Description
Eric Weinstein, PhD, is a mathematician, former managing director of Thiel Capital, and a manager of the Galileo Project research team. He is the originator of the Intellectual Dark Web and creator of Geometric Unity: a proposed geometrically unified theory of fundamental physics.
@ericweinsteinphd
https://www.geometricunity.org
https://www.eric-weinstein.com
Outline
00:01 – Podcast Intro ️
00:12 – Drinking, Hair, and Buffalo Trace Banter
03:44 – Dark Energy, String Theory, and Physics Gatekeeping
15:23 – Institutional Suppression of Science
17:36 – Credentials, Legitimacy, and Being a “Danger” to the Narrative
24:40 – Physics’ Power, Risks, and Missing Scientists
30:33 – Dissociation in Peak Performance
32:43 – Junk Narratives vs. Real Science
34:50 – Impact of Singular Geniuses & Music Analogies
46:20 – Guitar innovation and legendary players
47:53 – The death and revival of rock & role of audiences
51:49 – Music distribution, radio decline, and new youth scenes
1:01:20 – Country music, hip‑hop, and global storytelling
1:04:52 – Guitarists, Tim Henson, and microtonal innovations
1:10:54 – Virality, anonymity in music, and podcast anecdotes
1:16:58 – Audience banter & exits
1:17:39 – Two cultures, comedians in science & UFO collision
1:18:46 – Shift to belief: special access programs, White Sands, Epstein & New Mexico nexus
1:32:36 – Epstein, National Labs & Listening Posts ️
1:34:50 – Dinner, Influence, and Epstein’s Silence ️
1:36:40 – Epstein as a “Starker”: Black Ops, Control & Disappearances ️
1:48:28 – Epstein’s Network and Mafia-like Influence ️️
1:50:05 – Epstein’s Role, Sovereign Backing, and Scientist Access
1:52:27 – Epstein as a Construct in Intelligence Operations
2:03:53 – Covert operations vs intelligence ️️
2:04:19 – Scientists as “ninja priests” and hidden power ️
2:11:01 – Renaissance, Manhattan-style projects, and space ambitions
2:19:18 – Exploring the Observerse
2:21:14 – Multi-dimensional Time and Jailbreaking Spacetime
2:25:19 – Building a Secret Team and Defending a Radical Theory ️
2:34:34 – Driving theories and dangerous conversations
2:36:03 – UAPs, domestic programs, and illusion tech
2:39:33 – Airspace loss, El Paso incident, and geopolitical tech rivalry
2:49:56 – Scientists chasing status over discovery ️
2:51:35 – The immortal game of ideas vs fleeting fame ️
2:52:53 – Caution against billionaire dominance in public discourse ️
Transcript
00:00:01
Joe Rogan: Joe Rogan podcast, check it out
00:00:04
speaker_1: The Joe Rogan Experience [upbeat music]
00:00:06
Joe Rogan: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Um, I was like, “There’s only one way to do this. I have to just not drink for a while.” So I took like eight months off, and then I had, like, a margarita at dinner once, so I was like, “Ooh, I miss this.” And then I had a glass of wine here or there.
00:00:24
Eric Weinstein: I was wondering how that was gonna hold up.
00:00:25
Joe Rogan: Yeah. It was eight, about-
00:00:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but I… But you’re, you’re not ca- I know that you’re not captured by it.
00:00:30
Joe Rogan: No, no, no.
00:00:30
Eric Weinstein: Neither am I, but like-
00:00:31
Joe Rogan: It was different
00:00:31
Eric Weinstein: … our religious observance requires it. Does it?
00:00:34
Joe Rogan: You require abstinence or drinking?
00:00:36
Eric Weinstein: No, we, no, we drink.
00:00:37
Joe Rogan: What, when do you have to drink?
00:00:38
Eric Weinstein: Shabbat, every… Come f- any Friday.
00:00:41
Joe Rogan: How much do you drink on Shabbat?
00:00:43
Eric Weinstein: I probably have two and a half glasses of wine.
00:00:45
Joe Rogan: Is there, like, a number that you’re supposed to hit-
00:00:47
Eric Weinstein: No, there’s a communal cup that we-
00:00:47
Joe Rogan: … otherwise you’re a bad boy? [laughs]
00:00:49
Eric Weinstein: What? Well, that, that’s Purim.
00:00:51
Joe Rogan: What is-
00:00:51
Eric Weinstein: We should get into Purim.
00:00:52
Joe Rogan: We’re getting into it.
00:00:53
Eric Weinstein: All right.
00:00:53
Joe Rogan: Do we need glasses? You wanna have a drink?
00:00:56
Eric Weinstein: Uh, usually I re- we, you, you and I tend to go a while, so we usually do that at the end.
00:01:00
Joe Rogan: Well, let’s, let’s get some ice and some gla- are we rolling already?
00:01:03
speaker_3: I’ve been rolling, yeah.
00:01:04
Joe Rogan: Okay.
00:01:04
Eric Weinstein: Oh, shit.
00:01:05
Joe Rogan: Let’s get some… Tell Jeff to get us some ice and some glasses-
00:01:07
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t know we were-
00:01:07
Joe Rogan: … and a bottle of, uh-
00:01:08
Eric Weinstein: I hope I didn’t say anything wrong
00:01:09
Joe Rogan: … um, Buffalo Trace.
00:01:12
speaker_3: Do you wanna wait till I get back to start? ‘Cause we either haven’t started or we started.
00:01:15
Joe Rogan: We started. Fuck it.
00:01:17
speaker_3: Oh.
00:01:17
Joe Rogan: We started. Let’s just roll. Well, get Jeff to do it.
00:01:21
speaker_3: All right, sounds good. Yeah.
00:01:21
Joe Rogan: What’s that?
00:01:23
Eric Weinstein: Are we gonna have headphones?
00:01:23
Joe Rogan: Are we rolling still?
00:01:24
Eric Weinstein: Are we doing headphone shit?
00:01:25
Joe Rogan: We can. Headphones, no headphones.
00:01:27
Eric Weinstein: You tell me.
00:01:27
Joe Rogan: I don’t give a fuck.
00:01:28
Eric Weinstein: I don’t give a fuck.
00:01:28
Joe Rogan: We, we mix it up.
00:01:29
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:01:29
Joe Rogan: You know? What do you, do you, are you more comfortable… You got a nice head of hair.
00:01:32
Eric Weinstein: What? Thank you.
00:01:33
Joe Rogan: See, for me, it doesn’t matter. I feel bad when people, like, work on their hair real good, like especially ladies, and they get it all nice, and then they have to fucking smoosh it with this thing.
00:01:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay, if you ever have that kind of consideration for me, I’m gonna be very disappointed. I thought we were closer.
00:01:45
Joe Rogan: [laughs] Some people worry about that.
00:01:47
Eric Weinstein: No, I worry about the, uh-
00:01:49
Joe Rogan: You know?
00:01:49
Eric Weinstein: … the gray.
00:01:50
Joe Rogan: That you have gray in your hair?
00:01:51
Eric Weinstein: Uh, it’s, yeah, n- look at it.
00:01:53
Joe Rogan: Well, you’re, like, pretty dark for your age. How old are you now?
00:01:57
Eric Weinstein: 60.
00:01:57
Joe Rogan: Yeah. You’re, you have fucking dark ass hair for your age. If I let my, if I had hair, and it grew out, like my side hairs-
00:02:03
Eric Weinstein: You have hair
00:02:03
Joe Rogan: … it’s mostly gray now.
00:02:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?
00:02:06
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:02:06
Eric Weinstein: I sh- I should’ve-
00:02:07
Joe Rogan: I’m starting to get a little some gray hair in my eyebrows-
00:02:08
Eric Weinstein: … I should’ve thought ahead
00:02:08
Joe Rogan: … a little bit. What’s that?
00:02:10
Eric Weinstein: I should’ve thought ahead like you did.
00:02:11
Joe Rogan: What, shaved it?
00:02:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, shaved it when it, you, everyone knew it wasn’t gray, and then it’s just normal.
00:02:15
Joe Rogan: Does it… Well, I-
00:02:15
Eric Weinstein: ‘Cause, like, it’s very clear if I shave it now
00:02:17
Joe Rogan: … I think you can avoid gray hair with proper supplementation, at least that is the, the thought today.
00:02:25
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:02:25
Joe Rogan: That with, uh, enough zinc and copper and, uh, that, that somehow or another that’s involved in the diet. I don’t know. I’m talking out of my ass here. I don’t know that much about, um, what causes your hair to go gray.
00:02:38
Eric Weinstein: This is Austin Tap?
00:02:39
Joe Rogan: Uh, other than… This is, uh, Buffalo Trace.
00:02:42
Eric Weinstein: Buffalo Trace.
00:02:42
Joe Rogan: Older than America.
00:02:43
Eric Weinstein: Really?
00:02:43
Joe Rogan: Yeah. This is a, a s- distillery from 1773, I believe they started.
00:02:50
Eric Weinstein: Wow.
00:02:51
Joe Rogan: How about them apples, huh?
00:02:52
Eric Weinstein: It’s like that Chinese-sounding beer, Yuengling or something.
00:02:55
Joe Rogan: Cheers, my friend.
00:02:57
Eric Weinstein: Cheers.
00:02:57
Joe Rogan: Buffalo Trace is like Yu- why, is their, their beer really old? Beer really old?
00:03:04
Eric Weinstein: Um.
00:03:05
Joe Rogan: Do you have a old beer?
00:03:06
Eric Weinstein: Yue- Yuengling-
00:03:08
Joe Rogan: Is it old as fuck?
00:03:09
Eric Weinstein: Jamie knows everything. I feel-
00:03:11
Joe Rogan: He knows a lot
00:03:11
Eric Weinstein: … you know, people-
00:03:12
speaker_3: 1829.
00:03:13
Eric Weinstein: You see? Ah. I, f- people say that I have this AI. I’m using Claude, I’m using, uh, ChatGPT.
00:03:20
Joe Rogan: I use Jamie.
00:03:20
Eric Weinstein: Jamie.
00:03:21
Joe Rogan: Right. Yeah.
00:03:21
Eric Weinstein: For sure.
00:03:22
Joe Rogan: Oh, he’s way better than AI.
00:03:22
Eric Weinstein: We all, we all do.
00:03:23
Joe Rogan: He’s way, way better than AI ’cause he’s kinda psychic. You’re a little psychic, right?
00:03:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, yeah.
00:03:27
Joe Rogan: A little bit.
00:03:28
speaker_3: Well, I mean, I’ve listened to you talk a lot.
00:03:29
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:03:30
Eric Weinstein: My, my theory is, is that he also looks ahead. He knows sort of where you’re likely to head, so he’s got it ready.
00:03:36
Joe Rogan: Oh, 100%.
00:03:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:03:36
Joe Rogan: He knows how my goofy fucking brain works.
00:03:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:03:39
Joe Rogan: Yeah, for sure. Good to see you, my brother.
00:03:42
Eric Weinstein: Good to see you. [laughs] Hello, Joe.
00:03:44
Joe Rogan: How was your, uh, your… What, what, what was it exactly? How would you describe it? A speech? Uh, a presentation?
00:03:51
Eric Weinstein: I gave a, a talk on dark energy, uh, to the, uh, Karch Group at the UTexas, UTexas Austin Physics Department.
00:03:58
Joe Rogan: Uh, this is what I wanted to ask you about.
00:04:00
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:04:00
Joe Rogan: Michio Kaku’s been saying that he believes that dark energy is possibly something leaking in from another dimension. Is that… Look at that face. Look at that. [laughs] You gave a-
00:04:12
Eric Weinstein: Go, go on.
00:04:13
Joe Rogan: You gave a little side eye
00:04:15
Eric Weinstein: Go on.
00:04:15
Joe Rogan: Well, let’s see what he says. Jamie, see if you can find that, please. I think he said it was gravity leaking-
00:04:22
Eric Weinstein: Have you ever taken ants from different colonies and put them together as a kid just to see what happens?
00:04:26
Joe Rogan: Did I?
00:04:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:04:27
Joe Rogan: No, I never did that.
00:04:28
Eric Weinstein: I did that.
00:04:29
Joe Rogan: Oh, why? Just to watch them fight?
00:04:30
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yeah.
00:04:30
Joe Rogan: Oh, you fucking psycho.
00:04:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, a little bit.
00:04:32
Joe Rogan: No, I never did any of that.
00:04:34
Eric Weinstein: You were saying about Michio.
00:04:35
Joe Rogan: Yeah, that he, uh, I, I just, I didn’t even read it. I just saw it and went, “Oh, Jesus, I gotta talk to Eric about this.” [laughs] Michio goes, “Just dark matter isn’t matter at all. It’s gravity leaking in from a parallel dimension.” And this guy won’t do mushrooms. Isn’t that wild?
00:04:53
Eric Weinstein: Uh.
00:04:56
Joe Rogan: What do you think about that?
00:04:56
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember when I was here and I said, “Get Michio Kaku in here with me”?
00:05:01
Joe Rogan: Yeah. What, what is it, what is it about… Well, clearly he’s a brilliant guy.
00:05:05
Eric Weinstein: He, he is and was a brilliant guy. He’s decided to do something else, and to be entirely honest, I don’t love going after other named people. In, in general, my schtick is that I go hard after institutions. I’m a, a huge institutional supporter and their worst nightmare in the current world. Individuals, I don’t like beefing with. I, I watch all of the energy, the beauty of life lost to beefing with people. Michio Kaku’s doing a tremendous amount of damage to theoretical physics.
00:05:37
Joe Rogan: How so?
00:05:39
Eric Weinstein: Um, theoretical physics is, in my estimation, the most beautiful, most powerful, most economically potent thing you can do with your life, and we are the best. The United States is, in my opinion, the greatest nation in the history of the earth for theoretical physics because we are cowboys, we are irreverent We are the, we are the people who invented the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the semiconductor. Um, this is what we do, and we’ve lost the ability to do it at an, at a level that I cannot believe happened during my watch, my lifetime. So from 1984 to the present, those 42 years have been the greatest intellectual implosion I think that I know of, where people just got dumber.
00:06:36
Joe Rogan: And what do you think is the cause of that? I’m gonna disconnect-
00:06:38
Eric Weinstein: String theory
00:06:38
Joe Rogan: … this, uh, humidity here.
00:06:40
Eric Weinstein: Quantum gravity.
00:06:41
Joe Rogan: Quantum gravity did it?
00:06:42
Eric Weinstein: Yep. Mm-hmm. In 1984, there was a result, and it’s called the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation. And the guy that I’ve talked to you about before in UFO context, the guy who is Louis Witten’s son, Louis Witten, happy, happy birthday, turned 105, um, was the anti-gravity guy from the ’50s. His son, Edward Witten, decided that the 1984 Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation meant that we should all, all the smartest people should pile into one narrow subspecialty, and that that was the future. And because he was so much smarter than all of us, people listened, and I didn’t. And Michio Kaku is part of his wave. Almost all of the people that you’ve traditionally had on in physics have some connection to this. You, so you’ve had on, I don’t know, probably Sean Carroll, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene. Nobody wanted to say what was happening, which is that we were, we were being unraveled and destroyed. Our ability to be the world’s greatest theoretical physicists was being eroded year by year for 42 years.
00:07:58
Joe Rogan: And specifically, it w- the pursuit of string theory?
00:08:02
Eric Weinstein: It’s not string theory i- itself that’s the problem. String theory is harmless. It’s just a bunch of equations, a bunch of ideas, and it’s beautiful mathematics in many places. So, um, that’s not an issue. The issue is the exclusion of everything else. And, and this goes under the name TOGIT, or the only game in town, T-O-G-I-T.
00:08:25
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
00:08:25
Eric Weinstein: And it’s this idea that only we, the enlightened, can do theoretical physics, and the rest of you are just doing finger exercises, and you’re too stupid to know it.
00:08:36
Joe Rogan: So specifically, like, what is… What, what’s isolationist about string theory? Like, what is it about this one particular theory that all this thought has been pushed into that?
00:08:50
Eric Weinstein: The claim is that there’s this thing called UV complete physics, and that there’s no way that we can have a discussion about that directly. If I could ask Jamie, could I impose upon you to call up on YouTube Wheel of Fortune, and then use I’ve got a good feeling about this. I can explain it to you.
00:09:14
Joe Rogan: Wheel of Fortune, I’ve got a good feeling about this?
00:09:15
Eric Weinstein: I’ve got a good feeling about this.
00:09:17
Joe Rogan: Okay. Is that an episode of Wheel of Fortune?
00:09:18
Eric Weinstein: It’ll be over briefly. It’s very, very quick.
00:09:21
Joe Rogan: Okay.
00:09:21
Eric Weinstein: It’s about a minute and a half or something. And the, the key point is it’s a tight analogy for the problem faced in physics that anyone can understand. So I don’t– People think I try to make things complicated. I really try to make them understandable, but what I do is I talk about things… I don’t know that you’ve ever had anyone talk about UV completeness on the Joe Rogan Experience.
00:09:40
Joe Rogan: I don’t believe so.
00:09:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:09:41
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:09:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:09:41
Joe Rogan: Is this it? Okay, put your headphones on.
00:09:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Oh, wow.
00:09:45
Joe Rogan: Well, you’re not gonna be able to hear it unless you have headphones on.
00:09:47
Eric Weinstein: I know it like the back of my hand.
00:09:49
Joe Rogan: Ha. Wheel of Fortune.
00:09:53
Eric Weinstein: Ah, we need a phrase this time. That’s the category for this puzzle, and it is a prize puzzle. [audience cheering] Go ahead, Rick.
00:10:02
speaker_1: Gladly. [wheel clicking] Come on. Do it.
00:10:11
Eric Weinstein: And what do we get here? 500.
00:10:13
speaker_1: R.
00:10:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, you’d think there’d be an R in there somewhere, wouldn’t you? Oh, Rick. So you called it.
00:10:18
speaker_1: Oh, man.
00:10:18
Eric Weinstein: Caitlin. [wheel clicking]
00:10:26
speaker_3: L.
00:10:27
Eric Weinstein: Uh, one L. [audience applauding] [bell dings]
00:10:32
speaker_3: Can she really solve?
00:10:32
Eric Weinstein: Hmm. What’s that?
00:10:34
speaker_3: Can I solve?
00:10:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:10:37
speaker_3: It is a prize puzzle.
00:10:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:10:39
speaker_3: I’ve got a good feeling about this.
00:10:43
Eric Weinstein: That’s right.
00:10:44
speaker_3: Whoo. [audience cheering]
00:10:44
Joe Rogan: That’s insane. That lady’s a wizard.
00:10:49
Eric Weinstein: That lady is what I wanna do with my life.
00:10:52
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:10:53
Eric Weinstein: That is what great physics looks like. It’s totally irresponsible, and you know, Pat Sajak is, like, trying to ask her, like, “How’d you do that?” And she says, “Well, I had a good feeling about this,” you know?
00:11:05
Joe Rogan: Hmm.
00:11:05
Eric Weinstein: And the, the funny part about it is you can figure it out. The– If you, if you go back, can– Jamie, can you show the board r- right there. Yeah. So clearly that apostrophe is a huge clue, right? So the idea is that if you read that property, is it I’ll? Is it I’ve? Right? And then there’s no R. Um, so think about all of those blank squares as orders of magnitude that you are away from the energies that would allow you to do experiments that would explain physics. And think about the apostrophe, the L, and that pattern, as well as the fact that it, there’s no R, as the standard model of physics. So right now, what you have is a debate about whether or not we should buy more and more letters with higher and higher energy, or like should we build bigger accelerators and spend more treasure trying to collide particles, or should we just Caitlin our way out of this? So Caitlin Burke is my model of what I think we’re supposed to be doing.
00:12:07
Joe Rogan: And so an exceptional mind with an ability to see or propose things that other people aren’t seeing.
00:12:14
Eric Weinstein: How– I guarantee you that if we studied this, if we spent a month with the world’s smartest people on this puzzle, we’d learn that there are certain things that were present that, you know, the, the frequency of certain– The fact that there’s a single letter there that almost certainly is I or A. She, she took a tiny number of clues. But here’s the really important thing. Jamie, can we show the, the, the filled-in puzzle? So you’ll notice that the word this could be ch-changed to that because the only letter that’s been excluded is an R.
00:12:53
Joe Rogan: Hmm.
00:12:54
Eric Weinstein: So that is what the issue of unique UV completion is. In other words, u-a unique UV completion would say there’s only one phrase that fits there. She guessed. She couldn’t have known it is I’ve got a good feeling about that, or I’ve got a nice feeling-
00:13:11
Joe Rogan: Hmm
00:13:11
Eric Weinstein: … about this or that. So it’s actually not, um, or I’ll get a good feeling about this. But all of those were much less probable because they’re just not as natural. So this is a combination of science, guesswork, and raw courage. Like, the, the, the most marvelous thing about that exchange is she says, “Uh, can I solve?” And there’s like, he’s not even sure he’s hearing her properly, and then finally he says, “Okay.” That’s, that’s gatekeeping. Can I put this art- article on the archive? Can I give a seminar in your department? I wanna solve the puzzle, and a lot of what we’re arguing about is that the string theorists are the only ones who have the right to try to solve the puzzle at the moment. So imagine that somehow there’s a rule that only Rick, poor Rick, who guesses that there’s an R, imagine that he’s the only one allowed to solve the puzzle, and when she asks, “May I solve the puzzle?” No, no, no, you can’t. That’s pseudoscience. You, you’re a charlatan. You, that’s sha- you know. That is, uh, crank physics.
00:14:20
Joe Rogan: Hmm.
00:14:21
Eric Weinstein: So th-that’s what the problem that we’re facing is, is that we’ve got one group that got control of the gatekeeping, who is very good at mathematics, extremely bad at physics, and they’ve redefined what physics is and what good science is, where they’re the only ones who are guessing the puzzle. They can’t guess the puzzle, and everyone else is like… Here’s a crazy story from yesterday. I wasn’t allowed to say that I gave a talk in the physics department, even though any n-normal person would say that that happened, and I wasn’t allowed to do that when I visited a, uh, physics institution in Canada. I wasn’t allowed to say that I was visiting for a week, nor was I allowed to say that I gave a seminar that lasted nine hours.
00:15:07
Joe Rogan: But you just did.
00:15:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:15:09
Joe Rogan: Are you a lawbreaker?
00:15:10
Eric Weinstein: I’m breaking the rules now because I’ve-
00:15:12
Joe Rogan: Okay
00:15:12
Eric Weinstein: … now I’ve had it. I agreed, I agreed to not do this, and I’m– and with these missing scientists, I’ve changed my mind. It, I’m not gonna deal with these people anymore, and whatever is going on with science and the suppression of different ideas, um, is terrifying. Right now we have a situation– I, you know, I gave a talk at the University of Chicago. There’s no record of it.
00:15:42
Joe Rogan: Who’s asking you to do these talks, and who’s asking you to not give a record? You don’t have to name names, but like-
00:15:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Particular people. I-i-in general, the funny part is that the people who ask me to give talks in the physics departments are the most courageous person in each department. So the problem is that the person that I– you, you end up feeling resentful towards, “How dare you tell me that I can’t give this talk in this department officially?”
00:16:07
Joe Rogan: Hmm.
00:16:07
Eric Weinstein: Is the person who’s arranging for your stay and is arranging for the, the room, and they are under the most pressure from the institutions.
