In honor of International Women s Day, we re talking all things nuclear weapons. This week we re joined by Professor Eric Eddings to talk about the history of nuclear weapons, and why we should all be worried about them.
00:02:22.000One of the great conversations we've had in private is actually about geopolitics and particularly how all of that is informed by the invention of first nuclear weapons and then thermonuclear weapons.
00:02:36.000It's interesting that as we sit down to record this, this episode might not go out for a few weeks, but as we sit down to record this, the Trump administration has just announced that it wants to do nuclear testing, again, on par with other countries is the language.
00:03:08.000Nukes became a non-issue, which was never true.
00:03:11.000And there was never a peace dividend because there will never be a peace dividend as long as we know how to create this technology from physics.
00:03:21.000And this issue about fictionalizing nukes and what they mean and how to think about them so that we can live our lives.
00:03:29.000I mean, right now we're looking out at Los Angeles and there exists websites that will allow you to simulate the effect of any of the tests with any epicenter you like chosen at any point here.
00:03:42.000And whether or not you're going to have gamma radiation, as you will, from the thermonuclear weapons or cesium fission weapons or dirty bombs or who knows what.
00:03:52.000All of our cities, other than two in Japan, have been untested as to how they'll perform under these circumstances.
00:04:00.000So it's not clear that it even makes sense to build cities.
00:04:03.000But because no one's used a nuclear weapon in anger since 1945, we don't know whether this is a silly thing to be worried about or the most important thing to be worried about.
00:04:15.000So for years I've been calling for a return to rare above-ground nuclear tests, which I think were ended by the Test Ban Treaty of, what is it, 62?
00:04:25.000So it's been over 60 years since we've had above-ground nuclear testing.
00:04:31.000And as a result, we've just forgotten that the power of the strong force and the electromagnetic force together is.
00:06:10.000It's worked for 80 years, exactly as you say.
00:06:14.000And if you're happy with 80 years, you could even double it to 160 years, which is a drop in the bucket when it comes to geological time, even human time.
00:06:24.000So, yes, they make the world much safer in the short run.
00:06:32.000So, if you like to think in short-term thinking, nuclear weapons are the best thing that ever happened to humanity.
00:06:39.000Surely, though, as those weapons become more and more powerful – and one of the things you've talked about is the transition from nuclear weapons to thermonuclear weapons and the impact of that.
00:06:48.000But beyond that, I mean, Russia is developing what they call a tsunami bomb, which is basically a giant nuclear torpedo.
00:06:54.000It explodes in the water outside Los Angeles and, you know, the entire western seaboard basically gets swept off the map.
00:07:01.000Same on the eastern side, eastern seaboard.
00:07:04.000As the potential damage becomes greater, isn't that a greater disincentive for those weapons to be used and therefore we are more likely to not have a world war?
00:07:16.000You're more likely to not have a world war if everyone is convinced of the calculus and everyone remains rational.
00:07:23.000But, you know, this is sort of the whole idea behind playing chicken.
00:07:31.000And so, you know, it's like that scene in Rebel Without a Cause where you have two people who think that they can outwit the other one as to what level of risk they can handle.
00:07:45.000I don't view the current crop of leaders as particularly skilled.
00:07:51.000I mean, I would say that Putin would be the most skilled of the current crop of leaders in Xi.
00:07:57.000But they're not world-class talents in this department, I don't think.
00:08:02.000And nobody's used these weapons in so long.
00:08:05.000They're not even positive whether they'll work.
00:08:07.000And so the fear of God also has to be reinstilled in the population through, let's say, through music.
00:08:14.000I mean, there was a song called The Eve of Destruction that you hear listeners can find or, you know, On the Beach or Dr. Strange Love.
00:08:23.000And all of these stories we've stopped telling so that we no longer think of these things as immediate.
00:08:31.000So I don't think it works as well as you think it does.
00:08:34.000But if you're satisfied with that short-term cessation of hostilities because everyone's so terrified of the consequence, absolutely.
