Unknown Speaker: We have become a nation when it comes to science.

Host: You were called a fringe scientist.

Eric Weinstein: I [music] keep saying fringe.

Host: Yeah.

Eric Weinstein: I totally disagree with the narrative of the field. I want to blow a giant pole in the civil rights act. The stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species. When we make this jump, the world will become unrecognizable. I'm going all in.

Announcer: As your wealth grows, have you noticed how much more complex things get? Between investments, tax strategy, and estate planning, managing it all is a full-time job you didn't ask for. Creative Planning can help. Their coordinated team of investment managers, CPAs, and affiliated estate attorneys can do much of the heavy lifting so you don't have to. Creative Planning, where wealth works together. Go to creativeplanning.com/allin.

Host: I'm [music] going >> Eric Weinstein, mathematician, physicist, economist, PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard, National Science Foundation postoc, O&R fellow at Harvard, published a proposed mathematical framework and speculative unified field theory called geometric unity in 2021, formerly with Theel Capital, podcast host and guest. Welcome to the all-in interview.

Eric Weinstein: It's great to be here. Now, where are the besties?

Host: They declined the opportunity because this is an extended science corner that

Eric Weinstein: can't believe that Jason has turned tail and and ran.

Host: No, you and I. I mean, just for the audience, you and I both happen to be in DC right now. So, we're in a rented studio doing this interview, but good timing. What brings you to DC?

Eric Weinstein: Uh, opportunity. I'm really excited. I've meeting with the department of war um and took the opportunity to stay a couple extra days. Been talking to director Katzios over at OSTP and the White House science adviser. Fantastic meeting. Been talking to Jay Badachari who's an old friend over at NIH. About to talk to Jim O'Neal who's hopefully coming into NSF. Yeah.

Host: And really just taking a look at the first major proposal to reform American science since Venavar Bush at the end of World War II. So this is couldn't be more exciting.

Eric Weinstein: Did Katzios tell you that I just interviewed him on this topic?

Host: No.

Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, I did.

Host: Okay.

Eric Weinstein: You guys are old colleagues, right?

Host: Yeah. Yeah. Michael's Michael's great. And so he he that came up. He said, you know, here I am in this new role. Yeah,

Eric Weinstein: I guess I was sort of worried that this report, you know, obviously he's filling huge shoes and I was worried that it was going to be a disaster and I was stunned how how good it was. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but never never is.

Host: And then I told you that.

Eric Weinstein: Mhm. and you said that well you and I had been talking and that you had been conveying a lot of these issues to him and I feel like he's uh he's really grown into this role trying to become a student of the American science project and I couldn't be happier at hearing him say things like we know that we don't know everything we're just at the beginning we're just getting started so it looks like a great blueprint

Host: governmentdriven science has played a fundamental role in the success of the republic at least over the last hundred years last 50 75 prior to that there's a argument to be made in the in science and new golden age that Kratzio published and that others have been making I've heard you make it that science has really stalled in America. Can you make that case for us now?

Eric Weinstein: Well, it's a question of which science has stalled. Um so one of the great things about what Michael's saying is is that science is a big place and it's not being done in one way. So what I really think is the biggest, if you wanted to sort of fly over and give an idea of what's what's at risk, it's the absolutely courageous science that we can afford to do as a rich, ruggedly individualistic nation that no one else can afford to do. And so more or less when when I see us doing incremental research and doing things that are incredibly careful with low variance and calling it excellence, I get depressed because my feeling is is that what we should be taking on is the bets no one else can afford to take on. It's also the case that our chief geopolitical rivals, China, has a problem with freedom. And quite honestly, freedom is a weapon. It is a uh serious advantage that we can afford to look at ourselves and say we don't do everything perfectly and we want to know the truth. I want to know whether Fouchy killed 10 million people. I should be able to investigate that as a viologist, as an epidemiologist. I I I should be able to get answers and and go through the process of justice. When we have a situation in which our scientists are hamstrung because the conclusion is known ahead of time, we limit our own ability to use cowboy science to drive the rest of the world. And and quite honestly, we're giving away our biggest advantage, which is the middle finger, the American ability to say screw you to a supervisor who tells you what is true and what isn't true. young person should be able to say, "Hey, I think my field is going in entirely the wrong direction and I'm willing to bet my career on it. Don't interfere."

Host: This was always the biggest question for me is where were all the skeptics? Where were all the scientists that are supposed to question the dogma during the lockdowns, during COVID, during that pandemic? And I talked to Katios about this when we did our interview that if everyone in the room agrees on something, it's probably wrong. Like you know there there has to be some degree of skepticism but particularly because the fundamental basis of science is to ask questions, interrogate, generate evidence, generate data and then draw some you know conclusion and ask your next question. But it's almost like the asking questions stopped. Where did that come from? It sounds like you're saying it's because folks were hamstrung socially. Was it economic? What is it that happened that not just in this pandemic but just broadly are we seeing this happen more in these scientific domains where everyone kind of aligns around one thesis one dogma and you're not going to get funding you're not going to have friends you're not going to get colleagues to work with you you're going to get chastised if you ask different questions or ask whether these assumptions are correct

Eric Weinstein: this is the question and let me just answer it is is that we created the scientific procariat We created a world in which professors cannot afford to go against a consensus. Now the problem is consensus because if everybody agrees on something, you shouldn't need a consensus. There's no arithmetic consensus. Do we have an arithmetic consensus that 2 + 3 equals 5? No, it just is. When I hear the word consensus, I get very, very nervous because a consensus is usually an artificial agreement achieved through pressure. the Washington consensus is some sort of a thing where we're all going to go in a particular direction and if you don't go in that direction you don't have a job. So when you ask well what happens you know my question is that the the uh Jay Bacharia is a perfect example of what should happen. You have a guy who has a PhD in economics and an MD and he went against it with the Great Bington Declaration. Now he's the head of NIH. I I knew Jay when he was called a fringe epidemiologist by this loser Francis Collins and you know his sidekick who was probably our bioweapons are Anthony Fouchy. You know, if I say Anthony Fouchy was probably our bioweapons are, that's going to strike all these people, particularly on the institutional left is, well, that's conspiracy theory talk. So, my question is, we signed a couple of uh agreements in the 70s, the Geneva Convention and Boweapons Treaty. We have a cryptic system. Somehow we chose in that case a mysterious Ukrainian uh British zoologologist to receive huge amounts of money through a hippie dippy charity called the Ecoalth Alliance money from like Ditra, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the whole thing doesn't make any sense. So if you start doing things through covert operations, the problem is is that scientists can see right through covert operations. If you have great tools, you know, if you say, "I I wasn't at the scene of the crime." I said, "Oh, well, but we have a a hair

Eric Weinstein: follicle and I can pretty much tell you you were at the scene of the crime." That's how powerful science is. So now you have this different problem which is is that you've got all of these Bminus policy people in Washington, particularly in the covert community, not the intelligence community, but the covert community, inside the intelligence community, who don't want kick-ass independent scientists, because they're telling stories and narratives that are easily exploded. So right now, we don't don't just have a problem with good science, we have a problem with good journalism,

Interviewer: right? They also have to fall in line with the the pride narrative.

Eric Weinstein: Exactly. So there are times when you when you have to, you know, when the US went to war, Roosevelt was in a wheelchair with these leg braces and there was a general agreement that we won't report on the state of the president's health. Well, we had the same thing with Biden. Biden was undergoing some form of dementia. Did anyone think to ask a leading geriatric neurologist, look, examine his gate, examine his speech patterns, and tell us where he is he likely in his cognitive trajectory. So, if you're trying to to, you know, tell a lie that's important structurally, you really don't want scientists exploding it. When we did the and I I'm I'm not arguing with that. We shouldn't have been honest about what we were doing at a New Mexico boy school from 1940 to 1945 because science was creating the most powerful weapon ever seen on planet Earth.

Interviewer: For those not aware, that's the Manhattan Project.

Eric Weinstein: Absolutely. So, what I'm trying to say is is that right now, you're not taking those people who stood up and making them the president of a university or the chairman of a department. You're not giving them a chair. And I just gave a talk on this at at uh Jordan Peterson's ARC conference. You haven't reinserted the tiny number of people who stood up. You haven't rewarded them. My question is where's my third home for standing up?