00:16:16
Joe Rogan: So the institution is forcing them to say, “You, you’re allowed to do, give the talk-“
00:16:22
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
00:16:22
Joe Rogan: “… but you’re not allowed to talk about it on social media. You’re not allowed to-“
00:16:26
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:16:26
Joe Rogan: “… advertise that you’re doing it. You’re not allowed to say that you’re doing it.”
00:16:29
Eric Weinstein: So in this case, in the case of, of UTexas physics department, I was allowed to say I’m speaking in the Karch Group Seminar. It’s like a condom to make sure [chuckles] that the physics department doesn’t get pregnant.
00:16:39
Joe Rogan: But isn’t that really bizarre? Because University of Austin, Texas, was supposed to be a university that fixed all the bullshit that was wrong with other universities.
00:16:49
Eric Weinstein: Oh, it’s much, much more insane than that. This was the home of Steven Weinberg, who moved from Harvard to Texas because the money, the oil money was used to buy brains. So Har– Basically, Texas raided Harvard for people like John Tate in the math department, Steven Weinberg, who was the p-probably the greatest living, uh, theorist, and that was the continuation of the Bryce DeWitt group from North Carolina Chapel Hill that was set up to do antigravity by Agne Bains. So you’re right next to an amazing physics department with a crazy history, um, that in fact touched antigravity. This is one of the, one of the tiny number of places that has a, a real legacy in that department, and I, I was speaking there on gravity, on dark energy. And, uh, look, I’ve been lying my whole life about my relationship with the physics world because of this pressure. They can’t listen to me if I say I’m a physicist, so I say I’m an entertainer.
00:17:56
Joe Rogan: [chuckles]
00:17:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But then people say, “Well, why would you do that? Why would you say that you’re an entertainer when you obviously are conversant in all this stuff?” And the answer is: I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna lose my ability to enter a physics department. So I, I take on this completely wrong persona And you know, I have the emails. W- “You’re not giving a talk, you’re having conversations in room 5308.”
00:18:19
Joe Rogan: It literally says you’re not giving a talk?
00:18:21
Eric Weinstein: I could read what it is that they write to me, so-
00:18:24
Joe Rogan: Why, but why, what is the benefit of this formal declaration or this formal designation of the way you’re talking?
00:18:31
Eric Weinstein: So when I was at a physics institute in Canada, I w- I was told, “We’re worried that you’re going to use it to legitimize yourself.”
00:18:39
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:18:40
Eric Weinstein: It’s like, I’m going to do that. Of course, I’m going… I have a PhD from Harvard, you stupid f- I, I mean, like, y- you, you guys imagine I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m a podcast guest?
00:18:54
Joe Rogan: This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Once you’ve got a great name for your business, you need a great domain, and Squarespace makes it easy to lock in a domain. You just search the name you want, buy it, and then you’re ready to build. No hidden fees, no weird upsells. Go to squarespace.com/rogan for a free trial, and when you are ready to launch, use the code Rogen to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Right, just a regular-
00:19:25
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:19:25
Joe Rogan: … dude with some wacky ideas.
00:19:26
Eric Weinstein: Just a… Right, and so the idea is I have to play that character as opposed to I have-
00:19:31
Joe Rogan: Legitimizing yourself is a very bizarre phrase.
00:19:34
Eric Weinstein: Tell me about it.
00:19:35
Joe Rogan: That’s as- ’cause it’s assuming that you’re not legitimate. Do you know what I’m saying?
00:19:40
Eric Weinstein: I don’t think you’re understanding this.
00:19:42
Joe Rogan: But no, I am understanding it, but, but from their perspective-
00:19:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:19:45
Joe Rogan: … saying that you’re gonna use it to legitimize yourself and your ideas is r- a really crazy way to phrase it because, like, you’re, they’re acting from the assumption that you’re not legitimate.
00:19:55
Eric Weinstein: So that’s, they’re… You remember when, like, I think Reagan thought, I forget who it was, but Reagan thought there were recallable missiles?
00:20:02
Joe Rogan: Where you could turn ’em around?
00:20:03
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:20:04
Joe Rogan: Sorry, we changed our mind.
00:20:05
Eric Weinstein: So-
00:20:06
Joe Rogan: Like a BASE jumper-
00:20:07
Eric Weinstein: Without-
00:20:07
Joe Rogan: … who’s also a suicide jumper.
00:20:09
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] On second thought.
00:20:14
Joe Rogan: Halfway through.
00:20:14
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:20:14
Joe Rogan: Halfway in, he’s like, “Ah, fuck this. Nah, I li- I like cheesecake.”
00:20:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, a lot of these people who survive jumping off the Gold-
00:20:18
Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah
00:20:18
Eric Weinstein: … Gate Bridge, they learn, like, I, I love life. Um-
00:20:20
Joe Rogan: Yes. Yes, most of them.
00:20:22
Eric Weinstein: They’re reborn.
00:20:23
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:20:23
Eric Weinstein: Um, so what I would say is the problem is that I am, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t… This is not a boast. As you know, I don’t usually put my credential first. I’m probably the most blue chip defector from the institutions. Mutant, mutineer, let’s put it, call it that. Um, I have a p- I have essentially perfect credentials, and that’s the problem. So it’s not a question about you’re gonna legitimize your… I already legitimized myself by Harvard PhD, MIT post-doc, NSF post-doctoral fellow, ONR top in the country, Sloan Foundation grantee. I’ve been in math, physics, economics departments. I’m so bulletproof.
00:21:09
Joe Rogan: So that’s the problem.
00:21:10
Eric Weinstein: That’s the problem.
00:21:10
Joe Rogan: That’s the problem. It’s not that you’re a kook, that you-
00:21:12
Eric Weinstein: That’s what I was, what I was trying-
00:21:13
Joe Rogan: Right
00:21:13
Eric Weinstein: … to say you didn’t understand.
00:21:15
Joe Rogan: No, I do understand.
00:21:15
Eric Weinstein: It, it is specifically-
00:21:16
Joe Rogan: I just don’t understand why they want to do that to you.
00:21:18
Eric Weinstein: Because-
00:21:18
Joe Rogan: That’s what’s bizarre
00:21:19
Eric Weinstein: … narrative.
00:21:21
Joe Rogan: Okay.
00:21:21
Eric Weinstein: I am, I am the greatest danger to the narrative. I’m, I’m the most followed c- uh, mathematician in the United States. Maybe the world, Hanne Fry may be t- above it. That danger to the narrative is the problem.
00:21:37
Joe Rogan: Well, specifically for people who don’t know what we’re talking about, what is, th- to make this a standalone show, the people that-
00:21:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:21:43
Joe Rogan: … not aware of your work, what is it about you and your ideas that they are so hesitant to platform or legitimize, or why you’re such a danger?
00:21:55
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so in 2001, I said mortgage-backed securities were a great danger to the world. I had one of the first published papers on the danger of illiquid, of the pricing of illiquid securities. Uh, I went on Chris Williamson’s show, and he asked me, “Who’s gonna win, Biden or Trump?” I said, “You don’t even know whether Biden’s gonna make it to November.” I said that the people, representatives of the Democrat Party reached out to me and said, “Stop talking about Biden’s dementia. You need your affirmation that you’re seeing something real. We’ve put in three people, uh, as a committee to replace the president.” And I, I said like, “I’m supposed to feel good about that?” Um, so I keep-
00:22:35
Joe Rogan: They, well, they told you?
00:22:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:22:36
Joe Rogan: They put in three people?
00:22:38
Eric Weinstein: They put in a committee of three people, and if you knew who those people were, you’d be pleased as punch, so shut up.
00:22:44
Joe Rogan: That’s what they said to you?
00:22:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, correct.
00:22:46
Joe Rogan: “You would be really happy, so shut up”?
00:22:48
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:22:49
Joe Rogan: They didn’t even tell you who the people were?
00:22:50
Eric Weinstein: I think that they did, and I’ve conveniently forgot them. The, one of them might have been the chief of staff.
00:22:55
Joe Rogan: [laughs] Wow.
00:22:58
Eric Weinstein: So-
00:22:58
Joe Rogan: That’s like-
00:22:59
Eric Weinstein: But I say, but I say this, right?
00:23:01
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
00:23:01
Eric Weinstein: And I’m not trying to… I mean, I keep lots of secrets that people ask me to keep that I should keep, things having to do with national security, for example. But these people are incompetent, and they’re a danger to us. And right now, the, the string theory narrative is a complete danger. It’s not string theory that’s the problem. It’s the u- it’s the only game in town. And so, you know, there was a… Look, people are willing to spend their entire credibility just to make me go away.
00:23:37
Joe Rogan: Could you briefly just describe, like, what, what is the pro… So there’s not a problem with thr- string theory, or is string theory not complete, or is string theory readed, uh, has it reaped actual results?
00:23:49
Eric Weinstein: Mathematically, it’s reaped results, and string theorists have occasionally, um, done really great work in s- in a subject called quantum field theory. But quantum field theory isn’t about the quantum field theory of the world. Quantum field theory is like calculus. It’s some thing that’s very useful, and it, it grew up in physics. But we’ve now found out that quantum field theory has to do with pure problems in mathematics that have nothing to do with physics. And What they haven’t done is they haven’t dealt with the physical world. So if you take physics, why, why do we care about physics so much more than really almost any other aspect of the sciences other than biology? I had to give a talk at the New York De- Deep Tech Week, shout out to those guys, and I, I put it on the slide as, uh, three things. There’s boom, vroom, and zoom. Easy to remember. Boom is weapons. Physics will create weapons that you’ll dwarf ev- everything else, with the possible exception of biologicals. Uh, zoom, uh, vroom is energy, and the story of energy is basically the story of prosperity and control. Uh, if you look at wealth and the amount of fossil fuels burned, it’s more or less like a one-to-one correlation as to which nations are rich and poor per capital. And zoom is everything else. It’s propulsion, it’s computation, it’s communication, and those things, if you, if you take them together, um, more or less define the economy and the world order. Physics is the center of what makes us modern humans, and it became too dangerous in the 1950s. Even the ’40s, you know, atomic weapons are extremely bad, but they’re not hydrogen bombs. Um, somehow in November of ’52, everything changed, and we became, we became too dangerous. The, the community of physicists is the most powerful group of people made into completely, uh, ineffectual humans.
00:26:02
Joe Rogan: And do you think this is by design?
00:26:04
Eric Weinstein: Partially.
00:26:05
Joe Rogan: And wh- wh- what was the purpose of it? By, by saying that you became, that physicists became too dangerous, the ideas became too dangerous, w- is the idea that the weapons would become so immense and powerful that they had to do something to stop and curb that?
00:26:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, we didn’t know how to control it, right? So in other words, for example, in, uh, in 1940, we set up something called the Reference Committee, which I’m sure your listeners have never heard of, and the Reference Committee lived inside of the National Resource Council. Now, why was it important? Because chain reaction physics was so hot. Once the neutron was found, right? So think about neutrons as bullets. Um, they can go right into the middle of an atom because they’re, they’re not positively charged, so they’re not gonna be repelled by the nucleus. And they can bust apart atoms that are base- barely being held together, and that’s why you, you get bullets begetting bullets begetting bullets, and that’s what a chain reaction is. The people who were doing that in the 40– in the 30s suddenly found that when they mailed off a paper to a journal, if they weren’t part of the secret group in Los Alamos, their, uh, paper got held up and sent back for revisions, and there was no money in it. We, we secretly set up this thing to shunt real research into the National Resource Council. I think this was or- organized by a guy named Breit, B-R-E-I-T, and that was the beginning of this whole peer review control back in those days.
00:27:34
Joe Rogan: And this control, do you think is this ego-based, that the people who are the gatekeepers want to remain in the position of-
00:27:41
Eric Weinstein: We all wanna survive, Joe. I mean, this is a real problem. So you and I can hate on the institutions all we want from the safety of the JRE, but what are you gonna do when it becomes really, really easy for people to commit, like, mass murder? If you think about all the really bad mass, like the, the Vegas shooting that never really [laughs] got sorted out, it’s very hard to kill large numbers of people using things like bullets. If you wanna really kill a large number of people, you’re gonna go to biologicals, and you’re gonna go to nuclear. And what happens when that becomes easy? Like, maybe it’s a lot easier to build these weapons than the way we currently do it. Right now, we’re, we’re, uh, bottlenecked on things like centrifuges. And by the way, who knows what the next innovation in physics is gonna bring? So I always say this thing about if you’re not tracking everybody at my level, what are you doing as an intelligence service?
00:28:38
Joe Rogan: Is this part of your concern about the missing scientists?
00:28:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, of course.
00:28:42
Joe Rogan: Yeah. So the missing scientist narrative, um, for people that aren’t aware of it, I think they’re up to 15 now, and a lot of people say that some of these connections are baseless, and that some of ’em, th- it’s just, they happen.
00:28:52
Eric Weinstein: We’re not really up to 15.
00:28:53
Joe Rogan: No. Okay. So what do you think we’re actually up to?
00:28:55
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. Probably five or six.
00:28:59
Joe Rogan: But w- I saw someone online did a breakdown of it, and essentially they were saying that the odds of this being a coincidence are off the charts, that the people that are all involved in very specific types of technological, technological research, s- different things that are top secret, that all of these people either wind up missing-
00:29:20
Eric Weinstein: There’s a lot of murder in math and physics, first of all. People don’t really appreciate that. Um, you know, the Unabomber was a famous PhD mathematician. Uh-
00:29:30
Joe Rogan: He’s a big story, though. There’s a, there’s a lot of great stories.
00:29:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure. There was a guy named Cantor who, uh, broke into David Rittenhouse Laboratories in the University of Pennsylvania, where I was an undergraduate, and shot up a seminar. Um, there was, uh, you know, this situation in Iowa where a relative of mine got a seat in the physics department, um, because somebody was killed by one of the graduate students. I think it became a movie, like Dark Matter. So th- there, there’s an incredible amount of murder. Uh, the ball-peen hammer, uh, killing of, was it Carl Dulieu by, um, uh, Streliski at Stanford. So first of all, there’s just a lot of death because mathematicians and physicists are somewhat close to unhinged, and it’s, it’s a really nasty– There’s a lot of nasty culture, and sometimes it becomes violent.
00:30:23
Joe Rogan: Why do you think they’re close to unhinged?
00:30:28
Eric Weinstein: You spend that much time in your head? I, I’m amazed that I’m as well-grounded as I am.
00:30:33
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:30:34
Eric Weinstein: No, seriously. You’re just way out in the stratosphere. I, I f- I completely forget who I am, where I am, that I’m even a human being. That y- when you’re using your body as an instrument, as you, as you do, um, in combat sports and training, you become a different thing, you know? You know that archery thing where you have to-
00:30:52
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm
00:30:54
Eric Weinstein: … twist your arm. A lot of people don’t know that they can do that initially. Like, just a small thing like that. Or you don’t have-
00:30:59
Joe Rogan: What are you, what are you talking about? Archery thing that you twist your arm?
00:31:02
Eric Weinstein: If you have an old style bow-
00:31:05
Joe Rogan: Oh
00:31:05
Eric Weinstein: … y- y- you often get burned by the-
00:31:07
Joe Rogan: Oh, that you have to twist your arm like that-
00:31:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, just like-
00:31:09
Joe Rogan: … so that you don’t-
00:31:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:31:10
Joe Rogan: … so that you’re not like this and get-
00:31:11
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:31:11
Joe Rogan: … hit.
00:31:11
Eric Weinstein: But, but you, you, you don’t see-
00:31:13
Joe Rogan: I see what you’re saying
00:31:13
Eric Weinstein: … see, but then you twisted your, your wrist. You keep-
00:31:15
Joe Rogan: Yeah
00:31:15
Eric Weinstein: … your wrist straight. Just-
00:31:17
Joe Rogan: I don’t do that kind of archery, that’s why I’m confused.
00:31:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, okay. Sorry. I- you do real-
00:31:21
Joe Rogan: This, this kind.
00:31:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:31:22
Joe Rogan: You keep your hand like that.
00:31:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Um, well, but-
00:31:25
Joe Rogan: That’s a torque issue
00:31:26
Eric Weinstein: … but, like, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re a sniper, you know, there are all sorts of things about breathing in, in your ei- how you adjust your eyes and-
00:31:32
Joe Rogan: Right
00:31:32
Eric Weinstein: … you use your body as an instrument. As a mathematician or physicist, one of the reasons that I f- I wish I were in better shape is that in order for me to keep my mind in a particular way, I have to not think constantly about suppressing food, you know? So what… y- you’re doing a, you’re doing a very unnatural thing.
00:31:50
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
00:31:51
Eric Weinstein: And that unnatural thing, uh, not everybody can handle it.
00:31:57
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:31:58
Eric Weinstein: And they s-
00:31:58
Joe Rogan: I see what you’re saying
00:31:59
Eric Weinstein: … and we snap. A- and also our, our minds are more perfect. The messiness of the world and the perfection of our minds is at odds with each other, and I love disappearing into math and physics because it’s perfect.
00:32:12
Joe Rogan: But how does that lead to violence?
00:32:14
Eric Weinstein: Um, you’re upset because people are lying, you know? You’re, y- you… Like, the, the Unabomber had a, had really interesting points. He wasn’t a dumb guy. He was really correctly… You know, he has a, a, a, an amazing story called Ship of Fools. I highly recommend anybody read it, just the way Charles Manson’s Look at Your Game, Girl is a great song.
00:32:36
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:32:37
Eric Weinstein: It’s a great song.
00:32:38
Joe Rogan: Okay.
00:32:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Um, w- w- we’re not comfortable in part with, uh, coming back to the, the half measures and the, the special pleading that sort of characterizes normal life. So to get back to the missing scientist narrative, um, I don’t think there are 15 missing scientists in this data set. That’s bullshit. But there’s a-
00:33:02
Joe Rogan: It seems like they’re adding as many as they can.
00:33:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. They’re-
00:33:05
Joe Rogan: They’re trying to make connections that don’t seem to-
00:33:06
Eric Weinstein: Don’t do that. It’s, it’s like, it’s like the junkification of the UFO narrative. All of these narratives have a junk to them so that it… a- a- and I believe a lot of the junk is affixed to the narrative so that those who wanna follow the institutional instruction to ignore the fact that this is happening can point to the crappiness, right? And so that’s the out. And the really difficult thing that you do, and you do really well, is y- you try to piece together, okay, what’s bullshit, what’s real? There’s a lot of real in the UFO story, and there’s a lot of nonsense.
00:33:40
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:33:41
Eric Weinstein: There’s a lot of real in the COVID story and a lot of nonsense. The same thing is true for physics, but physics is more dangerous, and the fact that we’re not tracking… Like, I always wonder why they allow me to come on the Jerry and say stuff. I know a lot of stuff that I don’t know what it unlocks, and-
00:34:03
Joe Rogan: Well, it’s easy to dismiss anybody who comes on here.
00:34:06
Eric Weinstein: Sure, but China is smarter than… And by the way, the LLMs. I mean, look, there are a lot of threads here. To get back to the physics, um, and I’m giving a talk tomorrow on, at the, at the U- Texas Austin on supporting science, math, and physics and renewing our commitment to it. I don’t want to give the impression that it isn’t dangerous or that the gatekeeping is stupid. It’s really important to do great gatekeeping around mathematics and physics. It’s cryptography, it’s weaponry, it’s propulsion, it’s, you know, a sudden change in the world economy. Um, i- if you fi- figured out how to do fusion, it would have immediate geopolitical results.
00:34:50
Joe Rogan: So these p- specific scientists that are missing, how, whatever the number is, five, six, that you think-
00:34:56
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:34:56
Joe Rogan: … are legitimate, what e- what specifically are they working on that’s so dangerous?
00:35:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, the fusion guy, obviously, is, uh, at MIT, is anybody who might… I, I don’t know. Fusion isn’t my thing. Plasma isn’t my thing. Um, but that is unquestionably, uh, dangerous if you imagine how much depends on oil.
00:35:17
Joe Rogan: And is there, is it a good assumption that if you have one incredibly brilliant person that’s at the head of this thing, and they make a breakthrough, if you kill that guy, the whole thing is in disarray because the people that are under him, wh- whatever people he has working with him, aren’t as fully immersed in it as he is, that you can kind of, like, handicap a problem? So, like, let’s say if there’s-
00:35:42
Eric Weinstein: The top five people
00:35:43
Joe Rogan: … it’s an energy thing.
00:35:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:35:44
Joe Rogan: Let’s say if it’s an energy thing. Let’s say if someone has some new technology that’s gonna completely disrupt the fossil fuels industry.
00:35:49
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:35:50
Joe Rogan: And they go, “Listen, we can kill this fucking guy, and, uh, it’s still coming down the pipe, but we’ll delay it by 10 years and make $15 trillion.”
00:35:59
Eric Weinstein: So this is a question about the far right tail, like the extreme right tail of human intelligence and ability. And if you think about certain areas where you have a dominant figure, uh, Rodney Mullen in skateboarding, for example. What percentage of all tricks derive from Rodney Mullen? You couldn’t have stopped skateboarding, but you could certainly have held it back by getting to Rodney Mullen, right? Uh, when it comes to, you know, guitar, the, the amount of impact that, uh, Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen had It’s just wildly disproportionate. You know what, when I, when I was doing my podcast, I was really excited to do Rodney Mullen and Eddie Van Halen together. I wanted to get them, you know, totally different sports. But, um, those two guys are sort of the same. They just created so much vocabulary you can’t even imagine it.
00:36:55
Joe Rogan: Mm.
00:36:55
Eric Weinstein: And-
00:36:56
Joe Rogan: Eddie Van Halen doesn’t get the credit he deserves, either.
00:36:59
Eric Weinstein: Oh, tell me. Talk to me.
00:37:00
Joe Rogan: Well, it’s just, Van Halen became Van Hagar, and it became a different kind of music. And I think a lot of the original hardcore fans left, but a lot… I think it got more popular with-
00:37:17
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:37:18
Joe Rogan: … Sammy Hagar, but it was a different kind of music. And not that it’s bad, but it’s different. And then I think a lot of people just went, “Nah.” But, like, if you go, like, to, you know, some of the, like, big Van Halen with David- I think Van Halen with David Lee Roth in his prime was a, literally a perfect band. It was phenomenal. That was, they were the shit when I was in high school. I mean, it was, everybody had Van Halen on their-
00:37:45
Eric Weinstein: I-
00:37:45
Joe Rogan: … notebooks. They made the VH.
00:37:46
Eric Weinstein: I remember it.
00:37:47
Joe Rogan: They were awesome. And they were so good, and Van Hal- and Eddie specifically could shred so hard. And some of those classic riffs. I just don’t think in the mainstream world he got the credit that he deserves.
00:38:05
Eric Weinstein: I see it differently.
00:38:06
Joe Rogan: Well, people mention Clapton, who of course is a, a great wizard. Always it’s number one is Hendrix. Most people have Hendrix as number one, because he was so revolutionary.
00:38:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, nobody’s gonna say Allan Holdsworth.
00:38:17
Joe Rogan: Yeah, don’t know who he is.
00:38:17
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.
00:38:18
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:38:19
Eric Weinstein: I mean, my, my, my point is, is that, um, David Lee Roth kept Eddie Van Halen from becoming Allan Holdsworth. And that’s-
00:38:30
Joe Rogan: Who is Allan Holdsworth?
00:38:32
Eric Weinstein: Oh, that’s interesting. Allan Holdsworth, like, if you talk to your hot shit guitarist friends, they will very often, like, everybody’ll just pause and say, “Well, yeah, Al- that’s Allan Holdsworth.”
00:38:44
Joe Rogan: Really?
