well, right now, we're looking...

01:53:35.000 Now, if you check out...

01:53:37.000 Look at this.

01:53:37.000 Castrati were also supposed to be great lovers.

01:53:40.000 They could last long, says Tomasini.

01:53:44.000 To, say that name, Montesquieu?

01:53:47.000 How do you say that?

01:53:48.000 To Montesquieu?

01:53:51.000 They would have inspired...

01:53:54.000 A taste for Gomorrah in people whose taste is the least depraved.

01:53:59.000 What?

01:54:00.000 And when Casanova fell in love with a castrato who conveniently turned out to be a woman in drag, he asked her to dress as a castrato in bed.

01:54:09.000 Okay, I'm done.

01:54:10.000 Check, please.

01:54:11.000 For those women who choose, as Dryden put it...

01:54:16.000 To, in quotes, in soft eunuchs place their bliss and shun the scrubbing of a bearded kiss. 1.00

01:54:25.000 Yeah, they wanted someone who eats a lot of pussy. 1.00

01:54:27.000 Affairs were idolized and safe, but bed-hopping could be risky for the castrati. 1.00

01:54:33.000 One was assassinated by his lover's furious family, and another who wrote to the Pope requesting permission to marry on the basis of that his castration had been ineffective.

01:54:45.000 Received the reply, let him be castrated better.

01:54:49.000 The Pope said, no, you can't get married. 1.00

01:54:52.000 We're going to cut your nuts off. 1.00

01:54:53.000 Better. 1.00

01:54:54.000 We're going to do a better job.

01:54:56.000 All mouth and no trousers, Castrati had more fun than you could think.

01:55:00.000 Hello, Guardian. 1.00

01:55:01.000 That's a great fucking... 0.99

01:55:03.000 Samantha Ellis meets a singer who wishes he'd had the chop. 1.00

01:55:07.000 Oh, great.

01:55:10.000 See, this might just be a story.

01:55:12.000 You know what I mean?

01:55:13.000 The guy says, I regret not having been castrated. 0.98

01:55:15.000 Then go get castrated. 1.00

01:55:16.000 Want to hear something crazy? 0.99

01:55:17.000 But that's one of those things where that might be a story.

01:55:20.000 Like a good way to write something.

01:55:22.000 Maybe.

01:55:23.000 And clickbaity.

01:55:25.000 It's an intriguing.

01:55:25.000 It's a story that's been around for a long time.

01:55:28.000 Here's something you may not know.

01:55:29.000 The last castrato was recorded.

01:55:35.000 There's actually a recording.

01:55:36.000 Oh, we played it on this podcast about a dozen times.

01:55:38.000 Oh, yeah?

01:55:39.000 Yeah, it's pretty gross.

01:55:40.000 He wasn't a talented one.

01:55:42.000 Well, that's not what's gross.

01:55:44.000 What's gross is the thought that this was a child that was taken and castrated and then forced to live this life. 0.99

01:55:51.000 Look, it's absolutely ridiculous. 0.96

01:55:53.000 But getting back to Michael Jackson, I think... 0.84

01:55:55.000 There he is.

01:55:55.000 Is that right?

01:55:56.000 Yeah.

01:55:57.000 Alessandro Moreschi.

01:56:00.000 Moreschi?

01:56:02.000 Moreschi.

01:56:03.000 Alessandro Moreschi.

01:56:05.000 The last castrato.

01:56:07.000 Christ.

01:56:08.000 The complete Vatican recordings.

01:56:10.000 What did they do to that man's mouth while they had him there?

01:56:13.000 So, what I was going to say about the Berry Brothers is the Berry Brothers were a rival team to the Nicholas Brothers.

01:56:18.000 Okay, did we see...

01:56:19.000 Were those guys the Berry Brothers?

01:56:20.000 No, those were the Nicholas Brothers.

01:56:21.000 The Nicholas Brothers...

01:56:22.000 Nobody remembers the Berry Brothers.

01:56:23.000 If anybody remembers anything, they remember the Nicholas Brothers.

01:56:26.000 Okay.

01:56:26.000 But the issue was that the Berry Brothers were...

01:56:29.000 There's the Berry Brothers?

01:56:30.000 Okay, here's the Berry Brothers.

01:56:32.000 That...

01:56:33.000 This is...

01:56:35.000 You'll see that they're much more athletic in a certain sense and much less refined.

01:56:41.000 So doing a lot of cane twirling.

01:56:43.000 Yeah, but if you go to the end of this one, I believe.

01:56:45.000 It's pretty awesome.

01:56:47.000 Look, I mean, there's a scene where they...

01:56:52.000 You see those stairs?

01:56:53.000 Mm-hmm.

01:56:55.000 They're about to do something.

01:56:56.000 Jesus Christ, look at that.

01:56:57.000 Yeah.

01:56:58.000 A little spinning and then dropping into the splits.

01:57:00.000 All right, well, keep on this just for one second.

01:57:02.000 So they're running up the stairs...

01:57:06.000 And then...

01:57:06.000 Oh my god!

01:57:08.000 Oh my god!

01:57:09.000 They jumped off the top of the stairs, which we're talking about a good solid ten feet, and they landed into a split.

01:57:18.000 Alright, now that...

01:57:19.000 That's a nut smasher.

01:57:21.000 Okay.

01:57:22.000 These guys...

01:57:22.000 Look at that.

01:57:23.000 Look at that.

01:57:23.000 Bam!

01:57:24.000 That is insane that they can do that.

01:57:26.000 Three of them.

01:57:26.000 And then they did backflips.

01:57:28.000 Right.

01:57:28.000 Three of them.

01:57:29.000 My god.

01:57:30.000 That's a very impressive feat.

01:57:32.000 That's like parkour, but...

01:57:34.000 You never heard of these guys?

01:57:35.000 With a ball slam.

01:57:36.000 No, but I mean, it's like the 1920s, right?

01:57:39.000 Well, this is going to be later than the 20s.

01:57:40.000 Was it?

01:57:41.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:57:41.000 God damn, that's amazing. 0.99

01:57:42.000 30s, 40s? 1.00

01:57:43.000 Amazing.

01:57:44.000 The way they jumped off the top and landed like that?

01:57:47.000 Have you ever seen the Hell's a Boppin' sequence?

01:57:49.000 No.

01:57:50.000 What's that? 0.96

01:57:51.000 Put in Hell's a Boppin'. 0.92

01:57:52.000 This is just unbelievable.

01:57:53.000 Hell's a Boppin'. 0.98

01:57:54.000 Hell's a Boppin' and then Dance. 1.00

01:58:00.000 Um...

01:58:00.000 Hell's a bopping dance.

01:58:02.000 Hell's a bopping.

01:58:03.000 Yeah.

01:58:04.000 Okay, now go into the middle of it because there's a bunch of set up here.

01:58:07.000 Nope, farther.

01:58:09.000 Okay.

01:58:11.000 Jesus Christ.

01:58:12.000 Oh my God.

01:58:14.000 So this is a guy and a girl and so he throws her over his back.

01:58:19.000 Oh my God.

01:58:20.000 I mean, these people can do anything.

01:58:22.000 Woo! 0.99

01:58:23.000 But the amount of practice and how you would practice something like this, the real thing that would be insane to practice is that jump off the top into the split.

01:58:33.000 Man, it's athleticism, artistry, timing, and, you know, this is also...

01:58:42.000 Wow, that's incredible.

01:58:44.000 Oh my god, it's pro wrestling!

01:58:47.000 My god.

01:58:49.000 I mean...

01:58:50.000 What is the...

01:58:50.000 Well, I wish we could listen to the music, but we'd get...

01:58:52.000 No, no, don't do that.

01:58:54.000 But it just...

01:58:55.000 I want people to...

01:58:57.000 Wow.

01:58:57.000 To be aware of the level of artistry and skill that came out of places like Harlem.

01:59:02.000 It's just all of this is pure American ingenuity.

01:59:05.000 And this is 41. And, you know, these are hard shoes with, like, slippery soles.

01:59:11.000 Oh, my God.

01:59:13.000 What's amazing is that these guys can get any traction to do anything.

01:59:17.000 And the girl just did that to him. 1.00

01:59:19.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:59:20.000 This is the best of the best. 1.00

01:59:22.000 Oh, my God.

01:59:23.000 Right?

01:59:24.000 Jesus Christ.

01:59:25.000 My God!

01:59:26.000 Amazing!

01:59:27.000 You know what I love about this program, Joe, is that I get to take stuff like this and blow it out to people at, like, millions at a time.

01:59:33.000 Oh, well, that's what I love about having you on.

01:59:35.000 I would love to learn something about this.

01:59:38.000 This is amazing.