Eric Weinstein: Where's the ability to put my kids, you know, I want to put three kids through school. I want to participate in the security and the prosperity that we provide to everyone else. And this is the the key issue. You've created the American scientific procariat. That's one of the reasons why you have, you know, such strange political affiliations where you don't have balance in the professor. You've got this incredibly dangerous situation where we are not participating in freedom. And I will say in particular theoretical phys physics theoretical physics is the only profession to have lost free speech because of something called restricted data where I am not allowed to put pen to paper to write down a physics equation if in any way it affects nuclear weapons. Well try doing really good physics in a way that doesn't affect you know hadrons and nucleons. It impossible. So you have this threat, right, that somehow um the law I'm not even protected by the first amendment.

Interviewer: But I I want to go back to your point about incentives. So when you say I want to have a third home, what you're saying just to I'm going to do the Eric Weinstein translation here, but you're saying as a professor, I have to fall in line in order to gain tenure, in order to get a grant, in order to get the the chairmanship role or whatever the fellowship I'm looking for. If I don't fall in line, if I'm fringe, if I say things that are nonconformist, is that the right kind of way to

Eric Weinstein: heterodox?

Interviewer: Heterodox, if I choose to just go against the orthodoxy, right? I believe that um it was insane to take the idea of the Wuhan Institute of Irology off the table when it came to the origin of CO.

Eric Weinstein: Right.

Interviewer: Okay. Insane. It was clear then. And when you said that, you were called a fringe scientist and you were chastised and labeled an outcast and therefore you lost access, you lost jobs, you lost income. There was much that was left out of the equation for you. Y because you asked questions that were heterodox.

Eric Weinstein: I I came up with a set of equations in differential geometry in 1987 and I was uh really treated incredibly badly. those equations took over my field in 1994 and there was never an attempt to go back and say wait a minute we just brutalize somebody who got things right and very early and so you know by the same token it's just a very simple process you're not allowed to want better for your life you're supposed to be humble you know well true scientists don't care about money true scientists don't care about security the reward is the work it's you know blah blah blah blah blah it's all of this absolute dril The fact is is that we are providing your security. And I say third homes to be deliberately provocative. I used to say second homes and I'm done with that. You're dealing with a level of prosperity in a world in which the genie coefficients are blowing out. It's almost entirely due to the technology that is derivative of science and the scientists are not participating. So what you're doing is you're creating a collectivist mindset because we can't get paid. We can't win. If we get things right, we're out.

Interviewer: When did this change happen? Because did we not value and prize heterodoxy, hereticism, outlandish ideas. The origin of science, the origin of great innovation, which arguably America is still the global leader in today, arises from what initially seems heretical. seems like an idea that is far-fetched, unrealistic, not going to happen. But all it takes is one out of 10 of those things to be true and ultimately the envelope is pushed forward and we find ourselves in a new frontier, right? Science should follow the same formula as entrepreneurship in the sense technological or industrial kind of entrepreneurship roughly. Yeah. But where did things change and why is this just the natural course of you know Ted Kazinski the uniomber wrote this manifesto where he talked about over socialization. Is that ultimately what happened here? Is it social media played a role? Is it just that this is the saturation of social systems over time? Yeah. This or was there a deliberate external effort?

Eric Weinstein: The one thing you didn't uh recite in that list of things. You didn't you didn't mention my being in in the physics department I guess uh at Hebrew University MIT uh post-docctoral fellowship but the the most important one is that I was the co-chair co-PI with Richard Freeman of the science and engineering workforce project at Harvard in the economics department because I was worried that we were we had been losing this and there's a very crisp answer to this and between 1965 and 75 everything went wrong. Right. And and it's basically from the beginning of the Medicare Act of 65 to a controversy over something called man a course of study in 1975 that ushered in peer review and the control. But if you wanted to really pinpoint it, it really 65 69 to 71 is particularly brutal. And what happened was the MIT physics department, I think in 1969 in the spring, walked out in protest of the Vietnam War, including people who had been part of the Manhattan Project.

Eric Weinstein: And the government took one look at this and said, "Okay, you are wobbly. We can't trust you. We have a we have a very complicated, cryptic agreement with our physicists in particular. You are the most dangerous, most deadly, most intelligent, most successful group along with the mathematicians and we've relied on you and now we can't trust you because you're not you're not rowing uh in the same direction that the country is rowing with the with the war because you're joining the protest movement. What happened was is that immediately the MIT instrument laboratory, which I think was a where lots of government money was being funneled through, was taken outside the university and turned into Draper Labs. And the Mansfield amendment in 6971, named after Mike Mansfield of of Montana, said, "Okay, the military can no longer fund blue sky research inside of our university system unless it has a direct military uh express military purpose." That was the disaster because what the military had done is they said, "Look, we want you guys fat and happy doing blue sky research, which is what you think you should be doing. We trust you guys. We just want to know that you're there for us when we

Eric: So, the military was our best friend. Now that was uncomfortable because quite honestly you have a huge paniply of different ideas inside of high energy highly dynamic science project. If you don't have communists and fascists in the same department having tea together something has gone wrong

Eric: because scientists are very extreme. And Ted Kazinski, you know, wrote a marvelous story, for example, called Ship of Fools about a bunch of people overly concerned about political correctness on a ship that then, you know, runs into an iceberg because nobody's actually paying attention to the writing of the ship. They're having questions about

Interviewer: I didn't even know this.

Eric: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody should should read it. Now, of course, I'm not I'm not pushing people to uh a mass murderer. Uh you know, how however

Interviewer: it's heretical to acknowledge Ted Kazinski, by Well, but the point is is that

Eric: scientists are weirdos, or at least many scientists are weirdos. And if you're not going to deal with truly dangerous minds, I don't even know why you're suiting up for the science game. So, where do those minds go if they're not enabled or allowed into the institutions, the establishment, the machinery of science in America? Are they still around or their brains just blunted out and they're only allowed to say certain things or are we taking great scientists and reprogramming them and missing all the alpha? I mean, what?

Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. You're you're missing you're missing the alpha. And it's funny that you should say that because that makes it like alpha male or the uh alpha in investment theory, right?

Eric: Both works.

Interviewer: Yeah. I'm a I also do freestyle raps.

Eric: Really?

Interviewer: Yeah. No. Well, sometimes. Okay. We'll talk later about that.

Eric: Yeah. Cool. Um, well, mostly what you're doing is you're spaying and neutering uh your best minds. Uh, but the other thing is is look at Palmer Lucky. Okay, that guy looks to me like a scientist. He's a reverend. He's got a crazy shirt and he builds things that kill people.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Eric: Right now, if he was in a physics department, um, he could not easily be that guy. But if you wanted somebody who's in still in science, who looks to me like a great scientist, I would point you to Nema Arani Hamemed. Incredibly charismatic, brilliant as the day is long, completely uncompromising, did not go in for the string theory fat at a deep level, even though he's sympathetic to many aspects of it.

Interviewer: Do you guys even know that he's there? He's the best of us currently, and he's still not that old, you know. Um, my feeling is that there's pretty much been a giant decrease in our effectiveness. And I know why. When you kick Jim Watson out of Cold Spring Harbor, which he built, what are you doing? Do you know that Mark Tashnney uh is in his mid 80s? uh guy who wrote a genetic switch on fage lambda, one of the most brilliant, irreverent people. You know, at some point, I think I sent a journalist to him and the journalist came back with his tail between the leads and said that that that guy's insane.

Eric: Well, Eric Lander was the White House uh science adviser, Katzios's role. I think his picture isn't up on the wall because he's sort of an uncompromising, difficult to deal with guy. And my feeling, I hate to say, this is tough. M

Interviewer: you know if you ever saw the movie Whiplash

Eric: love it. One of my favorites.

Interviewer: Okay. Well, there's a reason that that guy has the best band. He you know he's not handing out tissues. And I I don't mean to be mean about I don't want a brutal place, but like this stuff is pretty unforgiving.

Interviewer: What's the solution to morass stagnation? What do we do here to try and catch up again? What do we do here to to restructure? Or is it about institutions? Is it about funding? Is it about people? Is it reprogramming? I mean, how do you get out of the social circuit that's fully programmed?