00:08:42.000That's the major positive externality of Armageddon and the apocalypse is that it keeps the peace very well in the short term.
00:08:51.000Well, my thinking is you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, right?
00:08:56.000And you know that, which is, I think, one of the reasons you're saying we should be testing nuclear weapons.
00:09:00.000Is your rationale that we should be doing this to remind people of just how dangerous this is?
00:09:04.000We should remind ourselves, you know, I don't think there's this sort of cavalier attitude that you develop when, you know how men who've never gone to war, I've never been to war, men who've never gone to war tend to talk tough because they have no idea what they're saying.
00:09:22.000And so I'm always interested when I see people who are like, you've got a tough guy and you've got a guy who's actually been in special forces at the same table.
00:09:32.000And the guy who talks tough will go on at great length and the guy who's actually seen some stuff will just remain silent.
00:09:39.000It's not even worth having the conversation.
00:09:41.000And my feeling is that there are too many people in the middle of a masculinity crisis who are currently at the head of world government.
00:09:49.000Eric, when we talk about nuclear weapons, what we sometimes fail to acknowledge is there's an element of luck to this piece because we came quite close, didn't we, in the Cuban Missile Crisis to everything going disastrously awry.
00:10:03.000Sure. Even in the early 80s with Stanislav Petrov, I believe, who more or less said, I think the Americans probably aren't actually attacking us. I'm going to hold off and launching.
00:10:15.000Yeah, it's come several times. It's come down to sheer good luck. And I just don't want to, I don't feel like playing Russian American roulette forever. I mean, it just, I guess even the questions are offensive.
00:10:34.000Well, why are we pretending that this is, it's not safe. I mean, to me, the exciting thing is if we were smart, we would be taking the supposed peace time dividend, and we'd be plowing it into the idea that the solar system is an escape room.
00:10:52.000It's our job to escape the solar system as fast as we possibly can and spread out so that if something goes wrong on one planetary surface, we're not all doomed.
00:11:02.000Hmm. And that doesn't seem to animate anyone. To me, it's clearly the world's most important question. I've spent my entire life on this question. I'm not really on the podcast circuit.
00:11:12.000That's what I really do. And no one's interested. Like no one, no government is interested. There's no, there's no Institute. There's no fund. There's nothing you can apply for.
00:11:25.000No one is interested in the idea that the solar system is an escape room and that Einstein is our jailer. We've got to get past Einstein before the thing goes off. It's as clear as day to me.
00:11:36.000I think the thing is, to put it mildly, incredibly big picture for most people, including myself. I think the thing that most people and most governments have been almost lulled into a false sense of security around nuclear weapons because we just assume that the other person won't use them.
00:11:55.000Where it starts to get a little worrying for me is when you look at Iran developing nuclear weapons with a country that is so fiercely ideological and particularly when it, when they look at Israel and they're like, they've said in their own words, they want Israel wiped off the map.
00:12:10.000Isn't, isn't that the most dangerous outcome if someone like Iran has a nuclear weapon as opposed to Russia or anything or any other country?
00:12:19.000I mean, India and Pakistan, you know, you have two countries that are, the difference between Urdu and Hindi is nil. These people are exactly the same culturally, you know, one more Hindu, one more Muslim.
00:12:34.000However, you know, that is an incredibly dangerous flashpoint because it's dependent upon skill and you have the government versus the army versus the ISI in Pakistan.
00:12:46.000You know, if I think about the Taiwan Strait and China and its calculation versus the US, that's incredibly dangerous.
00:12:53.000It's a half proxy war between Russia and Ukraine, with Ukraine representing NATO and the US.
00:12:59.000And we've humiliated Putin in particular, in my opinion, by the 2004 ascension into Article 5 status of the three FSU countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Latvia.
00:13:57.000We're four light years away from the nearest star.
00:14:00.000So if you think about habitable planetary surfaces, if you could grant science fiction powers to Elon and you could terraform the moon and Mars, we'd have three spheres that we could get to sort of by chemical rockets.
00:14:17.000That is not enough diversification for humanity.