01:59:39.000 How the f- Oh, my God! 0.99

01:59:40.000 She kicked him in the balls and sent him flying! 1.00

01:59:43.000 Oh, my God! 0.97

01:59:43.000 I'm not showing the video for people on YouTube watching. 0.97

01:59:45.000 You're going to have to Google it yourself, but please do.

01:59:47.000 Yeah, please do.

01:59:47.000 This is insane.

01:59:49.000 And this is 1941. My God.

01:59:53.000 Right, and if you want to think about partnerships between men and women and the way in power is passed back and forth between people of equal ability, it's just astounding.

02:00:02.000 Well, yeah, I mean, there's no one person who is the head of this.

02:00:07.000 But, like, he's throwing her around the room and then she's throwing him around the room.

02:00:11.000 Oh, my God, that's amazing.

02:00:12.000 Oh, they did it.

02:00:13.000 Colorized it.

02:00:14.000 Wow.

02:00:16.000 Wow, it looks so much better.

02:00:16.000 Oh, my God, that's incredible that they can do that.

02:00:20.000 Wow, that's one of the more amazing things about computer technology, like the footage that they did with World War I, where they took some of that footage and colorized it and smoothed it out and used computers to sort of fill in the choppiness of it.

02:00:34.000 Have you seen my friend?

02:00:36.000 You should have Leisha Lee on the show. 1.00

02:00:38.000 Rosebud AI is going to make models.

02:00:49.000 Yeah.

02:01:15.000 What is her name again?

02:01:18.000 Leisha Lee.

02:01:19.000 Yeah, she's a PhD in like math or statistics from Berkeley.

02:01:23.000 And again, one of these people who can do absolutely anything, art, dance, programming, high-level theory.

02:01:30.000 And so her company is Rosebud AI. Is this her?

02:01:34.000 No.

02:01:35.000 Okay.

02:01:38.000 She's also an actress.

02:01:41.000 Wonder Woman.

02:01:42.000 Jesus, one of them, huh?

02:01:43.000 Yep.

02:01:44.000 One of them confusing people.

02:01:45.000 One of them confusing people.

02:01:47.000 But it's unclear whether models will still have a job.

02:01:52.000 They won't.

02:01:52.000 Good.

02:01:53.000 Go to work, skinny bitch. 1.00

02:01:57.000 Become something more interesting than just a hanger. 1.00

02:02:01.000 How about that?

02:02:03.000 What other episodes of my podcast?

02:02:09.000 Because I launched it off of this one.

02:02:12.000 Yes.

02:02:12.000 I listened to Werner Herzog.

02:02:13.000 Yeah.

02:02:14.000 I thought that was interesting.

02:02:14.000 Although he's a little bit self-congratulatory, which is a little shocking.

02:02:17.000 But he is the most interesting man in the universe.

02:02:19.000 He's a very interesting guy.

02:02:20.000 He's also been in some really terrible movies.

02:02:22.000 Like he was in that Jack Reacher movie with Tom Cruise.

02:02:24.000 The best part about that movie is that he drives a Chevelle.

02:02:28.000 1970s Chevelle.

02:02:29.000 Don't know about this.

02:02:30.000 You don't know about 70s Chevelles?

02:02:31.000 Did you listen to the Brad Epp?

02:02:34.000 Brett episode?

02:02:35.000 Brett Weinstein.

02:02:37.000 Oh, your brother.

02:02:37.000 No, I did not listen to that one.

02:02:38.000 Okay.

02:02:39.000 I've only listened to five or six.

02:02:44.000 If you listen to episode 19, which is the Brett episode, I think that's been the most important one except for the one released today.

02:02:57.000 That sounds like you're gearing me up for the one released today.

02:02:59.000 Well, I would start with the Brett one.

02:03:02.000 And what's so important about the Brett one?

02:03:03.000 The Brett one is a story about his prediction that all the laboratory mice that we use from the major supplier, which is the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, may have been compromised by their breeding protocols,

02:03:19.000 which allowed the telomeres to radically elongate. 0.80

02:03:23.000 And that we thought that these mice were representative of all mice and that they had radically elongated telomeres at the end of their chromosomes, which appear to mediate the level of mitosis that can happen during histological repair.

02:03:37.000 So if you imagine that your cells can divide a certain number of times, if there isn't a counter That stops the number of divisions.

02:03:46.000 Everything can become tumorous.

02:03:48.000 And since you have like 30 trillion or 100 trillion cells in your body, it means every cell almost can kill you.

02:03:55.000 So it appears that the reason we may die from senescence, that is aging, is that that's our anti-cancer mechanism.

02:04:04.000 So if you eliminate like infectious disease, like viruses and insult from being hit by a car, The two things that you have in the end is either you die from immortality, which is cancer, where cells can divide an infinite number of times,

02:04:20.000 or you die from the recursion limit, which is how many times the cell can divide, called in biology the Hayflick limit.

02:04:28.000 And Brett predicted from first principles that what we thought about mice, which is that they have radically elongated telomeres, was only true for laboratory animals because all the laboratory animals in which we test things like drugs have been broken.

02:04:41.000 They've been broken because of selective breeding?

02:04:44.000 Yep, because the breeding rotations privileged much younger mice and removed all sort of threats from the environment.

02:04:53.000 And so because telomeres are not protein coding, they're sequences of nucleotides that repeat as a counter rather than coding for a translation in the ribosome into amino acid sequences.

02:05:07.000 What you have is that the body can mutate, if you will, to use the Jackson Laboratories concept of this, very rapidly.

02:05:18.000 Because it's not building something structural.

02:05:20.000 It's just a question of, do we have 17 on the end or 170 on the end?

02:05:25.000 Because it's acting, nucleic acid has multiple ways in which it can participate in regulating the body's responses.

02:05:35.000 So in fact, the breeding protocols constituted a novel system of selective pressures that destroyed the efficacy of all of our laboratory animals, potentially. 0.99

02:05:45.000 Holy shit. 0.90

02:05:46.000 So he predicted from first principles, he said, I bet if you test wild type mice rather than laboratory mice, you'll find that their telomeres are not long as you believe. 0.99

02:05:56.000 And this was actually carried out by Carol Greider, who did not acknowledge the prediction.

02:06:03.000 She didn't acknowledge the prediction.

02:06:04.000 You should listen to the show.

02:06:05.000 Why did she not acknowledge the prediction?

02:06:07.000 You should listen to the show.

02:06:07.000 Okay.

02:06:08.000 Okay.

02:06:09.000 No, because this is serious business.

02:06:11.000 It's complicated.

02:06:12.000 And it's a Nobel laureate on the other side of this.

02:06:14.000 So we're taking some risk over there at the portal.

02:06:17.000 That's really interesting.

02:06:18.000 So the consequences of this could be grave.

02:06:23.000 It could be that so much of the studies that are predicated on these mice tests, they're useless.

02:06:31.000 Well, I've called up the Jackson Laboratory and asked them, have you had any changes in your breeding protocol?

02:06:36.000 They said, we don't even count the number of telomere length.

02:06:41.000 And I said, do you have a history of when you've changed the breeding protocols?

02:06:44.000 Are you aware of these articles?

02:06:46.000 And she said, like, what?

02:06:47.000 I said, you know, these articles of Carol Greider.

02:06:50.000 And they said, how do you spell glider?

02:06:51.000 Like the plane?

02:06:52.000 I said, Greider, like the Nobel laureate.

02:06:56.000 And...

02:06:57.000 How do you spell that?

02:06:58.000 G-R-E-I-D-E-R. And... 0.98

02:07:05.000 So, and then they said to me, well, we don't remember if we've changed the protocols.

02:07:09.000 I said, you're producing laboratory animals.

02:07:12.000 I would imagine you would have a documented history of every change in the time series of how these animals were prepared.

02:07:20.000 Well, I don't know if there's anyone around from that time.

02:07:23.000 It's like, are you kidding?

02:07:27.000 Were you absent the day they taught science?

02:07:30.000 Who are you?

02:07:34.000 You know, this is like a single point of failure, if true.

02:07:37.000 I can't even, we've been at, for 20 years, we've been trying to get an answer.

02:07:41.000 20 years?

02:07:43.000 No one will break the story.

02:07:44.000 I mean, this episode, which is almost impossible to listen to, because at the beginning of the episode, I'm absolutely insufferable to Brett, because he won't tell the story.

02:07:53.000 He's afraid to tell his own life story.

02:07:56.000 Why won't he tell the story?

02:07:59.000 Because in academics, the idea of some punk kid alleging that they predicted in a telephone call to a Nobel laureate that if they would test wild-type mice, the telomeres would be radically shorter than the elongated telomeres of the laboratory tests.

02:08:19.000 And then the person refuses to acknowledge That such a prediction was made, even though we have emails from the lab that— Trevor Burrus So she refuses to acknowledge it or she doesn't acknowledge it?

02:08:32.000 I cannot find a single—I've been over the literature.