Eric: Great question. I mean, really great question. Let's just be provocative and throw some stuff out. National interest waiverss. I want to blow a giant hole in the Civil Rights Act so that we can have teams that are not constantly afraid of HR.

Interviewer: What does the Civil Rights Act do that makes it difficult for individuals to do what they need? Well, you know, you

Eric: science,

Eric: my closest friend uh from college, we have a group of three, two Jews and a Muslim.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Eric: And the Muslim is constantly teasing the Jews about, you know, you guys know all the banks of the newspapers and we, you know, joke with him about him being a terrorist. Now, that is not a model I can explain to anybody, but we've been, you know, incredibly close uh since 1982. My claim is is that you don't understand how high agency people actually form tight cohesive social units.

Interviewer: If you have the HR department saying, you know, Eric, I understand you you are making an inappropriate joke,

Eric: screw off. Get out of here. Who are you and what are you doing in my lab? Let me call security. Why do I need a note from my mommy and daddy to to do everything? I'm not saying be horrible. I'm saying you don't know enough about the culture of greatness to be my HR department. That's sort of what I'm saying. So like I'm just throwing out a provocative idea which by the way I'm a Democrat. I'm sort of a Democrat from the JFK school rather than I I don't think I would join.

Interviewer: I don't know I don't know what you would be today.

Eric: Well I'm I'm staying in the party. I'm a nail house Democrat. You know the nail house is the house that you build a mall around because the person won't sell.

Interviewer: Yes.

Eric: I'm not I'm not leaving the party. Um, but my party has gone insane. My feeling is if we were really who we say we are, we'd be making common cause with the Republicans I met with and saying, "Let's get on with it and reform the system together." And if you want to brag about how you made America great without us, you can go screw yourself. Um, my feeling is that I'd rather work with you, make America great, and then fight over the credit later. That's how you work in a war, you know. So my my first recommendation is

Interviewer: throw out the Civil Rights Act.

Eric: No, not throw it out. Poke holes in it because you like the intent of it. It's the letter that's arbitrageed against the the intent which creates the sort of collectivist thinking. You can't do great work without hyperindividualism and without rugged hyperindividualism. And so my feeling is is that that's not an Einrandian thing. That's not a conservative thing. it. The issue is is that I'm I consider myself left of center and there's no one more individualistic than I am. And so what you need is I need not to have peer review. Peer review is a fake story that was retconed into science. It is no, you can look it up on Google engrams, put quote space peer review space close quote, and you'll notice that there's really no mention of it before 1965. And the reason for that is that the Medicare act made the government the major payer for medical procedures. The government said, "Well, why are we paying for all this stuff?" Well, the doctors said, "We don't want you having oversight over our decisionmaking." So, our peer we will peer review each other. It started in a Utah clinic. And then it wasn't until 1975 when fiscal and social conservatives attacked the NSF over something called man a course of study or makos. Now some for some reason the NSF grouped in anthropology as a science. I I think that's a mistake. I think what we really need is we really need very hard sciences separated. And my feeling is the weaker scientists should go form their own organization and stop using our credit card

Interviewer: because they're destroying our credit limit.

Eric: Those are social sciences and soft sciences versus hard scientists where there's an industrial end point.

Interviewer: Well, it's not a question of an industrial endpoint. I mean, I think that's another thing that's really screwed up is that science has become synonymized with biomedical, which it isn't.

Eric: Yeah. and science has become uh in the conservative mind something that the the market can do well when it's like did did no one take econ 101 because the you know on the first day of school they're supposed to tell you that markets work really well as long as you're not in a category called

Speaker A: market failure and if you miss that day you say well markets are perfect and they can price everything but anything that's uh inexhaustible and inexcludable which is exactly the definition of science can't be priced by a market unless you create an artificial market. So, I can't tell you how dispiriting, you know, this is, if I've been kind to the Republicans. Here's a place where I'm going to be cruel. You can't have morons who do not understand that markets cannot see everything. There's a reason that we pay taxes for an army. And it's a technical reason. It's not a we think that's a good thing. It's that if market if you could make the army uh exhaustable and excludable, you wouldn't need to pay for it with taxes. So that your tax dollar has to be used for things that the market can't reach.

Speaker A: Homatopy theory is a great case. When I say homotopy theory in these science discussions, people say, "Well, what is that?" And my my my response is, "Well, you don't know. It's an incredibly important part of mathematics, pure mathematics. I don't know that it has any industrial applications." But you go after homatopy theory and you're you're pulling out a Jenga block from an incredibly important ecosystem that you don't understand.

Speaker A: So my my feeling about this is I'm going to inject a PhD perspective into this conversation because the what the PhDs are doing wrong is that they're staying out. Trump to them has cooties. They don't want Trump cies so they don't show up.

Speaker B: Yeah. And now, okay, well, if if they are not going to explain to you why we need homatopy theory and we need to tax people and to pay for it, the administration's not hearing what they need to be hearing and the people that are supposed to be saying it are not showing up to the administration.

Speaker A: That's right. And it's completely dysfunctional and quite honestly,

Speaker B: by the way, the statistic I gave Cratios is uh Nature did a survey of 2,000 scientists, their readers. Nature being a scientific journal that's widely read and by the scientific community and six

Speaker A: by the way not peer reviewed until the 70s

Speaker B: right and six% of the readers pled uh voted for President Trump 85% or something Kla Harris and then there was an undecided group but I think it speaks to your point like Trump is deemed to be so anti-science the institution of Trump is deemed to be anti-science that there doesn't even want to be an engagement.

Speaker A: Assume that you detest Trump. Okay. Assume that you think Trump is the devil. I just met with Michael Katzios. Great. I I wanted that role. I put my hat into the ring for that uh for that role. I didn't think I would get it because I wasn't willing to pledge sufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. Happened to go to Michael Katzio. I was very nervous because he he's not coming from a PhD background. What a what an unbelievable growth in that role. The guy understands. I don't know all sorts of things. I'm here to learn. Tell me what I need to know. And if no one shows up to do that toutelage, you're going to you boy, do you deserve exactly what you got because I think Michael is trying to do absolutely the right thing. I know Jim O'Neal very well from the Peter Teal universe coming in at NSF. Jay Bodacharia. Absolute gem. If you can't work with these people, is that their problem or is that your problem?

Speaker B: So, arguably this and sorry, let me just go back to talk about markets and I I'll make a libertarian argument. If markets work well for driving economic value and those who are good at that participate meaningfully in that value creation, there will be wealthy people and those wealthy people will see the value of mathematics, the value of pure physics, the value of astrophysics and cosmology and they'll fund it. Jim Simons, didn't he fund quite a lot of research?

Speaker A: Jim was a genius with detailed knowledge of pure mathematics. Mhm.

Speaker B: So if you have, you know, Yuri Milner is a guy who has a background in quantum chromodnamics, if you have more of those people, and there are point is, and I'm not trying to argue with you about it, but my point is, shouldn't the market work regardless that they'll see the value of the science that you're identifying? They'll identify it. Capital will flow to that research, it will get funded somehow. There's a lot of independent institutions out there that get capital. and is or is that not sufficient for the landscape? And I'll also state like you know one of the uh statistics that I brought up with Katzios which he published in his book is that over time we have seen a significant decline in the effectiveness of dollars deployed against scientific research in the US an 80fold decline in return on every dollar invested in government research. So, I just want to throw those two points out there, like is there not private market capital that will find its way to solve these problems? And isn't the government getting worse over time at deploying capital and driving returns? And I might be giving you a a te-ball here. So,

Speaker A: I guess or or I feel like I should have I should have gotten high on cannabis uh in order to even take that question on. I don't believe any of that first point. Um and and it's I knew Jim Simons decently well. Uh Jim was the kind of guy who could do that. But even he didn't understand. My last conversation with Jim Simons, I was trying to explain to him how the churn Simons uh transgression interpreted as an action functional is the only rival to Einstein Hilbert. um and that effectively he will find um if he if he pursues this that churn Simons and Einstein Hilbert are on an equal playing field as daughters of the ultimate theory.

