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Eric Weinstein
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train my day. Joe Rogan podcast By night, all day.
Joe Rogan
I was like, there's only one way to do this. I've just not drank for a while, so I took, like, eight months off, and then I had, like, a margarita dinner one. So I was like, oh, I missed this. And then I had a glass of wine here and there.
Eric Weinstein
I was wondering how that was going to hold up.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Weinstein
But. But you're not. I know that you're not captured by it.
Joe Rogan
No, no.
Eric Weinstein
Neither am I. But our religious observance requires it.
Joe Rogan
You require abstinence or drinking? We drink What? When do you have to drink?
Eric Weinstein
Shabbat. Every come. Any Friday.
Joe Rogan
How much do you drink? One Shabbat.
Eric Weinstein
I probably have two and a half glasses of wine.
Joe Rogan
Is there, like, a number that you're supposed to hit? No. Otherwise, you know what?
Eric Weinstein
Well, that's Purim.
Joe Rogan
What is.
Eric Weinstein
We should get into Purim.
Joe Rogan
We're getting into it.
Eric Weinstein
All right.
Joe Rogan
Do we need glasses? You want to have a drink?
Eric Weinstein
Usually I. You and I tend to go a while, so we usually do that at the end.
Joe Rogan
Well, let's. Let's get some ice and some glass. Are we rolling already? Okay, let's get some. Tell Jeff to get us some ices.
Eric Weinstein
I didn't know we were.
Joe Rogan
And a bottle of. I didn't say anything wrong, Buffalo Trace.
Jamie
Do you want to wait until I get back to start? Because we either haven't started or. We started.
Joe Rogan
We started it. We started. Let's just roll. We'll get Jeff to do it. What's that?
Eric Weinstein
I don't even have headphones.
Joe Rogan
Are we rolling still?
Eric Weinstein
Are we doing headphone?
Joe Rogan
We can. Headphones. No headphones. I don't give a. We mix it up. Okay, you know, what do you do? Are you more comfortable? You got a nice head of hair.
Eric Weinstein
What?
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 smush it with this thing.
Jack
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
If you ever have that kind of consideration for me, I'm going to be very disappointed. I thought we were closer.
Joe Rogan
Some people worry about that.
Eric Weinstein
No, I worry about the gray.
Joe Rogan
That you have gray in your hair.
Eric Weinstein
It's. Yeah, look at it.
Joe Rogan
Well, you're, like, pretty dark for your age. How old do you now?
Eric Weinstein
60?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. You have fucking dark ass hair for your age. If I let my. If I had hair and it grew out like my hair, it's Mostly gray now. Yeah, Yeah, a little bit. What's that?
Eric Weinstein
I should have thought ahead like you did.
Joe Rogan
What? Shaved it?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, shaved it when everyone knew it wasn't great and then it's just normal because like it's very clear if I shave it now, I think you can
Joe Rogan
avoid gray hair with proper supplementation. At least that is the. The thought today that with enough zinc and copper and 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 what causes your hair to go gray.
Eric Weinstein
This is Austin Tet.
Joe Rogan
Other than this is Buffalo Trace. Older than America.
Eric Weinstein
Really?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. This is a. A distillery from 1773 I believe they started. Wow, them apples, huh?
Eric Weinstein
It's like that Chinese sounding beer Yunling or something. Cheers, my friend.
Joe Rogan
Buffalo Trace is like you. Why is there their beard? Really old beer. Really old. They have a old beer?
Eric Weinstein
Y yling. Is it old as Jamie knows everything. He knows a lot. You know people.
Jamie
1829.
Eric Weinstein
You see, people say I have this AI I'm using Claude, I'm using Chatgpt.
Joe Rogan
I use Jamie.
Eric Weinstein
Jamie, right.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, for sure. Oh, he's A.I. he's way better than A.I. because he's kind of psychic. You're a little psychic? A little bit.
Jamie
Well, I mean I've listened to you talk a lot.
Eric Weinstein
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 100%.
Joe Rogan
He knows how my goofy fucking brain works. Yeah, for sure. Good to see you, my brother.
Eric Weinstein
Good to see you. Hello, Joe.
Joe Rogan
How was your. Your what? What? What was it exactly? How would you describe it? A speech presentation.
Eric Weinstein
I gave a talk on dark energy to the Karch group at the U. Texas Austin Physics department.
Joe Rogan
This is what I wanted to ask you about. Michio Kaku has 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.
Eric Weinstein
You gave. Go on.
Joe Rogan
You gave a little side eye. Well, let's see what he says. James, see if you can find that, please. I think he said it was gravity
Eric Weinstein
from different colonies and put them together as a kid just to see what happens.
Joe Rogan
Did I? No, I never did that.
Eric Weinstein
I did that.