02:08:35.000 There is no mention anywhere of—and I live this with Brett in real time, so I know the events were happening.

02:08:44.000 We have communications with that lab since.

02:08:51.000 I cannot find any acknowledgement from the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory that this interaction ever took place.

02:09:00.000 And that because he called and wrote and did not write an email, he did not have a paper trail of that prediction.

02:09:07.000 Now there's consequential emails that show the interaction between the labs.

02:09:14.000 But how many times have you ever heard anyone predict a molecular result from first principles in evolutionary theory?

02:09:22.000 This is what Brett was supposed to be famous for.

02:09:24.000 And then, you know, he became like this obscure professor at some ridiculous college and then this thing happened to him.

02:09:32.000 But that's not his origin story.

02:09:33.000 His origin story is that he is the badass of biology So what,

02:09:57.000 if anything, has been done since this information has gotten out?

02:10:01.000 The world went crazy for the episode and there was silence everywhere inside of what I've called the gated institutional narrative.

02:10:08.000 Because to acknowledge it, they really have to throw out how much research?

02:10:13.000 We don't know.

02:10:14.000 I don't know.

02:10:15.000 But it puts the question out how much research is compromised by the laboratory breeding protocols and breeding rotations from a single point of failure at the Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor, Maine.

02:10:29.000 Wow.

02:10:31.000 Episode 19. Oh, get on it.

02:10:34.000 And you will hear me in a way where you will just say, Eric is the biggest dick I've ever heard in my life. 0.99

02:10:40.000 But it's all to push Brett to actually talk. 0.99

02:10:44.000 You should have him back on the show to talk about it.

02:10:46.000 It's killing.

02:10:46.000 I would love to.

02:10:47.000 Yeah.

02:10:47.000 So he just wants to...

02:10:50.000 He kind of wants to soft dance it.

02:10:52.000 Is that what it is?

02:10:53.000 He's just wrong.

02:10:54.000 I mean, here's the problem.

02:10:55.000 There's a point after which I'm not Mr. Nice Guy and I'm just like adamant.

02:11:00.000 Brett is simply wrong.

02:11:02.000 It's a result and a story that needs to be told.

02:11:05.000 If there is another side of the story, we need to hear the other side of the story.

02:11:10.000 And my goal is to have Carol Greider say, you know what?

02:11:14.000 This interaction did happen and I probably could have handled this better because she has work that she's done, which is beyond question, some of the most important work that has nothing to do with anything Brett has done.

02:11:26.000 But it does not give that laboratory the scientific right to deny the existence of this interaction, the importance of the interaction.

02:11:37.000 And because there are potential downstream consequences in pharmaceuticals, we need to have an answer, and every answer is interesting.

02:11:44.000 If the laboratory mice having radically elongated telomeres is not a problem in some way, that's fascinating.

02:11:52.000 How could you have an animal that has this huge adaptation to the laboratory not affect things?

02:12:00.000 That would be interesting.

02:12:01.000 If it does affect things, that's fascinating.

02:12:03.000 Well, especially if you're If you're running tests on it that have anything to do with telomere length.

02:12:08.000 Right.

02:12:09.000 Well, no, but if it doesn't have to do, like for example, let's say you have a really toxic substance, right?

02:12:15.000 And it causes a lot of cell death that requires histological repair.

02:12:20.000 Well, if you have huge long telomeres, you're going to have an ability to metabolize that toxicity much better.

02:12:28.000 Right.

02:12:29.000 You'll be able to take the insult that comes from this.

02:12:32.000 And so these mice are probably preternaturally disposed towards radical histological repair.

02:12:38.000 That's why they remain youthful and young.

02:12:40.000 And if you test something that might be, you know, if you're doing toxicology studies, it could be that the telomeres, even though you're not testing the telomeres, What you're actually doing is picking up that these broken mice are like the world champs of repair, but they suck at cancer.

02:12:55.000 They all die of cancer.

02:12:56.000 All of them?

02:12:57.000 Yeah, almost.

02:12:58.000 Essentially, all the mice with radically elongated telomeres let go long enough, all die of cancer.

02:13:04.000 Because they're tricked out for one special thing, which is...

02:13:09.000 Recovery.

02:13:10.000 Yeah, we are the best at repair.

02:13:12.000 Oh.

02:13:13.000 So think about it as the theory of death and clear away all of the noise.

02:13:18.000 There are two ways that nature can't figure out and escape from.

02:13:21.000 Either you die of immortality, which is that all your cells want to live forever, and that's a huge danger.

02:13:31.000 Or we call it a resource leak in computers.

02:13:34.000 Or they die because the only thing nature can figure out to do is to say you only get a finite number of cell divisions up front.

02:13:43.000 Now, there's some adjustments to the theory, but if you look at the moles on my face, which people love to comment on in the comment section, they probably started as a runaway replicative process that arrested at the border of the mole in order to keep it from killing me.

02:14:04.000 So we have cells that go rogue all the time.

02:14:07.000 But then what happens is that there's some means of making sure that the process doesn't take down the entire organism.

02:14:15.000 But think about 30 trillion assassins as the cells in your body, all of which might kill you at any moment.

02:14:20.000 It's like terrifying.

02:14:22.000 And today's podcast.

02:14:25.000 Today's podcast, so first of all, you can reach it now.

02:14:30.000 I finally got a website, which is ericweinstein.org.

02:14:35.000 And I told you that we have to leave this planet and that...

02:14:40.000 It's hard not to laugh.

02:14:44.000 Sorry, it's just hard not to laugh.

02:14:46.000 But you're serious.

02:14:47.000 We have to leave this planet.

02:14:48.000 We have to leave this planet.

02:14:49.000 Why?

02:14:49.000 Why do we have to leave this planet?

02:14:52.000 Because we can't all be...

02:14:54.000 This planet has the best beaches. 0.98

02:14:56.000 This planet also has China, Russia, Iran, and the United States under ridiculous leadership.

02:15:01.000 There's lots of reasons why we have to leave this planet. 0.72

02:15:03.000 We're not good stewards.

02:15:04.000 We're not wise enough to stay on this planet.

02:15:06.000 We're too powerful.

02:15:07.000 We went through this.

02:15:07.000 And by the way, you pointed out this quote, which is, we are now gods but for the wisdom.

02:15:12.000 And that became a meme.

02:15:13.000 So that was very interesting.

02:15:17.000 I gave these lectures, I think, in 2013. It's one of the best quotes ever, isn't it?

02:15:25.000 I don't know.

02:15:27.000 Who originated that quote?

02:15:30.000 That was me.

02:15:32.000 That was you?

02:15:32.000 Yeah.

02:15:33.000 When did you say it?

02:15:33.000 On your program.

02:15:34.000 What day?

02:15:36.000 Which one?

02:15:36.000 Do you remember which one?

02:15:37.000 You've probably turned into a clip.

02:15:39.000 I'm trying to think about...

02:15:40.000 It just came off my tongue and you...

02:15:42.000 It's one of those ones where I'll drive down the street and it'll pop in my head.

02:15:47.000 You're like the nicest person.

02:15:48.000 No, no.

02:15:49.000 No, it's a fantastic quote, but it's so right.

02:15:53.000 It's like every now and then someone can get the whole thing in a sentence.

02:15:57.000 We're now gods, but for the wisdom.

02:16:01.000 So that's why we have to get off this planet and diversify because too many people have godlike powers.

02:16:08.000 Like Donald Trump commands a tremendous amount of godlike power thanks to our physics community.

02:16:13.000 Well, his ratings.

02:16:14.000 See how high they are?

02:16:18.000 It's so hard to stay on focus.

02:16:20.000 Sorry.

02:16:21.000 Okay.

02:16:22.000 So there's too much godlike power.

02:16:25.000 Right.

02:16:26.000 So the best hope that I can come up with, and it's a slim one, is that if we could figure out what goes beyond Einstein's theory, the Einsteinian speed limit might be bendable or breakable because we would be in a framework that was larger than Einstein's.

02:16:42.000 People often interpret this as what they call FTL or faster than light travel.

02:16:46.000 But that's not what I mean necessarily.

02:16:48.000 What I mean is that the underlying source code gives us opportunities that we don't normally have.

02:16:54.000 So...

02:16:55.000 Seven years ago, I tried giving these lectures at Oxford, which is probably the university that is spiritually closest to what I care about, because they care about geometry and physics, and they enter a relationship.

02:17:07.000 They've kept the faith with that tradition through people like Roger Penrose and Michael Atiyah.

02:17:15.000 And I released this theory of geometric unity, or rather I released the video of the lecture that introduces this theory.

02:17:25.000 So this was the first time since 1980 And it's the video of you giving this discussion.

02:17:50.000 Yeah.