Speaker A: Uh he didn't know that. So partially the issue is is that it is so difficult in my area to know what's going on in the adjacent area. I just got off the phone before the podcast with my good friend Edward Frankle who does uh algebraic geometry whereas I would do differential geometry. It's very difficult for us to communicate even though those fields are adjacent to each other. So yes, if you happen to have an algebraic geometer who's a billionaire, uh, and one who's a representation theorist, another one who's, uh, interested in, um, oh, I don't know, category theory, you could do it that way, but this is completely insane. So,

Speaker B: okay, so government should fund

Speaker A: government has to be the basic funer of these things.

Speaker B: The next part of this, we need to have the right people representing the decisions on where we should be funding, what we should be funding.

Speaker A: Correct. And that's what we did previously is that we sort of had slush funds and they're very good people had money. Somebody years ago I was at a conference in Bereva um on physics and people were talking about where they were going to get their next job and this old guy comes up to us and said I just pity all of you. There was an American and I said in what way? He said you know I never applied for a job in my life. He said sorry what do what do you mean? He says, "If you were any good and you needed a job, you talked to one of the people who was high up in the field and they got on the phone and by the time they got off the phone, you had a job where you needed to be."

Speaker A: And so my claim is is that when you have administrator types come in and say, "What we need is KPIs. Uh we need to to drive this on a data we I'm data driven. I want to know what the translation is. Do do you even know what ROI is or is it just what you can measure?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And so my claim is a lot of what you want is you want these people on retainer so whenever you have a real problem you call up the Jason's and it's stocked with the most terrifying intellects you can imagine and we can get to work and we can solve your problems. But if you're saying, "Well, why should my taxpayer dollars uh, you know, go do whatever you find interesting?" Well, if I can pursue what I find interesting, and when you call me up, I'm going to be very friendly to helping my own country, my own nation, I'm going to feel positive about that. If you tell me you should work on this because this thing is what drives the ROI, my feeling is, do you just not understand science? Do you imagine that your technology mindset is the same

Speaker A: thing as my scientific mindset. You want to get paid. I mean, I I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. I'm not nearly interested as interested in having a new McLaren as whether my name is going to be discussed 10,000 years from now if humans are still around. And I I say that because, you know, Jim Watson just died. My good friends Isidor Singer, Raul Bot are are now dead. Those are people whose contributions will be discussed 10,000 years from now.

Speaker B: Can you say that about almost anyone you know who's doing software as a service? Uh hard to say. You know, as I used to say, um what's the difference between uh Grecia Pearlman and Ron Pearlman? And so in the modern era, the question is who's Greca Pearlman? And you know, a thousand years from now, it's who's Ron Pearlman. So my feeling is is that we have our own toys that we we care about. We care about our history. We care about different things. It's it's not unreasonable to want to do and to want to be able to check into a Four Seasons uh and to fly business class, but we don't need a corporate jet. Like that's your stuff. So treat scientists like the rock stars that they should be will be. Otherwise, you're going to lose them. You're going to lose that talent. You're going to lose that moment.

Narrator: Protecting nature is often labeled anti-growth. The Conservation Fund disagrees. They believe protecting land, wildlife, and outdoor access goes handinhand with economic opportunity. For 40 years, they've moved with market speed to protect at risk land while supporting local communities. With 9 million acres protected across all 50 states, the Conservation Fund is proving that they deliver lasting outcomes that benefit communities and nature. Learn more at conservationfund.org.

Speaker B: When you say slush funds, the way the funding process works in the modern era is grants. you you apply for a grant with a very specific set of objectives and that's what the capital is going to be used for. And to your point earlier, grants are typically approved if they're lower beta, which means more predictable in terms of the outcome.

Speaker B: So, so we're appropriating modern portfolio theory to science.

Speaker A: To science.

Speaker B: Love it.

Speaker A: Yes. Well, I mean, that's the way it it's been operating is my argument. Or has it not been? And does that not miss the opportunity to take crazy high beta bets and not just bet on the idea but bet on the person. So

Speaker B: crazy high beta bet.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Let's do an example.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Imagine that I have a 1% chance of curing all cancer,

Speaker A: right?

Speaker B: Should you hire me?

Speaker A: Well, 99% failure is pretty expensive. But the benefit of killing curing all cancer um the government is incredibly rich and when you're incredibly rich you can afford to take different bets to maximize your outcomes. The problem is is that the government co-invested through things that are poorer than it.

Speaker A: So each department says you know we can't really afford we don't get that many appointments. So, we're going to go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest outcome and then we're going to start lying about how important that is. You'll notice that if you ask people, "How's your field doing?" Everybody says, "It's never been a better time to be a particle theorist." Well, it's a terrible time to be a particle theorist, right? And and we can't say that. And and it's funny because again in portfolio theory, if you have a balanced portfolio and part of it starts succeeding and part of it failing, what you usually do is you take money out of the thing that's succeeding and put it into the thing that's failing because otherwise you get too much concentration in the portfolio. Nobody's ever thought about any of this stuff. And so what you have is you have people who don't even understand modern portfolio theory and don't understand market failure designing things. It's really important to know basic market theory and we don't.

Speaker B: Yeah. So if we fix that do we fund individuals versus ideas? You know this is the other kind of

Speaker A: say more.

Speaker B: So the whole story I I gave this example to Katzio. Stuart Butterfield worked on this project for a couple years. He was down to three million bucks. All the VCs put money in started nearly failed. And he calls him up. He called up Ben Horowitz. He just told the story recently. He said, "Hey, should I give the money back? This project didn't work. But by the way, we've been doing a intra company communication tool for our engineering team. Maybe I could pivot into that." He's like, "Yeah, keep the money. Do that. I trust you."

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You pivoted it, turned it into Slack, sold it for $30 billion.

Speaker A: The idea being that you back the person, not the idea. that the the great people, the great entrepreneurs continuously evolve, continuously build, continuously pivot. I mean, here you are with Zuck reinventing that company again and again and again. And if you find the upandcomers, is there a way to kind of find the individual that are emerging in their fields?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. But

Speaker A: and you fund them for a period of time and you say or is this a portfolio theory again where you say some bets are on an idea, some bets are on people and you know the people bets should be long-term and fully funded,

Speaker B: right? I'll give you the magic formula that gives you an idea of how difficult this is and how tricky you have to be. Tell me who the established leaders of of a field will block but will not short fund that guy.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: For now

Speaker B: because if you're not willing I mean if you I I'll say this with my own uh main theory. If you are willing to short either geometric marginalism or more importantly geometric unity, I want to dance with you.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Because I want to take your house. I want to take your retirement. It would be my absolute pleasure to destroy you in the market.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: But that's not what happens. It's like, well, we want to block him, but we know that he knows a lot of stuff. Yeah.

Speaker B: And we know that we haven't really read it. And you know, there's something about somebody saying, "Look, you're 99.9999% uh going to fail." And I say, "Care care to formalize that?"

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: You know, let's have Well, why? I'll bet you $100 that by next year you haven't gotten full acceptance in the That's not what you said. You said that you'd be willing to put up your house to win a dollar from me, and I want to do that at size, you know. So my feeling is come at me baby that would be fun.

Speaker B: And let me tell you something. He also listened for things that no one is willing to say. I I am on record as saying that the the smartest man in the world today is Edward Whitten. Brilliant.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Unbelievable. The guy drove theoretical physics off the road and off a cliff 42 years ago.

Speaker A: Nobody else is willing to say it.

Speaker B: Mhm. So the question is is the one person who noticed that nobody's gone to Stockholm [laughter] that the standard model has not changed the recent conference uh in string theory supposedly the only game in town in fundamental physics. Go to strings 2026 website. There's a list of all the talks. There's a search engine. Put in these following words. Electron, Hadron, Higs, Leptton. There's no physics in this. They're not talking about anything that could hurt a foe. They're not talking about the physical world. I was at arguably the world's leading physics institute. And I said, "Who are the smartest people here?" And it was I was given three names. Two of them were pure theorists. I talked deeply with both of them. When I got to the point about how to advance the standard model, which is our notion of all the particles you see in the in this room, both of them said, "I have no interest in the physical world." And I said, "Well, you're the two leading professors at our major, our most expansive theoretical physics institute, and neither of you care about the physical world." just openly expressed this is madness and you know I give talks at physics departments and I I've now started non-ooperation with the departments who've asked me to come and talk but will technically deny me a talk. So for example, I've given talk a talk at the University of Texas Austin, but I'm I'm not allowed to say that the talk occurred in the

physics department.