00:14:35.000The only place to find new planetary surfaces, if we're not going to make artificial platforms, like, which is very difficult, is to be able to get very far away very quickly.
00:14:46.000And you can sort of do that with something called time dilation.
00:14:50.000But if you were to tour a round trip and traveling just under the speed of light, by taking a short jump to the nearest star and back, you'd lose eight years relative to your relatives.
00:15:39.000But this is like the greatest puzzle ever.
00:15:42.000It tells you that everything that we're good at, science, physics, introspection, mathematics, can be brought to bear on the question of our survival.
00:15:53.000And if we can crack this one problem, we can split up.
00:15:56.000You can have a planet, you can have a planet.
00:15:58.000It's the Oprah principle of the cosmos.
00:16:00.000And then we don't all have to have the same fate if one planet goes stupid.
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00:18:11.000I mean, I see what you're saying, but I think for the vast majority of governments and people, they see their concerns are more real world.
00:18:33.000And by real world, I think things are happening in the here and now.
00:18:37.300I guess. So the point is, so to then propose these things, whereas they may be in the long term a good idea, a lot of people will go, but we don't have enough money in this country.
00:19:15.300You should explain how a nuclear weapon works, then how a thermonuclear weapon works, and then also what have been some of the developments since the thermonuclear weapons were invented.
00:19:25.300Like I mentioned, the tsunami bomb, et cetera.
00:19:29.300So the first thing is, why didn't we have these crazy weapons during the Civil War?
00:19:32.300The Civil War was very close to World War II in human history.
00:19:36.300And if you look at one, it's clearly fought in antiquity, and then suddenly you've got jet planes and you can have the ability to drop off.
00:19:43.300The key issue is that we didn't understand that there was something called the neutron.
00:19:47.300We knew about protons and electrons before we knew that there were neutrons.
00:19:51.300In 1911, I think, Ernest Rutherford said, maybe there's a neutral version of the proton inside of the atom.
00:19:57.300And that was the most dangerous idea, in my opinion, any human ever had.
00:20:51.300It's bullets creating bullets, creating bullets, tapping at these.
00:20:55.300Think about a bunch of magnets velcroed together so that they stay together and don't repel.
00:21:01.300And then suddenly when you tap them, the velcro comes apart because it's just at that critical.
00:21:06.300So that would be called a subcritical mass of heavy elements like uranium.
00:21:11.300And now the idea is that if you push that together, it goes from subcritical, not enough bullets to start the chain reaction, to critical, enough bullets.
00:21:22.300So what you do is you take a subcritical mass of radioactive material and you wrap it in a sphere of chemical explosives.
00:21:31.300And you push that thing from subcritical to critical so that the density of the bullets means that there are enough targets for them to hit.
00:23:32.300You know, there's like before Christ and after Christ, and they're just very different.
00:23:36.300Before November of 1952, with the test known as Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb,
00:23:42.300and the publication in April of 1953, less than six months later, with the double helix giving the structure of DNA,
00:23:50.300we didn't have the power of the twin nuclei, the nucleus of the atom and the nucleus of the cell.
00:23:55.300And then after that, suddenly, we were like gods. And that is the BCAD of human history.
00:24:02.300That's much more important than the birth of Christ. Before that time, we didn't have the power of gods, and after that time we did.
00:24:08.300And what is the difference between the nuclear weapon as it originally was, the detonator, and the second generation, the hydrogen bomb, etc.?
00:24:18.300Well, there was no point to duck and cover. I mean, you weren't going to survive this thing.
00:24:24.300It was just at a different scale. I mean, you're talking about orders of magnitude, bigger bombs than what already caused the emperor to surrender in Japan.
00:24:36.300We're just talking inconceivable levels of destruction.
00:24:43.300My guess is that one or two devices means that Los Angeles is no more.
00:24:49.300By no more, you mean completely flattened and raised to the ground?
00:24:53.300Yeah. I mean, the Soviets, of course, were slightly late to the game. Sakharov, the father of that bomb.