02:17:50.000 So it's introduced by Professor Marcus de Sotoy, who has Richard Dawkins' old job as the Simone Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

02:17:59.000 And he met me in a bar, and he got me a little drunk, and he said, okay, what are you really working on?

02:18:05.000 And I told him.

02:18:06.000 And at first it sounded crazy, and then he started thinking about it.

02:18:10.000 And he asked me more questions and he brought me over to Oxford.

02:18:14.000 He got me an appointment, had me talk to their experts.

02:18:16.000 And then he decided that he wanted me to give these what he called special Simone lectures.

02:18:21.000 And they are an attempt to go beyond Einstein to look for a unified theory of physics between the two major branches that have resisted unification.

02:18:32.000 Now, that's usually...

02:18:35.000 We're good to go.

02:18:45.000 It's a political program that comes out of what would have been the quantum field theory community before it became the string theory community.

02:18:51.000 The idea is we have to take Einstein and make him submit to the will of Bohr.

02:18:56.000 And I don't think it's exactly like that.

02:18:59.000 I think they got it wildly wrong and they synchronized themselves and sort of took the field off the cliff and they weren't able to ship a product they couldn't deliver on any of this promise.

02:19:09.000 And so when I saw that they were about to go off a cliff, I switched fields as an undergraduate into mathematics and used mathematics as a stalking horse to study the same sort of underlying structures but not to get swept up in the politics of physics.

02:19:24.000 And I had this theory, which I can now talk about for the first time in like 37 years or whatever it is.

02:19:31.000 And like today is the first day that I'm sort of free because I've kept this to myself.

02:19:36.000 So if you want to ask me any question about geometric unity...

02:19:39.000 But why?

02:19:39.000 Why did you keep this to yourself?

02:19:41.000 Because I don't trust these people.

02:19:42.000 You don't trust these people in the same...

02:19:45.000 Like I know there was some people that have written some articles.

02:19:48.000 Wasn't it Sean Carroll's wife?

02:19:48.000 It doesn't matter.

02:19:50.000 It's not them.

02:19:51.000 It's an entire system that believes in peer review.

02:19:54.000 It believes in forced citations.

02:19:55.000 You have to be at a university.

02:19:56.000 You have to get an endorsement to use...

02:19:58.000 They're a pre-print server.

02:20:01.000 It's too few resources, too many sharp elbows.

02:20:04.000 Do you think that there's a logic to that method?

02:20:08.000 No, I think...

02:20:09.000 To preserve it from charlatans and from crackpots that are...

02:20:13.000 Yeah, you have to do that.

02:20:13.000 Yeah.

02:20:14.000 That just want to publish stories.

02:20:15.000 Yep.

02:20:16.000 So this way you have to be sponsored.

02:20:17.000 Makes sense, right?

02:20:18.000 Yes, but whatever I'm doing, whatever mistakes I'm making...

02:20:23.000 Assume I'm wrong about this theory, which is fine.

02:20:28.000 I'll find out that I'm wrong.

02:20:30.000 Give me the layman's version of the theory.

02:20:32.000 All right.

02:20:32.000 First time ever.

02:20:33.000 Yeah.

02:20:38.000 Let's start off with Escher's drawing hands.

02:20:41.000 So, Jamie, do you have a picture for that?

02:20:44.000 The key problem that we have in a fundamental theory that people don't think about is not why is there something rather than nothing.

02:20:52.000 I don't think we can answer that.

02:20:54.000 It's why is there so much that is rich out of almost nothing?

02:21:01.000 And so this issue shows that if you had a piece of paper, could you will into being something The hands holding pens using ink to draw each other, right?

02:21:14.000 That problem is akin to the problem that we face in a fundamental theory.

02:21:19.000 If you had the canvas, how would the canvas bring all of the richness that you see around you into being?

02:21:26.000 And what I did was I said, okay, we have to go below Einstein.

02:21:30.000 So we have four degrees of freedom, but they're not yet space and time.

02:21:34.000 It's proto-spacetime, but before.

02:21:37.000 And then I said, okay, those four degrees of freedom are like the stands in a stadium.

02:21:45.000 And the stands somehow need to build the pitch.

02:21:50.000 And the pitch is a 14-dimensional space.

02:21:53.000 So let's imagine that you had...

02:21:58.000 Okay, we've got four objects here, right?

02:22:04.000 So the four degrees of freedom correspond to the four objects.

02:22:06.000 Then we need a ruler to measure how much of each of these four objects we have.

02:22:11.000 So that would be four additional variables.

02:22:14.000 And then you have angles, because length and angle is what Einstein gave us in space-time.

02:22:18.000 So the angles between any two objects are the same as the reverse of the angle.

02:22:22.000 So then you can count it up and there are six angles to be had.

02:22:25.000 So there's four degrees of freedom, plus four rulers, plus six protractors, which is 14. So there's a 14-dimensional auxiliary space.

02:22:35.000 And in my estimation, you and I are in some ways potentially having this conversation in a 14-dimensional world that we perceive back in the stands rather than on the pitch as a four-dimensional conversation.

02:22:49.000 That is, we are in a three-dimensional room going forward in time.

02:22:52.000 So I've called this the Observerse.

02:22:55.000 And the Observerse is two spaces rather than Einstein's one space.

02:23:00.000 Right.

02:23:00.000 Can I stop you right there?

02:23:01.000 Sure.

02:23:02.000 Why 14 dimensions?

02:23:04.000 Because I'm saying that the fields, that is the stuff, is dancing not mostly on the four dimensions that we think we perceive, but it's also dancing on the rulers and the protractors.

02:23:18.000 So in other words, if I have X, Y, and Z, I need rulers in the X direction, the Y direction, the Z to measure things, and I need a watch, which would be like a ruler in the time direction.

02:23:29.000 So those four rulers are in fact in play as well.

02:23:33.000 And the protractors, because like space-time is four degrees of freedom plus rulers and protractors, I'm saying work over the space of all rulers and all protractors as part of where these particles and fields can dance.

02:23:48.000 So the rulers and the protractors are part of the system, not just a choice of particular rulers and particular protractors.

02:23:55.000 So by choosing particular rulers and particular protractors, Einstein is grabbing a tiny filament of the space of all possible rulers and protractors.

02:24:06.000 So in effect, spacetime is recovered as the act of the observer contemplating itself.

02:24:12.000 It's a little bit poetic, but I mean that the choice of a spacetime metric inside of the space of all metrics It's a section of a 14-dimensional bundle over a four-dimensional space.

02:24:23.000 Now, that's the first sort of mind-bending weird thing is that this is not happening in one place.

02:24:29.000 It's happening in two places.

02:24:30.000 In X and in Y, the stands and the pitch.

02:24:34.000 There are things that are happening in the stands and there are things that are happening in the pitch.

02:24:38.000 So you know when a guy is trying to make a free throw and everybody is waving their giant noodles trying to get him to miss?

02:24:44.000 There's an interaction between what's happening in the stands and what's happening on the floor.

02:24:49.000 And the Obserververse is the bundling of two spaces and saying, hey, you're confused as to what's going on here.

02:24:58.000 Some fields are happening in the stands, some fields are happening on the floor, and everything feels as if it's happening in the stands because that's where you're sitting in some weird way.

02:25:07.000 Then you've got this really crazy stuff, which I think one aspect of it is everybody in theoretical physics is looking to figure out whether there are three or more generations that is copies of matter.

02:25:21.000 Everything in this room is generation one.

02:25:23.000 It's all made up of up quarks, down quarks and electrons.

02:25:26.000 So that up quarks and down quarks give you protons and neutrons and electrons give you the sort of interesting personality of the various chemical elements.

02:25:35.000 There are also neutrinos, but they're streaming through us, so I'm not going to count them.

02:25:39.000 And that's all generation one of matter. 0.89

02:25:42.000 So everything in that, think of that as like plastic Lego.

02:25:45.000 Then there's another Lego set made out of wood.

02:25:48.000 And then there's another Lego set made out of lead.

02:25:52.000 And we don't see those other two Lego sets, except if we're doing very energetic experiments.

02:25:58.000 So there were three copies of matter, and everybody was trying to figure out three or more, and I thought maybe it's two or fewer.

02:26:05.000 And so one of the aspects of this theory is that the third generation of matter is an imposter.

02:26:10.000 I think?

02:26:28.000 Which is not prohibited, but has never been seen as a fundamental.

02:26:32.000 So it makes predictions for the particle properties of new spin-half and new spin-three-half particles.

02:26:39.000 It attempts to say that there are sectors of matter that I think decoupled, that the universe is not in fact left-right asymmetric, which would be called chirality.

02:26:50.000 And if you think about the weak force, so if you have a neutron on a table, it'll decay in I think something like 17 minutes on average, half-life.

02:27:00.000 When it decays, there's an asymmetry in that decay called beta decay.