Really?

Yeah. I gave a talk at the Perimeter Institute in the Skyrim. It is not a talk. Eric is answering questions. I gave a talk at the University of Chicago in the

This is because your talk and your persona is viewed to be fringe and outlandish.

You keep saying fringe. Yeah,

I totally disagree with the narrative of the field.

I just out and out say that when physics in 1983 physics made sense in 1984 it did not. It was very stark and it was like overnight more or less three people Leonard Suskin, David Gross and Edward Whitten drove the field in a totally different direction and now the achievement of this has not been any advance in our knowledge of the physical world but it has been something that no one knew was possible. You take the field in which Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Fineman and Stannislov Ulam created the most terrifying weapons from SU3 cross U1 gauge theory and you've made it safe. It is now safe to do physics with your geopolitical rivals. You can invite your friends from China to come and become graduate students in your department and you will fill their heads with things about ads CFT that couldn't hurt a fly because there's no physics in it. So the question is did I is this a secret program?

Go back to 1983. Wait, so we drove off a cliff in 1983 and the question is did someone say, "Hey, let's drive this off a cliff."

Well, this happened before. Do you do you think that there is some community subgroup set of assets set of projects that are happening somewhere on Earth that are making advances in physics and have been for the last 50 years?

Great that you asked that question. That would be crazy, wouldn't it, David? Can you imagine if there was like a secret place that was making advances in an important field of physics and people who were studying physics outside of that place were being stymied?

I would find it hard that it would be kept secret.

Okay. What happened in 1940 is that something that you've never heard of called the reference committee was established inside of the National Research Council. So when the neutron was first hypothesized in 1911 by Rutherford, it was then discovered in the early 30s, a woman named Lee Mitner came up with the concept of the chain reaction which was then proven by Fairmy at the University of Chicago with something called Chicago pile one. Thereafter, a guy named Wright uh briti t formed something called the uh reference committee inside the national research council so that if you submitted a paper on chain reaction physics to a journal, it got shunted into the national research council and they would return it to you saying unfortunately you know these results are really preliminary. um we don't see this as being uh at the level of the journal. Please revise, etc., etc. Okay, now you've resubmitted it. It's still not going. You don't know that this thing exists. This is how people outside of the Manhattan Project, outside of the white badges, treated their colleagues who weren't allowed inside the Manhattan Project. So let's at least agree that from 1940 to 1945 there was a review process which destroyed the ability to earn a living if you were doing chain reaction physics and you weren't invited into the secret group.

Yes.

Okay. The question isn't is that nuts? It's clearly not nuts because I know that this actually existed and happened. Question is did it happen once or more than once? If it happened more than once, the question is, what is the analog of the boys school in New Mexico? What is the analog of the white badges? What is the analog of the reference committee?

And you have a theory?

Yeah.

Okay.

If it's happening, I've said that the leading candidate would be Renaissance Technologies on Long Island.

I've heard you say this.

Yeah.

But surely there's

Let's look at the cover story.

Okay. The cover story would be, you know, we are so good at trading that we don't even allow people who know markets into our firm. We only hire people in directly relevant subjects of physics, like particle theorists, like differential geometers, like machine learning experts. And we have a very strange thing that we have a very close relationship with the Brook Haven National Laboratory. And by the way, there's a middling university right next door who happens to be absolutely world class historically in the exact subjects that would be relevant to doing next level physics. Okay. So you multiple fields medalists and US News and World Report never ranks this as like one of our great facilities. Even though if if you look at the people have passed through State University of New York at Stonybrook, it's unbelievable. Yeah, to me that looks like Fort me when it was still no such agency collecting way too many number theorists.

But Eric, people have come out of that place, that workplace. I know one or two of them and there are no such stories. At some point you would envision that some number of them, some small percentage of them would leak some information or some set of facts if that were to be true about some of this advanced physics work going on or there would be probably more innumerable returns realized from that than perhaps there have been.

I'm not saying that I know that that's true. My point was, and I tried I tried to be careful. If you said, "Eric, that sounds preposterous because to be entirely honest, the concept of Los Alamos, which was published in 1944 by a journalist named Jack Raper in a Cleveland newspaper, he he broke the story.

Nothing happened because what he said was crazy. He said, "There is a secret city with a mayor who's supposed to be the next Einstein working on a doomsday weapon." and the town is so secretive that nobody knows what's going on inside it. So my claim is is that I'm doing the Jack Raper thing and you're doing the what happened to Jack Raper. Well, clearly there's only one person saying that and he's nuts.

Well, in that in both cases, I could show up and start asking questions and interrogate and see if I can find something.

Again, I'm not saying that Renaissance Technologies is that. I am saying you have a secure campus with a story that makes no sense. Yeah,

you know markets. Do you have any idea how much the medallion fund

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know. Cuz again, my friends who were there, they get to leave their money there and then the returns continue.

They get to leave their money there is not what happens.

Okay.

They closed the fund to all but internal money.

Yes. Yes. That's what I mean.

You know, another interesting story,

but if you leave the firm, you get to your capital can stay in the medallion fund. So my claim to you is Jeffrey Epstein had a story which is that he only accepted a billion dollars or more invested with him if you gave him power of attorney. These things tend to have some reason that no person outside has money and gets to ask questions. Right?

So Jeffrey Epstein did not run a hedge fund. He told me that he ran a multistrategy FX hedge fund and that he needed a 727 because it had a trading floor and he filled it with yeshiva students because they were the only ones you could trust. He was extremely specific about using trend following, mean reversion and carry is the three strategy. I think he didn't say he said he didn't do any gamma trading uh you know or or options trading. That was a lot. It was a cover story that that was burned and then he became disgraced financier and then he became tax expert Jeffrey Epstein. You're looking at a fake world with cover stories that fail over. If you remember the old Get Smart line, would you believe, you know, a thousand special agents are going to swarm this? I find that very difficult to believe.

Uh 100 policemen,

you know, not not true, Miss Maxwell. Two two boy scouts with a slingshot. This is fake. And my claim is I don't know what's going on at Renaissance, but Jim Simons is an absolute genius. Hardly distinguished in that. We have many. And I don't know anybody who's ever gotten close to these returns. I don't know any information about what that thing actually did, does claims to do.

Yeah. And I'm saying it

Speaker A: has very close relationships with a talent pool Stony Brook which is not acknowledged and then and a national lab.

Speaker B: Go back to 8384.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And assume we did not go into this quantum universe that we

Speaker A: not quantum quantum gravity universe.

Speaker B: Quantum gravity universe, right? And we're in a different universe where we have a sense what does that physics look like today? If we progress physics, help an audience that's a generalist audience understand a little bit about what it means that if physics didn't stall out and before I do that, let me just ask this question. Some would argue that physics has played an important role and maybe it's not fundamental and you could that might be your answer here in advancing things like semiconductor manufacturing technology, advanced lithography, material science. We've we've made tremendous progress in our capacity to drive compute and that's led to this moment today where we have these tools that we call AI, right? And all of the underlying advancements in chemistry, material science, physics got us to this moment today. Yeah. And that we have made progress and it has been applied. And that would be one argument. And so maybe tell me why that that kind of misses the point. and then we can talk a little bit about kind of what would the world look like today if we didn't go off track in 1983 84.

Speaker A: Great question. Let me try to engage that and then feel free to redirect me if I'm not answering the question. In the theory we have of which I'm going to call it the the frontier model which combines general relativity and the standard model of particle theory. We know certain things that we can't use. We found out that there were three veence quarks inside of every proton and every neutron. And nobody has ever pulled a veilance quark out of a proton or a neutron in isolation. Something called infrared slavery. Uh and screw the woke for not saying we can't say the word slavery. Infrared slavery. Deal with it, boys. Um you have a situation in which there is no industrial application. We've known about it since 1968. So sometimes you don't get to use something for an extraordinarily long period of time. But what happens if some advancements maybe we're never going to pull a quark out of a proton? Maybe it's impossible. What if there are other things we might be able to do had physics actually advanced? So for example in the mid 1970s the two gentlemen called Abdul Salam and I forget Pat's first name put forward the uh Patis Salam model. I believe that the petis salam model will be found to be the correct first order grand unification above where we are. Problem is is that it has something called SU4 rather than SU3. And the SU3 is what generates the force that keeps all those protons from running away from each other inside of a nucleus because obviously like charges are want to repel. That's why we were able to take out two Japanese cities in 1945 is that we got control of the strong force and then that allowed us to use the electromagnetic force to generate completely destructive um power but it didn't destroy protons and neutrons. What happens when you have SU4 is that you see that the electron and the nutrino are the fourth color that we associate with the up quark and down quark which make up protons and neutrons. You could have a weapon that rotates up quarks and down quarks into the lighter lepttons that disintegrate matter.