00:25:02.300And, of course, they had to go big or go home. So they did this Tsar bomb. And the Tsar bomb, it's in Novoa Zemlya?
00:25:10.300Novoa Zemlya, yeah. New land. New land. New land, yeah.
00:25:16.300And this was at a scale that was inconceivable. I wish I had. The American comparable device was this thing called Castle Bravo, which was way bigger than we had expected.
00:25:27.300We didn't know how well we could control it. But if I've played on the simulators, all of these concentrated cities are just instantly uninhabitable.
00:25:39.300And what are the long-term effects of these types of weapons? Does it mean that the land that they have been detonated on will never be able to bear fruit, et cetera?
00:25:51.300Well, my understanding is that the hydrogen ones are actually cleaner. You really have gamma radiation in the form of, like, photons that are very hard to guard against.
00:26:00.300And the other ones have these radioactive isotopes that linger on them for forever. But I've never really cared that much about the post-war scenarios.
00:26:12.300My feeling is that once you get going, everything that you know about life as we've led it is gone.
00:26:19.300So, and not to say nothing of the fact that as we understand it currently, I think if you had nuclear war between major players, the tit-for-tat would actually end all human life on Earth, wouldn't it?
00:26:34.300Even if it didn't. You're talking about setting back everything that we know of as modern life to levels that, I don't know whether there's subsistence living or hunter-gathering or somebody's got some crazy compound, but I'm not going there.
00:26:55.300It's too much. And by the way, there's a, you know, there's a comparable version of this for pandemic.
00:27:04.300You know, and we're talking about playing with things where we're just not, if you saw what happened with COVID, it just took over the planet.
00:27:13.300I guess the question is, if you have weapons of that magnitude, does not therefore instill a certain humility in the people wielding them?
00:27:24.300For instance, you look at Putin. Glad you find this question's funny. But, you know, unless you are completely insane, you wouldn't be tempted to push that button because you know that the moment you launch that weapon, not only have you ensured the destruction of millions of people, you've also ensured your own destruction.
00:27:47.300What conversation are we even having? These people are nuts, Francis.
00:27:58.300Putin is absolutely up for brinksmanship.
00:28:02.300Xi, I think, thinks he can calculate this to a fairly well.
00:28:06.300Donald Trump is famous for promoting himself as a wild card, my friends, in order to confuse his negotiating partners.
00:28:15.300I just don't see this level of skill. Netanyahu clearly did not understand he was in a hybrid war, and he fought a kinetic war while he lost the hybrid war.
00:28:27.300Well, hold on a second. I mean, if you look at Russia-Ukraine, and we should come back to that because of the point you made, but, you know, you know what I think about the invasion of Ukraine.
00:28:36.300I think it's an abomination from Putin.
00:28:39.300And I know you do, but I also think, and we should explore this, actually, before we get into the nuclear dimension, because the one argument I've never heard anyone who thinks that the West provoked Russia is ever addressed is the argument that I always make on this,
00:28:52.300which is ultimately, every time Russia is strong, it seeks to cushion itself westwards, create a bigger cushion between Moscow and its western frontier.
00:29:03.300And so, if you don't expand NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that's fine, but what you will end up with is a Russian-dominated Eastern Europe in the way that you had before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
00:29:14.300Now, some people will see that as a price worth paying, others not, but ultimately, my point is, you're going to find yourself in a confrontation with Russia at some point, unless you have no red lines whatsoever.
00:29:25.300And Putin is on record as saying, America is evil, because what they did is they upset the post-World War II order.
00:29:33.300They reneged on the agreement of the post-World War II order.
00:29:36.300Well, the post-World War II order was Russian tanks in Berlin, right?
00:29:40.300So, and half of Germany being effectively controlled by the USSR.
00:29:45.300So, unless you're prepared to tolerate that, you are always going to get into a standoff with Russia.
00:29:51.300And therefore, if you don't expand NATO into Estonia, Lithuania, they just become, they get taken over by Russia in some form.
00:30:02.300And if we say, well, Russia's got nuclear weapons, we always just, we gotta, we gotta be careful.