00:38:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And it’s sort of like listening to a modem for normal human beings, right? Um, that’s why it’s just, just not popular. And so Eddie Van Halen was this-
00:38:55
Joe Rogan: Who did he play with?
00:38:56
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know, Allan Holdsworth.
00:38:58
Joe Rogan: Just by himself?
00:38:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:38:59
Joe Rogan: Okay.
00:39:00
Eric Weinstein: Can we just actually weirdly put Allan Holdsworth, just, like, choose something with a-
00:39:04
Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah, we’ll listen to some of his music.
00:39:05
Eric Weinstein: So-
00:39:05
Joe Rogan: We might have, we’ll edit it out of the episode, because otherwise we get dinged on YouTube.
00:39:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, I don’t want you to… Okay. But like-
00:39:10
Joe Rogan: But we’ll play it. We’ll play it, and then we’ll just come right back to it.
00:39:12
Eric Weinstein: All right. Let’s do that.
00:39:13
Joe Rogan: Give me some, Jamie. Was it, is it any specific song that you’d like?
00:39:17
Eric Weinstein: No, it all, it’s all mind-melting.
00:39:19
speaker_3: Just checking to see if he’s got anyth- anything popular we might have known so I could tag, tap into that, but I don’t see nothing.
00:39:26
Joe Rogan: Like, is there a song that you like that you could recommend?
00:39:29
Eric Weinstein: I just listen to a certain amount of it and then I don’t listen to it again. I’m not at that level where I need Allan Holdsworth.
00:39:35
speaker_3: Mm.
00:39:36
Joe Rogan: Okay.
00:39:37
speaker_3: [laughs] What does that mean?
00:39:37
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m-
00:39:38
Joe Rogan: “What does that mean?” [laughs]
00:39:39
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:39:39
Joe Rogan: Thank you, Jamie. [laughs]
00:39:41
Eric Weinstein: I’d rather see some guy flying through the air with, like, his pants on fire than listen to Allan Holdsworth.
00:39:46
Joe Rogan: [sings] Panama.
00:39:47
speaker_3: [sings] Panama.
00:39:49
Joe Rogan: Okay, here we go.
00:39:50
speaker_3: Live in Tokyo.
00:39:51
Joe Rogan: 1984, Live in Tokyo.
00:39:52
speaker_3: Tokyo Dream. [rock music]
00:39:59
Eric Weinstein: See if you can use the histogram to figure out, like, where the nerds are going.
00:40:04
Joe Rogan: Histogram?
00:40:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Th- it shows you, like, where people spend their time on a video.
00:40:09
speaker_3: No, it’s not happening.
00:40:09
Joe Rogan: Oh, really?
00:40:12
Eric Weinstein: I would go right into the middle of it or something.
00:40:14
speaker_3: I’m already checking. What you doing?
00:40:22
Joe Rogan: So nothing-
00:40:22
speaker_3: These concerts sell out, or?
00:40:23
Eric Weinstein: Nothing’s going on right now.
00:40:25
Joe Rogan: Put it in the middle, Jamie. [rock music]
00:40:53
speaker_3: What is-
00:40:53
Joe Rogan: Okay
00:40:53
speaker_3: … is all, uh, uh, you’ve heard this before though?
00:40:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:40:56
speaker_3: What… Is that a bass? What is the other guitar I’m hearing? ‘Cause that is not matching up with what that bass player seems to be playing. [rock music] Do you hear that extra guitar that’s slower and off time?
00:41:10
Joe Rogan: I don’t know.
00:41:13
speaker_3: That’s a bass, I think.
00:41:20
Eric Weinstein: So-
00:41:20
speaker_3: It doesn’t sound like he’s playing a-
00:41:21
Eric Weinstein: My, my, my guitarist friends will just salivate. And I’ll look at them-
00:41:27
speaker_3: They need help. It’s dog shit.
00:41:27
Joe Rogan: They won’t help. [laughs]
00:41:28
speaker_3: Dog shit, Jamie. [laughs]
00:41:29
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:41:29
speaker_3: I mean, no offense, but it’s-
00:41:33
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:41:35
speaker_3: … it’s, can’t be very-
00:41:36
Joe Rogan: It sounds like jazz, right? So it’s like jazz guitar.
00:41:40
speaker_3: [laughs]
00:41:40
Joe Rogan: Like, there’s no, there’s no singing.
00:41:41
speaker_3: I apologize, sir.
00:41:42
Joe Rogan: Well, look, it-
00:41:42
speaker_3: [laughs]
00:41:44
Eric Weinstein: If I put on, if I-
00:41:45
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:41:48
Eric Weinstein: No more J- Jerry.
00:41:50
Joe Rogan: [gasps]
00:41:50
Eric Weinstein: I’ve had it.
00:41:51
Joe Rogan: [gasps] Oh, Jamie.
00:41:53
speaker_3: Well…
00:41:54
Joe Rogan: [gasps]
00:41:55
Eric Weinstein: Jamie, you are gonna have so much nerd hate.
00:41:57
Joe Rogan: That’s fine.
00:41:57
Eric Weinstein: Is your-
00:41:58
Joe Rogan: I get that every day.
00:41:58
speaker_3: I’ve, I’ve had people-
00:41:59
Eric Weinstein: Okay
00:41:59
speaker_3: … agree with me, too, I believe.
00:42:00
Joe Rogan: Oh, 100%.
00:42:01
Eric Weinstein: Well-
00:42:02
Joe Rogan: More, more will agree with you-
00:42:02
Eric Weinstein: But that, but that was my-
00:42:03
Joe Rogan: … but I’m on your camp
00:42:03
Eric Weinstein: … that was my point.
00:42:04
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:42:04
Eric Weinstein: I think David Lee Roth had some, uh, had some comment about if it weren’t for me, the brothers would be, uh, playing biker bars in the Far Valley or something, you know? And so David Lee Roth came up with what we would call the sy- syntactic sugar, the thing that made Van Halen fun and listenable and danceable, like Dance the Night Away.
00:42:25
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:42:25
Eric Weinstein: Just f- I, I didn’t like Van Halen. I love that song.
00:42:29
Joe Rogan: What?
00:42:29
Eric Weinstein: I never liked Van Halen.
00:42:30
Joe Rogan: Oh, how dare you.
00:42:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I loved Eddie Van Halen, and-
00:42:34
Joe Rogan: You didn’t like Van Halen?
00:42:38
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t… You wanna, the, the, I’m not even em-
00:42:40
Joe Rogan: Okay
00:42:40
Eric Weinstein: … embarrassed about that. The one I’m embarrassed about-
00:42:42
Joe Rogan: Okay
00:42:42
Eric Weinstein: … I completely dismissed AC/DC in real time-
00:42:45
Joe Rogan: Oh
00:42:46
Eric Weinstein: … because I’m an idiot.
00:42:47
Joe Rogan: Oh.
00:42:48
Eric Weinstein: I’ve never been more wrong about something in my life.
00:42:50
Joe Rogan: How did you dismiss AC/DC?
00:42:53
Eric Weinstein: Good question. They had a dumb thing going on with the school pants and the Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap and-
00:43:00
Joe Rogan: Fucking song.
00:43:01
Eric Weinstein: What? Great song. Well, you know, n- n- uh, like musically, Hot for Teacher is an amazing composition.
00:43:07
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:43:08
Eric Weinstein: Unbelievable, right? But, but i- it’s, the key thing that they figured out is making things marketable.
00:43:14
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:43:15
Eric Weinstein: Right?
00:43:15
Joe Rogan: And that’s David Lee Roth.
00:43:16
Eric Weinstein: And it, I think it’s David Lee Roth.
00:43:18
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:43:19
Eric Weinstein: And, and, but Eddie Van Halen-
00:43:19
Joe Rogan: No, Eddie is so charismatic and did jumping splits. Yeah, he was a maniac.
00:43:24
Eric Weinstein: Amazing.
00:43:24
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:43:24
Eric Weinstein: Amazing. And he had a, he, a secret weakness for old-timey music.
00:43:29
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:43:30
Eric Weinstein: Right? Like, Just the Gigolo, Ice Cream Man-
00:43:32
Joe Rogan: Yeah
00:43:32
Eric Weinstein: … all that kind of stuff. So he’s like a almost a throwback to 1930s, for, you know, even earlier, Vaudeville.
00:43:40
Joe Rogan: He’s an odd guy. Have you ever met him?
00:43:42
Eric Weinstein: I’ve wanted, I’ve wanted to so badly.
00:43:44
Joe Rogan: Fun guy.
00:43:44
Eric Weinstein: I’m so jealous.
00:43:45
Joe Rogan: But I, I don’t think you ever really get to him. It’s always the show. Like, in podcasts, it’s a little, like I really enjoy talking to him, but it’s a little odd.
00:43:54
Eric Weinstein: I’ve seen, I didn’t love the way he was. My, my feel, I, like I would, I would go the Jewish angle. I’d, I would, I would connect to him based on shared cultural heritage. But l- what I think about Eddie is that Eddie wasn’t just a guitarist. He, he was an electronics guy, he was a keyboard player, he was handsome as the day is long, bursting with charisma. And, like, you and I mostly don’t know whether guys are good-looking. I know Eddie Van Halen was good-looking.
00:44:25
Joe Rogan: Tell me more. [laughs]
00:44:28
Eric Weinstein: He, he w- he was the whole thing.
00:44:30
Joe Rogan: Yeah, for sure.
00:44:31
Eric Weinstein: Right, yeah.
00:44:31
Joe Rogan: Rock star.
00:44:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And so my feeling is, is that those two guys really t- you know, it’s, it’s one of those things where you have two guys in a band that, you know, both of them are, are one i- one in a billion kinda people, and they happen to meet. I, I, I, I’m happy to be wrong about Van Halen, but I didn’t do it in real time. I came to it later. But I remember the first time I heard Van Halen I. I had the same mystical thing. What is that? Nothing sounds like this. And I’ve almost never had that in music, you know? The first time I heard, uh, Smells Like Teen Spirit.
00:45:07
Joe Rogan: Mm.
00:45:07
Eric Weinstein: What is that? Those, you know, there are these moments where th- something discontinuous happens.
00:45:12
Joe Rogan: But you heard, like, Ain’t Talk About Love, and that never got you?
00:45:17
Eric Weinstein: No, Panama doesn’t get me.
00:45:19
Joe Rogan: Ain’t Talk About Love-
00:45:20
Eric Weinstein: Love
00:45:20
Joe Rogan: … is a fucking jam. When was the last time you listened to it?
00:45:28
Eric Weinstein: This year.
00:45:30
Joe Rogan: And nothing?
00:45:31
Eric Weinstein: It’s not that.
00:45:32
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:45:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, okay, so y- part, part of the thing is, is that do you, do you play an instrument? When you play an instrument-
00:45:38
Joe Rogan: Yeah, that is a problem. Yeah, I don’t play anything
00:45:41
Eric Weinstein: … y- you know, the thing about Eddie Van Halen is, is that he accepted the geometry of the neck of the guitar. And m- very often you see m- musicians say, “I don’t care what key it’s in, I, I, I can figure out how to do anything.” Eddie Van Halen didn’t do that. He said, “Look, there’s certain things that this thing makes possible, and I’m gonna im- I’m gonna accept the limitations of the instrument and figure out how to push it in all sorts of ways.” Another quote of his that I just love is this thing about, um, “If it doesn’t cry, weep, moan, I don’t care.” He wanted all of those noises.
00:46:19
Joe Rogan: Mm.
00:46:20
Eric Weinstein: And figuring out how to get those noises, figuring out how to make the guitar into more, this is a thing that obsesses people like Jeff Beck or Roy Buchanan or Eddie Van Halen, where they’re just, they’re in some other space where it’s no longer an instrument the way you and I see it, you know? I, I’ve never wanted a whammy bar on my instrument until I saw Jeff Beck do crazy stuff that just isn’t possible.
00:46:52
Joe Rogan: Did I ever tell you I drove him around once?
00:46:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had that car-
00:46:54
Joe Rogan: Yeah
00:46:54
Eric Weinstein: … on air.
00:46:55
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:46:56
Eric Weinstein: And th- that, um… You know, you, you’ve never had Derek Trucks on the program, have you?
00:47:03
Joe Rogan: Tadeshi Trucks?
00:47:04
Eric Weinstein: Uh, yeah.
00:47:05
Joe Rogan: No.
00:47:08
Eric Weinstein: That guy is-
00:47:09
Joe Rogan: I would
00:47:09
Eric Weinstein: … d- not a human.
00:47:11
Joe Rogan: Oh, he’s amazing.
00:47:12
Eric Weinstein: Amazing. And, um-
00:47:14
Joe Rogan: And has a bunch of different people sing songs.
00:47:17
Eric Weinstein: So yeah, I, I, look, I, I care tremendously about the guitar, and, you know, the funny thing that I realized is that I stupidly mention guitars on Jerry, and I got sent amazing guitars and, you know, I had, I had Jamie send a, a, a Quad Cortex. Um, I should’ve mentioned, like, Lamborghinis or, like-
00:47:36
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:47:36
Eric Weinstein: … jewels or something.
00:47:37
Joe Rogan: It doesn’t work.
00:47:38
Eric Weinstein: I know.
00:47:38
Joe Rogan: I’ve mentioned all those things.
00:47:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Um, but I became friends with, like, the greatest guitarists of our time, and they’re all suffering because nobody cares. And, and I h- I heard, and I haven’t seen it, that you had Marcus King-
00:47:53
Joe Rogan: Yeah
00:47:53
Eric Weinstein: … on-
00:47:53
Joe Rogan: He was awesome
00:47:53
Eric Weinstein: … and talked about the death of rock.
00:47:56
Joe Rogan: Well, I talked about the death of rock before, and Marcus reached out-
00:47:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:47:59
Joe Rogan: … and that’s why I had him on. He’s like, “Man, rock’s not dead. We’re doing it every fucking night.” And I was like, “All right. Come on, man. Let’s talk.”
00:48:05
Eric Weinstein: And did you get to the blues, which he excels at?
00:48:08
Joe Rogan: Well, we b- mostly just were talking about just music in general and his life, and he’s in it for-
00:48:13
Eric Weinstein: Wait till you give you a nice guitar.
00:48:15
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it’s beautiful, right?
00:48:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:48:16
Joe Rogan: He’s a cool motherfucker.
00:48:17
Eric Weinstein: He’s a cool guy.
00:48:17
Joe Rogan: And he’s super talented too.
00:48:19
Eric Weinstein: Never met him.
00:48:20
Joe Rogan: Well, it’s like these, these… This is what my, my conversation was about. Like, this is what’s, what prompted it, rather, is that when I was a kid, rock and roll music was the big popular music.
00:48:33
Eric Weinstein: 100%.
00:48:34
Joe Rogan: It was all Rolling Stones, AC/DC. These bands were huge. Zeppelin, they were fucking huge.
00:48:42
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:48:42
Joe Rogan: They were the biggest bands. That’s not the case anymore
00:48:45
Eric Weinstein: That’s right
00:48:46
Joe Rogan: And that’s weird. And I, what I said is, I don’t understand how a m- a, a music genre that’s so popular can stop being popular when it’s still so good. Like, when we have Protect Our Parks, and, you know, we’ll play Free Bird, we still go nuts for that guitar solo.
00:49:04
Eric Weinstein: What happened to Free Bird? I’m pretty sure if you looked at Google’s data, Free Bird was in… It, it went away for a long time.
00:49:14
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
00:49:14
Eric Weinstein: And then it got resurrected as a meme, right? Because you, you can feel, right, this insanely long intro.
00:49:23
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
00:49:24
Eric Weinstein: Just so luxurious. You can’t believe anybody would put up with it anymore.
00:49:26
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:49:28
Eric Weinstein: And then it gets-
00:49:29
Joe Rogan: It’s two different songs.
00:49:29
Eric Weinstein: Right. Lord knows I can’t-
00:49:32
Joe Rogan: Bored
00:49:32
Eric Weinstein: … cha, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And you just-
00:49:34
Joe Rogan: And then all of a sudden it becomes alive
00:49:35
Eric Weinstein: … right. Fly high, free bird, yeah. And then doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Suddenly, you’re on fire.
00:49:41
Joe Rogan: Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:42
Eric Weinstein: You know, it’s just like you wanna fly an American flag. You wanna-
00:49:45
Joe Rogan: Yeah
00:49:45
Eric Weinstein: … shoot lasers, whatever it is. That feeling, I think, went away, and I think that, I think that Free Bird, if y- I’d love to see the data. It came back, and in part, it was probably Trump and Elon and this re- we’re in a masculinity crisis world over, and the masculinity crisis originally killed Free Bird, and it brought it back.
00:50:12
Joe Rogan: I think Free Bird was brought back by Protect Our Parks.
00:50:16
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:50:17
Joe Rogan: You think so?
00:50:17
Eric Weinstein: I-
00:50:18
speaker_3: It’s nev- I mean, as Google Trends says, it’s never really gone away. [laughs]
00:50:22
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:50:22
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? What is-
00:50:24
speaker_3: There’s a peak in 2010
00:50:25
Joe Rogan: That’s more like-
00:50:26
Eric Weinstein: Sorry?
00:50:26
speaker_3: There’s a peak in around December 9th, so 2010.
00:50:29
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, that’s 20… It’s-
00:50:31
Joe Rogan: A, a peak in 2010? That’s weird.
00:50:33
speaker_3: Something could’ve happened. We could look it up.
00:50:35
Joe Rogan: I wonder what it was.
00:50:36
speaker_3: It probably was in a movie or something.
00:50:38
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it seems pretty steady.
00:50:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, the reason I said that is that I would make this reference, ’cause you used to be able to refer to Free Bird, uh, it was a meme.
00:50:48
Joe Rogan: Right, right, right.
00:50:48
Eric Weinstein: Like, everybody knew it.
00:50:49
Joe Rogan: Yeah, people would yell it out.
00:50:50
Eric Weinstein: And then there was a period of time where no young person had any clue what I was talking about, and I, I kn- oh, that’s interesting. Because they, they still knew Stairway to Heaven. If you remember these, like, top 500 songs of all time.
00:51:02
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
00:51:03
Eric Weinstein: And then it would always come down to the last two, and it would always be Free Bird and Stairway to Heaven. Those would, invariably.
00:51:10
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:51:11
Eric Weinstein: Then suddenly nobody knew what Free Bird was, and now everybody knows again. So I, I, I…
00:51:18
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
00:51:19
Eric Weinstein: I, I s- I, I will be s- I will stand corrected, but there was a period of time where young people didn’t know it.
00:51:24
Joe Rogan: Well, is this Google Trends? Is that what that is, yeah?
00:51:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:51:26
speaker_3: Yep. And, uh-
00:51:26
Joe Rogan: So it’s just people looking it up?
00:51:27
speaker_3: I could even go, like, that’s probably when they put the video on YouTube for the first time, or it became available on Apple for the first time-
00:51:34
Joe Rogan: Hmm
00:51:34
speaker_3: … to download, and it wasn’t-
00:51:35
Joe Rogan: Right
00:51:35
speaker_3: … only on Napster or something like that.
00:51:36
Eric Weinstein: But to go back to the, the blues aspect of it, it’s blues-based rock that feels like that thing that you and I relate to.
00:51:45
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
00:51:46
Eric Weinstein: And-
00:51:47
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00:52:41
Eric Weinstein: You know, we’re not most… I, I’m really into the blues, but that’s a, it’s its own controversy, because when Black audiences stopped showing up to blues shows, the performers got worse because the, the audience was a huge part of the experience. I, I tell you about this argument I got into with John Mayer about the blues?
00:53:02
Joe Rogan: No.
00:53:04
Eric Weinstein: So I, I ran into John Mayer, um, where was it? San Vicente Bungalows, and I’ve been in awe of that guy intellectually. When he talks about music, I get so much out of it. He’s just very perceptive, very brilliant guy. And so I was, uh, you know, really excited to meet him, and we get into this discussion, and I said, “You’re, like, a huge Stevie Ray Vaughan fan.” And I said, “I, I, I really don’t get it. I like him. I think he’s a great player, but I don’t understand the focus.” And he said, “Oh, I can explain that.” He says, “I, I came from the MTV generation, and he was the blues packaged for us. Like, a genius guy for sure, but packaged for MTV.”
00:53:47
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
00:53:48
Eric Weinstein: And he said, “But, you know, blues isn’t really, um, blues isn’t a f- isn’t, isn’t a m- real musical form. It’s an ingredient.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He says, “Well, you would never go to a blues show.” I said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this to John Mayer, but I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”
00:54:10
Joe Rogan: House of Blues.
00:54:11
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:54:12
Joe Rogan: It’s literally-
00:54:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, he meant something
00:54:15
Joe Rogan: … a bunch of different bands.
00:54:15
Eric Weinstein: So the, the thing is, is that I caught the end of Black audiences, like, old Black people listening to the blues and paying for it. So there’s who pays and who plays, and, and B- Black people are still paying for blues, but a lot of them aren’t… Sorry, are still playing blues, but a lot of them aren’t paying for it. So when I go, for example, to, uh, see Cadillac Zack’s Maui Sugar Mill show every Monday night, I go occasionally in, uh, in Tarzana. It’s, like, 70-year-old and up white people. So you see, like, hot chicks in their 80s in crop tops dancing, and- That’s what it is now. It’s like a really old crowd keeping this thing alive, and I can’t understand it because it feels great, Joe.
00:55:01
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:55:02
Eric Weinstein: And, um, and that’s the thing. It’s just like, you know, Bonamassa, he does these cruises keeping the blues alive. My feeling is like, “F that.” We- we’ve gotta actually get people back into understanding what it is. So if you picture those huge bands in your youth, stop thinking about the, the band on stage rocking out and pan in your mind into the audience, and what do you see?
00:55:32
Joe Rogan: Young people.
00:55:33
Eric Weinstein: Young people. What are they doing?
00:55:37
Joe Rogan: Dancing, having fun.
00:55:38
Eric Weinstein: They’re dancing. There’s some, there’s some chick in a crop top on some guy’s shoulders rocking out.
00:55:45
Joe Rogan: Free bird.
00:55:46
Eric Weinstein: When, when hot chicks stop dancing to your music, it starts to enter its death throes.
00:55:51
Joe Rogan: Damn.
00:55:51
Eric Weinstein: And that’s true with jazz, it’s true with traditional R&B, and it’s true with the blues, it’s true with rock. And so the important thing, and I, I keep telling people, is that you have to get people dancing. Once you start becoming intellectual, like Alan Holdsworth, nobody’s dancing to Alan Holdsworth.
00:56:10
Joe Rogan: Maybe you are.
00:56:11
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] That’s not my shit.
00:56:14
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:56:14
Eric Weinstein: You have no idea.
00:56:14
Joe Rogan: How many people dance to it, Jamey? What do you think?
00:56:16
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Dude.
00:56:17
speaker_3: I’m, honestly, those of you guys sound old as shit right now.
00:56:20
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:56:20
speaker_3: There’s so much music and rock music in arenas right now-
00:56:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh
00:56:24
speaker_3: … that’s selling out.
00:56:24
Joe Rogan: What is rock in, in arenas right now?
00:56:26
speaker_3: I mean, just, like, there’s a bunch of bands I can… So, like, Bad Omens, Beartooth. Korn just posted a video in front of, like, São Paulo, Brazil, 50,000 people going crazy.
00:56:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, like Meshuggah. I, I-
00:56:37
speaker_3: It’s out there.
00:56:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:56:38
speaker_3: But it’s not what you guy- You guys don’t like it either, you know?