Speaker B: You could have dark chemistry. Dark is not the right concept. It's really decoupled matter. Dark matter is decoupled matter. Nutrinos are essentially dark matter. They're barely detectable. In fact,

Speaker A: they don't interact.

Speaker B: Well, they do,

Speaker A: but very very weak.

Speaker B: Very, very weak. Only through the gravitational and weak forces, which are the two incredibly weak ones. And gravity's so weak, it's not worth enough nutrinos concentrated, you can

Speaker A: Well, but here's another here's a here's a possibility. If you rotate a nutrino into some charged particle, you can send it through the earth.

Speaker B: Just explain what you mean by when you say rotate. What does that mean? So this these nutrinos are these subatomic particles. They don't really interact well. But what does it mean to rotate them?

Speaker A: Well, let's take and and I think a large amount of the energy produced in the sun is neutrinos that actually come out like if you actually you and I are being irdiated by nutrinos by billions of nutrinos. And the only reason that we're not dead is that, you know, imagine

Speaker B: they don't interact with our atoms.

Speaker A: Well, they barely interact. Once once in a blue moon they do. So, you know, at night the sun is streaming this through the earth. It's passing through all.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But it when it gets to us, it goes it it keeps going. You know, you can shoot it through I forget what it is a light year of lead and you know, you very rarely interact. What happens with the rotation is in this sort of internal sense. So it's kind of metaphor of rotation in this abstract place

Speaker B: which leads to a neutron. If I put a neutron on the table and we just sit there and watch with a half life of something like 17 minutes I forget it'll turn into a proton and this is called beta decay because what came out is that people saw an electron scream out of the neutron and that's why a neutral particle became positive because the negiveness went off in the electron. So just to be clear for the audience, a neutron can turn into a proton and release an electron in at the same time.

Speaker A: Yeah. But that turned out to be the wrong model because what it really did is is that you there were three quarks inside of it and one of the down quarks. So a neutron is down down up. So a down quark let off something called a W minus which is a force particle not a matter particle. and then that thing decayed into an electron and something else. The only reason we determined that there was something else going on. It's a little bit like accounting. If you have a really good accounting system and you notice that uh the envelope from the till is a little light,

Speaker B: you say, okay, according to conservation principles, somebody has been messing with the money till

Speaker A: and that turned out to be the nutrino. And so what happens is is that a nutrino and an electron have the same relationship as an up and a down quark and you can transmute them using these W uh W particles. The danger of this is that when you have more force particles than we know currently things that are to all intents and purposes stable now might not be stable in that new regime. So you could disintegrate a mountain potentially if SU5 uh is present. SU4 is more stable than the SU5. I don't think SU5 is relevant. But what I'm saying is if you think about physics, think about boom, vroom, and zoom as an easy way to keep track of why this is our most terrifying and most amazing subject. Boom is weaponry, vroom is energy, and zoom is propulsion, computation, and all the cool stuff that we get to do. So if you want to think about it, you've been denied for, let's say, the standard model got finalized more or lessif 53 years ago. For 53 years, you've been denied new boom, vroom, and zoom. And potentially the stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species because the boom is so terrifying. I can't tell you whether that's true or not, but it means that you don't have any room and zoom from the new stuff that could have occurred. And so, we have to be honest. I want I want the the zoom in particular. We could probably make the case that no one on earth got there and everyone has aligned around the distraction, the disinterest and the pursuit because of that absolute risk. Because if someone did actually make advancements and they could access the bigger boom,

Speaker B: yeah,

Speaker A: it would be game over already. I mean, there's no such thing as more absolute power that would give an individual or a group the ability to leverage that in some way to their kind of infinite will. And

Speaker B: I don't I don't agree with this at all.

Speaker A: Great. Okay.

Speaker B: So, I spent two years indoors beingounded to be vaccinated because of four amino acids being spliced into spike protein of corona virus. Now, my guess is that that's pretty easy,

Speaker A: right? Think about it. You need 12 nucleotides to code for four amino acids at the exact right place in spike protein and that's enough to shut down Earth. These are this is high lever science. And my claim is before we decide that what we want is let's get back to kicking ass and taking names, let us at least pause and say most people are ignorant of how much power is present with a little bit of scientific knowledge. which is a marvelous scene in Breaking Bad where the protagonist named Heisenberg takes what appears to be crystal meth and throws it uh in the office of a psychopath named Tuco and Tuco says well like what the hell was that that caused that massive explosion I forget whether it was lead aside or mercury fulminate or one of these extremely volatile compounds do you have any idea how easy it is to make black powder I I I asked modern audiences nobody knows that it's 75% salt peter, 10% sulfur, and 15% charcoal. The anarchist cookbook has gone out of discussion. The power of science, the leverage of science is so profound that we should at least ask the question, what if you had nuclear weapons that didn't require centrifuge? What if there are easy things to do that high school students could do? You you remember this guy who scavenged the amaresium and smoke detectors to build a working reactor and I think it was Brooklyn.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. Well, nobody thought collect 218 smoke detectors and you can have a working nuclear reactor.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So my claim is that if you want to think about Walter White as a paradigm, you have to go back to something called the United States versus progress the progressive magazine in which the teller Ulam design for thermonuclear weapon was put forward by a publication and the government said no no this is restricted data. We need prior injunction. This is the most dangerous piece of geometry. This is Stan Ulum's work. And the whole idea is that if you're going to use a fision device chemical shell compresses sub uh critical file material to create a detonator out of an atomic bomb. How do you get that to compress a rod or something into a fusion device? The only thing that can reach that tertiary stage fast enough is light. you have to figure out the geometry because it's the the detonator is going to rip apart the entire assembly if it doesn't get now that secret got published and the only reason the government didn't go after um Howard what is it Morland is that we stupidly declassified all sorts of pieces and shards of this and he went to the Los Alamos library and he pieced it together so my claim is if you don't know the story of John Aristotle Phillips, the substandard um physicist who in his Princeton PhD thesis as the Princeton mascot said, "Look, I'm not very good, Freeman Dyson. I want to use the fact that I'm not very good to do something amazing. Tell me whether or not you will let me come up with a plan for an atomic bomb." And Freeman Dyson said, "I will give you no help, but I'll tell you whether it will work." So the substandard physicist put together this and he submitted his junior thesis and I forget whether it's page 24 but that that thesis is not in the library and the government removed the page that has the plan. The fact is that this stuff is readily present and we've never seen an atomic weapon used since 1945 mostly if we don't use this power.

Speaker A: But if it turns out that it's easy to do, then and by the way, if the US fails with Iran, you're going to see a proliferation of countries acquiring nukes because we trusted the US. But you've got this. You are the world's policemen. Petrol dollars aren't petro dollars. They're violence dollars. The US was supposed to have the violence needed to secure the oil, and the oil backs the money. We're watching the disintegration of that regime in real time as the US goes through its Suez moment, right? You know, whe whether you think Donald Trump should have gone in to Iran or not, and I I happen to think that he was courageous and did something that we should have done in 1981 or '82 or something. We have to win. We we have to win because if you have a world that decides that there is no world's policeman, everybody's going to want their own nuke. And you can go back to the Tom Lair song called Who's Next? And you'll you'll you'll find that more or less you're going to have a world in which you can't figure out the game theory because it's no longer diatic. It's multipolar.

Speaker B: Imagine a world beyond nukes.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: What does that world look like? So what else is there beyond the boundaries of what at this point is almost a 80 year old technology?

Speaker A: Sure. And again I go back to the 83 story. We're making advancements. Did we stop making advancements? And is someone else is China going to make these advancements? And what does that look like? Is that what UAPs unidentified aerial phenomena are? Because you've recently made comments that you were a deep skeptic on UAPs but now you you have a view that maybe there's something there. Oh, there's definitely something there there.