00:30:47.300I feel like we haven't spent enough time thinking about Russia, the differences between Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians.
00:30:56.300I have to say, I think it's just really important that we recognize that the West probably made a bad line of division between Austria and Hungary, where we sort of stopped seeing ourselves at some point.
00:31:26.300I mean, in many ways, my feeling, particularly as a mathematical physics guy, it was a different mathematical physics culture, a different musical culture.
00:31:39.300You know, this is why, for example, Van Cliburn's winning of the competition in Russia was so powerful.
00:31:51.300This is that America recognized that in the style of play, the Russians were dominant.
00:34:51.300I think that there's an issue of geography.
00:34:54.300And geography has a lot to do with how people die in war.
00:34:59.300So in general, for example, Austria is Alpine Germany.
00:35:03.300It's a very hilly place, whereas a lot of Germany is much flatter.
00:35:09.300That is going to affect how tanks and other things roll through, how defensible something is.
00:35:15.300You have a piece of geography in Eastern Europe which leads to incredible killing and movable borders.
00:35:22.300So if you look at just a historical timeline of how, let's say, Lithuanian-Polish Empire expanded and contracted and everything's moving around,
00:35:31.300it really doesn't get still until the nuclear weapons come in.
00:35:34.300So you have a situation in which these people have been subjected to very high levels of uncertainty and warfare because of a bad accident.
00:35:44.300So you have the same situation in some sense with the Jews during the 1930s and 40s.
00:35:50.300You had a fantastic percentage of the world's Jewish population put to death.
00:35:56.300And one thing that could have happened is that we would have found that we had adjusted to the concept of the expendable Jew.
00:36:05.300And the Jews said, under no terms is this going to happen.
00:36:11.300We're going to treat every Jewish life as precious.
00:36:13.300We will bargain a thousand people for the return of a single Jewish hostage.
00:36:53.300But if you move a Russian to Bel Air or Beverly Hills, they very quickly acclimatize to the idea that their safety matters.
00:37:02.300And my feeling about this is this is the luxury of a country with unbelievable borders, two beautiful oceans, a very long peaceful border with Canada, and kind of a weird border with Mexico, thinking that there's something about American life that is precious.
00:37:51.300And we have I wish that we were oriented differently.
00:37:55.300But I don't agree with that, actually.
00:37:58.300But there's also a lot to unpack elsewhere.
00:38:00.300I mean, the greatest objection, I think, to what you're saying is that Russia sees itself as being a separate civilization.
00:38:09.300Russia sees itself as the descendant of the Eastern Christian civilization.
00:38:15.300And there's a continuation of it, in fact.
00:38:18.300So the idea that an alliance is possible, but I think what you're talking about, which is absorption, I don't think there's ever been any appetite for that.
00:38:33.300I think there was a period of time when Russia, and if we're just going to be honest, because we both know both cultures, there was a desire to say, don't you see us as you?
00:38:44.300You know, the concept that somebody has really made it, if they've made it in the West.
00:38:51.300The Russians were, in some ways, in my opinion, like many other civilizations, partially poo-pooing and partially desirous of being seen.
00:39:03.300And I believe that, in part, it was up to NATO and the West to not treat this as we won, you lost, haha, but instead to be gracious in victory and say this was not a defeat of Russia.
00:39:18.300This was a defeat of communism, which had settled over Russia.
00:39:22.300But even once you've done that, look, Russia has a brief experiment with democracy in the 90s.
00:40:37.300Well, because, you know, the times of trouble is a period of time when a very short time due to political instability and some other things that happen, like a third of the Russian population gets wiped out.
00:40:50.300You have foreign fake rule after foreign fake rule after foreign fake rule coming in and people go, OK, we've got to have stability.
00:41:00.300I mean, that's precisely my point, is people with that mental attitude might be right for their geography, might be wrong for their geography.
00:41:07.300But what it does is it creates a group, a culture that I think is not compatible with the way that we do things.