00:56:41
Joe Rogan: Yeah, but it’s not, it’s, it’s not the big popular music that it was when I was a kid.
00:56:45
speaker_3: There’s only f- f- five artists in the world that are popular, like, all over the place right now.
00:56:49
Eric Weinstein: That’s right, because it’s now micro.
00:56:52
Joe Rogan: ‘Cause that was-
00:56:52
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:56:52
Joe Rogan: Right, ’cause there’s too many bands, there’s too much music, too much content.
00:56:54
Eric Weinstein: It’s also the, the, the control of the institutions to tell us what we like-
00:56:59
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm
00:57:00
Eric Weinstein: … has, uh, has slipped, right? And so in part, you know, like, it, it was our version of payola that, um… You know, when I was growing up in, uh, in LA, it was KMET and KLOS that determined, or KROQ, those are the three stations that mattered. And they told us, “Here’s, here’s the offering, boys. This is what’s on tap.” Right now, you know, are you into mathcore?
00:57:26
Joe Rogan: Do you think that’s it, is the death of… ‘Cause wow, now, now that you’re saying that, I’m thinking, the death of radio and the death of rock and roll, they sync. Because radio really stopped being a thing, early 2000s? Early 2000s, radio stopped being a thing.
00:57:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, remember when Limewire came through and everybody could get all the songs that they wanted.
00:57:53
Joe Rogan: Right, right.
00:57:53
Eric Weinstein: Right?
00:57:53
Joe Rogan: That was an issue. But it, it felt like, if anything, I thought at the beginning when, like, Metallica was railing, when Larls, Lars Ulrich was railing against Napster, I’m like, “These are just your fans. They’re just your fans that are getting your music for free.”
00:58:06
Eric Weinstein: Yep.
00:58:06
Joe Rogan: “You’re gonna have to adapt, but they still love you, and y- you know, don’t you make most of your money touring?” Or I don’t know. I don’t know what the-
00:58:13
Eric Weinstein: But right-
00:58:13
Joe Rogan: … economics of it are, but they’re gonna change
00:58:14
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:58:14
Joe Rogan: This is a new thing.
00:58:15
Eric Weinstein: Right now, micro markets, you know. Just, just in prog metal, there are so many different flavors.
00:58:22
Joe Rogan: I understand, but, uh, but what we’re getting at is that the radio sort of dictated what became popular-
00:58:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:58:30
Joe Rogan: … in a lot of ways.
00:58:31
Eric Weinstein: Now video games-
00:58:32
Joe Rogan: And now things become popular in more of a sense of a viral way.
00:58:36
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Well, one thing is that these clips, if your clip gets picked up by TikTok and, and Instagram Reels, that’s, you know, some tiny fraction of, of a song is the catnip that leads everyone to your door.
00:58:50
Joe Rogan: 100%. I’ve d- downloaded many, many songs that way.
00:58:53
Eric Weinstein: But I, I, I was, uh, hanging with Misha Mansoor, who was making the Jamey claim, like, “You, you got old, grandpa.”
00:58:59
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
00:58:59
Eric Weinstein: And his point… Yeah. The thing is, I, I have at least the courage to hang out with actually cool people. He said, you know, his point was, “You’re, you’re just not even watching it correctly.” And I said, “What do you mean, Misha?” And he said, “Video games. Video game- The music in video games matters much more than you imagine.” And I, it’s like, totally right.
00:59:20
Joe Rogan: Hmm, that makes sense.
00:59:22
Eric Weinstein: And so, you know, th- what we are thinking about in get off, get off my lawn mode-
00:59:28
Joe Rogan: Right
00:59:28
Eric Weinstein: … is there was something lost, and it hasn’t been reborn anywhere. So that’s the part that young Jamey is not getting correct. Something was just lost. Now, lots of new stuff sprouted up, but, like, EDM and DJing is really where a lot of that dancing hot chick energy went.
00:59:49
Joe Rogan: Hmm. That makes sense.
00:59:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Right? And then, like, if you’ve ever-
00:59:53
Joe Rogan: And that’s where guys wanna go, where the dancing hot chicks are.
00:59:57
Eric Weinstein: They will follow anywhere.
00:59:59
Joe Rogan: Right.
00:59:59
Eric Weinstein: Right? And, and, you know, that’s the whole… I was in, uh-
01:00:03
Joe Rogan: What’s this, Jamey?
01:00:04
speaker_3: This is EDC Vegas 2026. This is just the example of what you’re saying, like.
01:00:08
Joe Rogan: Is this, uh, electronic?
01:00:09
speaker_3: Yep.
01:00:10
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:00:10
speaker_3: This is, like, as big as it gets. If I look at the stage, look at all these lights.
01:00:14
Joe Rogan: I wonder, if molly didn’t exist, how much of this would be out, uh-
01:00:17
speaker_3: Yeah, so, I mean-
01:00:18
Joe Rogan: It’s a good question, right?
01:00:19
speaker_3: … if LSD didn’t exist, how much of that music wouldn’t have gotten big, too?
01:00:22
Joe Rogan: Oh, a lot. Yeah.
01:00:24
speaker_3: But yeah, this is where all the girls hang out.
01:00:26
Eric Weinstein: Right. Uh-
01:00:26
Joe Rogan: So-
01:00:26
Eric Weinstein: So, like, I found myself in, in Vegas-
01:00:29
speaker_3: Except for Ella Langley, now sort of antithesis, antithesis to that, but.
01:00:34
Joe Rogan: What is?
01:00:34
speaker_3: Ella Langley.
01:00:35
Joe Rogan: What’s that?
01:00:36
speaker_3: She’s, uh, biggest country artist in almost ever now. First female with, like, two top 100 songs ever.
01:00:43
Joe Rogan: How am I so out of the loop?
01:00:45
Eric Weinstein: Um, because-
01:00:46
Joe Rogan: What is her, what’s her big song?
01:00:47
speaker_3: “Texas.”
01:00:47
Joe Rogan: Oh, I know that song.
01:00:48
speaker_3: Yeah, yeah.
01:00:48
Joe Rogan: That song’s great.
01:00:49
speaker_3: Yeah. She’s got another one now, and-
01:00:50
Joe Rogan: And has she been around for a long time?
01:00:52
speaker_3: Nope. She’s pretty new. She’s, like, 24, 25.
01:00:54
Joe Rogan: And she’s killing it.
01:00:55
speaker_3: Murdering it
01:00:58
Eric Weinstein: So part, part of what’s going on is there’s no way to monitor. Like even if you have really current young people, they’re monitoring a subset of what’s going on. Nobody, nobody’s tracking the whole thing.
01:01:11
Joe Rogan: Right. And but why country, though? Why is country exploding the way it’s exploding?
01:01:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, because we’re all in a meaning crisis.
01:01:17
Joe Rogan: Oh.
01:01:17
Eric Weinstein: If you think about the way in which, uh, country music, for example, can develop a story through, uh, tropes very, very quickly.
01:01:28
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:01:29
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so in part, the, the idea is that story songs and a return, you know, try that in a small town, uh, is transgressive. Try that in a small town is a [laughs] it’s a really powerful message.
01:01:46
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:01:47
Eric Weinstein: You don’t have to say a lot. And we all want the cowboy, we all want the girl at the county fair, you know? Um, we just don’t know how to get back to her.
01:01:58
Joe Rogan: Right. We all want a wholesome existence.
01:02:00
Eric Weinstein: You know, I got a barbecue stain on my white T-shirt. That’s Tim McGraw, right? Like, uh, you know, she’s just killing it in that, that miniskirt. You know? Heart, don’t forget something like that. Beautiful story. Very, very quickly told. And that’s old now, but the, the, the point being, um, hip hop and its storytelling and the return to spoken word and poetry and, and then the, the legacy of the talking blues, that had, had a great run. Spread worldwide. You know, you talk about whites taking over. What do you mean whites? Like Tamils and, you know, in- indigenous Peruvians are, have, have taken over hip hop in, in their local sectors. Uh, so hip hop was just this great platform that once, uh, every local culture figured out some version of that. And I talk about, um, when I entered Bollywood, there was a song, um, Amad Dech, Termunde Bigra Jai. You know, Mama look, your, your child is being ruined, and it has this like, um, hey mom, hey dad, don’t moan and groan. Why don’t you learn to live with the times and please leave us alone.
01:03:15
Joe Rogan: Mm.
01:03:15
Eric Weinstein: Um, and it goes-
01:03:16
Joe Rogan: Which is every generation’s message.
01:03:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but it’s like it’s delivered in, uh, you know, boogie woogie, reggae, rap, rock and roll and bhangra. You know? And it, it’s like trying to w- it was the first lame attempt at rap that I saw in a Bollywood film with Jackie Shroff. And th- they’ve all made it theirs. And so I was hanging out in India now with a DJ, um, on his program, uh, Untriggered, and it’s changing the, the developing world, um, at a level that rock and roll changed us. It was a, you know, the music of liberation. John Mayer’s point, of course, is that the guitar, the electric guitar retains the stylistic characteristics of cars in the 1950s, and that thing was the twin experience of having a car and having a guitar was, was personal expression and liberation for fif- for American males in the ’50s.
01:04:10
Joe Rogan: Mm.
01:04:11
Eric Weinstein: So, um, yeah, I, I th- but I think a lot about our guitarist friends because they’re suffering. The world’s greatest guitarists are living today and nobody cares. They all follow each other. The funny thing is if you start following these people on Instagram, as I do, um, I look to see which of my friends are following the great guitarists, and it’s other great guitarists. It’s none of my normal friends. Like how, how many of my normal friends know who Tim Henson is, a great Texas guitarist? Uh, y-
01:04:45
speaker_3: I do.
01:04:46
Eric Weinstein: This man. You do?
01:04:47
speaker_3: Yeah, yeah.
01:04:48
Joe Rogan: What kind of music?
01:04:49
speaker_3: Paul, oh man, I couldn’t even explain it. He m- uh, he pretty much invented a genre that only he mastered and is, can explain.
01:04:56
Eric Weinstein: It’s like Tex-Mex melodic. I- if I had a glass and I broke it, if I took Tex-Mex and I broke it on the ground and I reassembled it from different things and it’s completely angular and an idea will last, it’s like a psychedelic thing where it’ll last for five seconds and then it’ll be on to the next thing, and it’s just angular and fragmented and sewn together and beautiful and inspiring.
01:05:21
Joe Rogan: Give me some, Jan.
01:05:22
speaker_3: Yeah, and I have to, I have to play it for you ’cause-
01:05:23
Joe Rogan: Yeah
01:05:24
speaker_3: … the drummer and bass player are also awesome, but it’s pretty much revolved around the guitar. [upbeat music]
01:05:30
Eric Weinstein: And you see, the thing is that they’re so tight with each other that, um, you know, a better example even than this would be this thing that they released called Goat, which was the thing that put them on the map. Um, and-
01:05:45
Joe Rogan: That was great
01:05:45
Eric Weinstein: … it w- right? Tim-
01:05:46
Joe Rogan: Let me hear Goat
01:05:47
Eric Weinstein: … so also Tim is just like the loveliest human being.
01:05:50
speaker_3: Oh, I watched him as a young boy.
01:05:51
Joe Rogan: Well, that’s him before he got all the crazy neck tattoos.
01:05:53
Eric Weinstein: Oh. [upbeat music] Well, that’s just broken out. I don’t know… That’s not Tim, is it?
01:06:06
speaker_3: They posted it. It says it’s Tim.
01:06:09
Eric Weinstein: This is, this is a different, different human.
01:06:13
speaker_3: Oh.
01:06:13
Joe Rogan: Let’s hear the song.
01:06:14
speaker_3: Okay.
01:06:16
Joe Rogan: I think that’s someone posting a riff.
01:06:18
speaker_3: That was their account.
01:06:20
Joe Rogan: Yeah, I know, but maybe he just put it up there. [upbeat music]
01:06:23
speaker_3: Skip it.
01:06:24
Eric Weinstein: By the way, do you hear the Mexican influence?
01:06:27
Joe Rogan: Yeah, definitely.
01:06:28
Eric Weinstein: So like this is-
01:06:29
Joe Rogan: This is very unique. Very unique sound
01:06:31
Eric Weinstein: … this is who I hang with. I love these guys. This is, this, this matters to me, and this is new, right? And just the way this, uh, what, like Antoine de Potrain that’s taking over the world, is basically you hear the Middle East. Um, but these guys are basically into microtones. If you take 24 beats, you can divide it by sixes, you can divide it by fours. Uh, so th- the mathematics of rhythm Um, you know, the stuff that like only Vinnie Colaiuta was able to do before, people are sort of getting hip to things that were happening on oud are now happening on microtonal guitars and what it is, as I see it, is, is this like this violent birth of people bored by standard Western forms. And I’m, I’m for this. I’m not for all of the slop that, you know, like young people are always into the coolest stuff. No, they’re not. There are lame times, there are cool times. There’s really cool stuff happening now, but it’s, it’s, it’s the fact, and particularly this Quebec kind of thing that, that broke out with these guys in costume. Um-
01:07:40
Joe Rogan: Huh?
01:07:42
Eric Weinstein: You don’t know this? Antoine Depoitrine, something like that. There’s something-
01:07:47
Joe Rogan: Quebec costumes? What are you talking-
01:07:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Like, you remember The Residents, who were this art group from San Francisco? Nobody knew who they were. They would have giant eyeballs as heads and they would play completely insane things like Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, but in angular, bizarre ways.
01:08:03
Joe Rogan: I missed that, too.
01:08:04
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:08:05
Joe Rogan: Did you miss it?
01:08:05
speaker_3: I don’t know where we’re going.
01:08:07
Eric Weinstein: So Antoine Depoitrine is, is this thing that took over which doesn’t sound like anything. It’s like that new thing. So you know, you- y- because… [upbeat music] So look at that guitarist’s friends.
01:08:46
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
01:08:50
Eric Weinstein: Now-
01:08:52
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
01:08:52
Eric Weinstein: … the mathematics-
01:08:53
Joe Rogan: So good, Jamie
01:08:55
speaker_3: Yeah
01:08:55
Eric Weinstein: … the mathematics of this is that there’s this freak fact, which is that if you take the octave, which is the doubling of frequency, um, you take the 12th root of it, break it into-
01:09:05
Joe Rogan: [coughs]
01:09:05
Eric Weinstein: … 12 semitones, and then take 19 of them stacked, 2 to the 19 over 12 is equal to 2.996 something. It’s almost 3. And that means that you can force people into this quantized music where you come up with this num- number 12, which is magical for number theory reasons, and you can fool the ear into thinking that 19 of these 12 semitones is a, a complete tripling of frequency. And because of that, we’ve been in im- even-tempered music since the time of Bach, and these guys are breaking us out, together with Jacob Collier, and they’re saying, “W- why would you accept that as a prison?”
01:09:45
Joe Rogan: And so how does stuff like this become popular? Is it just viral?
01:09:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:09:50
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:09:50
Eric Weinstein: Because suddenly you see two guys in costumes that don’t look anything like anything you know making music. It, there’s a moment where it switches into six beats per unit, into four beats per unit because it’s on a 24 cycle, and suddenly you just feel good.
01:10:08
Joe Rogan: And also, if any of these guys get cocky, you could just swap them out.
01:10:12
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
01:10:14
Joe Rogan: Put a mask on some new guy, get him in there.
01:10:17
Eric Weinstein: No, but it’s, it’s anti-egoic.
01:10:18
Joe Rogan: “Fuck off, Tom.”
01:10:19
Eric Weinstein: It’s anti-egoic.
01:10:20
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:10:21
Eric Weinstein: Right?
01:10:21
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:10:21
Eric Weinstein: So in part-
01:10:22
Joe Rogan: Of course
01:10:22
Eric Weinstein: … you know, it’s like Buckethead. Buckethead didn’t want to be… Like you have trouble being Joe Rogan. I even have trouble being Eric Weinstein. I’m a fraction of a Joe Rogan. It’s hard to be well-known, and these guys are erasing themselves. And that-
01:10:36
Joe Rogan: Mm
01:10:36
Eric Weinstein: … idea of, you know, um… It’s very funny. Tim Henson, I think, has a song called Ego Death with, uh, Steve Vai. Um, ego death is really hot because people erasing themselves is what everybody isn’t trying to do, uh, who’s chasing clout.
01:10:53
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:10:54
Eric Weinstein: So-
01:10:54
Joe Rogan: And people like that.
01:10:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, because-
01:10:57
Joe Rogan: People-
01:10:57
Eric Weinstein: … it’s a form-
01:10:58
Joe Rogan: Yeah
01:10:58
Eric Weinstein: … or they don’t just like that, they also don’t mind if you’re chasing clout and you say, “I’m chasing some clout.”
01:11:07
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:11:08
Eric Weinstein: “I’m trying to get that bag.” So what they don’t want is somebody saying, like Bill Gates- [laughs]
01:11:14
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:11:14
Eric Weinstein: “I just wanna help.”
01:11:15
Joe Rogan: “I’m just looking out for humanity-
01:11:16
Eric Weinstein: “Just wanna help”
01:11:16
Joe Rogan: … and global health.”
01:11:18
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.
01:11:19
Joe Rogan: B- so, um, what I’m doing, I’m engineering ticks so that they bite you and you get allergic to red meat, and I’m dropping them off from helicopters.
01:11:27
Eric Weinstein: We’re going to administer vaccines involuntarily through ticks.
01:11:31
Joe Rogan: Yeah, and mosquitoes.
01:11:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So all of this stuff really bothers people.
01:11:36
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it’s gonna-
01:11:37
Eric Weinstein: It’s the disingenu- well, it’s the dis-
01:11:38
Joe Rogan: Well, it’s also he doesn’t have any friends, you know? And he can’t get any pussy anymore ’cause he keeps getting caught. He can-
01:11:44
Eric Weinstein: He can get it.
01:11:46
Joe Rogan: [laughs] But if we were smart, we’d feed that guy pussy.
01:11:51
Eric Weinstein: We did.
01:11:51
Joe Rogan: Keep him happy.
01:11:52
Eric Weinstein: We did.
01:11:53
Joe Rogan: We? I wasn’t involved.
01:11:55
Eric Weinstein: Neither was I.
01:11:56
Joe Rogan: Yeah, allegedly.
01:11:57
Eric Weinstein: What do you mean allegedly?
01:11:59
Joe Rogan: Just kidding.
01:11:59
Eric Weinstein: I didn’t go to that island.
01:12:01
Joe Rogan: You didn’t? No.
01:12:03
Eric Weinstein: No.
01:12:03
Joe Rogan: No, you were one of-
01:12:03
Eric Weinstein: Uh-
01:12:03
Joe Rogan: … one of the people that, uh, saw through him right away.
01:12:06
Eric Weinstein: No, but he offered me partnership, and I didn’t take it, and I regretted that for a while.
01:12:12
Joe Rogan: ‘Cause you would’ve been cha-ching.
01:12:15
Eric Weinstein: I would’ve been made rich or deceased.
01:12:18
Joe Rogan: Probably both.
01:12:19
Eric Weinstein: Probably both. Yeah, a f- a couple times I’ve been offered real wealth and with crazy stuff, but the Epstein thing, I don’t know that I’ve actually said that on a podcast. Um, yeah, he offered me partnership, and the only condition was that I had to get rid of my existing partners. Like I had to stab my partners in the back in order to become his partner.
01:12:42
Joe Rogan: Oh, yeah, so he’d own you. Yeah.
01:12:46
Eric Weinstein: You know, it’s like sh- show me that you’re-
01:12:48
speaker_3: I don’t wanna sidetrack this for I’ll come back, but, uh, these two are 333-year-old aliens, time travelers-
01:12:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. [laughs]
01:12:55
speaker_3: … apparently, so they cannot be easily replaced.
01:12:57
Joe Rogan: Yes, they can.
01:12:58
speaker_3: [laughs]
01:12:58
Joe Rogan: That’s horseshit. [laughs]
01:12:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But I, look, I’ll make a prediction. If these guys haven’t been unmasked-
01:13:03
speaker_3: I don’t even know who they-
01:13:03
Eric Weinstein: … that you’re gonna unmask these guys, and you’re gonna find out that they’ve got Middle Eastern heritage.
01:13:06
Joe Rogan: Well, please don’t unmask them. They already unmasked Banksy.
01:13:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:13:09
Joe Rogan: Can’t we have some fucking mysteries in this world, damn it? I think they’re cool. I like that music.
01:13:15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:13:15
Joe Rogan: That was fun. That was fun.
01:13:17
Eric Weinstein: Um-
01:13:17
Joe Rogan: I like viral things too. I like things that just spread just from weirdness, you know? Someone sends it to me. That’s one, one of the things that I love about Spotify. If I’m listening to something weird, it’ll suggest something weird, you know? Like, that I’ve never heard of before, bands I’ve never heard of before, and all of a sudden I click on it. The suggestion thing, that’s how I get new music now, or I use, um, what’s that fucking app? Shazam.
01:13:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:13:39
Joe Rogan: I use Shazam if I’m at a, you know, pool hall or something, something cool comes on, I’m like, “Ooh, what is that?”
01:13:44
Eric Weinstein: See, I, I do that, but then I c- end up in these ruts. Like for example, I really like songs that go between A minor and E major, and that is … So it just gives me more and more of them.
01:13:58
Joe Rogan: You nerd. You’re a music nerd.
01:14:00
Eric Weinstein: [snorts]
01:14:01
Joe Rogan: But listen, that’s your algorithm. There’s nothing wrong with that.
01:14:04
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Y- y- you’re a mixed martial arts nerd.
01:14:07
Joe Rogan: I am.
01:14:07
Eric Weinstein: I know.
01:14:08
Joe Rogan: I’m also, uh, there’s a lot of things that are way more boring than that. Pool. I’m, I watch professional pool probably three or four hours a day.
01:14:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?
01:14:17
Joe Rogan: Yeah. That’s how I escape. I escape in the geometry and the movements, the patterns.
01:14:23
Eric Weinstein: Dude, you should have seen the comedians in the physics department yesterday.
01:14:26
Joe Rogan: Oh, I bet-
01:14:27
Eric Weinstein: It was hysterically funny
01:14:28
Joe Rogan: … I bet, it must have been amazing.
01:14:29
Eric Weinstein: Duncan-
01:14:30
Joe Rogan: Duncan and Kurt together.
01:14:32
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my God.
01:14:32
Joe Rogan: First of all, together they are the fucking dynamic duo. They are such a good duo, ’cause they’re both sarcastic, and they’re, they’re both, like, heavily-
01:14:39
Eric Weinstein: They were so well-behaved
01:14:41
Joe Rogan: … engaged in satire
01:14:42
Eric Weinstein: … as far as they could.
01:14:43
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:14:44
Eric Weinstein: But then, um, I don’t know whether I can tell these stories anymore.
01:14:48
Joe Rogan: Tell these stories.
01:14:49
Eric Weinstein: No. Anyway.
01:14:49
Joe Rogan: Tell them. What happened? What did Kurt do? [laughs]
01:14:52
Eric Weinstein: So part of the-
01:14:54
Joe Rogan: [laughs] Fuck, I love that guy. He’s so awesome.