02:27:05.000 And that was found by a woman, bring up Madame Wu from Columbia and the Cobalt-60 experiment. 0.99

02:27:13.000 So in the 50s, this gal, Madame Wu, Who should have won a Nobel Prize, discovered that when cobalt-60 decays through beta decay, the electrons come spin out one side and not the other, meaning that the universe is like Marilyn Monroe or Cindy Crawford having a birthmark that lets you tell the left from the right.

02:27:35.000 So this is like the ultimate experimental badass who never got recognized fully.

02:27:41.000 And she did an experiment based on work of Yang and Li That for the first time showed that the universe had a preference of one of its left over its right, if you will.

02:27:52.000 I don't believe that preference is fundamental.

02:27:54.000 I believe that there's another copy of matter that...

02:27:59.000 So the analogy I give is that if you think...

02:28:01.000 If you look at your three fingers in the center of your hand, your middle finger, which is my favorite, is obviously symmetrical about itself.

02:28:09.000 Your digit ratio two and four is pretty close, but is determined by the amount of testosterone you're exposed to in utero.

02:28:15.000 I think?

02:28:36.000 So when you place your fingertips together, you see that if you didn't know, if you were like Oliver Sacks out, and you could only see part of your body, you'd think about, oh, the world is asymmetric.

02:28:47.000 Well, my belief is that in weak gravitational situations, this other matter decouples.

02:28:52.000 So you only see one hand or the other, and we're all in one-handedness.

02:28:58.000 So what I'm starting to do is that I'm terrified Of talking about this stuff.

02:29:06.000 I don't have the right credentials, not a physicist.

02:29:08.000 I've been out of this game for forever, so I often say the wrong things and break rules and who knows what.

02:29:15.000 And I haven't really talked about it.

02:29:17.000 This is like really a very lone...

02:29:19.000 I mean, I've been completely alone on this project all my life.

02:29:23.000 What do you think the end result of this project potentially could be?

02:29:28.000 Because you're saying we could get off this planet.

02:29:31.000 What are you talking about in terms of the actual implementation of this theory of yours?

02:29:37.000 So, Jamie, if you could bring up my answer to the final edge question, which is what is the last question?

02:29:44.000 John Brockman asked when the final year that he conducted the annual edge question.

02:29:48.000 And that is the annual edge question?

02:29:50.000 Yes.

02:29:51.000 He would ask like 200 people, many of them physicists or biologists or mathematicians.

02:29:56.000 He would ask a question and they'd write an essay.

02:29:58.000 And then every year he'd publish it as a book.

02:30:00.000 And so I did that for 10 years.

02:30:02.000 Finally got tired of it.

02:30:04.000 And he said, okay, this is my final year.

02:30:06.000 We've exhausted this.

02:30:07.000 What is the last question?

02:30:09.000 So this is the question that I asked.

02:30:11.000 Does something unprecedented happen when we finally learn our own source code?

02:30:18.000 Now, nobody picked up on this, but that's what my concern is, which is what happens when the universe finally contemplates itself?

02:30:27.000 When we are the first, like, we're always worried about the AI becoming self-aware, a la Skynet.

02:30:33.000 Okay, we are the AI, and we're about to become self-aware if we can figure out what our own source code is.

02:30:42.000 So we are Skynet.

02:30:43.000 Okay.

02:30:44.000 So you're talking about the source code of reality itself.

02:30:48.000 Yep.

02:30:49.000 And that our limited perceptions of reality are giving us a distorted view of what the landscape actually is.

02:30:57.000 I'm trying to make sure...

02:30:58.000 I was somewhat holding this back because I'm afraid of what it unlocks. 0.99

02:31:03.000 And now that I know that we're willing to elect Donald Trump, not store masks, play footsie with China, be Putin's bitch, all of this stuff... 1.00

02:31:15.000 To hell with this. 0.99

02:31:16.000 We're going to mismanage this planet into Armageddon if we don't get some grown-ups into the room.

02:31:21.000 And so I don't know that I'm a grown-up, but I'm willing to vie for leadership by putting something up, having it investigated and seeing where it goes.

02:31:30.000 What is your number one fear about this source code being, for lack of a better term, mastered?

02:31:37.000 Well, the last time we gained some serious insight into the way nuclei worked, that with a little bit of geometry from Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller gave us the namesake of the bikini.

02:31:56.000 That was a terrifying moment.

02:31:58.000 Everything changed in 1954?

02:32:02.000 The namesake of the Bikini?

02:32:04.000 Yeah, Bikini Atoll was an island in the Pacific where we blew up a hydrogen device.

02:32:10.000 Is that those insane images where you can see the water going a mile high into the sky?

02:32:16.000 Gorgeous.

02:32:17.000 Yeah, is that what that is?

02:32:18.000 Yeah.

02:32:19.000 But they did that a lot, right?

02:32:20.000 Well, they did it for a period of time.

02:32:22.000 And so to your question, what if...

02:32:26.000 So it's still expensive to create fusion devices.

02:32:29.000 So we don't know of any individuals who own the ability to create fusion devices.

02:32:35.000 If you recall, at some point, somebody made a functioning nuclear reactor out of discarded smoke detectors.

02:32:45.000 Really?

02:32:45.000 Got like 500 smoke detectors, took out the radioactive element, created a reactor.

02:32:50.000 Really?

02:32:50.000 I think so.

02:32:51.000 Probably a kid, right?

02:32:52.000 Yeah.

02:32:53.000 Probably a kid who couldn't get into Harvard.

02:32:57.000 So we have a situation in which we don't know when ordinary humans will gain limitless destructive power.

02:33:05.000 Try to imagine the Columbine kids weaponizing viruses or something like that.

02:33:11.000 So one of the great dangers is that great power, I can't tell what the power would be if the theory is correct.

02:33:20.000 It might give us the ability to escape.

02:33:23.000 Now when you say escape though, why do we have to escape?

02:33:26.000 This is what I'm always so confused about. 0.82

02:33:30.000 Because even when Elon talks about going to Mars, Mars sucks. 1.00

02:33:35.000 Mars sucks. 0.99

02:33:36.000 Can't you fix here? 0.99

02:33:38.000 Wouldn't that be the best approach?

02:33:39.000 Well, you and I agree on that.

02:33:41.000 Yeah.

02:33:41.000 What we don't agree on, I think, is that I'm convinced that we don't have the ability to steward this place.

02:33:48.000 Why?

02:33:50.000 Don't you think we're better at it now than we were a thousand years ago?

02:33:53.000 No, no, no, no.

02:33:54.000 No?

02:33:55.000 So Genghis Khan was doing a better job?

02:33:58.000 Genghis Khan was doing a better job because he didn't have limitless power.

02:34:04.000 Just try to imagine a full-on nuclear interchange.

02:34:07.000 And then we're having this conversation afterwards.

02:34:10.000 So you're concerned that nuclear war is not just possible but inevitable?

02:34:18.000 It's certainly inevitable given a long enough time series because all these weapons simply will become cheaper.

02:34:26.000 There's no countermeasure.

02:34:28.000 It's too easy to destroy things relative to building them.

02:34:31.000 Do you think that when we're looking at the failure of leadership on the scale that we're seeing play out because of this pandemic, that this is indicative of how it would go no matter what went wrong?

02:34:42.000 Yes.

02:34:43.000 Yeah.

02:34:44.000 If this was an issue of forest fires, if it was an issue of climate destruction, if this was an issue- Volcanoes, hurricanes, nuclear war, same thing.

02:34:54.000 Same thing.

02:34:56.000 Here's a weird one.

02:34:57.000 Look at the history, Jamie, of Vesuvius eruptions by year since the 1800s.

02:35:05.000 My guess is that Wikipedia would probably have a list- And the last one was in 1944, 45, during World War II, grounded a bunch of planes.

02:35:15.000 And then Vesuvius stops erupting.

02:35:18.000 Like, we're wildly overdue for a Vesuvius eruption.

02:35:23.000 And then when Ikefelikul erupted in Iceland, like, we hadn't realized that the era of jet travel in the developed world had happened during an incredibly quiet period of volcanic activity.

02:35:37.000 So did we build any kind of volcanic sensitivity into these planes?

02:35:42.000 No, we just grounded the fleet.

02:35:46.000 Right?

02:35:46.000 And there's a volcano not so far from Ikefelikul called Ketla.

02:35:52.000 Makes Ikefelikul look like a child's play. 0.98

02:35:57.000 So you have to look at the Big Nap as the greatest danger To all of us.

02:36:04.000 And this point about being Jewish is that, you know, to be really Jewish, Ben Shapiro makes a point which is not very popular, which is a lot of people call themselves Jews aren't actually Jews.

02:36:16.000 They're really Jews on the way out. 1.00

02:36:19.000 People who can't figure out why they're keeping these traditions up, they sort of like to go three days a year, mumble a few words.