00:41:15.300And the evidence is there. I mean, the Polish people or the Ukrainian people, they didn't go down the same path as Russia after 1991, after 1989, because Russia wants to be a power center.
00:41:27.300It doesn't want to be part of a thing where it's not the main thing.
00:42:05.300Because their mindset is not suited to this culture, it's suited to that culture.
00:42:11.300But communism was entirely foreign to this place.
00:42:15.300Well, that's not what I'm saying. I mean, like, right now.
00:42:18.300Sure. I understand. What I'm trying to say is, I believe that we had opportunities that may no longer be present for a greater union after this battle was over.
00:42:29.300When there was uncertainty, if instead of trying an isolated democracy with, you know, American economists meddling in post-Cold War reconstruction, whatever, if we tried something different, I think there was an opportunity.
00:42:44.300Something different how? Like, what should we have tried?
00:43:03.300This is what we did with Germany, is that we made a point about defeating Nazism, and we allowed the German people the ability, which was not entirely true, to say, oh, yes, those Nazis were terrible. That wasn't us.
00:43:18.300Yes, but what happened in Russia, you're right, is we didn't defeat communism as the ideology.
00:43:25.300We didn't say, you went through this terrible period of communism, all of these terrible communist leaders, they were bad, whatever.
00:43:32.300But, you know, a lot of people in Russia don't think communism was a great period in Russian history.
00:43:36.300But my point is, in order to have gone through that, Russia would have felt even more humiliated, or some Russians would have felt even more humiliated than they ended up doing.
00:43:46.300And the thing that many Russians feel humiliated by is not that the evil American economists came and ruined everything.
00:43:52.300It's actually the fact, I remember this as a kid in Russia, being given humanitarian aid.
00:43:58.300And the view is, well, you know, these people, they gave us these crumbs off their table. How insulting.
00:44:05.300We will build ourselves up again, and we will be strong, and we will show them.
00:44:38.300You know, just as a side note, I'm very worried about my family losing its familiarity with its Eastern European heritage.
00:44:47.300I make a point of, my son and I go on kvass runs, and we try to figure out who's got the best kvass from all of the Armenian stores that carry it.
00:44:56.300And just talking a lot about the Soviet schools of mathematics under Gelfand, and under physics, under Lev Landau, and what these cultures were about and what they meant.
00:45:09.300I care tremendously about Russia, and I feel connected to it.
00:45:39.300I really think that we should have separated two things.
00:45:41.300We should have separated out the communist overlay and the Russian substrate.
00:45:45.300And we should have been celebrating not only Russia, to be blunt, but, you know, there's Ukrainian opera.
00:45:51.300There's the incredible savoir-faire and joie de vivre of the Georgians, the proud histories of the Armenians.
00:46:00.300And, you know, there's so much over there that we don't even know exists as Americans.
00:46:06.300And I really feel like I wish we treated these places with the respect that I have for them and all of their accomplishments, their literature, their music, their science.
00:46:21.300Even in mathematics, we make up two different names for the same theorem, depending upon whether we want to claim that it was done in the West or it was done in Eastern Europe.
00:46:33.300I think we have a difference of opinion.
00:46:35.300I think that it's not an easy sell, but it's not impossible.
00:46:40.300And I think you think it's more difficult.
00:46:42.300And I will have to say that you probably know far more about these two cultures than I do.
00:46:46.300Well, I agree with your point about respecting different cultures and their many achievements.
00:46:53.300The reason I'm not picking on you specifically, I have heard this argument a lot about how the reason we've ended up in conflict with Russia is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West mistreated Russia.
00:47:07.300And I'm sure you can find plenty of individual examples of where that's absolutely the case.
00:47:12.300But overall, my contention is that Russia is a separate civilization that doesn't want to be part of our civilization, doesn't see itself as part of our civilization.
00:47:22.300And the only viable, friendly relationship with Russia is one of alliance.
00:47:30.300But it would have been achievable at cost in the same way that the alliance with the Soviet Union during World War Two was necessary for the West and unavoidable if we were going to win that war collectively.
00:47:44.300The cost was the subjugation of all of Eastern Europe.