01:14:57
Eric Weinstein: So, so, some experimentalist-
01:14:59
Joe Rogan: I, I love that he’s a real person. Whenever I, he comes into the mothership green room-
01:15:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:15:02
Joe Rogan: … I’m like, “Yes. Give me a dose”
01:15:04
Eric Weinstein: … oh, he got real. He, he gave me some wild anti-Israel stuff, I think. I couldn’t tell whether it was pro or anti. Um, he sh- so at the end, there was an experimentalist who was like, “Come to my, come to my parlor. I, I’ll, I’ll show you my, uh, etchings.” No, no, no, cryogenic giant vacuum tubes from hell, or whatever. So we all went down there, and so we’re in the basement of the physics department, and you can tell the difference between the theory floor and the ex- like, the part where they actually do things. And these guys were just, you know, were effectively at 77 degrees before abs- uh, above absolute zero, with, uh, conditions that only occur in deep space inside of this thing coated in, like, tin foil. And so these guys are just cracking jokes about growing weed and, and, uh [laughs]
01:15:52
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
01:15:52
Eric Weinstein: “What happens if you put hydroponic weed in the machine?”
01:15:54
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
01:15:55
Eric Weinstein: But the other thing is, is that comedians are really, they’re really intellectual nerds, and a lot of them, not all of them. And-
01:16:04
Joe Rogan: Those two guys are.
01:16:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:16:05
Joe Rogan: For sure.
01:16:06
Eric Weinstein: For sure.
01:16:06
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:16:07
Eric Weinstein: And they really wanted to know.
01:16:09
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:16:09
Eric Weinstein: “Okay, what is it that you guys are doing down here?”
01:16:11
Joe Rogan: The good ones.
01:16:11
Eric Weinstein: “And how do I understand?”
01:16:12
Joe Rogan: The good ones are very curious.
01:16:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, Duncan’s amazing.
01:16:14
Joe Rogan: Very curious. Yeah.
01:16:15
Eric Weinstein: Although he d- he drew a completely pornographic-
01:16:17
Joe Rogan: I know. [laughs]
01:16:18
Eric Weinstein: You saw this thing?
01:16:18
Joe Rogan: He was making notes, yeah. Let me send it to Jamie, ’cause Kurt said it to me, “This is the notes Duncan was taking-“
01:16:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my God
01:16:24
Joe Rogan: … “during the physics” [laughs]
01:16:25
Eric Weinstein: ‘Cause I’m, like, doing battle a little bit with the, there’s one extremely smart string theorist in the audience named Jacque Distler, and so almost all of the interactions between Jacque and myself were, we, we were both being very collegial, but it was, you know, it was pretty, pretty hot.
01:16:43
Joe Rogan: I sent it to you, Jamie.
01:16:44
Eric Weinstein: And, uh, and so he says, “While you were doing that, I s- I did a little sketch of you.”
01:16:48
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
01:16:49
Eric Weinstein: “I, I can figure out your exact anatomy. I, it’s a gift.”
01:16:54
Joe Rogan: [laughs] Well, you need something like that. Uh, those, those stories-
01:16:58
Eric Weinstein: That’s the last talk he’s ever coming to.
01:17:00
Joe Rogan: No.
01:17:00
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m kidding.
01:17:01
Joe Rogan: Have him back to every one of them.
01:17:02
Eric Weinstein: No, actually, I was really trying to hook-
01:17:04
Joe Rogan: So he’s taking notes.
01:17:06
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, please.
01:17:06
Joe Rogan: Give me some volume.
01:17:07
Eric Weinstein: Joe.
01:17:08
speaker_1: So can you give me two seconds?
01:17:10
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
01:17:12
Eric Weinstein: Thank you, Joe.
01:17:18
speaker_1: So here’s the message.
01:17:18
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
01:17:18
Eric Weinstein: Hey, guys, I got some other things to do this afternoon. It’s been great.
01:17:22
Joe Rogan: [sighs] Okay. Bye. [laughs] Oh, my God.
01:17:34
Eric Weinstein: So-
01:17:35
Joe Rogan: Oh, Jesus
01:17:35
Eric Weinstein: … but yeah, I wanted … You know, C.P. S- Snow did this, uh, famous essay called The Two Cultures, and it was about how, um, literary intellectuals and scientific intellectuals used to be one group, and then they, they moved apart, and so now we can’t hear each other across the chasm. I really wanted to create a pipeline of not the sci- seven scientists we see on all of the talk sh- on the podcasts, but, like, choose who you wanna talk to, who’s doing cool shit. The comedians belong in our science departments. Uh, otherwise, how are people gonna know what’s going on? There’s, there’s funny shit happening.
01:18:22
Joe Rogan: Well …
01:18:23
Eric Weinstein: And by the way, the UFO thing that’s now blowing up-
01:18:26
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm
01:18:28
Eric Weinstein: … there’s gonna be some crazy science collision with the UFO narrative. There’s no way of stopping it at this point.
01:18:34
Joe Rogan: So you’ve turned a corner on this. Let’s talk about that.
01:18:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:18:37
Joe Rogan: Because, uh, I saw you on Jesse Michel’s show, and you were talking about how just a few years ago you thought that the entire narrative was complete nonsense.
01:18:46
Eric Weinstein: Probably five, six years ago by now.
01:18:48
Joe Rogan: And what changed?
01:18:50
Eric Weinstein: Um, there was no way to explain… So Jesse was going on and on about it. I said, “Jesse, you’re a smart guy,” and you, you, you know, I, I often would call him the, the back alley scholar, so he knew a lot of stuff, um, that was sort of forbidden knowledge. And He wouldn’t be quiet about it. So I, I said, “Okay, I’m gonna disabuse you of the idea that you’re actually into something.” And I realized very quickly, at a minimum, there is a massive denied program, like usually called a special access program.
01:19:33
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
01:19:34
Eric Weinstein: One or more. There’s no way to synchronize that number of people who’ve had experiences that are so similar, and there was a lot of stuff that I couldn’t make sense of. And w- what attracted me in a certain sense, um, was I couldn’t come up with any explanation. It’s so rare. I usually have exactly the opposite problem, which is I come up with too many explanations. I can’t come up with a single explanation that makes sense of what I now know. And al- also the fact that the government outreached to me and to Sam Harris and to Lex Fridman. And, you know, there was this thing where these guys who checked out, um, said, “There’s gonna be a massive disclosure, and we need people to disseminate these things to the public, and you have a share of the, of the public who listens to you. And we need to get you informed so that you can help mediate the disclosure.”
01:20:25
Joe Rogan: So what prompted this change in narrative?
01:20:29
Eric Weinstein: What’s going on behind the-
01:20:31
Joe Rogan: Yeah
01:20:31
Eric Weinstein: … with the government?
01:20:32
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:20:32
Eric Weinstein: We don’t know. We don’t know… Look, we don’t know what the thing or things is, are yet. Um, some of it is so, again, so low quality that it’s embarrassing to be seen with it. So my colleagues who don’t want to take this seriously, uh, use that. Like, “Okay, so you’re, you, you, you’re, you’re now on the little green men train?” And I said, “No, I’m on the special access program train.” There is, there’s for sure special access program or s- programs that have UFO on the side of them that may or may not have aliens or craft or non-human intelligence in them. It may be that it’s decoys. It may be… I don’t know what it is. There’s no way to deny that there’s like a giant lump under the carpet.
01:21:17
Joe Rogan: And what, what prompted you to change your opinion and, and, and decide that there is some sort of a special access program?
01:21:26
Eric Weinstein: When I started coming in contact with totally sober people from reasonable walks of life who would say the craziest things to me, and a lot of them checked, and they didn’t yet know each other.
01:21:36
Joe Rogan: Like, what kind of crazy things?
01:21:38
Eric Weinstein: Um, let me take somebody who’s public. Brandon Fugal, for example, uh, was at a dinner where he started talking about being visited by a craft a few feet over the, his head that came over the mesa, and his head of security was catatonic, standing in the back of a pickup truck, unable to move. And it was just way too specific, and a shared experience that multiple people had had, right? And so, you know, the, the, the joke, of course, is that, uh, the secrets of Skinwalker Ranch or, or, you know, whatever this-
01:22:17
Joe Rogan: Right
01:22:18
Eric Weinstein: … um, there’s real stuff going on there, and there’s nonsense BS that the History Channel has packaged to come up with a salacious series, and they’re… One is funding the other. So I don’t know what that is, but, like, the, some of these injuries are real. And, you know, talk-
01:22:37
Joe Rogan: Injuries?
01:22:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, like Gary Nolan talking about people reporting… You know, he… G- Gary Nolan told me this story that somebody had said that a ball of energy would come and enter the body and move around and then leave, and he said, “You know, the craziest thing is, is that when I inspected the tissue, there was a path of necrosis [laughs] that can’t be explained,” like something that shows up on imaging. And that’s… Gary’s a really smart, serious guy. I can check a lot of the things that he says scientifically. Why would he say something like that? I mean, I didn’t see it myself, but it-
01:23:22
Joe Rogan: Well, he’s also done some very strange work on material science-
01:23:27
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:23:28
Joe Rogan: … uh, where he’s analyzed particles or little, little pieces of metal and alloys that have come from wreckages from the 1970s and ’60s.
01:23:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, that I don’t know the provenance. Like, he’ll carry-
01:23:39
Joe Rogan: Right
01:23:39
Eric Weinstein: … around a little thing, and he’ll show it to me, and he’ll say, “You know, you know, there’s no combination of, of, uh, of materials and alloys that, that this matches that we know how to produce.” And I say, “Okay.” It doesn’t mean anything to me. Again, it’s just… It’s all… I, I have no pr- at this point, I have no primary, um, contact with anything anomalous. I just have all sorts of secondary stuff. And by the way, the thing that you saw with the Jesse Michaels in American Alchemy, um, boy, did that get a response inside the government, that particular episode.
01:24:15
Joe Rogan: How so?
01:24:16
Eric Weinstein: I had a lot of people who had stopped talking to me about UFOs who suddenly… You know, I had like eight calls immediately after it aired. “Hey, Eric, just thought I’d catch up with you.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” There was a huge discussion inside. [laughs]
01:24:31
Joe Rogan: Hmm.
01:24:31
Eric Weinstein: Um, and the first, uh, uh, uh, without getting into particulars, the first official outreach, like really official outreach, that checks in the wake of that episode. And I’m not under any NDAs. Nobody’s told me anything that I can’t discuss.
01:24:49
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
01:24:49
Eric Weinstein: But that, that may change. Um, one thing that’s very clear to me is that when I hear something from many sources, I, I don’t need to protect it anymore. It’s already out, okay? I have now heard the White Sands story from many sources.
01:25:07
Joe Rogan: This is the one where the crafts hovered over the base, shut down the nuclear program. Is that it?
01:25:17
Eric Weinstein: I’m just gonna say what I can say that’s fuzzed out that can’t be traced to anybody.
01:25:21
Joe Rogan: Okay.
01:25:23
Eric Weinstein: Um- I was very upset with the s- shutdown of the El Paso airspace.
01:25:30
Joe Rogan: That was recently.
01:25:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It was supposed to be, supposed to be we had a problem with cartel drones.
01:25:35
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:25:35
Eric Weinstein: I don’t believe that. I think Texas is another name for New Mexico. I think El Paso is a name for White Sands. Can we get a map of the United States that can focus on White Sands and El Paso? [laughs] I, I think we have a problem that we’ve lost control of our airspace.
01:25:55
Joe Rogan: You think this was part of what happened in New Jersey as well?
01:26:01
Eric Weinstein: I can’t say as much because what I know, no. What happened around New Jersey I don’t have from as many sources that I feel comfortable saying that this is fuzzed out. I can fuzz out the El Paso story. Nobody has told me that El Paso was shut down because of the problem at White Sands.
01:26:21
Joe Rogan: Okay.
01:26:23
Eric Weinstein: People have said things about New Jersey that is-
01:26:26
Joe Rogan: All right.
01:26:27
Eric Weinstein: All right.
01:26:27
Joe Rogan: So there’s El Paso.
01:26:29
speaker_3: El Paso here, White Sands up, right above it.
01:26:31
Joe Rogan: How far away is that?
01:26:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:26:32
speaker_3: Uh…
01:26:32
Eric Weinstein: My guess is about an hour f-
01:26:34
Joe Rogan: By driving?
01:26:35
speaker_3: Yeah, let’s see. It’s probably-
01:26:37
Eric Weinstein: Like-
01:26:37
speaker_3: … 60, 70, 80 miles at most.
01:26:39
Joe Rogan: Okay.
01:26:40
Eric Weinstein: So I don’t know what’s going on, but, uh, my, my guess is… So on Piers Morgan I said this thing, um, which is that New Mexico is the connector of the nuclear story, the Epstein story, and the UFO story. They’re all gonna come together. Remember we’re, we’re only talking about the island.
01:27:11
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
01:27:15
Eric Weinstein: It, somehow I think I was the first person to seize on this. There’s this thing that isn’t an interview, which is Steve Bannon trying to train Jeffrey Epstein how to respond to rehabilitate it. And if you can find this, this is s-
01:27:30
Joe Rogan: I’ve seen it.
01:27:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:27:31
Joe Rogan: It’s very weird.
01:27:33
Eric Weinstein: So he says, um, “You wanna know about why I got Zorro Ranch in New Mexico?” Can we play this clip? Can you find…
01:27:46
speaker_3: Um.
01:27:46
Eric Weinstein: I think Jesse repackaged it after I pointed it out. But this is the story that, uh, like, somehow we, we’re so hung up about sex. We’re either angry about trafficking or we’re getting off on the idea that all these rich people, um, are gonna get their comeuppance or, you know. We keep turning the Epstein story into something other than a scientific espionage story, which is one of its c- one of its facets.
01:28:15
Joe Rogan: It’s one component.
01:28:16
Eric Weinstein: It’s one component.
01:28:17
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:28:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but we, but it doesn’t excite us that this is a guy spying. Control of science, Joe, is not something that is officially a big issue, and it is a massive issue.
01:28:32
Joe Rogan: It’s not publicly a big issue.
01:28:33
Eric Weinstein: That’s correct, yeah.
01:28:34
Joe Rogan: And he clearly had a-
01:28:36
speaker_4: So let’s, let’s back up
01:28:37
Joe Rogan: … big interest in science.
01:28:38
speaker_4: So why did I buy a ranch in New Mexico? 1993, so that’s gives you some sense. So I would’ve funded it in 1990. Uh, Los Alamos, which was the high energy lab up in, in New Mexico, was losing all its scientists. And Los Alamos-
01:28:56
Eric Weinstein: It was where Oppenheimer and where the, where the, uh, a lot of the b- uh, the nuclear weapons program, the bomb, the nuclear bomb-
01:29:01
speaker_4: That’s where the Manhattan Project.
01:29:02
Eric Weinstein: Manhattan Project was-
01:29:03
speaker_4: Yes, yes
01:29:03
Eric Weinstein: … at Los, Los Alamos, and you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that?
01:29:07
speaker_4: Yes, because the scientists were going to b- They cut the funding for high energy physics, but the people who worked in Los Alamos would still be in the Santa Fe area.
01:29:17
Eric Weinstein: They cut that because the end of the c- This was the Cold War dividend, right?
01:29:21
speaker_4: I don’t remember exactly why. It was because, again, people thought there was, th- th- that physics and high energy physics really wasn’t that important.
01:29:27
Eric Weinstein: Because that was about nuclear weapons.
01:29:29
speaker_4: No, it was because they were trying to… They decided, which may be not right, this was the same time that Murray Gell-Mann came up with the term quark, Q-U-A-R-K. He, he picked it out of a old poem, the word quark. But it was something, it was mysterious. So they were starting to understand in, in the ’90s that the, in the, our world of the physic world, there was things that were just unexplainable. F- They called it strange things. You gave it a name. You gave it some characteristics. You called it, it had charm, was one of the term. It had a charm. It had a flavor. It had a color. But nobody really kn- no one, Mr. Bannon, understood what it was, just like the financial system.
01:30:13
Eric Weinstein: And you wanted to investigate that?
01:30:15
speaker_4: I, I wanted to see if we could build tools so others smarter than me could help investigate it.
01:30:21
Eric Weinstein: And that was the beginning of your-
01:30:22
speaker_4: Santa-
01:30:22
Eric Weinstein: … concept of the Santa Fe Institute?
01:30:24
speaker_4: Yes.
01:30:25
Eric Weinstein: And Santa Fe Institute was founded to do study in this type of-
01:30:29
speaker_4: Of can you, can these areas of strange things be described by some form of mathematics?
01:30:38
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Now, what you’re seeing there is fascinating. Like, just take, uh, by the way, very well isolated, exactly the bit that I wanted. In that interview or that training, he claims to have founded the Santa Fe Institute. Santa Fe Institute was founded, I think, in 1984, not 1990 or 1993. Bannon clearly knows more about why these f- scientists were being defunded than does the person who buys this property. Now, that property is not only close to Los Alamos, it’s also close to Sandia National Laboratory. What you s- Like, people said to me, “Eric, you said he was an idiot. He’s clearly very knowledgeable. Um, you can see there that you were wrong.” I was like, “That is an actor.” That is not anyone smart with proximity to Murray Gell-Mann and others. Like, he, he knew Murray Gell-Mann well. Murray Gell-Mann didn’t name quarks in 1990. That was- goes back to, like, the ’60s, when George Zweig called them aces and Gell-Mann called them quarks, for three quarks for Muster Mark that came out of James Joyce. So he’s, he’s just repeating stuff that he doesn’t understand. And why did he buy the house Zorro Ranch? To be close to the scientists whose funding was cut. The people who make weapons and who do high-energy physics, who had the rug pulled out from under them by the United States when they won the Cold War by putting this pressure on the Soviet Union. Like, there’s nothing more important than theoretical physicists, you idiots. And you, and you don’t fund these people, and you don’t watch them? Like, the Department of Energy is supposed to have counterintelligence to stop creeps from hanging around the national labs, which is America’s secret university system. Hello. And that’s what he was doing. He was buying a property to be close to the national labs in New Mexico that make the weapons and that are in charge of trying to figure out the future. So if you think about the national labs as this parallel thing to the university system, but it’s the secret part where you have to be American and you have to have a security clearance and all this kind of stuff. Epstein set up a listening post. Now, what are, what’s the UFO story? The UFO story is all about nukes. And what was Epstein doing in Cambridge, Massachusetts? The analog of Zorro Ranch is named One Brattle Square. It’s right in the heart of Harvard Square. You know, I know it like the back of my hand. It’s a seven-minute walk to the Science Center. The Harvard Science Center, on floors three, four, and five, is where the math department is. And who was Epstein’s initial contact in the math department? It wasn’t Martin Nowak, who he funded. It was a different guy named Benedict Gross. Dick Gross was an expert in number theory and in elliptic curves. And elliptic curves are what power the cryptography behind Bitcoin, behind public keys. You’re talking about a guy who was setting up listening posts next to extremely sensitive stuff that we’ve stupidly left unprotected in the open university system or defunded in our national labs.
01:34:19
Joe Rogan: And when you say listening posts, like, what do you mean? Bugs in the labs?
01:34:21
Eric Weinstein: He’s gonna hold… No, no, no.
01:34:23
Joe Rogan: No? He just, just remained in contact with these people?
01:34:27
Eric Weinstein: You know what, Joe, you’ve got real money. Guys with real money use dinner. Dinner is an incredible thing. I watched Peter Thiel use dinner. Fly people in for dinners. You put people up in a nice hotel for three nights, serve them amazing food from a private chef, you get a black car to collect them, and they’ll tell you anything. I don’t think, mean that Peter was doing this in an evil way. But I watched dinner after dinner after dinner as people disgorged all they knew because they were so happy they’re getting a $200 bottle of wine and being treated like humans. You know? Like respected. So in part, you have to understand that dinner in and of itself, or a mansion, or a first class ticket, is all it takes to get people to start talking.
01:35:21
Joe Rogan: Uh, “Jeffrey Epstein was CIA. The communications network at Zorro Ranch prove it. The DOJ’s own files showed Epstein built a military-grade encrypted link to satellite orbit at Zorro Ranch. The contractor who built it now holds a Pentagon missile defense contract.”
01:35:41
Eric Weinstein: So remember-
01:35:41
speaker_3: I don’t know about that. I just don’t know
01:35:42
Eric Weinstein: … Jeffrey Epstein is a construct?
01:35:45
Joe Rogan: Uh-huh.
01:35:45
Eric Weinstein: You know, there’s this whole question about, like, why won’t Jews talk about Jeffrey Epstein and the sex shit? It’s like, as if I haven’t been on this since 2004.
01:35:55
Joe Rogan: Yeah, no one can accuse you of not talking about it. If they can, they’re just being ignorant.
01:36:00
Eric Weinstein: No, they’re being a bitch because it used to be super dangerous. This was, like, one of the really costly things, is to say-
01:36:08
Joe Rogan: So what do you think that was, though? This in- satellite encrypted…
01:36:14
Eric Weinstein: All right. Let’s, let’s go there, but I’m a little bit nervous. Um, why was Jeffrey Epstein able to get all of these people much richer than him into his orbit? That’s the question you should be asking. So here’s my theory.
01:36:32
Joe Rogan: Okay.
01:36:36
Eric Weinstein: Uh, just be careful. I don’t know. Okay. What happens when you become a billionaire? I don’t know. Not there, nowhere close. What happens is, is that you find out that it’s not what you thought it was. First of all, you now have staff everywhere. You can’t move around easily because you need a security detail, right? When I first met Peter Thiel, I said, “Wow, your security detail on this beach is amazing. I can’t even tell where they are.” He says, “Am I supposed to have a security detail?” I’m like, “Peter, you’ve gotta be kidding.” Now he’s got one. So the first thing is, is that you find you, you lose your privacy, you lose your freedom of movement. You’ve got a retinue of people who have to be constantly maintained. They’re under your roof. You know, like, “This isn’t what I signed up for. I wanted to be rich.” They’re like, “Well, you are rich. You can buy things.” Well, you can’t buy privacy. You can’t buy freedom. You can’t buy anonymity, all these things that you want. And you can’t buy the ability to do Fun, naughty stuff. I’m not talking about little kids. I’m saying, like, if you’re gonna take drugs, you’re at risk of, you know, having everybody wanna tell the story. If you wanna have, uh, a ménage, you’re at, at the same risk. So the, the question becomes: What do I do to f- to get what I thought I was going to do, which is the right to have freedom over my own life, and to misbehave in fun ways, whatever? Nobody can figure out how to do it. Jeffrey Epstein could do it. Now, why is it that he could do it? Well, who’s spoken to the contractors who built his island? It’s the most obvious thing to do. If I was an investigative journalist, that’s what I’d do. I’d talk to, like, the plumbers, the maids, all of the people who are just working for a living. Those are the people who constantly leak information about their employers. Well, who’s the only person [laughs] who has a– Who has the ability to build something? The CIA has its own fr- uh, has its own construction company. Sovereigns, countries, nations have the ability to do stuff where they know how to keep things under wraps. If you think about S4, I guarantee you there’s a men’s room at S4. Well, who cleans it? That’s a really important question, because that’s the weak link. And so rich people haven’t figured out how to be rich. That’s what everybody was attracted to in that upper income bracket.
01:39:17
Joe Rogan: That he would provide them with experiences.
01:39:19
Eric Weinstein: He would provide them with things that they couldn’t figure out how anybody could provide, because they were dealing with a state. I assure you that the Sultan of Brunei knows how to do stuff, because he’s both an individual and a state. Most of us are either in this sort of black ops world, or we’re dreaming about being very rich, or just norm- normal human beings. The very rich are very disappointed. Epstein felt rich, as I said before, in a movie sense. He had freedom. He could say and do things that other people couldn’t. You know, Elon is constantly tripping over the fact that… I, I think he’s a wild guy. I- I’m up for wild guys. I want cowboy billionaires, cowboy physicists, cowboy everything.