Speaker B: Okay,

Speaker A: that's something there. There, by the way, maybe China. It may be us. It may be a fake story, but there's definitely something there

Speaker B: based on the videos and the first person accounts.

Speaker A: It's not the videos. I I've never cared about the videos. I've talked to too many smart, sober people, too many similar stories. There are definitely special access programs. Yeah.

Speaker B: That are all about this. Yeah.

Speaker A: The only thing that we learn from uh that that works for to keep secrets is compartmentalization. And so we are so compartmentalized that almost no one can piece the story together. It may be that the the so-called stove piping is such that we can't figure out what we know because we can't talk to each other.

Speaker A: If you want to know what's possible, I could freak you out and it would be super cool and super frightening. One thing is is that I'm worried about multi-temporal adversaries,

Speaker B: time traveling,

Speaker A: times travel,

Speaker B: times,

Speaker A: everybody says time travel because they think that time can only be one-dimensional. But imagine, for example, that you put a giant gun on a rail car. The rail car can only move in one dimension. Now, somebody puts a giant gun on something like a tank and you go to the Bonavville Salt Flats. Now, you can move in two dimensions. Now you put it on an A-10 warthog and you can move in three. Those are all spatial dimensions. Why do you think there's an arrow of time? It's because you believe time can only be one-dimensional. I don't think time is one-dimensional. And I if you meet an adversary who has access to multi- time, it's like you're trying to compete with them with an A-10 Warthog and you've got your only gun on a on a track except with time rather than with space. if I could sneak up behind you in time knowing your intent. I mean, this is terrifying stuff to me. And it's also like I would love to have this over our adversaries, but I don't want to meet anybody who knows how to do this kind of stuff, not on a level playing field. Let me say another one. The solar system is an escape room. And Elon is focused was focused on Mars. I said that Mars is a red herring. It's a mcguffin. Tonight, it's focused on the moon. He is our only adult so far as I can tell uh crazy and mad as he is and he uses that to motivate engineers because Mars is barely doable. These are the only rocks that are potentially habitable. It's not enough diversity if we have this much power in this these few spheres with which we could put atmosphere. So assume that you could put atmospheres on the Mars and on the moon and you could get back and forth between them with chemical rockets. You'd have three places to screw up. We need tens of thousands, if not millions of places before we figure out how to civilize ourselves. So, we have to get out of here. It's too expensive to leave the solar system. So, my claim is that in an Einsteinian world, you're never going to. If Einstein is left to be in force, the speed of light is too brutal. So, you go to Alpha Century, four light years away, you come back, you do it at nearly the speed of light. Everything is eight years advanced by the time you get

Speaker A: back home. Nobody wants to do that. And that's just the first star. My claim is is that we have been too long in Einstein's prison. General relativity really begins in 1913. It's really due to Grossman and Einstein, not just Einstein alone. I don't know why we say that. Uh it's not really Einstein Hilbert. It's really Einstein Grossman. But more or less since 1915 1917, the equations haven't moved. They're going to break because of what's happening in southern Arizona. Tit Peak has this object called Desi, the dark energy spectroscopic instrument. And I believe that it is going to show that the cosmological constant times the metric, which is how we encode dark energy into the equation, is going to break because it's not constant. The only reason that you have lambda times the metric which is this term is the product rule. If you take a derivative called divergence, you have to take the derivative of lambda times the metric left alone plus lambda* the derivative of the metric. The derivative of the metric has to vanish. That term is the only possible term that can go there because of something called love locks theorem. If you're within general relativity, you're trying to do this geometrically. My claim is is that that's going to break. We're going to get to five sigma if we aren't there already. I haven't kept up with the news. And then we're going to realize that the dark energy, the most important generally

Speaker B: makes up 60 70 80% of our universe.

Speaker A: We have the wrong formula for it.

Speaker B: We have no contemplation of what it is.

Speaker A: Well, I I'm focused on saying I have a candidate formula and I think everybody who has one should come forward. where we should hold a conference and say who wins, who's who's got the best idea. We can't just have Ed Whitten patting himself on the back saying, "Well, string theory is the only game in town." It's like 42 years later, come on. This this is preposterous. Getting back to policy, give me some money and get rid of these people. I don't want them reviewing anything that I'm doing. Give me somebody competent to talk to.

Speaker B: So, sorry, let me just go back. The dark energy measurement, which we're going to end up having a very high accurate estimation,

Speaker A: right,

Speaker B: tells us that the general theory of relativity and the equations associated with it are wrong because of the relationship that we see between matter and rotation and movement. And so there's something off about that. And that

Speaker A: we know that general relativity is not the last. We know general relativity is wrong.

Speaker B: It is a view. It is a derivative.

Speaker A: It is the map and not the territory. It is a great great model. Whoever comes next has to recover it. But there is no initial singularity due to the big bang. Nor is there a singularity in the in the center of a black hole called the Schwarz singularity. That's that's where our ignorance shows. We have two singularities we can't get rid of inside the theory. So you have to go outside of it. But the thing is it's so perfect.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: that nobody can figure out, you know, sort of in the first four seconds of a physics talk, you say, "Let X13 be a space-time manifold." Well, okay, it's over.

Speaker B: Yeah,

Speaker A: that's the sarcophagus, and you're already in an Einsteinian frame of thought. And so, we know that it's wrong, and nobody can figure out how to make it wrong. And that is what keeps us stuck here. There's a marvelous demonstration around 2003 at a TED talk of this guy showing a surface and he's got some sort of display and he does this and suddenly everything enlarges and then he does this and everything gets smaller and this is the beginning of a multi-touch gesture called pinch to zoom that we all use. My claim is is that we don't realize that pinch to zoom is probably built into the thing that we're confusing for spaceime. So we don't know to do this and when you do that you change the distances. So you don't need to break the speed of light. So this is just again you're asking somebody who can't come in to the physics establishment who is in the physics. I am in the physics establishment. This is we're in some sort of crazy world in which people who have radical ideas can't do the radical ideas inside of the institutions. Like a radical idea is is that male and female are mostly determined by the SRY complex on the Y chromosome. If I say that I can't be in a meeting because I'm a bigot. Okay? I can't be in a physics department because I don't I think Ed Whitten drove the field off of cliff. Nobody said nobody else is saying it. Clearly the one person who's saying that has to be wrong.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Now this is the whole thing is that I have the first uh first paper I think on the danger posed by mortgage back securities. I think I was the only person to loudly say you don't know whether Biden's going to make it to November. And I think I said loudly, I think this is four years of dimension dimension. When people say something different, do you do you force them back into this consensus? Well, that's what nations do. And we have become a nation when it comes to science.

Speaker B: Talk about China.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: From what you know, is China thinking differently about physics? Is China trying to recast the paths? Is China trying to invite innovative ideiation amongst their scientific community or are others I mean it seems like the west is probably clumped together. Is China different? Is anywhere different?

Speaker A: Yeah, let's let's talk about that. First of all, France is historically the world's greatest mathemat mathematical country. China where we're always taught to be, you know, so scared of the Chinese in math couldn't buy a base hit until very recently. Now, what they're doing is is that they're looking at us with our absolutely ridiculous collectivist fictions and they're they're they're siling up to our best people and they're saying, "Are you sure you wouldn't want to be free? You sure you wouldn't want to get paid? Come over to China. Taste the freedom. Get paid. Have fun."

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And our people are going there.

Speaker B: American scientists are going to China.

Speaker A: American scientists, Russian scientists, all sorts of scientists are going to China for some prestige, some money, and some freedom. And we are going to train them up and they are going to be frighteningly good up until the point that that freedom involves Tibet, Tianan Square, and Taiwan. Are they going to rethink some of these thoughts on the path we're taking in physics? Are they going to be fundamental in how they rethink things? [snorts]

Speaker A: Let me tell you what I really believe on that.

Speaker B: Yes,

Speaker A: the AIs are going to change soon. Right now the AIS are trained on a corpus that privileges things like cell nature and science as the prestige journals of biology or in mathematics it would be the invention and the annals and the journal of the American math society. These are where the narratives of the fields are held. Okay. The trash can is also a corpus. Take all of the ideas that have been poo pooed and laughed at and call that the trash can corpus, the TC corpus. The AIS are going to start reading all of the things that our quote leading physicists have laughed at. Look out.