00:47:47.300And what I'm saying is, unless we took the position that we took, we would have ended up allowing Russia to overrun not just half of Ukraine as it now has, but all of Eastern Europe is the inevitable destination of that for the very geographical reasons that you lay out.
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00:49:55.300You know, this gets into, I think it's very unfortunate that certain civilizations in the boundary land between what is clearly Western Europe and Russia.
00:50:12.300But, you know, it has always been the case to me that Ukraine, people in the east of Ukraine, people in the west of Ukraine barely see themselves as members of the same country.
00:50:22.300The way the western crust of Turkey looks to Anatolia and says there be dragons, you know, even though it's their country.
00:50:30.300So there's a great deal of intracountry alienation.
00:50:33.300You know, where Chernovsi looks to the Donbass and says, wow, that's, that's some freaky stuff.
00:50:43.300Particularly with Lvov, which I think of as being a Polish city, even though it's in Ukraine.
00:50:48.300Look, it's Eastern European, Eastern Europe is complicated.
00:50:53.300And you have to think not in terms of, boy, it's really sad that Riga can't simply be part of the west.
00:51:01.300My feeling is, is that if we were in-grouping Russia, we would be getting a better deal for Latvia than saying, okay, Latvia, you're with us.
00:51:10.300And then antagonizing Russia, but this is about my pay grade.
00:51:17.300This is just my caring about each of these places individually and caring about different places within, you know, just to tell a tiny little anecdote.
00:51:27.300I got my great aunt in Kiev to take me to Umayn, where my family was from.
00:51:32.300And she said, do you want to see the park where your grandfather used to walk with me?
00:51:37.300And I said, sure, you know, and it was like Versailles.
00:51:41.300It was, it was some park on a scale you couldn't even believe called Sofivka.
00:51:45.300Nobody in the west has ever heard of this place.
00:51:57.300So what I think we need to do is to recognize that we have an exaggerated blindness when it comes to Eastern Europe.
00:52:03.300And a lot more of us should try to speak, you know, a regional language, and a lot more of us should care just the way the Brits used to have their foreign service be very well informed about all four far flung provinces where they could see the world because they had an empire to take care of.
00:52:21.300I think the U.S. should be honest that it's had an empire and it should care a great deal more to speak the local languages, to care about the traditions, to understand the difference between Orthodoxy and other forms of Christianity, et cetera, et cetera.
00:52:34.300Look, I agree with you with the argument in that sense.
00:52:37.300And look, the arguments you make about Eastern Europe, you know, there's a lot of people in Latin America who feel very bitter towards the United States because they would put forward the same, you know, the same arguments.
00:52:56.300And in some ways it's probably merited.
00:52:59.300I think one of the challenges that America faces is that the geographical isolation of your country.
00:53:06.300You don't have to engage with the world the same way the British do because we're a tiny little island and we are in Europe separated by a small bank of water.
00:53:18.300So we, we have to be more engaged than you do at the moment.
00:54:17.300Of course, you're not around to hear them.
00:54:19.300I'm sure if you were around people would be angry.
00:54:21.300Um, and you know, I'm, that's what we do.
00:54:23.300But like, I'm talking, the guy who mostly comes from Ukraine is talking to the guys from Russia and Venezuela as if you're British and I'm American.
00:54:32.300There is something a little rich about all this, you know, that, that in general, the UK was very knowledgeable about the world because Oxford and Cambridge and the foreign service and the army and the British East India company worked as a system.
00:54:48.300And that system eventually gave way to the American system.
00:54:52.300I think one thing people don't understand or appreciate about James Bond is that James Bond was created because Felix who works for the CIA has to be a less than character.
00:55:03.300And, and there's something about the British that is necessary to keep the world in order, right?
00:55:08.300It's, it's sort of a, it's a post empire vision for a powerful, strong, virile Britain.
00:55:17.300I, look, what you were talking about, in my opinion, and as someone who lives in the UK, you're talking about a Britain that sadly no longer exists, Eric.