01:40:27
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
01:40:27
Eric Weinstein: But in general, we don’t want cowboys. And, you know, again, this has nothing to do with little kids. That’s a different thing.
01:40:34
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:40:36
Eric Weinstein: But if you wanna go take drugs, take drugs. If you wanna have a ménage, have a ménage. Fine. I don’t wanna hear about it. I don’t, uh, don’t spill the tea. I can’t stand this culture. Uh, Epstein knew how to keep quiet stuff quiet, and why is that? His product, as I’ve said before, was silence. If you want a really dangerous question, ask the question, um, what– Did the people who were in his direct orbit have an unusually high number of disappearances around them?
01:41:10
Joe Rogan: Did they?
01:41:11
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. But it’s a dangerous question. I’ve never investigated it, but that’s… Have you ever seen… Yeah, everybody talks about Eyes Wide Shut now.
01:41:19
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
01:41:20
Eric Weinstein: You notice that nobody talks about Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Woody Allen was directly in his orbit?
01:41:27
Joe Rogan: God, I don’t even know if I’ve seen that movie.
01:41:29
Eric Weinstein: There is a scene where Martin Landau and Jerry Orbach’s characters are a pair of brothers. I think that they only meet on screen once. And Martin Landau’s having an affair, and the woman has decided that she has rights, and Martin Landau is a very r- wealthy ophthalmologist or something like that, and he has a brother who’s a shtarker. Shtarker being the Yiddish word for a tough guy. And it’s one of the most… Can, can we find-
01:42:04
Joe Rogan: Let me find
01:42:04
Eric Weinstein: … Jerry Orbach, Martin Landau, Crimes and Misdemeanors. It’s the most bloodcurdling, so well done.
01:42:09
Joe Rogan: Which, uh, the scene description, though, you didn’t really get to it.
01:42:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, they’re only in one– If they’re only in one scene together, they’ll be at a… This– I haven’t seen it in ages, but it– My memory is that they’re at a house walking around a pool, and then they walk inside to the pool house, and there’s a resentment that the brother who’s in the life, um, is only called to the house occasionally, right? And it’s this way in which the genteel and the people who can get things done that you’re not allowed to do in the, within the law are connected. And so Woody Allen is clearly writing this from personal experience. He has some interaction between being in high society and knowing shtarkers. And I actually knew, um, his old– Woody Allen’s old producer is the father of a friend of mine, so a guy named Jack Grossberg. And Jack Grossberg was a, a pi- epitome of a tough Jew in Hollywood who would deal with the Teamsters or when there was a labor dispute. And, you know, he wasn’t in the life, but he was a guy who could stare down a mafioso. Um, I think that in part Woody Allen is writing about what Jeffrey Epstein was providing, which was a s- a measure of silence.
01:43:30
Joe Rogan: Is this it?
01:43:31
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no.
01:43:31
Joe Rogan: Oh, okay. Well, then I don’t know.
01:43:34
Eric Weinstein: No. We’re looking for Martin Landau-
01:43:36
Joe Rogan: Oh, okay
01:43:36
Eric Weinstein: … and Jerry Orbach in Crimes and Misdemeanors.
01:43:47
speaker_3: Yeah, well, that’s gonna be hard to find ’cause it’s, uh-
01:43:49
Eric Weinstein: Oh, that one
01:43:50
speaker_3: … maybe right there?
01:43:51
Eric Weinstein: Yep.
01:43:51
speaker_3: Okay.
01:43:55
Eric Weinstein: I think that this is the scene that nobody’s talking about.
01:43:59
speaker_5: I don’t know, but she’s killing me.
01:44:00
Eric Weinstein: But-
01:44:01
speaker_6: Want me to have somebody talk to her?
01:44:04
speaker_5: Like what?
01:44:05
speaker_6: Straighten her out.
01:44:08
speaker_5: What, you gonna threaten her? That’s all I need.
01:44:11
speaker_6: How else do you expect to keep her quiet?
01:44:13
Eric Weinstein: Can you turn that up?
01:44:13
speaker_3: No, that’s as loud as I can get it, unfortunately.
01:44:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:44:18
speaker_5: Well, Christ, Jack, what do you suggest?
01:44:23
speaker_6: What did you call me for?
01:44:26
speaker_5: I don’t know. I, I hoped you’d have more experience with something like this.
01:44:31
speaker_6: You called me because you needed some dirty work done. That’s all you ever call for.
01:44:37
speaker_5: Look how bitter you are.
01:44:41
speaker_6: You’ve staked me plenty of times. I don’t forget my obligations.
01:44:46
speaker_5: Threatening will only make it worse, Jack.
01:44:49
speaker_6: Okay. Forget about it. What do you want me to say?
01:44:52
speaker_5: How the hell can I forget about it? I’m fighting for my life. This woman’s gonna destroy everything I’ve built.
01:44:59
speaker_6: That’s what I’m saying, Judah. If the woman won’t listen to reason, then you go on to the next step.
01:45:05
speaker_5: What? Threats? Violence? What are we talking about here?
01:45:08
speaker_6: She can be gotten rid of. I mean, I know a lot of people. Money will buy whatever’s necessary.
01:45:12
speaker_5: I’m not even gonna comment on that. That’s mind-boggling.
01:45:15
speaker_6: Well, what did you want me to do when you called me?
01:45:17
speaker_5: Not to do dirty work, despite what you think. Anyway, it’s gone beyond just Miriam now. She’s, she’s talking financial doings. I’m, I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what I expected from you, Jack, but, you know.
01:45:35
speaker_6: You know, you’re not aware of what goes on in this world. I mean, you sit up here with your four acres-
01:45:40
speaker_5: Don’t give me any of that stuff
01:45:41
speaker_6: … and your country club-
01:45:42
speaker_5: I don’t wanna hear about my success
01:45:42
speaker_6: … and your rich friends, and out there in the real world, it’s a whole different story.
01:45:46
speaker_5: Come on.
01:45:48
speaker_6: Look, I’ve met a lot of characters from when I had the restaurant-
01:45:50
speaker_5: I know you have. I’ve heard these stories before
01:45:51
speaker_6: … from Seventh Avenue, from Atlantic City, and I’m not so high class that I can avoid looking at realities. I can’t afford to be aloof. I mean, you come to me with a hell of a problem and, uh, then you get high-handed on me.
01:46:06
speaker_5: Jack, I don’t mean to be high-handed. I haven’t been sleeping. Nights, I’m irritable, okay?
01:46:10
speaker_6: Okay. Okay, forget I said anything.
01:46:17
speaker_5: Let me just get something straight here. Am I understanding you right? I mean, are you suggesting getting rid of her?
01:46:28
speaker_6: You won’t be involved, but I’ll need some cash.
01:46:36
speaker_5: What will they do?
01:46:39
speaker_6: What’ll they do? They’ll handle it.
01:46:44
speaker_5: I can’t believe I’m talking about a human being, Jack. She’s not an, an insect you don’t just step on.
01:46:52
speaker_6: I know. Playing hardball was never your game. You never liked to get your hands dirty. But apparently, this woman is for real, and this thing isn’t just gonna go away.
01:47:06
speaker_5: I can’t do it. I can’t think that way.
01:47:23
Eric Weinstein: So while everybody’s watching Kubrick, this is a guy in Epstein’s direct orbit. This is what Epstein was. He was a starker. He was a science spy. He was a starker. He had buttons, and we’re just all pretending like we have no memory of this, no idea about how we’re all connected, how the highest in society are connected to the people who get things done.
01:47:48
Joe Rogan: And blackmail.
01:47:51
Eric Weinstein: Blackmail is a lot… Like we’re over-indexed on, uh, in my opinion. Again-
01:47:56
Joe Rogan: Okay
01:47:56
Eric Weinstein: … who am I? I’m just a guest. But-
01:47:58
Joe Rogan: But this is this assumption.
01:48:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, look-
01:48:01
Joe Rogan: Is that he helped very early people-
01:48:02
Eric Weinstein: I was very early saying he was a construct when nobody would listen.
01:48:06
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:48:06
Eric Weinstein: Here’s the next piece of it. I think he had buttons. He had button men at his control. He made problems disappear. Things went away. That’s how you make sure that you have the experience of being a king rather than a billionaire. The billionaires had more money than him, but they didn’t have the ability to make their problems go away. And by the way, they’re not suggesting that all the people in his orbit were availing themselves of this as a service. But if I was a competent investigator, I, I would be talking to Woody Allen and saying, “What did you mean by that scene?” You… Look-
01:48:51
Joe Rogan: Because you think that scene is directly connected to Woody Allen’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?
01:48:55
Eric Weinstein: No. I think that that scene is directly connected to the connection between Hollywood and Teamsters and unions and organized crime. There are people who know how to make things happen that aren’t within the law. Uh, w-what is the mafia? We go, we watch all these mafia pictures, right?
01:49:15
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
01:49:16
Eric Weinstein: The mafia is about contract enforcement when you can’t use the courts. That doesn’t sound like what the mafia is, but that’s what it is. It’s a business. What happens when you’re in an illegal business and you can’t enforce a contract? Right?
01:49:33
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:49:33
Eric Weinstein: You have to use muscle. So we, we use genteel. He, like he says, “She can be talked… We, shall, you want me to talk to her? Uh, we can handle it.” Th-this is the genteel language of roughing somebody up, killing somebody- And making problems go away. So the mafia is about business, it’s not about violence.
01:50:05
Joe Rogan: Okay, so his connection to scientists, though.
01:50:08
Eric Weinstein: Mm.
01:50:08
Joe Rogan: What was the purpose of that?
01:50:10
Eric Weinstein: We don’t know, but I, I keep saying-
01:50:11
Joe Rogan: What’s your assumption?
01:50:12
Eric Weinstein: My assumption is, is that he was a, uh, a clearing house, that somebody set him up at fair expense, I’m gonna say nine-figure expense. So I think this was a nine-figure fortune, hundreds of millions. And what it had was it had the trappings of multibillionaire. It had trillionaire written all over it for a nine-figure fortune. So it’s orders of magnitude off of what it was, and I believe that that, that was only possible because there was a collection of sovereigns behind him. I don’t think it was one nation, I think it was a bunch of countries. And the, the most obvious country is not Israel, it’s the US, because he was operating on US soil. Do I think Israel was involved? Certainly. Do I think that the UK was involved? I do. Saudi Arabia, I do. I think that this was a massive piece of structure conf- con- confused with a sex scandal and a blackmail operation, and we’re, we’re all sort of taking the bait.
01:51:20
Joe Rogan: So the sex scandal and all the sex stuff was sort of to keep people happy and give people a place to go to where they could have these experiences. If you’re dealing with physicists-
01:51:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:51:32
Joe Rogan: … or some high-end scientist guy, they don’t have access to this. They probably have never been with a beautiful woman in their life. All of a sudden they’re hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein.
01:51:40
Eric Weinstein: We do better than you think, Joe.
01:51:41
Joe Rogan: I’m not talking about you, bitch.
01:51:42
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m not talking about me either.
01:51:43
Joe Rogan: I’m sure you’re fine.
01:51:44
Eric Weinstein: Ain’t talking about Love.
01:51:45
Joe Rogan: Let’s… But let’s be realistic. Most of these guys aren’t, they’re not hot, right? And then all of a sudden there are around 10s who are giving them back massages, and drugs are being used, and there’s this feeling of anonymity-
01:51:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:51:58
Joe Rogan: … of safety. You can get away with this. Everybody else is doing it. It’s been going on for decades. It’s fine.
01:52:04
Eric Weinstein: It’s fine.
01:52:04
Joe Rogan: This is the place to go, and it’s fun, and they look forward to it, and they probably also do have intellectual discussions ’cause you are surrounded by-
01:52:11
Eric Weinstein: Who wouldn’t want in?
01:52:13
Joe Rogan: Right. Right, and so that’s how he ropes you in.
01:52:16
Eric Weinstein: That’s right.
01:52:16
Joe Rogan: But, so what is his… Why, why scientists, and what would be the benefit of having access to these scientists and having this place in Zorro Ranch and being able to talk to these people?
01:52:27
Eric Weinstein: Think about it from the per- perspective of who is doing the constructing rather than the constructed. So he’s the construct.
01:52:35
Joe Rogan: Okay.
01:52:35
Eric Weinstein: He’s an incompetent. He g- he just lied to Steve Bannon, mis… You see him touch his face. Classic tell of lying. Uh-
01:52:43
Joe Rogan: Touching your face is a classic tell of lying?
01:52:45
Eric Weinstein: If you looked at what he just did, he-
01:52:46
Joe Rogan: The way he did-
01:52:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah
01:52:47
Joe Rogan: … answering the question. Okay.
01:52:48
Eric Weinstein: 100%.
01:52:48
Joe Rogan: So he’s lying about the information or he’s lying about his depth of knowledge?
01:52:53
Eric Weinstein: He’s a liar. Yes, he’s lying about his depth of knowledge.
01:52:55
Joe Rogan: Okay.
01:52:56
Eric Weinstein: So how did I know he was a construct? In part, one of the things… Like, there are dumb tells that we give away. One of his was he was supposed to be a currency trader, and when we tr- say we’re trading currency, we’re not trading currency, we’re trading what are called spot contracts that are to be settled with an exchange of currency in two days’ time, right? So in other words, if we, if we… If I do a euro trade, it’s really a dollar-euro trade, and you and I are gonna trade dollars for euros, and we agree to do it in two days’ time. And then if you wanna keep the position on, you exchange that contract for a contract that will follow t- to erase that contract and form a new contract with, which pushes it out two days. You call that rolling things over.
01:53:34
Joe Rogan: Okay.
01:53:36
Eric Weinstein: He didn’t know that dollar-Canada was on a one-day contract rather than a two-day contract where everything else… So in other words, there was an anomaly, and anybody in co- currency trading would’ve known that. Or I forget whether he didn’t know that, uh, trading pounds for dollars is called cable in the business. So he… There were, there were just dumb tells that he didn’t know about foreign exchange. Yeah?
01:54:01
Joe Rogan: Hm.
01:54:02
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, he’s claiming to be a, an FX hedge fund manager to me, and there were, there were stupid tells like that.
01:54:08
Joe Rogan: Right.
01:54:09
Eric Weinstein: And then he’d, like… He knows way too much about my exactly particular specialty in mathematics. Like, the number of people it coulda come from would be five or fewer. Um, so technically what I did my thesis on is something called self-dual Yang-Mills theory, which is about every force other than gravity is a Yang-Mills force. Except my thesis was really about gravity, and I didn’t disclose it, and only people very, very close to me knew that that’s what it was about. He was obsessed with gravity. And he shows up, I think, in the Harvard math department in 2002 with Dick Gross, and clearly he was talking to people in the Cambridge mathematical physics world who would’ve been… You know, there, there’s something called the Chern-Simons theory, which is mistakenly associated closely with Yang-Mills theory, but is really all about gravity. And that, my work really shows that there is a parent theory that has Chern-Simons theory and gravity as its two consequences. He knows about that without knowing anything about the structure and the subject matter. He knows about the history of my stuff and something called Seiberg-Witten theory. He doesn’t know anything concrete. How does he know all this stuff? He was in my world, and he was very focused, you know, on… I, I met him through Jess Staley, um, who was at JPMorgan. Now, Jess Staley is deeply implicated in this. I didn’t know that at the time. And Jeff Epstein has been mirroring my entire life, everything that I do. And I became well-known when I was writing these essays for edge.org, and he was in with John Brockman at the Brockman Literary Agency. Uh, when I got married, uh, the rabbi came from Harvard Hillel, which was a building now called Rosovsky Hall, which he put together with Les Wexner’s money. Um, he was funding probably the conference at the Perimeter Institute that we did on the financial crisis. At every turn in my life since I was a young man, Jeffrey Epstein was there in the background, even though I only meet him once.
01:56:40
Joe Rogan: Why do you think that is?
01:56:42
Eric Weinstein: Because we’re interested in the exact same thing. Well-
01:56:44
Joe Rogan: And what is that?
01:56:46
Eric Weinstein: The, the most powerful stuff in the universe.
01:56:49
Joe Rogan: Why is he interested in that-
01:56:51
Eric Weinstein: Why-
01:56:51
Joe Rogan: … if he doesn’t know the science?
01:56:52
Eric Weinstein: So what am I, what do I care about? I care about finance and financial markets. I care about the CPI. I care about the fate of Israel. I care about, uh, evolutionary theory. I care about mathematics that goes, like geometry, like the geometry of elliptic curves, but really more in differential geometry. He cared about physics. Every time that I care, and I care about s- the smart- the world’s smartest people at a functional level, not the people with the highest IQ, but the people who are irreverent enough to actually move the needle. So he and I are, we’re just… We’re interested in where’s the action, where’s the high-end intellectual action in the world that actually moves things? And you know, quite frankly, he was meeting in my offices in San Francisco while I wasn’t aware of it, in 2017. I didn’t know that.
01:57:51
Joe Rogan: Meeting in your offices.
01:57:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:57:52
Joe Rogan: Meaning he went to your office and met with who?
01:57:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, with, with Peter. That’s in the records.
01:57:57
Joe Rogan: Ab- about you?
01:57:59
Eric Weinstein: No, I don’t know. But you, he, he… Hopefully not. I, I know that I’m in an email that he sends Peter late in the story, but I, I’m, I’m not gonna discuss specifics. But no, I was telling Peter not to deal with him, and Peter thought I was overblowing the, the danger. I, I, I… He scared me because I know what element he came from. That was not a refined person. That was a scary, scary person. That, that, that was a person who came, you know, like The Hesh character on The Sopranos?
01:58:37
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
01:58:40
Eric Weinstein: Or Moe Green in, uh, you know-
01:58:42
Joe Rogan: The Godfather
01:58:43
Eric Weinstein: … The Godfather. Yeah.
01:58:43
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
01:58:44
Eric Weinstein: That’s that element.
01:58:47
Joe Rogan: And you recognized that immediately.
01:58:49
Eric Weinstein: I… Well, that was my point in, in bringing up Crimes and Misdemeanors. It’s not like I don’t know people.
01:58:56
Joe Rogan: I understand the, all this. But what do you think his purpose was? Like, so getting connected to all these scientists, being around all this knowledge, the New Mexico, I still don’t understand, like, what was the end game?
01:59:07
Eric Weinstein: Can I get another drink?
01:59:08
Joe Rogan: Absolutely.
01:59:09
Eric Weinstein: Thank you, sir.
01:59:09
Joe Rogan: There you go, sir.
01:59:10
speaker_3: Uh, can I share this article with you?
01:59:11
Joe Rogan: Please do.
01:59:12
speaker_3: Okay. This was the one I just pulled up a second ago.
01:59:15
Eric Weinstein: If we could get another ice cube too, that’d be great.
01:59:17
speaker_3: Oh, we got you.
01:59:17
Joe Rogan: How about this? Um, Jeff, can you get us an ice cube, please?
01:59:21
speaker_3: I would just… Down here, this kind of s- this is a long article. I believe this, most of this comes from the Epstein files that came out on the DOJ’s website. Uh, this, the woman who wrote this, she’s a former Boston Globe and New York Times reporter, uh, also LA Times. The summary here is what I was kind of getting at, ’cause it kinda, it’s two or three paragraphs, but it explains a lot of what you’re asking here.
01:59:46
Joe Rogan: “Standard framing of Jeffrey Epstein as a Mossad asset is well supported. Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father, sold Israel backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia National Laboratories in 1985. His eldest daughter, Christine Maxwell, built the FBI’s post 9/11 counterterrorism data warehouse through her company, Chi- Chiliad. Uh, Isabelle Maxwell, Christine’s twin sister, co-founded Comtouch with Israel unit eight- 8200 alumni. Ghislaine ran the human intelligence operation. The Israel intelligence network around both Maxwell and Epstein is documented and substantial. But the intelligence infrastructure supporting Epstein and Maxwell at Zorro Ranch points somewhere else, or to somewhere additional. It points to the United States military intelligence, plain and simple. The contractor who built his encrypted link to orbit is American, headquartered in Georgia, and now holds a Missile Defense Agency contract. The satellite uplink was authorized by an American FCC license. The project was managed out of a New York office. The man who recruited Epstein as a child served in the American OSS, and his own son was in charge of the Federal Justice Department when Epstein died, or didn’t, in its custody.”
02:01:00
speaker_3: Bill Barr and his father is who that’s referring to.
02:01:03
Joe Rogan: “The man whose ranch provided the ideal relay point was OSS, built American missile guidance systems and military drones. And just up the road, another former OSS guy, Carl Ingwer, sold his New Mexico ranch to the strangest duo of all time, Donald Rumsfeld and Dan Rather.” Hmm.
02:01:24
Eric Weinstein: So this is what I’ve been trying to say all along. The only country that I’m absolutely positive was behind Jeffrey Epstein is, is us. You can’t operate here. Look, right now we are in the middle of endless antisemitic Christmas. Just goes on forever. And you can… You look at Jeffrey Epstein, I have no question that he was directly connected to Israel, you know? Um, but first and foremost, I believe that he… And, and I, I hate when we use the word asset. You should use a vaguer word because those technical things, like who’s an agent, who’s an operator, uh, i- agent is a word used differently by the FBI and CIA. Every time we try to sound like we’re cool, like we know what the intelligence community actually is we make mistakes because we say something that b- it becomes deniable. You know? So like there’s a concept of NOC, non-official cover.
02:02:31
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
02:02:32
Eric Weinstein: You know, if you say somebody, you know, is a NOC and you’re, and you, you guess the wrong distinction, they can say, “No, he wasn’t.” Was he an asset? Well, I’m sure that has a technical meaning.
02:02:42
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:02:42
Eric Weinstein: You don’t mean it technically. You mean was he in any way affiliated with the [laughs] intelligence community? And just not just the intelligence community, one of the ways that the intelligence community f- functions as a, as a cover for the special operations community. Right? Covert operations is something the CIA does through ground branch that is not intelligence. So we call it intelligence, and it, we give them a free pass all the time. No, those, that, those are the guys who do the wet work. That’s a paramilitary organization.
02:03:19
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:03:20
Eric Weinstein: So my claim is that Epstein w- is, is a major piece of structure, and having nothing to do with the actor that they hired.
02:03:29
Joe Rogan: Okay, so you think Epstein is essentially just a construct figurehead of an intelligence gathering organization?
02:03:38
Eric Weinstein: No.
02:03:39
Joe Rogan: No?
02:03:40
Eric Weinstein: Epstein is a construct-
02:03:42
Joe Rogan: Okay
02:03:42
Eric Weinstein: … first, first of all.
02:03:43
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:03:43
Eric Weinstein: Second of all, there is an intelligence part of the intelligence community, and there’s a covert operations part of the intelligence community.
02:03:53
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:03:54
Eric Weinstein: Covert operations is not intelligence. I know it’s under that roof-
02:03:58
Joe Rogan: Right
02:03:58
Eric Weinstein: … that is totally wrong.
02:03:59
Joe Rogan: Got it.
02:04:00
Eric Weinstein: Right.
02:04:00
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:04:01
Eric Weinstein: So if you want bad things to happen to somebody, you don’t call intelligence, ’cause that’s just human in- intelligence or signals intelligence or whatever. You’re not gonna call a cryptographer to make a problem go away.
02:04:13
Joe Rogan: Right. What does this have to do with the science community?
02:04:18
Eric Weinstein: One, we have huge amounts of power. The United States is terribly configured because we pretend that we’re okay doing everything through our university system, which shouldn’t be done in an open f- setting. Like you have to be honest about the fact that we’re badly configured.