Speaker B: That's where the discovery and the reinvention is going to happen.

Speaker A: China is going to have a private model and they're going to say assume that the completely failed the most failed theory in the history of modern physics string theory and something called M theory and quantum gravity assume for the moment that it's a red herring meant to distract us. It's not our leading theory. It hasn't been our leading theory for 42 years. It can't that the dog can't hunt. What was it meant to stop us from seeing?

Speaker B: And the AI will get there.

Speaker A: The AI will get there.

Speaker B: And when the AI gets there, we have

Speaker A: everyone who has an AI that can do this. Again, I'm I'm saying completely radical things because quite honestly, that's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to have John vonman's and Richard Fineman's and Paul Dox and all of these characters and we don't have any of them. So, I'm trying to say what this sounds like. You're all wrong and I'm right. And don't tell me that I'm arrogant or that I'm conceited or that real scientists are humble or if you

Eric: understand something, you can explain it to a 5-year-old. That's all nonsense. What I'm trying to say is string theory has not been our leading theory for 42 years. It has never been the only game in town. And just the way Jeffrey Epstein was never a hedge fund manager. We're not allowed to say this. I don't know why. I want to know is there somebody over at CIA and the science and technology directorate who would like to have that conversation? Is there anybody over at the Department of Energy who would be interested in not having this conversation right now? You and I are having a conversation with our friends, the Chinese and the North Koreans and the Russians. Why are we doing this? Are you so confident that I'm wrong given this obviously huge amount of knowledge that most people have never heard?

Interviewer: Well, I think the question is can you really distinguish and can you really cage the AI? I mean at the end of the day

Eric: say more.

Interviewer: So if the rate of progress with AI is such that and the ubiquity of access and the corpus to your point of knowledge and non-knowledge

Eric: right

Interviewer: is apparent to everyone. the AI can be directed from anywhere and it's probably a conversation about what does humanity look like and I think that's a conversation with humanity not with nation states per se.

Eric: Well, I think what I'm trying to get at is my model of the AI is it is insane to have pushed out the AI as a commercial product. It's just funny. Let me imagine the scene from silence.

Interviewer: It's just matrices and linear algebra. I mean,

Eric: yeah, it's just inner products.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Eric: There's a scene in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lectar is wheeled out on a gurnie in a straight jacket with a crazy mask and there's all these people around because he's so dangerous, but he's very, very intelligent. That's what I think Anthropic is doing. Here's your new employee, Hannibal Lectar. He's a consultant. You've hired Hannibal Lectar from a temporary agency. And the harness that is supposed to keep you from hurting yourself is all the people around him, the mask and the straight bear. And we've decided that this military research project is something you need in your home. It's like telling people, look, the second amendment just says the right to keep and bear arms. We have this thing we haven't used called the Davy Crockett, a soldier launched personal nuke. Why isn't it available at Kmart with a waiting period?

Interviewer: Yeah. Well, it's been distilled at this point. I don't know if that's a relevant point anymore because models have been distilled or the model development's been commoditized and it's been open weight released and it's out there now. So models are there, models are here.

Eric: Yep.

Interviewer: And to your point, maybe those models get pointed at the path of discover novel physics and look at strange texts and ideas and rethink everything.

Eric: It's going to be a hell of a ride.

Interviewer: It's going to be a hell of a ride. Yeah. I just want to hear your one assessment because I wonder if this is a glimmer. What do you think UAPs are today? Is that really the first window in what's happening? If there's something there, the question for you is what do you think today UAPs are?

Eric: Let's answer that question, but I want to take let's do it in a debugger and we'll step through it line by line of the code as it executes. I look at you, I'm on a podcast. My first thought is I know what risks I'm running. If I say what I think, I can tell you which colleagues will not open their doors to me. No, I'm not kidding. When I took a job with Peter Teal, let's imagine that there are only about 125 people I can speak to about my work. I would say 30% of the doors closed to me just by virtue of the fact that I work with Peter Teal. And I don't think he's the devil and he's a close personal friend. Now you're asking me the question of how many of the remaining doors would you like to close?

Interviewer: Eric, it's not just a question.

Eric: I know how these people think and I know how terrified they are. Let's answer it anyway. If general relativity is really the last word, I think that these UAP UFO things are nation states experimental weapons system. I think that there's been some breakthrough particularly in the 1970s. No, sorry, in the 60s. There's a 1971 Australian intelligence document where Australia, which was the testing ground for nukes of the United Kingdom, started seeing all these UAPs near their nuclear test just the way we see them near ours. And the Australians revealed that all of our best people, not all of our best people, many of our best people and many of our top institutions were doing anti-gravity, technically gravity shielding research. And the cover story was the golden age of general relativity where suddenly general relativity was hot from the early 50s to the late 60s early 70s. The claim from that 71 document is no no the only reason everybody went towards gravity is that there were there was interest in gravity shielding anti-gravity etc etc. I don't believe general relativity is the last word. I believe pinch to zoom exists. There's another multi-touch gesture called shear to tilt and that means that we can leave our solar system. Okay, that's great news because it means we can survive. The implication is if we can leave everyone else can come and given the size of the universe the odds that we are the most advanced life form is laughable. There's no point in worrying about them. So if we can leave, I think they're here and I think we can leave.

Eric: And I think the thing the scenario to worry about is North Sentinel Island that everybody who lives on North Sentinel Island is considered a citizen of India and they don't know the word India. They're an uncontacted people who don't know that they're part of something larger that watches them that does not allow people to land. But if they started sending out radio signals and then they started letting off nukes on that tiny little island, India would not have this paternalistic attitude towards its primitive tribe. So my concern is that when we let off a nuke in 1945 or when Italy became very good at quantum theory with Fermy and I forget what the name of the the atomic boys and there was this magenta incident under Mussolini. Somehow UAPs are very tied to nukes. And I believe that a nuke is the sign that you become advanced enough that the next thing you figure out how to do is to leave and traverse through propulsion. We don't realize that yet because we've never seen that happen. But my claim is is that almost every civilization before it gets to using the profound propulsion game which is these multi-touch gestures first lets off a nuke and that we alerted whatever India is in this analogy we're almost ready to come out and we're so pathetically unevolved that we are a danger to any other civilization if there's so much power in the next theory, which I I believe geometric unity is the next theory. Now, that will cause a certain percentage of your audience to say, "Oh, it's just self-promotion." As opposed to, "No, no, no, that's what you're supposed to do. If you have a theory, you talk about"

Interviewer: Yes.

Eric: I think I think that there are all sorts of things that you can do. I think there's multi-temporal movement. I think that there's dark chemistry. I think that there's dark light. I think that there are two other families of chyro matter left to discover at a luminous level. Spin three halves matter exists. I believe that SU4 cross SU2 cross SU2 is the next grand unified theory that we'll find. There is so much more to do that when we make this jump, the world will become unrecognizable. And I believe that there are other life forms in the universe and that they can come and they can visit. And I don't think that that's preposterous. I think that we are an uncontacted people.

Interviewer: On that note, I think we have more to talk about in the future. This has been a truly unique, fascinating, and I think for a lot of people in our audience, this is not a typical conversation. But I I just want to highlight the importance of hearing what you have to say. Because I think it's very important that even if something seems not apparent, particularly when things seem unlikely or when things

Speaker A: ...seem outlandish or whatever term you might want to put onto things, it's valuable to take that in. It's definitely a lot to kind of think about the paths ahead and I'd love to talk more.

Speaker B: I'd love to do that. I'd love to do it with your friends and I also just want to say thanks for having me. It's time for America to lead because there's no other nation I trust like I trust our people to take care of this planet. We should make common cause with our rivals as fast as we can because the danger of getting to the next level of leverage in a contested situation is overwhelming.

Speaker C: It's very important we went in the Persian Gulf and it's very important that the scientific community recognizes that despite their feelings about Donald Trump. We've got four or five individuals with the science portfolio who are much much better than the PhDs think and before you turn up your nose at this consider doing what I did which is to come for a few days to Washington DC and utter the dangerous words how can I help? I'm going all in.