Joe Rogan
Oh, why Just watch him fight.
Eric Weinstein
Oh yeah.
Joe Rogan
Oh, you fucking psycho.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, a little bit.
Joe Rogan
No, I never did any of that.
Eric Weinstein
Were saying about Michu.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that he. I, I just. I didn't even read it. I just saw it and Went, oh, Jesus, I got to talk to Eric about this. Michio. She 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? What do you think about that?
Eric Weinstein
You remember when I was here and I said, get Michio Kaku in here with me?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. What?
Jamie
What is it?
Joe Rogan
What is about. Well, clearly he's a brilliant guy.
Eric Weinstein
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 general. My shtick is that I go hard after institutions. I'm a huge institutional supporter and their worst nightmare in the current world. Individuals I don't like beefing with. I watch all of the energy, the beauty of life lost to beefing with people. Micho Kaku is doing a tremendous amount of damage to theoretical physics.
Joe Rogan
How so?
Eric Weinstein
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 people who invented the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the semiconductor. This is what we do. And we've lost the ability to do it at a level that, 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.
Joe Rogan
And what do you think is the cause? I'm going to describe this. Humidity.
Eric Weinstein
Quantum gravity.
Joe Rogan
Quantum gravity, yep.
Eric Weinstein
1984, there was a result, and it's called the Green Schwartz anomaly cancellation. And the guy that I've talked to you about before in UFO context, the guy who is Lewis Whitten's son, Lewis Whitten, Happy birthday, turned 105, was the anti gravity guy from the 50s. His son, Edward Whitten decided that the 1984 green Schwartz anomaly cancellation meant that, 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. So you've had on, I don't know, probably Sean Carroll, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Nobody wanted to say what was happening, which is that we were being unraveled and destroyed. Our ability to be the world's greatest theoretical physicist was being eroded year by year for 42 years.
Joe Rogan
And specifically the pursuit of string theory.
Eric Weinstein
It's not string theory 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 many places. So that's not an issue. The issue is the exclusion of everything else. This goes under the name Togit, or the only game in town, T o G I T. 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.
Joe Rogan
So specifically, what is. What's isolationist about string theory? Like, what is it about this one particular theory that all this thought has been pushed into that? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's good to be passionate about something. Exploring what interests you adds more color to your life, makes it more fulfilling in a way. And that's not just limited to your personal life. If you run a business, you know how much of a difference it can make when the people on your team are excited about what they're doing. And if you don't, what? Well, it's time to find out. With ZipRecruiter. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com Rogan it's been rated the number one hiring site based on G2. And that's because ZipRecruiter is always looking for ways to improve the hiring process, including its newest feature that lets you see the most qualified and more importantly, most interested people for your role. To make sure they're some of the first you start talking to find candidates who really want your job on Zip Recruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free@ziprecruiter.com Rogan that's ziprecruiter.com Rogan Meet your match at ZipRecruiter.
Eric Weinstein
The claim is that there's this thing called UV Complete Physics. 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.
Joe Rogan
Wheel of Fortune. I've got a good feeling about this.
Eric Weinstein
I've got a good feeling about this.
Joe Rogan
Okay. Is that an episode of Wheel of Fortune?
Eric Weinstein
It'll be over briefly. It's very, very quick. It's about a minute and a half or something. And 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 things. I don't know that you've ever had anyone talk about UV completeness on the Joe Rogan?
Joe Rogan
I don't believe so.
Judah
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Is this it? Okay. Put your headphones on. Yeah, well, you're not going to be able to hear it unless you have headphones on.
Eric Weinstein
I know it like the back of my hand.
Joe Rogan
Wheel of Fortune.
Eric Weinstein
We need a phrase this time. That's category for this puzzle, and it is a prize puzzle. Go ahead, Rick.
Joe Rogan
Gladly.
Eric Weinstein
And what do we get here? 500R. Boy, you'd think there'd be an R in there somewhere, wouldn't you?
Jack
Oh, really?
Eric Weinstein
You called it Caitlin. L1l. What's that?
Joe Rogan
Can I solve? Okay.
Eric Weinstein
It is a prize puzzle. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
I've got a good feeling about this.
Eric Weinstein
That's right.
Joe Rogan
That's insane. That lady's a wizard.
Eric Weinstein
That lady is what I want to do with my life. 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, and the funny part about it is you can figure it out if you go back. Jamie, can you show the board right there? Yeah. So clearly that apostrophe is a huge clue. Right? So the idea is that if you read that property. Is it aisle? Is it? I've. Right. And then there's no R. 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 in that pattern, as well as the fact that 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 Kaitlin Burke is my model of what I think we're supposed to be doing.
Joe Rogan
So an exceptional mind with an ability to see or propose things that other people aren't seeing.