02:04:38
Joe Rogan: What do you mean by that?
02:04:39
Eric Weinstein: We didn’t know how deadly physics was. When Rutherford in 1911 said that there’s a neutron, nobody… I’m s- I’m sure nobody said to him, “Oh my God, you’ve ended the plan- w- you”
02:04:51
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:04:51
Eric Weinstein: “Now humanity is doomed.” So it used to be the case that physics was something that was like interesting and fun, but now it’s like the most deadly thing you can imagine, as well as being interesting.
02:05:01
Joe Rogan: In a quick timeline too if you just stop and think about that.
02:05:03
Eric Weinstein: 41 years.
02:05:04
Joe Rogan: We’re talking… Yeah, so literally. Yeah.
02:05:06
Eric Weinstein: 41 years. So my claim is that we are walking around right now with all of these extremely deadly ninja prin- pr- priests in our physics departments, in our math departments, who don’t even know that they’re deadly ninja priests. They’ve never worked on something classified. They’ve never solved problems for our government. But in part, we fund our science, our scientists, as part of a complex cryptic arrangement worked out by Vannevar Bush that is now remembered by essentially no one. So the idea is you people, Teller, Ulam, Feynman, Oppenheimer, von Neumann, you are dev group. You’re, you’re SEAL Team Six of the human mind. You’re Delta. And most of the time you’re gonna teach classes. You know, it’s like, i- Indiana Jones is a, you know, an archeologist with a bow tie, and then he’s running around with a whip and, you know, killing people and-
02:06:12
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:06:13
Eric Weinstein: Okay. That’s what physicists and mathematicians are. That’s why we’re funded. That’s why the Department of Energy funds physics. It’s not the Department of Energy, it’s the Department of Nuclear Weapons. It’s the Department of Physics.
02:06:27
Joe Rogan: So they let the physics people work out all these problems, and then they take whatever their findings are and apply them to weapons.
02:06:34
Eric Weinstein: Boom, vroom, and zoom.
02:06:36
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:06:37
Eric Weinstein: And that changed the economy. It changes the ability to compute. This is what… This is who I really am. This is what I really do. And I will not mouth this narrative that all of my colleagues will mouth. Physics is interesting. Yeah, a lot of the time it’s dull, you know? Physics is international. Oh, really? Why do you think the American taxpayer’s funding this international effort? Just to educate Chinese? For all I know, we’re trying to sterilize the Chinese and the Indians with string theory. So because nobody’s talked to me about this, I can speak freely, but if you ask me, you know, I… The Indians are some of the most aggressive string theorists on Earth, and my question is d- do we import them in such large numbers so that they’ll go home and be ineffectual? W-
02:07:32
Joe Rogan: That’s crazy. So that’s a real possibility?
02:07:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
02:07:35
Joe Rogan: That string theory exists as a distraction.
02:07:39
Eric Weinstein: Joe, what do you think the odds are that a scientist can say, “My failed theory is the only game in town,” and not get laughed out of town?
02:07:49
Joe Rogan: Not so good.
02:07:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
02:07:51
Joe Rogan: I would imagine in a free-thinking world, not so good.
02:07:53
Eric Weinstein: In a free-thinking world, I would say, “Ed Witten, you’re full of shit.” Who talks like that? You’re not… You, you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met, and you have not earned the right to say that your failed theory, your disaster of a catastrophe- Of a theory is the most failed theory in history in physics and you’re saying it’s the only game in town? Who died and left you king, sir?
02:08:17
Joe Rogan: I wanna bring you to one of the weirdest theories that you have.
02:08:19
Eric Weinstein: All right.
02:08:20
Joe Rogan: Which is you talked about this very overly supported physics department in this upstate university, upstate New York university that’s attached to a hedge fund.
02:08:33
Eric Weinstein: SUNY Stony Brook’s mathematics department and physics department.
02:08:37
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
02:08:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
02:08:39
Joe Rogan: This is a weird one.
02:08:40
Eric Weinstein: All right.
02:08:40
Joe Rogan: ‘Cause it’s attached to a hedge fund that does Bernie Madoff type numbers.
02:08:44
Eric Weinstein: Bernie Madoff is a loser piker.
02:08:47
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
02:08:50
Eric Weinstein: Joe, Bernie Madoff was regular, and that’s why they called him the Jewish T-bill.
02:08:56
Joe Rogan: T-bill?
02:08:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
02:08:56
Joe Rogan: What’s a T-bill?
02:08:57
Eric Weinstein: A Treasury security that allowed you to just earn some very boring, very high rate of return where you were supposedly having your money at risk, but you essentially never lo- there were, like almost no down months.
02:09:11
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
02:09:12
Eric Weinstein: Renaissance Technologies is like, “No, no, no. Hold my beer. We’re just gonna make numbers like nobody’s ever made in human history.” There’s nobody in second or third place relative to Renaissance Technology Me- Medallion Fund.
02:09:26
Joe Rogan: And how is it connected to this university, and what do you think is going on up there?
02:09:34
Eric Weinstein: One, I don’t know.
02:09:36
Joe Rogan: But something weird.
02:09:38
Eric Weinstein: It’s weird as hell. I, I know, I knew Jim Simons personally. Jim Simons is a genius, but a lot of other people are geniuses. I hate to say it, but y- you can’t swing a cat in my world without hitting a genius. So he was, he was great, but he wasn’t that much smarter than every other genius at that level. So I would say, you know, top 100 minds in mathematics and physics, clearly better than that. Jim started off working for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Unit. Um, supposedly quit out of outrage over Vietnam, becomes the super young chairman of the SUNY Stony Brook mathematics department, holds a lunch center seminar with a guy who will become the world’s smartest living physicist, a guy named C.N. Yang, and they discover over lunch a connection between differential geometry, Jim’s, uh, specialty, and C.N. Yang’s, uh, specialty, which is the standard model. Jim then quits, forms a hedge fund long before it’s cool with the father of another guest of yours on this program, Brian Keating, and the two of them both have medals, so they call it Medallion because they’ve won prizes. So, what was his name? James Ax, not Keating. Uh, and the two of them start this thing, and it takes off at some level that nobody’s ever seen numbers before. And then they institute this policy, which is we’re not gonna hire financial experts. We’re only gonna hire [laughs] math physics people. So we’re gonna hire geometers, we’re gonna hire particle theorists, general relativists, and machine learning people. It’s like, who, who came up with this story? Do you buy, do you buy this story? This is so strange because it, it sort of also mirrors a second story that was not associated with Brookhaven, which is the national lab near SUNY Stony Brook, but associated with Los Alamos, which is a story called The Prediction Company. Except in that case, the name of the person isn’t Jim Simons, it’s Doyne Farmer, and The Prediction Company is the analog of Renaissance. So what you see is that once people have a pattern, it seems like these patterns repeat. So my point is, if you ask the question, do we have a Manhattan Project in the current era, we don’t know. You don’t know, I don’t know. But if we’re allowed to speculate, the question would be, where would it be located? So how would you find, for example, the existence of a boys school in rural New Mexico where all of these super smart people are holed up? That’s a real puzzle. How would you figure out that Los Alamos was happening if that was your goal? Um, you’d look for indirect evidence. Can you, Jamie, can you call up an article called Forbidden City from 1944 by a guy named, unfortunately, Jack Raper? R-A-P-E-R.
02:13:13
Joe Rogan: Geez. Change your name, bro.
02:13:14
Eric Weinstein: I know, right. [laughs]
02:13:17
Joe Rogan: Just call yourself Rapper. Add a P or something.
02:13:20
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] So-
02:13:23
Joe Rogan: Or a G before it maybe
02:13:24
Eric Weinstein: … in, in 1944, the craziest thing in the… What?
02:13:27
Joe Rogan: G, Graper?
02:13:27
Eric Weinstein: Graper, right. Exactly. Um.
02:13:31
Joe Rogan: Here it is.
02:13:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So this article [laughs] appeared Monday, March 13th, 1944, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The story of a secret city with a mayor who is the second Einstein working on a doomsday weapon where nothing leaks.
02:13:53
Joe Rogan: And this is from what year?
02:13:54
Eric Weinstein: 1944.
02:13:56
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:13:57
Eric Weinstein: So the entire Manhattan Project leaked because a Cleveland journalist named Jack Raper happened to vacation in New Mexico and stumbled on the greatest secret ever kept.
02:14:14
Joe Rogan: Really?
02:14:14
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Dude, how can we not know this, Joe?
02:14:18
Joe Rogan: Wow. And it’s all about Oppenheimer. “Residents must stay. Dr. Oppenheimer is a Harvard graduate, attended Cambridge, receives a PhD from Gottingen University in Germany, Germany, a professor of physics, University of California, California Institute of Technology, and is a fellow of too many organizations to enumerate.” And so they were recognizing that Oppenheimer was doing something. They knew that he was working on a doomsday device.
02:14:46
Eric Weinstein: Uncle Sam has placed the city in charge of two men. The men who command the soldiers… I can’t read it.
02:14:53
Joe Rogan: “You see that the garbage and rubbish are collected, the streets kept up, the electric light and plant and the waterworks functioning, and all other me- metropolitan work operating smooth is Colonel somebody.” I don’t know his name, but it isn’t so important because the Mr. Big of the city is college professor Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer-
02:15:11
Eric Weinstein: Hmm
02:15:11
Joe Rogan: … called the second Einstein by the newspapers of the West Coast.
02:15:15
Eric Weinstein: So what I’m trying to say is Jack Raper never got a Pulitzer Prize, died in obscurity. Leslie Groves, who was the other guy who running, was running the town, decided to send him to the Pacific to punish him for being the best journalist in America. And when he found out he was 60 years old, they decided, “Okay, we’re, we’re just gonna ignore this story and hope everyone else does because it’s too crazy to be real.” Now, what I’m telling you right now is Raper never figured out what Los Alamos was, but he knows that it doesn’t make sense. And I’m telling you, Renaissance Technologies doesn’t make sense.
02:15:55
Joe Rogan: So these different, what-
02:15:57
Eric Weinstein: Another widespread belief is that he’s developing ordinance and explosives. Supporters of this guess argue that it accounts for the number of mechanics working on the production of a single device, and there are others who would tell you tremendous explosions have been heard. Oh, that Jack Raper with his overactive imagination.
02:16:14
Joe Rogan: Wow.
02:16:14
Eric Weinstein: Ha ha ha. The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they say the darndest things, Joe.
02:16:19
Joe Rogan: Okay. So what do you think they’re working on, these people at this upstate New York university?
02:16:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, what are we not working on? In other words, how do you discover what we’re actually up to is in part you listen for the holes. What do I work on? I work on the ability to get out of the solar system. That is my life’s mission. I think Elon is a bit of a pussy. [laughs]
02:16:54
Joe Rogan: Okay. How so?
02:16:55
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. He won’t meet with me.
02:16:57
Joe Rogan: Well-
02:16:58
Eric Weinstein: It’s okay
02:16:58
Joe Rogan: … maybe ’cause you call him a pussy.
02:16:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. No, but it-
02:17:01
Joe Rogan: Maybe he’s busy. Maybe he’s trying to make chicks pregnant.
02:17:05
Eric Weinstein: No. [laughs]
02:17:07
Joe Rogan: He thinks it’s me.
02:17:07
Eric Weinstein: It’s something he does to, with recreation. Elon’s a genius, and Elon is trying to replace scientists with Grok. And one of the things that, I was on an Indian podcast, uh, called, the guy’s name is Beer Biceps guy, Ranveer, he’s the Joe Rogan of India, and-
02:17:26
Joe Rogan: What’s his name?
02:17:27
Eric Weinstein: Uh, Ranveer Allahbadia. Can you find him?
02:17:30
Joe Rogan: Shout out to Ranveer.
02:17:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So Ranveer is a friend of mine in Versova, and I went on his podcast. And I, before SpaceX and X and, uh, xAI merged, I said, um, I said, “Look, I don’t think SpaceX is Elon’s space program. His space program is Grok.” Elon doesn’t trust scientists, for good reason, ’cause they’re weak. So he’s building his own scientist from when, when we were strong. He’s gonna have it read the corpus of physics done by competent physicists who actually care about the physical world so he doesn’t have to deal with any of us. That’s why he won’t meet. It’s not because he’s not interested, not because he doesn’t know. Um, I invited him to the talk as I did you yesterday. The goal is to get out of the solar system, and we’re so far away from everything good that there’s no way of doing it under relativity. So why are we not researching the only thing that can save us, which is diversification? We need to spread out to the largest number of habitable worlds possible.
02:18:42
Joe Rogan: So this implies some sort of a new propulsion system.
02:18:45
Eric Weinstein: This implies new science.
02:18:47
Joe Rogan: New science.
02:18:47
Eric Weinstein: Stop thinking technology.
02:18:48
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:18:48
Eric Weinstein: There’s no way to… You can’t engineer your way out of a science problem. You have to science your way out of it.
02:18:53
Joe Rogan: And what would be that science?
02:18:55
Eric Weinstein: Post-Einstein, post-relativity. That’s what I do.
02:18:59
Joe Rogan: And how would that apply to us leaving the solar system?
02:19:02
Eric Weinstein: We don’t live in space time. Space time has a speed limit.
02:19:07
Joe Rogan: Explain that.
02:19:08
Eric Weinstein: If you can only go the speed of light at your best-
02:19:11
Joe Rogan: Right
02:19:11
Eric Weinstein: … and you can’t even get anywhere close to that-
02:19:12
Joe Rogan: Right
02:19:12
Eric Weinstein: … how are you gonna get to something four years o- light years away?
02:19:16
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:19:17
Eric Weinstein: Um, in a fantasy world. By the time you go and come back, even assuming all-
02:19:22
Joe Rogan: You’d be dead.
02:19:22
Eric Weinstein: No.
02:19:22
Joe Rogan: Everybody’d be dead.
02:19:23
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. Assume you can go at under the speed of light, just under. You can use time dilation and relativistic effects to your benefit, but it’s gonna cost you eight years to go and come back.
02:19:34
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:19:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay, I don’t wanna do that. If I’m gonna explore the cosmos, I don’t wanna use, I don’t wanna live in space time.
02:19:41
Joe Rogan: So what are the alternatives?
02:19:43
Eric Weinstein: The observerse. The successor to space time, uh, happy to predict this on your show, will be named the observerse, which is a combination of not just using a four-dimensional space time manifold, but a 14 and a four-dimensional space simultaneously. This was what, what I was talking about at the university yesterday.
02:20:02
Joe Rogan: And how would that… Like, when you say the difference between science and technology.
02:20:06
Eric Weinstein: So-
02:20:07
Joe Rogan: How would that science be applied?
02:20:09
Eric Weinstein: If we look at the surface of this table, I can’t do this to it.
02:20:14
Joe Rogan: Can’t spread it apart-
02:20:15
Eric Weinstein: Right
02:20:15
Joe Rogan: … move it. Right.
02:20:15
Eric Weinstein: Called pinch to zoom.
02:20:17
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:20:17
Eric Weinstein: It’s a multi-touch gesture invented around 2003 or something, debuted at TED. But if I come to this device, I can do that
02:20:26
Joe Rogan: Your phone
02:20:26
Eric Weinstein: Right. So imagine that this is spacetime.
02:20:29
Joe Rogan: Okay
02:20:29
Eric Weinstein: And this is the observers. So if I wanna go to a distant star, there’s no way I’m gonna just go really fast [laughs]
02:20:39
Joe Rogan: Right
02:20:39
Eric Weinstein: ‘Cause that’s dumb. Um, and I need an energy source, and I need to do things that we can’t normally do. You have to jailbreak spacetime. If Einstein is in force, we all die. If we go beyond Einstein, some of us will live and some of us will die
02:20:55
Joe Rogan: And what would be the energy that you would need in order to do this?
02:21:01
Eric Weinstein: So the, how do you unlock this? One is maybe it’s not that energetic t- to, to do these things. Energy is, is, um, technically time momentum. You can talk about momentum in the X direction, momentum in the Y, momentum in the Z. Fine. What’s momentum in the time direction? It has a different name. We don’t call energy time momentum, but that’s what it is. So first of all, I don’t believe that there’s one direction of time. There’s no arrow of time. That’s not true. I believe that time is multidimensional. The only dimension that has an ordering is one dimension. So in other words, if I say to you, um, “Joe has two cigars, Eric has none,” who has more cigars? Joe. Okay. Joe has two cigars, but Eric has three glasses and no cigars. Joe has one glass and two cigars. Who has more stuff? Well, now it’s not clear because Eric has more glasses than Joe, but Joe has more cigars. So in two dimensions, we no longer can say this is better than that for things where you have more of one and less of another
02:22:15
Joe Rogan: Okay
02:22:17
Eric Weinstein: Time is like that. In one dimension, there’s an arrow, there’s an ordering. We call it w- it’s, it’s a, it’s, you know, like a well-ordered set or something. In two dimensions, all bets are off, and, and two and higher. The number of dimensions in total is gonna be either five or seven, and each of those dimensions has a different kind of energy. So in other words, energy is unique because there’s only one time dimension. But as soon as ener- time has multiple dimensions, you can talk about multiple forms of energy, just the way you can talk about dir- momentum in the X direction, momentum in the Y direction, or momentum in the Z direction. So in part, what I’m trying to do is to jailbreak spacetime. That’s what I’m actually doing, and I’m doing it with zero support, with no confirmation that this is real because something is controlling my entire community to make this funny haha, just like Forbidden City, was Jack Craper… Jack Raper has gone mad. He thinks that there’s a city in New Mexico where there’s a mayor who’s a second Einstein developing a doomsday weapon. Is that funny? [laughs] What a loon, that guy. What an idiot. Ha ha. That’s what’s going on, Joe
02:23:39
Joe Rogan: So how do you think that technology could be applied to these ideas in order to create some mode of travel?
02:23:51
Eric Weinstein: Pinch to zooms, Joe
02:23:52
Joe Rogan: Right, but how? How would that be done?
02:23:54
Eric Weinstein: So right now we’re in a four-dimensional world.
02:23:56
Joe Rogan: Okay
02:23:56
Eric Weinstein: Call that Flatland
02:23:57
Joe Rogan: Okay
02:23:58
Eric Weinstein: Imagine that there are 10 perpendicular dimensions called symmetric two tensors. Four of those are spatial directions and six of them temporal, or f- four of them are, uh, temporal and six of them spatial. I can’t tell you. One of those two
02:24:20
Joe Rogan: Okay
02:24:20
Eric Weinstein: But there are additionally either four or, or six extra time dimensions or six or four space dimensions. We have to gain access to break out of Flatland. We live in Flatland. We don’t know we live in Flatland, and I know what that, technically the name is fiber dimension, what it is. We have to gain access to it, which is discovering that somebody gives you or a, an obsidian rock that has a property that you’ve never seen before called pinch to zoom. So I need to make the distance to the nearest s- star small so I can go with reasonable speed
02:25:03
Joe Rogan: Or instantaneously
02:25:05
Eric Weinstein: Mm, I don’t need instantaneously. I- I- if I have something four light years away and I can make it 100 feet away, I can walk 100 feet easily enough. You know, I can, I c- I, I can push something
02:25:17
Joe Rogan: Right. Okay
02:25:18
Eric Weinstein: So the idea is if I can gain access to the fiber, the distance becomes relatively immaterial
02:25:25
Joe Rogan: So if you think that these physicists are working on this and all, all these very-
02:25:28
Eric Weinstein: No, I didn’t say that I think-
02:25:29
Joe Rogan: Okay
02:25:30
Eric Weinstein: I’m saying if anybody-
02:25:32
Joe Rogan: Is working on that
02:25:33
Eric Weinstein: Either two, one of two things is happening. Either we are become the stupidest nation on Earth, destroying our own ability to do physics. We gave away the store. We’re morons. That’s possible. Or we’re doing it in private
02:25:48
Joe Rogan: And you feel like it’s possible to hide all this from the general public-
02:25:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, my point is you’re not gonna-
02:25:53
Joe Rogan: Same way they-
02:25:53
Eric Weinstein: … hide it. They… No, no, no. The same way they did it before would be spoiled by satellites. Right now, if you tried to do Los Alamos, you couldn’t do it because of the satellites
02:26:04
Joe Rogan: Right
02:26:04
Eric Weinstein: So it has to be hidden in plain sight. It has to look like something that it isn’t. So if you asked me, let’s imagine you asked me a different question. Let’s imagine you asked me, “Eric, nobody’s willing to give you money. Nobody’s willing to employ you. Nobody’s willing to have you speak at their seminar e- despite the fact you have complete blue chip credibility How would you, how would you organize a secret team to get control of our adversaries, the world, and the ability to traverse the cosmos? I sure, sure as shit wouldn’t build a chemical rocket company. That’s dumb. But I’d do it as cover, and I sure as shit wouldn’t do things in an open university department. Here’s what I’d do. I’d build an organization that could rationalize billions passing through it with almost no footprint, because what I really need is whiteboards, and coffee, and smart people, and a secure campus, and a story. That’s all I need.
02:27:11
Joe Rogan: God, wouldn’t you love to have access to what they’re doing?
02:27:14
Eric Weinstein: No, ’cause I’m gonna do it myself.
02:27:16
Joe Rogan: How are you gonna do that?
02:27:17
Eric Weinstein: ‘Cause I know, I know really smart people, Joe.
02:27:21
Joe Rogan: Don’t you need, like, insane amounts of money and a laboratory somewhere?
02:27:24
Eric Weinstein: You know what? It’s funny, like Sam Altman is racing Dario Amodei is racing, uh, Elon Musk for super intelligence. So I ask myself, if you could have premium subscriptions to Groq, Gemini, xAI… Um, sorry. Uh, Groq, Gemini, Claude, all of them.
02:27:49
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
02:27:49
Eric Weinstein: Or you could have Edward Frenkel’s home phone number, which would you choose? I’d choose Ed Frenkel’s home phone number. So I get to call Ed Frenkel whenever I want to. That’s smart. Look, there, there are people that you don’t even know about who are just terrifyingly smart, who… Allow me to assemble that team, that’s what, you know, I-
02:28:16
Joe Rogan: Is that literally what you’re trying to do?
02:28:18
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yeah.
02:28:19
Joe Rogan: And how are you doing it?
02:28:21
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. I stayed with Ed, uh, for five days in Berkeley. I got him and, uh, another colleague who’s also terrifying. Uh, I’m using Soviets, Joe. Ex-Soviets.
02:28:35
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:28:35
Eric Weinstein: ‘Cause those guys haven’t, haven’t lost the magic. And, uh, you know, I had Frenkel and a guy named Misha Kapranov come down for five days to kick the shit out of my theory. It was crazy, absolutely crazy. We’re drinking vodka at like 10:00 AM, having insane meals, and just working our asses off the way we’re supposed to.
02:29:04
Joe Rogan: How’d it go?
02:29:05
Eric Weinstein: Amazing.
02:29:07
Joe Rogan: What’d they think about your theory?
02:29:09
Eric Weinstein: So far, all systems go, Joe.
02:29:12
Joe Rogan: Okay. So-
02:29:15
Eric Weinstein: In, in other words, the story… C- can we just pull up… I, I, I just wanna do this for, for my own reasons. Can we pull up the lead, the pinned tweet on my Twitter profile? Which, by the way, thank you for retweeting.
02:29:28
Joe Rogan: No problem.
02:29:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Love you.
02:29:30
Joe Rogan: Love you too. What is it? Go to it real quick.