01:06:19.300Or go to americanfinancing.net slash trigonometry.
01:06:24.300So we've returned to where we started through the medium of hydrogen.
01:06:28.300And where we started was, your point was that a lot of the people who now have control over nuclear weapons are second string.
01:06:36.300Or in the case of, you know, some countries who are pursuing nuclear weapons might be outright, you know, crazy.
01:06:43.300I think there are people like that as well.
01:06:45.300But what I don't understand is how does the testing of nuclear weapons to demonstrate to us just how destructive they are address that problem?
01:06:56.300There was a question about testing the nuclear weapon for the simple purpose of reminding us of what we're talking about, to scare the crap out of us so we can get another 80 years of peace.
01:07:08.300But the other thing is if we test them within our scientific programs, then we will have more lethal weapons because we will be more assured that we know how they behave.
01:07:19.300We've lost a lot of knowledge about how these weapons behave by letting that atrophy.
01:07:26.300So it really matters a great deal, whether it's underground, whether it's above ground or underground nuclear testing.
01:07:37.300You know, the underground stuff doesn't have the same impact and the above ground stuff has terrible consequences.
01:07:43.300I'm not the person to design this and I don't think we're doing it in a smart way.
01:07:48.300I think what we're doing is that we're all playing chicken again.
01:07:51.300And by the way, there's a lot of stuff that can happen beyond nuclear weapons.
01:07:55.300It doesn't need to have the same raw terror.
01:07:58.300But if you can figure out how to send energy through the Earth and have it refocus at some other point so that you could vaporize something at a cell phone cohort.
01:08:10.300Right now, we don't know how to do that because the only thing that you can send through the Earth would be neutrinos, which are hard to catch on the other side, or gravity waves.
01:08:22.300You can't send photons through the Earth, particularly, or electrons.
01:08:28.300But if you do further research in physics, you may be able to create all kinds of weapons that you can't possibly imagine, including time weapons.
01:08:37.300Which brings us nicely to AI because it currently feels that we're in an arms race when it comes to AI between America and China.
01:08:48.300Is that something that concerns you, Eric?
01:16:53.300If we are just, if we just believe and work hard enough and risk everything, our history tells us that it's always possible to survive.
01:17:03.300And that's what, you know, really as a Jew, what I want to bring to a diverse audience of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists, I don't care.
01:17:15.300There's something about the Jewish will to survive that is not infecting planet Earth.
01:17:21.300I just see everybody basically on the couch with their remote solving minor problems.
01:17:26.300And it's time to recognize, no, no, no.
01:18:20.300We have the ability to fall in love, form families, drive each other crazy,
01:18:24.300and not screw up this whole beautiful experiment.
01:18:27.300And my feeling about it is that we've decided somehow that there's something wrong with us.
01:18:33.300And I think that we're just making things out to be much more difficult than they are.
01:18:39.300There are glorious, wonderful challenges.
01:18:41.300There are places to visit that are still remarkably undiscovered on Earth.
01:18:47.300And we're going to wake up hopefully in the next couple of years to the idea that with the machine's help,
01:18:55.300we can solve all sorts of problems that we thought were intractable.
01:18:58.300And so I think the thing that we're not talking enough about is that this is the sprint to the finish,
01:19:05.300and it can be glorious even though it's incredibly dangerous.
01:19:09.300And that if we just have a completely different attitude, which is that we are the original badasses that changed everything in such a short period of time,
01:19:18.300and we get back to being those people who did so much, instead of visiting the monuments built by our ancestors,
01:19:25.300I think we could imagine that unlike this period of stability and safety for the last 80 years,
01:19:32.300this could be a period of incredible chaos, great peril, lots of fear, but unparalleled fun, excitement, wonder, glory.
01:19:41.300We don't even feel comfortable with the word glory.
01:19:44.300We can say Slava Ukraina, but we can't say glory to us.
01:19:47.300And I think it should just be a glorious age filled with hope, and I think we can get out of here.
01:19:51.300And I love the fact that I'm back on the show, and I can end on a positive note like that.