02:36:25.000 There's something intrinsically Jewish about wanting gold bars someplace where you can grab them, you know, knowing where the exits are on a building.

02:36:35.000 Like, you have to be prepared because the problem of anti-Semitism to leave at a moment's notice.

02:36:42.000 And Jews have always lived like this. 1.00

02:36:43.000 And many of us have forgotten because we've gotten soft in a world with, you know, knock wood, anti-Semitism, while prevalent, has been under control in the U.S. for a long time.

02:36:55.000 And I think we've weirdly become denatured Because we haven't been living with open antisemitism.

02:37:03.000 You see it crop up in the comments section of every video.

02:37:06.000 But it's incredibly important to stay in a state of readiness.

02:37:12.000 And I've tried to keep that story about Passover and the exodus into Israel from what Jews call Mitzrayim, which means the narrow places, or Egypt.

02:37:23.000 So my contention is the Jews had a great run In Egypt.

02:37:29.000 And we are all the Jews and earth is Mitzrayim.

02:37:35.000 And it's time to go.

02:37:37.000 Where are we going?

02:37:39.000 We don't know that we can go anywhere.

02:37:41.000 This is a recapitulation of our previous conversation.

02:37:44.000 We have to know whether exoplanets are viable, whether we can spread out.

02:37:49.000 And whether or not they're in the middle of a big sleep.

02:37:51.000 Well, they may be.

02:37:52.000 But if we're running a million different experiments, it's different than if we're running one correlated experiment with Donald Trump at the helm of the most dangerous machine ever created in the world.

02:38:03.000 Like, that was not my plan.

02:38:07.000 So, the formulation of this theory, what you're trying to do is revolutionize space travel?

02:38:12.000 No.

02:38:13.000 What you're trying to do is make it possible for us in a lifetime?

02:38:16.000 We've been stalled out.

02:38:17.000 We've been stalled out for almost 50 years in theoretical physics.

02:38:21.000 Stalled out also.

02:38:23.000 So the simplest way of saying it is no one younger than Frank Wilczek, who was born in 1951, has gone to Stockholm for a discovery in theoretical fundamental physics made since like 1973. Physics effectively,

02:38:47.000 the prestige part of physics came to an end in the early 70s when everything changed across the board.

02:38:53.000 We had a broad economic change in our world.

02:38:57.000 Jamie, do you want to bring up GDP versus median male income?

02:39:03.000 Something bizarre happened in the early 1970s that we should all be talking about that almost nobody knows about.

02:39:09.000 And one of the things that happened was that physics effectively came to an end.

02:39:14.000 A lot of physicists will...

02:39:16.000 All right.

02:39:17.000 You see that graph?

02:39:18.000 Mm-hmm.

02:39:19.000 So GDP... Explain it to people that are just listening.

02:39:21.000 So what it shows is from, what is it, 1947 till about 1973, GDP and median male income are going up in lockstep.

02:39:31.000 They're almost perfectly correlated.

02:39:34.000 And then abruptly, median male income flatlines from about 1973 to 2010 on this graph.

02:39:44.000 And GDP keeps going up.

02:39:47.000 Now, that is – people always talk about the singularity when like we will become one with the robots and AI will take over.

02:39:53.000 This was the actual singularity that happened.

02:39:56.000 And it happened relatively unnoticed.

02:39:59.000 And that's what began to drain.

02:40:01.000 Again, median male income is irrelevant.

02:40:03.000 It's just one indicator that's particularly clean to show you that that's when the action happened.

02:40:10.000 My belief is that since the early 70s, very little in our society has been progressing.

02:40:17.000 That's not true for computers.

02:40:18.000 That's been like the big bright spot.

02:40:20.000 It's not true for fracking.

02:40:21.000 There's some innovations in imaging.

02:40:23.000 But in general, in an average room, if you subtract off the screens, you can't definitely tell that that room didn't exist in 1973. Because we stopped growing, we got crazy because everything was built on growth.

02:40:37.000 Everything was a scheme that became a Ponzi scheme when growth ran out.

02:40:42.000 So we've sort of been hollowing ourselves out from that time and getting crazier and farther away from reality.

02:40:48.000 And we have to actually figure out where we are.

02:40:51.000 And my belief was that our economy was almost completely created by theoretical physics.

02:40:59.000 Theoretical physics underlies chemistry, so the chemical revolutions like plastics from the graduate.

02:41:05.000 It gave us the semiconductor from which we do our computing.

02:41:10.000 It gave us the World Wide Web, which came out of CERN. It gave us telecommunications, which use the electromagnetic spectrum.

02:41:17.000 It gives us medical imaging from tomography.

02:41:20.000 We don't really appreciate that theoretical physics has been the great success story of our time.

02:41:25.000 And the theoretical physics community is the intellectual SEAL Team 6 of the world.

02:41:30.000 We underpay them.

02:41:31.000 They're under-resourced.

02:41:32.000 They're now completely unethical because we've underpaid them.

02:41:36.000 Unethical how so?

02:41:39.000 They won't talk about their failures.

02:41:41.000 They don't talk about who did what.

02:41:43.000 They're not fair and decent because there's not enough resources.

02:41:46.000 And so when resources get scarce, people become psychopathic.

02:41:49.000 And like string theory is just an utter failure that we can't discuss because the baby boomers use that as, well, we're making huge progress while they're actually doing nothing. 0.75

02:41:59.000 I mean, I don't want to say they're doing nothing.

02:42:02.000 They weren't making contact with physics.

02:42:04.000 They became mathematicians, like a bunch of soldiers and generals who were playing war games during peacetime.

02:42:12.000 It's related to what they're supposed to be doing, but there was nothing for them to do.

02:42:16.000 So they sort of went to the gym and ran on a treadmill rather than actually running marathons.

02:42:22.000 So we have a terrible situation in that the community that powered our economy and gave us this incredible power in the world through like nuclear weapons and the rad lab at MIT and whatnot has gone into decline.

02:42:37.000 And it's very dangerous to restart theoretical physics.

02:42:40.000 So it's been safe because there's been nothing new that we can use coming out of it.

02:42:45.000 My belief now is that we have to talk about a thousand-year solution to human life with weaponized viruses, with weaponized nuclei.

02:42:57.000 I mean, the amount of damage we can do is astounding.

02:43:02.000 And that's going to restart at some point since the nap is now coming to an end.

02:43:08.000 This is the end of the nap.

02:43:12.000 Three months ago, we were all just leading beautiful lives doing whatever.

02:43:17.000 We were struggling.

02:43:19.000 We were frustrated, but we weren't indoors.

02:43:21.000 What makes you think this is not something that we're going to overcome and we're going to get back to business as usual December 2019?

02:43:30.000 Assume that we do.

02:43:31.000 Okay.

02:43:32.000 So we come up with a killer treatment.

02:43:35.000 We replenish all the masks.

02:43:36.000 We have vaccines.

02:43:39.000 We all just spent how long watching our leaders tell us to shelter in place.

02:43:47.000 I mean, we all went through this movie.

02:43:53.000 I don't think...

02:43:55.000 I'm watching the conversations about open borders change.

02:43:58.000 Hey, should we talk about open borders today?

02:44:01.000 Let's just keep going about escaping the planet and your theory.

02:44:04.000 Well, okay.

02:44:05.000 Because we've taken many deviations and it's already 430. All right.

02:44:09.000 Is it?

02:44:10.000 Yes.

02:44:10.000 I don't even know what time is.

02:44:11.000 Yeah.

02:44:12.000 Okay.

02:44:12.000 So this theory, geometric unity, replaces space-time.

02:44:16.000 So think about a fundamental theory as a newspaper story.

02:44:19.000 It's who, what.

02:44:20.000 Sorry.

02:44:21.000 It's where, when, which is space and time.

02:44:23.000 Who, what.

02:44:24.000 Who would be fermions, that is matter, electrons, quarks.

02:44:27.000 And what, which would be the force that pushes them around.

02:44:29.000 How and why.

02:44:31.000 How would be the equations?

02:44:33.000 And why would be something called a Lagrangian?

02:44:36.000 And what this does is to say that there used to be two origins for physics.

02:44:44.000 There was space-time, which Einstein gave us, and then there's this thing called SU2 cross U1, which comes from nowhere that anyone knows.

02:44:53.000 What is that?

02:44:54.000 Well, you and I are seeing each other Through photons.

02:44:59.000 Photons are scattering off us and being perceived by our eyes.

02:45:03.000 Photons are associated with electromagnetism.

02:45:05.000 And there is actually a circle at every point in spacetime.

02:45:10.000 So here we are in space, my fingers are up here between us, and I'm going to snap at a particular instant.

02:45:16.000 At that point of the snap, there was a circle, as there is a point, a circle at every other point in spacetime that we do not perceive, that generates all of electromagnetism.