02:29:37
Eric Weinstein: So first of all, I wanna show off the header.
02:29:40
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:29:40
Eric Weinstein: Can we go up to the top of the header before we do that? Those two formulas, the bottom one says CFJ. C is Sean Carroll, the middle F is, uh, fields, and J is Roman Jackiw, uh, professor at MIT. Sean Carroll’s second most, um, cited paper is, has this as its action or Lagrangian. Right above that is my action or Lagrangian, and what you see, all those zeros is things that Sean Carroll doesn’t know how to handle, and that thing where you see a P, you see star parentheses P in the bottom line, not the bottom, the second from the bottom, is Sean’s relativity violating, uh, hack. Sean Carroll did not disclose that Geometric Unity is a direct competitor to his most cited work. So now if we can roll the clip, it’ll make more sense as to what’s going on. And let’s blow that thing up to full screen. Your misportrayal of the situation, uh, is nearly constant for reasons that completely elude me.
02:31:04
Joe Rogan: Sean?
02:31:05
speaker_1: The good news is I have read Eric’s paper. Here it is. I actually have it here, right here. First thing you gotta do is make sure that your theory makes contact with modern physics as it is understood. If you have a new paper out, physicists are gonna look at it. They’re gonna look for, you know, where’s the Lagrangian? [upbeat music]
02:31:26
Joe Rogan: So this is, for people that are just listening, this is showing that you have Lagrangians in your, these equations.
02:31:34
Eric Weinstein: It’s showing Sean Carroll lying.
02:31:36
Joe Rogan: Right. Did you-
02:31:38
speaker_1: Where’s the interactions?
02:31:40
Joe Rogan: Did you– The interactions are in there as well. But you ca- did you call him out on this on the show?
02:31:45
Eric Weinstein: I couldn’t believe that he’d do this.
02:31:47
Joe Rogan: So you didn’t say anything?
02:31:48
Eric Weinstein: I, I was just stunned.
02:31:49
Joe Rogan: Proton stability, that’s in there as well. So e- essentially he’s lying to make it seem like your theory doesn’t work when you have all the things-
02:31:57
Eric Weinstein: No
02:31:57
Joe Rogan: … that he’s saying your theory doesn’t have.
02:31:58
Eric Weinstein: One of two lies. We don’t know which lie.
02:32:00
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:32:01
Eric Weinstein: There’s a lie that says, “Uh, I read your paper.”
02:32:06
Joe Rogan: So he didn’t.
02:32:06
Eric Weinstein: I’m, I’m willing to m- entertain the fact that he’s lying that he read my paper.
02:32:10
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:32:11
Eric Weinstein: And I’m willing to entertain the fact that he’s lying that he read my paper and he’s gonna deny that these things are in there, but he’s, what… I don’t know which lie he’s telling.
02:32:21
Joe Rogan: Right. One of them’s a lie.
02:32:22
Eric Weinstein: One of them’s a lie.
02:32:22
Joe Rogan: Either he lied saying he read your paper, or he lied saying… He definitely lied saying those things aren’t in there, ’cause he did say those things aren’t in there. That’s a lie.
02:32:29
Eric Weinstein: Right. He just says, “There’s none of that, none of that, none of that.”
02:32:31
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:32:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So my claim is-
02:32:32
Joe Rogan: Why didn’t you respond? Like, right there
02:32:35
Eric Weinstein: Joe, what am I s– Just, let’s just-
02:32:38
Joe Rogan: Fine
02:32:38
Eric Weinstein: … one more second. I’m in a world that makes absolutely no sense, and I don’t wanna disappear. I’m not suicidal. I have been the major competitor of string theory for 42 years. I’m not a podcaster, I’m not a guest, I’m not an entertainer. What I really do for a living, I’m not paid to do.
02:33:04
Joe Rogan: Okay, I understand that.
02:33:05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
02:33:05
Joe Rogan: But when he’s saying-
02:33:06
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know what to do
02:33:07
Joe Rogan: … you just didn’t know what to do in the moment.
02:33:08
Eric Weinstein: I mean, what do I want? Do I want a legal battle?
02:33:10
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:33:11
Eric Weinstein: I’ve got a defense contractor. I’m- One of the world’s largest companies is a defense contractor, which is, has a campaign against me for reasons I don’t understand. I just have no clue why anyone would say, “You don’t have a Lagrangian.”
02:33:27
Joe Rogan: And so he’s c- at- attached to a defense contractor?
02:33:30
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. But there’s a, there’s a… By virtue of the fact that the conspiracy against me, and I, I, I literally mean technically a conspiracy, is organized through these Discord servers. And th- there’s an engineer at Google who, for example, can’t get a paper against me that lies about what it is that I’m up to, um, published on the archive, which is where physicists share their stuff. So the, the engineer will say, “How, how about you do a talk at Google, Sabina Hossenfelder?” And Sabina Hossenfelder will come to Google, and she’ll be given her thing if sh- if he will be allowed to post an anti-Eric screed or paper or whatever you wanna call it against me. So what I’m trying to say is I’m acting as Jack Raper in some way.
02:34:22
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:34:22
Eric Weinstein: I’m doing stuff and saying stuff, like Epstein is an a- is a construct.
02:34:27
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
02:34:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, okay, now you can say that, but you couldn’t say that when I started saying it. You can’t say Ed Witten is driving theoretical physics off of a cliff. You can’t say, you know, the reason that uh, w- we have the particles that we do has a, that there’s a 10-dimensional fiber and a fiber bundle above space time that isn’t acknowledged. For some reason, the things that we’re talking about on this show are dangerous. We’re having dangerous conversations, Joe. That’s what JRE does. And sometimes you, you go all the way, and sometimes you puss out. But, like, this is a dangerous place because they can’t tell you what to do, and that’s why they put you in, like, a different color on the screen during COVID, ’cause you went against the narrative. The narrative was, “Go get vaccinated.” The narrative was, “If you think that COVID came from anything other than a wet market, you’re a racist.” Every time you’ve gone up against the narrative, they try to destroy you. You’re still here, but you’ve been badly, badly bruised at various times. You are a danger to the narrative as I am a danger to the narrative. That’s one of the reasons why this is like, I don’t know, what is this, my eighth, sixth, some large number of appearances. We are scary to the narrative, and the narrative can no longer be held together.
02:35:49
Joe Rogan: I wanna bring you back to the technology that’s involved. So when we’re talking about this program that may or may not exist-
02:36:00
Eric Weinstein: Right
02:36:00
Joe Rogan: … and when we’re talking about UAPs-
02:36:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
02:36:04
Joe Rogan: … for lack of a better term, do you think that these are connected? And do you think that-
02:36:08
Eric Weinstein: Yes
02:36:09
Joe Rogan: … Well, so one, one of the things that I’ve suspected, and man- I’m not the only one. Many people have suspected this. It’s very odd that a lot of these sightings that these Air Force pilots and Navy pilots, that they find they’re over and near military bases.
02:36:25
Eric Weinstein: That’s right.
02:36:26
Joe Rogan: Which is where you would practice, or restricted airspace, which is where you’d use your stuff. And when they see these things, and they have these experiences with these things, the people that they report them to don’t seem shocked.
02:36:41
Eric Weinstein: Right.
02:36:42
Joe Rogan: Yeah. I mean, this is, um, what Ryan Graves experienced. This is what Commander David Fravor experienced. That they tell these people about these things, and no one is like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
02:36:55
Eric Weinstein: Right.
02:36:55
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:36:55
Eric Weinstein: Because they know.
02:36:56
Joe Rogan: Because this might be ours.
02:37:00
Eric Weinstein: So some of this is ours.
02:37:01
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:37:02
Eric Weinstein: Some of this is foreign nations, and some of this is unun- is not understood. That’s what I believe.
02:37:07
Joe Rogan: Okay. So some of these things they’re think they’re seeing is a part of some undisclosed program.
02:37:14
Eric Weinstein: I believe that, for example, some of this is not craft, but the ability to create the illusion of craft.
02:37:22
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:37:23
Eric Weinstein: Some of this, I believe, is craft.
02:37:27
Joe Rogan: So the ability to create, like, a hologram?
02:37:31
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. Like a hologram.
02:37:33
Joe Rogan: Plasma?
02:37:33
Eric Weinstein: L- like… Yeah.
02:37:34
Joe Rogan: P- projected plasma.
02:37:35
Eric Weinstein: That’s right.
02:37:36
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:37:36
Eric Weinstein: Some-
02:37:37
Joe Rogan: Which we know they can do.
02:37:38
Eric Weinstein: Some of them-
02:37:38
Joe Rogan: Which we’ve seen them, we, we’ve shown videos.
02:37:40
Eric Weinstein: We’ve, we’ve, we’ve seen limited versions of this. Imagine that those things scale up.
02:37:45
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:37:45
Eric Weinstein: Okay. If there were no aliens or craft, I would wanna create a program if I was in the disinformation business. I would wanna create one of these things, right? Because there’s a God-shaped hole in all of our souls and minds, and so aliens and spacecraft fill that hole.
02:38:10
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:38:11
Eric Weinstein: So there’s, like, a tr-
02:38:11
Joe Rogan: God, it’s God for atheists.
02:38:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Yeah. It’s God for atheists. So first of all, I would think that we were incompetent if we didn’t have something that created UFO ghost stories. Why wouldn’t you use that? I also believe that there are foreign nations that may have leapfrogged us. You know, clearly we saw that where we invested in aircraft carriers and other people invested in drones, and they realized that this was about economic warfare. Costs too much to shoot down, cheap stuff to make. So we’re in the process of having our Suez moment, if you will, in Iran, if we’re not careful, where it is revealed that our r- lead in aircraft carrier groups is not what we thought it was.
02:38:59
Joe Rogan: Hmm.
02:39:00
Eric Weinstein: So we can get to Iran in a second if you like, but what I believe is that, um, we’ve been dumb. We’ve been extremely stupid since the end of the Cold War. Bill Clinton and Dick Morris ushered in an era of stupidity that I cannot even believe is so antithetical to my notion of my belonging to the smartest nation on Earth, um, that we’ve just basically gutted our smart people. The smart people don’t even know each other. Now, what is going on with the technology and what we’re seeing, we’ve lost control of some airspace. That’s what I believe is… I don’t know that to be true, but I believe in with very high probability.
02:39:39
Joe Rogan: And you think that’s what San Antonio was about?
02:39:42
Eric Weinstein: San Antonio?
02:39:44
Joe Rogan: No, I’m sorry. El Paso.
02:39:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
02:39:45
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
02:39:46
Eric Weinstein: I, I believe that El Paso is not about cartel drones, that’s true.
02:39:49
Joe Rogan: Okay.
02:39:49
Eric Weinstein: I mean, that’s not to say that there isn’t a cartel drone here or there, but I don’t think we shut down airspace [laughs] in-
02:39:55
Joe Rogan: Right
02:39:56
Eric Weinstein: … El Paso to deal with cartel drones.
02:39:58
Joe Rogan: Right. So when, what were the experiences that people were, were reporting, and, like, what, like, what do you know about what happened in El Paso?
02:40:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, there’s what I know, which is all secondhand. So, what I know, what I can say I know firsthand is the reporting of various things by various people, but I probably had five-plus conversations about White Sands. People who don’t know each other, not connected. So whoever is supposed to be keeping White Sands a secret failed.
02:40:31
Joe Rogan: Okay, so-
02:40:33
Eric Weinstein: I believe that White Sands has an infestation problem with stuff that is either not ours or is being blue team, red teamed ours and not told to our people. How would you deal with the following puzzle? So maybe we’re putting our own, our own, one group is putting our drones or something in the air.
02:40:57
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:40:58
Eric Weinstein: And another group is being told, “How would you deal with this problem? We, we, we’ve lost control of our airspace,” but something is going on in New Mexico.
02:41:06
Joe Rogan: What was the descriptions of these drones? Is it, what does it say here? “Airspace at the center of the brief but highly publicized incident, February 11, 2026, FAA abruptly announced a 10-day shutdown of the airspace over El Paso International Airport. The restriction was lifted after just a few hours. Pentagon anti-drone testing. The Pentagon was testing high energy laser counter-drone technology out of the nearby Fort Bliss military base. The FAA grounded commercial flights out of an abundance of caution because of the unannounced testing. Cartel drone activity. Officials from the Trump administration cited incursions from Mexican drug cartel drones breaching US airspace as the primary reason for the defense systems, that the defense, the defense systems were deployed in the first place. Lack of communication. White House officials later noted that the FAA administrator implemented the surprise flight ban without notifying the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, or White House officials.” That seems crazy.
02:42:03
Eric Weinstein: It’s, the story doesn’t hang together.
02:42:05
Joe Rogan: That part doesn’t hang together at all.
02:42:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, that’s the thing.
02:42:07
Joe Rogan: The FAA administer implemented a flight ban without notifying the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, or the White House officials? That doesn’t even seem legal.
02:42:18
Eric Weinstein: Joe-
02:42:18
Joe Rogan: But I don’t know.
02:42:23
Eric Weinstein: You, you and I both have at least 105 IQs. These are, like, 65 IQ stories.
02:42:30
Joe Rogan: Yeah. They, well, the Mexican drone cartel one seems like a dopey narrative.
02:42:35
Eric Weinstein: But maybe there are actually Mexican drone car- drones.
02:42:39
Joe Rogan: Oh, I’m sure that cartels have drones.
02:42:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so there’s, cartels have drones, and we’re gonna use the fact that New P-
02:42:44
Joe Rogan: Right
02:42:44
Eric Weinstein: … that El Paso is close to White Sands.
02:42:45
Joe Rogan: Right. But what did, what was the reported drone activity? Do you know anything about it? Like, what, what supposedly-
02:42:51
Eric Weinstein: I do.
02:42:51
Joe Rogan: Yeah?
02:42:52
Eric Weinstein: Not gonna say.
02:42:53
Joe Rogan: Ooh.
02:42:54
Eric Weinstein: No.
02:42:54
Joe Rogan: Mysterious.
02:42:55
Eric Weinstein: Hardly being mysterious. I’m saying as much as I can.
02:42:58
Joe Rogan: I understand.
02:42:58
Eric Weinstein: But here’s the thing.
02:42:59
Joe Rogan: I’m joking around.
02:43:00
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
02:43:01
Joe Rogan: So I mean, I’d like to know. Like, what-
02:43:03
Eric Weinstein: Right. But I’m-
02:43:04
Joe Rogan: Tell me later?
02:43:05
Eric Weinstein: No.
02:43:06
Joe Rogan: Shit.
02:43:07
Eric Weinstein: No, it’s not like that.
02:43:09
Joe Rogan: [laughs]
02:43:09
Eric Weinstein: Look… Oh, fuck you both.
02:43:13
Joe Rogan: [laughs] Let’s play that awesome music again. He loves-
02:43:17
speaker_3: There’s a video from the AP put out just four days ago that says there is a cartel attacking lots of people.
02:43:23
Joe Rogan: Well, I’m sure there’s cartel drones.
02:43:25
Eric Weinstein: What I’m trying to say is-
02:43:26
Joe Rogan: There’s no, no, no, I know
02:43:27
speaker_3: … they definitely have drones.
02:43:28
Eric Weinstein: Every single person who knows how to keep a secret knows how to use the truth to hide a lie.
02:43:32
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:43:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
02:43:33
Joe Rogan: Of course.
02:43:33
Eric Weinstein: So what-
02:43:33
Joe Rogan: And, and that’s always been done.
02:43:35
Eric Weinstein: So the, the, the thing that I’m doing is I am, I am an Amer- I am, I am so grateful to this country. I love my country. I am going to maintain the ability till my dying day to help my country and advise my country. My country is a bitch. I don’t know why she’s acting this way. I don’t know why she’s been stupid since 1992, right? But she’s been acting like a moron since the Clinton administration. We’re bad at being America, and I c- I can’t stand it, so I’m gonna… Look, I would love to tell you everything I know. I would love to penalize people for being bad at their jobs. But I’m going to retain the ability to advise my government till my dying day, and so I’m not gonna say what I know.
02:44:27
Joe Rogan: Okay. It says, this is from New York Times, “Inside the debacle that led to the closure of El Paso’s airspace. FAA citing grave risk of fatalities from a new technology being used on the Mexican border got caught in a stalemate with the Pentagon, which deemed the weapon necessary.”
02:44:45
Eric Weinstein: Whatever
02:44:46
Joe Rogan: Okay. Who knows?
02:44:47
Eric Weinstein: Bullshit. Come on.
02:44:48
Joe Rogan: As many stories as you can spin, right? Throw them all out there, right? Throw a bunch of them.
02:44:52
Eric Weinstein: Look, our press was largely set up in World War II to go to war, and it’s been that way ever since. And during the Walter Cronkite era, and the Eric Sevareids, and all that kind of stuff that nobody really remembers, we had a measure of freedom to talk about things, and it got too much. And in the middle of the 1970s, we had the Church and, and Pike Committee hearings, and we freaked out. We found out who we really were. We are both the super naive, squeaky clean state and the baddest of the bad MFs. We’re both things. We’re a hybrid. We’re extremely Machiavellian, we’re extremely naive. There’s no way of stopping that being what we are.
02:45:39
Joe Rogan: So you think that it’s very possible that there’s a foreign nation that has some sort of technology that can invade our airspace at will, and that is what the shutdown was?
02:45:51
Eric Weinstein: I believe that somebody may have leapfrogged us as they have leapfrogged us in drone technology.
02:45:59
Joe Rogan: So they may have leapfrogged us in some propulsion technology.
02:46:03
Eric Weinstein: I believe that there is a nation in Asia-
02:46:08
Joe Rogan: Hmm
02:46:08
Eric Weinstein: … China, which puts on amazing drone shows and buys up our academics who aren’t being paid, ’cause we’re sitting around bitching, “What have you f- what have you technical people done for us? Why do you deserve to be paid from taxpayer dollars?” And the answer is, “Oh, shut the fuck up. We, we created your economy, you stupid bitches. We’re the baddest of the bad. We, we, we are the source of your wealth and your strength, and you come to us bitching about your taxpayer dollars? You deserve to lose to China, you little…”
02:46:43
Joe Rogan: Hmm.
02:46:45
Eric Weinstein: I c- I have no words for the, the… Also, the new crop of tech billionaires who were bitten by COVID, who think that-
02:46:53
Joe Rogan: What, what do you mean by that?
02:46:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, they think that Anthony Fauci was a scientist, and so they f- they believed in science before Fauci, and now they don’t believe in science.
02:47:02
Joe Rogan: [sighs] I don’t understand what you’re saying.
02:47:05
Eric Weinstein: So a- oh, my God.
02:47:06
Joe Rogan: I don’t… I literally don’t understand what you’re saying.
02:47:07
Eric Weinstein: All right. Silicon Valley had a huge about-face when they figured out that Fauci was full of shit. A lot of them bankrolled our universities. They supported science. They were Democrats. And then somehow COVID happened, and because they had this childlike, uh, belief in universities, science, and the Democratic Party, they ran to the Republican Party like children, not understanding that Anthony Fauci was not a scientist. COVID is a giant lie. Collins, and Fauci, and Ralph Baric, and Peter Daszak are menaces to the credit of scient- of science. The credit rating of science went into the toilet with Silicon Valley, and a new, a new idea was born, which is that the engineer is everything, the scientist is nothing. Everything should be a, a for-profit, not a non-profit. If artificial intelligence should replace our best people. I mean, the, th- this is the spell that many of our s- like, I, I would like to think that I count Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel as friends, Sam Altman as a friend. I don’t know what happened to all of these people. They’re just wrong, and they’re rich, and somehow we– like, our public intellectuals became our billionaires. What does Naval say? What does Marc say? What does Elon say? Everybody who’s talking their book is now our p- our public intellectuals. And quite honestly, th- they’re all brilliant, but they’re all highly motivated.
02:48:58
Joe Rogan: Hmm. That’s fact.
02:49:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But where are our scientists? Where are our intellectuals? Where are our people who care more about, how do I say this, glory and immortality rather than private jet travel? You could not give, get me to give up my claim on immortality for private jet travel. I don’t understand the fascination with private jets. They’re cool, mildly.
02:49:40
Joe Rogan: Well, it’s not just private jets. It’s, uh-
02:49:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, what is it?
02:49:44
Joe Rogan: I think they attach monetary gain to, um, success and, uh, above and beyond needs, so it becomes, um, a way of measuring success. They look at numbers above and beyond everything else.
02:50:03
Eric Weinstein: My craziest, brilliant friend who’s completely insane is a guy named Michael Vassar. And Michael Vassar had a, made a point to me, as he often does, which is really dangerous, and he said, “When did the world’s smartest people stop caring about their own game and their own prizes and start focusing on the prizes of the people pursuing wealth and status?” And he said, “Somehow, when scientists care about McLarens and Lamborghinis, something terrible has happened.” And it, boy, has that, like a splinter in my mind turning over. I can’t get rid of it. He’s right He’s just right. By the way, this is a guy who also told me that Dario Amadei was like a really important person. I needed to pay attention to him when I– he was just some guy that I knew. Um, Vassar’s point is the scientists stop having their own game with their own prizes, and so they’ve started caring about things that they should be completely ignoring. I don’t have a McLaren, and I couldn’t care less. I do care about immortality. I do care about recognition. I do care about my name being removed from things that I’ve done and other people’s, you know, cherry topping going on top of it. Quite honestly, we’re a different game. We’re a different species. There’s a– You know that, that song, uh, One Night in Bangkok?
02:51:34
Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.
02:51:35
Eric Weinstein: It came from a musical about chess, and he says in the lyrics to that song, which we don’t remember, he says, uh, I’d have– You know, something like, “I’d have you over, I would invite you, but the queens we use would not excite you, so you can go back to your massage parlors in Bangkok.” The whole point is that the chess world doesn’t care about who got laid. Chess world cares about the evergreen game, the immortal game. What did Fischer do to Spassky? What, what’s going on with Magnus Carlsen? Somehow, the science world stopped caring about our own stuff, and we got to make sure that the public intellectuals are not dominated by billionaires. As much as I love these guys, they’re my friends.
02:52:23
Joe Rogan: I think you’re right.
02:52:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. They’re smart as hell. They wouldn’t have gotten to be billionaires otherwise, but they’re always talking their book. Always. Look at, you know, people are like famous libertarians, and they become surveillance people. You know?
02:52:39
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:52:39
Eric Weinstein: They, they, they– Bill Gates, you know, is he just buying farmland for [chuckles]…
02:52:45
Joe Rogan: Right
02:52:45
Eric Weinstein: … to be– He wants to make sure that we have a s-steady supply of, uh, of food.
02:52:49
Joe Rogan: Corn.
02:52:49
Eric Weinstein: Of something.
02:52:50
Joe Rogan: Right.
02:52:51
Eric Weinstein: Um, we’ve gotta stop the addiction to billionaires as the only people we trust, because at least they’re rich.
02:52:59
Joe Rogan: Let’s end it there. Gotta wrap this up, but I appreciate you very much. This was very good.
02:53:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?
02:53:05
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it was a good one.
02:53:05
Eric Weinstein: Great seeing you, Joe.
02:53:06
Joe Rogan: Great seeing you, too, and I think you’re– the last point is, it should resonate with a lot of people. It’s dead right. [upbeat music]
02:53:13
Eric Weinstein: Look forward to seeing you soon, Joe.
02:53:14
Joe Rogan: Look, we’ll maybe go to another planet together.
02:53:16
Eric Weinstein: Love it.
02:53:17
Joe Rogan: All right. Bye, everybody. [upbeat music]