02:45:27.000 So call this the mysterious U1. We don't know where this U1 comes from.

02:45:32.000 Why is there a hidden circle that generates the electromagnetism that you and I use to make visual contact that we use to send electronic signals like our Wi-Fi?

02:45:44.000 Not only is there a circle, there's also a three-dimensional object called SU2 and an eight-dimensional object called SU3. And effectively, SU2 generates the weak force.

02:45:56.000 That's not quite right.

02:45:57.000 It's called actually weak isospin.

02:45:59.000 And SU3 generates the strong force, which is sort of on the nose, which is why the protons in your body don't all push apart given that they're positively charged and like charges repel.

02:46:10.000 So why don't you explode?

02:46:11.000 That's the strong force and it comes out of something called SU3. We have two origin stories.

02:46:18.000 One origin story is the story of space and time.

02:46:20.000 The other origin story is the story of SU3 cross SU2 cross U1. And what I did was to get rid of the freedom to choose the symmetries that generate the personalities of the particles that make up this place.

02:46:35.000 And then the question is, okay, I called it the magic beans trade.

02:46:39.000 Because if you think about Jack and the beanstalk, Jack gives away the family cow to get beans, which seems like the worst trade of all time.

02:46:47.000 But the beans actually had much more in them Then was understood.

02:46:52.000 And so Jack gets the better of the trade because the beans allow him to do something crazy.

02:46:56.000 So that's what I did.

02:46:57.000 I gave away the freedom to choose the symmetries to generate the particle properties.

02:47:01.000 I tied my hands the way Einstein would tie his hands.

02:47:05.000 And then I tried to show that you could recover these particle properties by trusting that the theory would self-assemble.

02:47:13.000 And that's the hands drawing hands.

02:47:15.000 So the idea is that I generated the fermions On top of the space of all rulers and protractors on top of the four dimensions.

02:47:24.000 And the natural object, which would be called spinners or chimeric spinners, when perceived on the four-dimensional object, that is when you pull back the information from the second world that got created into the first, from the pitch into the stands.

02:47:41.000 The particle properties appear to be more or less the right particle properties of the particles that we see.

02:47:47.000 Now when I started this in the early 80s, we didn't know that neutrinos had mass.

02:47:51.000 And so we thought that there might be only 15 particles in a generation.

02:47:55.000 And my stuff would only work if the number of particles in a generation was 2 to the n.

02:48:00.000 So the joke when I was in college was, I sure hope that 2 to the 4th equals 15. Now it can't be, because 2 to the 4th is 16. But then luckily for me, nutrients were found to have mass and that sort of changed the probability that there are 16 particles.

02:48:17.000 So this is some weird thing to deal with the fundamental incompatibility of the two theories, general relativity of Einstein and quantum theory of Bohr and Dirac.

02:48:31.000 In the 70s, we found out that there was a geometry that governed the Bohr-Durak part of the world, called Erismanian geometry, from Charles Erisman Analyzation.

02:48:45.000 And Einstein had used Bernard Riemann, a German mathematician, his geometries.

02:48:50.000 So my gambit, and why it's called geometric unity, is that the two branches of physics Are derived from two geometries.

02:48:59.000 So rather than saying it's about quantizing geometry, which is the quantum field theory imperialist perspective, Einstein must submit to Bohr, the real issue is that there's a fight between the parents, that is, Bernard Riemann and Charles Erismann.

02:49:14.000 Now, we don't know those names nearly as well.

02:49:16.000 And so my goal was to say, is there any world in which these two geometries and the advantages of these two geometries could be made to play together?

02:49:23.000 And in general, there isn't.

02:49:26.000 But there is one case in which it works, which is this issue of natural spinners.

02:49:32.000 And so the whole gambit was to say, what if the world is not a generic world, but a very natural and peculiar world where certain games work that would not work in a generic situation?

02:49:46.000 So what I tried to do is to recover Einstein the way Einstein tried to recover Newton from a more fundamental theory and the incompatibility Is that Einstein had to compress something called the full Riemann curvature tensor, which is the sort of measure of how warped something is.

02:50:03.000 So he broke that beast that tells you the warping of something into pieces.

02:50:09.000 He threw one of them out called the vial curvature, and then he adjusted the properties of the other two that were left to create general relativity.

02:50:16.000 So my thing does that, but it also has another property called gauge invariance.

02:50:22.000 Engage in variance is the sine qua non of the particle theory.

02:50:26.000 And this is only possible in very limited circumstances.

02:50:29.000 And the gambit was, what if the world is in that tiny class where this game can work?

02:50:34.000 So it's sort of a career suicide theory, because if it doesn't work this way, you don't really get anything in the end.

02:50:41.000 So, you know, think about that exhaust vent in the Death Star.

02:50:45.000 This tiny little vulnerability.

02:50:47.000 And man, you better hope that thing goes in.

02:50:51.000 What are you trying to do with this?

02:50:53.000 By releasing this with this discussion, this video that you're putting out, are you hoping that more people examine it and try to actually implement it and then ultimately this would be something that allows people to do what?

02:51:14.000 To revolutionize space travel?

02:51:17.000 I don't know.

02:51:19.000 I didn't know whether I wanted man to have his own source code.

02:51:23.000 So I was divided.

02:51:25.000 But you're serious about this.

02:51:27.000 This is like very close to...

02:51:30.000 I love you.

02:51:31.000 I came on this program and I said, it's straight.

02:51:33.000 We have to get off this planet.

02:51:34.000 We made a joke about getting high and all this stuff.

02:51:37.000 But I've always been dead serious about what I'm saying.

02:51:42.000 Now, if you ask me at a personal level...

02:51:48.000 I started this for lots of personal reasons.

02:51:52.000 I always thought that the idea of wanting to go beyond Albert Einstein was something everybody would grow up wanting to do.

02:51:58.000 It didn't occur to me that there was another thing that you would want to do with your life.

02:52:01.000 That seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

02:52:03.000 I want to understand why we're here.

02:52:05.000 Well, that means you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.

02:52:07.000 Yeah.

02:52:07.000 You found your niche.

02:52:08.000 I found my niche.

02:52:09.000 And then it started this kind of completely bizarre thing because I was not a good math student, but I had to go to the best place.

02:52:17.000 And so how does a B minus math student in high school work?

02:52:21.000 Go to Harvard University with a master's degree at 19. It's like just sheer will because I was not a good math guy.

02:52:28.000 So I just willed it into being.

02:52:30.000 I got myself there.

02:52:32.000 I taught myself whatever it is that I do.

02:52:35.000 I don't have an advisor, which is very unusual.

02:52:38.000 And I became intertwined with this theory and this theory has been separating me also from people I love and the world that I'm in.

02:52:46.000 I've never known whether I'm crazy or whether or not I have something.

02:52:51.000 I don't know whether it unleashes power if it works or it only unleashes destructive power.

02:53:00.000 Trevor Burrus Are you willing to have conversations like debates with detractors or critics of this?

02:53:04.000 I'm willing to have discussions with constructive critics.

02:53:09.000 Constructive critics.

02:53:10.000 And in fact, I've done – well, because – Publicly you have?

02:53:12.000 You said – Privately.

02:53:14.000 Privately.

02:53:14.000 Yeah.

02:53:15.000 I mean I've talked to people like Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study who I just think is fantastic.

02:53:23.000 There's another guy named Luis Alvarez-Gaume at the Simons Institute.

02:53:27.000 This is all very hard for the average person to follow.

02:53:31.000 I think it's not about the average person.

02:53:33.000 I understand that.

02:53:33.000 But I'm saying I think it would be incredibly valuable to just release it for the average person.

02:53:38.000 I'm starting to.

02:53:39.000 Yeah.

02:53:39.000 But I mean, this conversation, I know you're saying it's not for the average person, but just to have it available to everyone.

02:53:48.000 So if they want to, they could slowly go over it and try to understand it bit by bit and put it together.

02:53:55.000 I should talk about this.

02:53:56.000 I'm building...

02:53:57.000 I shouldn't even say I'm building it.

02:54:03.000 There is a fanatical community arising around the portal for what we're doing that's different.

02:54:10.000 And there is a 24-7 Discord server where people are talking.

02:54:15.000 Like, if you're ever bored or lonely, these people are always on and always talking.

02:54:19.000 I'm never that bored or lonely.

02:54:21.000 It's not for you, baby.

02:54:23.000 But we've been trying to recruit a bunch of artists because I believe that art is part of the secret weaponry of pushing out.

02:54:31.000 Like I don't think you know how crazy it was when we did the hop vibration up here.

02:54:35.000 It was like close encounters.

02:54:37.000 All these artists start creating hop vibrations.

02:54:39.000 Like I went to Temecula and this guy, Nico Myers, has a huge hop vibration in his backyard coming off of this program.

02:54:48.000 It's like when people tattoo your face on their arms, right?

02:54:50.000 Yeah.

02:54:50.000 I'm aware of all this stuff.

02:54:52.000 I just choose to shut the door.

02:54:54.000 Oh, I'm in there with them.

02:54:57.000 Yeah, you can do that.

02:54:58.000 Good luck.

02:54:58.000 Well, because we're smaller.

02:55:00.000 That's true.

02:55:01.000 It is that too, but it's also a lot of what I do requires me thinking on my own.

02:55:08.000 I have to be by myself and spend a lot of time staring off into space.

02:55:14.000 Yeah, and me too.

02:55:15.000 But what I'm saying is that when it comes to people following the story...

02:55:21.000 Artists and computer people are going to help us push out aids to...

02:55:29.000 Can you pull up ericweinstein.org?

02:55:33.000 There's a visualization that's sketched in the door.

02:55:37.000 There's a portal in the website.

02:55:40.000 There you go.

02:55:42.000 Okay, so go down.

02:55:45.000 All right, you see that door?

02:55:46.000 Yeah.

02:55:47.000 Yeah.

02:55:49.000 I don't know why that's the clip they took.

02:55:51.000 Okay.

02:55:52.000 Beyond that, there should be something...

02:55:54.000 Okay, right here.

02:55:55.000 This is a picture of a fiber bundle and the path-lifting property relative to a connection.

02:56:00.000 So those floating planes, that was what generates electromagnetism called horizontal subspaces.

02:56:07.000 And you're actually looking at a gauge theory in that picture.

02:56:10.000 And so what you're saying is that what's valuable about the artists getting on board with this is that they can make a visual interpretation of this that can be...

02:56:19.000 Cartoons.

02:56:20.000 There's a guy named...

02:56:21.000 If you had Grant Sanderson...

02:56:23.000 No.

02:56:24.000 He does a show called Three Blue, One Brown, which is some of the best math videos you've ever seen.

02:56:30.000 Gorgeous stuff.

02:56:31.000 Just sucks people in.

02:56:34.000 And you're learning relatively hard math that somebody's made visually beautiful.

02:56:39.000 This guy is a national treasure.

02:56:42.000 And I'm hoping to get Grant on the program.

02:56:46.000 We've been experimenting.

02:56:47.000 When we had Roger Penrose on the program, I said, I'm not going to talk to you about quantum consciousness.

02:56:50.000 I'm going to talk to you about twisters.

02:56:52.000 And about your contributions to the field.

02:56:54.000 And what my community did is they built something called the portal.wiki.

02:57:01.000 So if you bring up the portal.wiki, there's an entire ecosystem that's digesting what happens in our episodes for the lay public.

02:57:11.000 One of the more amazing things about the internet and about something like your podcast is if you build it, they will come.

02:57:21.000 You know, you have a bigger audience.

02:57:23.000 I will say that I think I have the world's best audience.

02:57:27.000 These guys...

02:57:28.000 Like, go down to episodes or...

02:57:30.000 How many episodes have you had so far?

02:57:33.000 Is it 28?

02:57:34.000 Yeah.

02:57:35.000 Oh, Eric Lewis, by the way, you should have in.

02:57:37.000 The greatest pianist now playing, in my opinion.

02:57:40.000 So if you go to the Graf Waltz.

02:57:44.000 I love that you're doing all this, and yet you're still interviewing porn stars and James O'Keefe.

02:57:49.000 Hey, we want everybody.

02:57:50.000 Yes.

02:57:51.000 I love that. 1.00

02:57:51.000 To hell with this cancellation shit. 1.00

02:57:53.000 Yes. 1.00

02:57:53.000 Well, not just that. 1.00

02:57:55.000 I just love that you're just a curious person that actually wants to communicate with people, on top of being this space man.

02:58:03.000 So, for example, we have this graph wall tome project where we start off with this paragraph from Ed Witten.

02:58:09.000 If you go down, you'll see that they're figuring out how the paragraph from Ed Witten fails over into this wall that was chiseled in Indiana limestone in Stony Brook, New York, which has all of these below that.

02:58:27.000 So that's the paragraph that tries to sum up the universe as we understood it in the modern era in prose.

02:58:34.000 And I recommend everyone read that.

02:58:36.000 And then if you go down from that, There's this plan, right?

02:58:40.000 Yeah, there's a clickable thing underneath that graphic.

02:58:44.000 So, for example, this is the plan for this sculpture that Jim Simons, the world's greatest hedge fund manager, paid for.

02:58:51.000 And if you click on any one of these things, these ruins, so it's like the uncertainty, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, my people are digesting everything that we say, everything that we point to, And helping each other understand what goes on in my program so that I don't have to spend all the time in the shallow end.

02:59:13.000 Wow. 0.98

02:59:14.000 This is heavy shit. 1.00

02:59:16.000 Oh, my God. 1.00

02:59:18.000 But this is what's interesting.

02:59:19.000 Joe, I learned this from you, actually.

02:59:21.000 You said, because I didn't think this was a smart idea at all.

02:59:26.000 And...

02:59:28.000 People are so eager to break into what's next.

02:59:32.000 We want to spin our chrysalis and become the butterfly that we were meant for.

02:59:36.000 We're tired of being caterpillars.

02:59:37.000 Yes.

02:59:39.000 I know you're hearing 5-MEO-DMT, but that wasn't what I was thinking.

02:59:42.000 No.

02:59:43.000 I really think that what you're showing, that is a branch of what humanity is trying to do with creativity, with curiosity, with the thirst for innovation.

02:59:57.000 That's it.

02:59:58.000 Well, it's time to go to the next level.

03:00:00.000 And we are trying...

03:00:01.000 And the funniest part is like, brought to you by Athletic Greens and Theragun.

03:00:07.000 Both the good products.

03:00:08.000 Yeah.

03:00:09.000 This is the funny thing about sponsorship.

03:00:11.000 You see, my grandfather was a salesman.

03:00:13.000 And so in a weird way, I'm living a romantic dream of connecting to my grandfather who sold, like, used clothing and clothing door to door.

03:00:21.000 He was a schmata salesman.

03:00:22.000 And...

03:00:25.000 I've been astounded at how much I enjoy all of the products that I'm advertising.

03:00:30.000 Like the sleep pad that cools you so you don't wake up in a pool of your own sweat.

03:00:35.000 Unbelievable.

03:00:36.000 It's great.

03:00:36.000 I've lost 17 pounds through Athletic Greens.

03:00:40.000 Well, you've also stopped stuffing your face with stuff you shouldn't eat, right?

03:00:43.000 No.

03:00:44.000 Only Athletic Greens?

03:00:45.000 No.

03:00:45.000 You do look skinnier.

03:00:47.000 Your face looks thin.

03:00:48.000 Yeah, it is.

03:00:49.000 But in part, it's because I figured I had to integrate it into a program where intermittent fasting started paying off.

03:00:58.000 Listen, man, we could talk forever, but I have to wrap this up, unfortunately.

03:01:01.000 But I'm going to watch your video, and then I'm going to watch it high.

03:01:05.000 I'm going to do two.

03:01:06.000 I'm going to watch it twice, and I'm going to try to figure it out.

03:01:08.000 Hey, and Joe, at some point, let's just hang out, and I'd love to just show you exactly what it is tailor-made to whatever questions without any worry about...

03:01:17.000 Yes.

03:01:19.000 Let's do that.

03:01:20.000 I can't wait.

03:01:21.000 And I just wanted to say thanks again for everything.

03:01:24.000 But you do now owe me two appearances on your show.

03:01:27.000 I haven't called either of them in.

03:01:28.000 And thanks for calling me on.

03:01:30.000 On your show?

03:01:31.000 Yeah.

03:01:31.000 Two on your show.

03:01:32.000 You said my show.

03:01:33.000 Well, sorry.

03:01:33.000 On my show.

03:01:34.000 On your show.

03:01:34.000 On my show.

03:01:35.000 Yes, yes, yes.

03:01:35.000 Yeah.

03:01:35.000 Okay.

03:01:36.000 You got it.

03:01:36.000 Two.

03:01:37.000 I owe you two.

03:01:38.000 You're the best.

03:01:38.000 Thank you, sir.

03:01:39.000 You're the best.

03:01:40.000 Bye, everybody.

03:01:41.000 Wait, one thing.

03:01:42.000 What?

03:01:44.000 EricWeinstein.org. 1.00

03:01:45.000 Please sign up for our mailing list so we can find you after the Yeah, go get your mind fucked. 1.00

03:01:50.000 Good luck. 0.99

03:01:51.000 Good luck, everybody.

03:01:52.000 Thank you, brother.

03:01:53.000 All right, thank you.

03:01:54.000 Bye, everybody.

03:01:54.000 Stay safe.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 03, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1453 - Eric Weinstein

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Summary

Transcript