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 frequency of certain. The fact that there's a single letter there that almost certainly is I or a. She took a tiny number of clues, but here's the really important thing, Jamie, can we show the filled in puzzle? So you'll notice that the word this could be changed to that because the only letter that's been excluded is an so that is what the issue of unique UV completion is. In other words, a unique UV completion would say there's only one phrase that fits there. She guessed she couldn't have known it isn't, I've got a good feeling about that, or I've got a nice feeling about this or that. So it's actually not, 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. The most marvelous thing about that exchange is she says, 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 gatekeeping. Can I put this article on the archive? Can I give a seminar in your department? I want to 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're a charlatan. That's. You know, that is crank physics. So 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 normal person would say that that happened. And I wasn't allowed to do that. When I visited a 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.
Joe Rogan
But you just did.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Are you a lawbreaker?
Eric Weinstein
I'm breaking the rules now because now I've had it. I agreed to not do this. And with these missing scientists, I've changed my mind. I'm not going to deal with these people anymore. And whatever is going on with science and the suppression of different ideas is terrifying right now. We have a situation. I gave a talk at the University of Chicago. There's no record of it.
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.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, particular people 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 you end up feeling resentful towards. How dare you tell me that I can't give this talk in this department officially, 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 institution.
Joe Rogan
So the institution is forcing them to say, you. You're allowed to give the talk, but you're not allowed to talk about it on social media. You're not allowed to advertise that you're doing it. You're not allowed to say that you're doing it.
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 that the physics department doesn't get pregnant.
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.
Eric Weinstein
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 basically, Texas raided Harvard for people like John Tate in the math department, Steven Weinberg, who was probably the greatest living theorist. And that was the continuation of the Bryce DeWitt group from North Carolina, Chapel Hill, that was set up to do Anti Gravity by Agnew Bainson. So you're right next to an amazing physics department with a crazy history that, in fact touched Anti gravity. This is one of the tiny number of places that has a real legacy in that department. And I was speaking there on gravity on dark energy. And 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. Yeah. But 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 want to die. I don't want to lose my ability to enter a physics department. So I take on this completely wrong Persona. And, you know, I have the emails. You're not giving a talk. You're having conversations in room 5308.
Joe Rogan
It literally says, you're not giving a talk.
Eric Weinstein
I could read what it is that they write to me, but what is
Joe Rogan
the benefit of this formal declaration or this formal designation of the way you're talking?
Eric Weinstein
So when I was at a physics institute in Canada, I was told, we're worried that you're going to use it to legitimize yourself. It's like, I'm going to do that. Of course I'm going. I have a PhD from Harvard, you stupid. I mean, like you guys, imagine I'm a podcast guest.
Joe Rogan
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Eric Weinstein
Right?
Joe Rogan
Just a regular dude with some wacky ideas.
Eric Weinstein
Right? And so the idea is I have to play that character as opposed to.
Joe Rogan
Legitimizing yourself is a very bizarre phrase.
Eric Weinstein
Tell me about it.
Joe Rogan
Because it's assuming that you're not legitimate. Do you know what I'm saying?
Eric Weinstein
I don't think you're understanding this, but.
Joe Rogan
No, I am understanding it. But from their perspective, saying that you're gonna use it to legitimize yourself and your ideas is a really crazy way to phrase it. Because, like, they're acting from the assumption that you're not legitimate.
Eric Weinstein
So that's. You remember when, like, I think Reagan thought. I forget who it was. Reagan thought there were recallable missiles.
Joe Rogan
Well, you could turn them around.
Eric Weinstein
Right?
Joe Rogan
Sorry, we changed my mind. So, like, a BASE jumper is also a suicide jumper on second Halfway through, halfway in. He's like, ah, fuck this. Nah, I like that, yo.
Eric Weinstein
A lot of these survive jumping off the Gold Gate bridge. They learn like, I love life.
Joe Rogan
Yes, yes. Most of them, they're reborn. Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
So what I would say is the problem is that I am. 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. I have essentially perfect credentials. And that's the problem. So it's not a question about you're going to legitimize your. I already legitimized Myself by Harvard, PhD, MIT, postdoc, NSF, postdoctoral fellow ONR top in the country, Sloan foundation grantee. I've been in math, physics, economics departments. I'm so bulletproof.
Joe Rogan
So that's the problem.
Eric Weinstein
That's the problem.
Joe Rogan
That's the problem. It's not that you're a kook.
Eric Weinstein
That's what I was trying to say. You didn't understand.
Joe Rogan
No, I do understand. Understand why they want to do that to you.
Eric Weinstein
That's what's bizarre narrative.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
I am the greatest danger to the narrative. I'm the most followed mathematician in the United States, maybe the world. Hannah Fry may be above it. That danger to the narrative is the problem.
Joe Rogan
Well, specifically for people who don't know what we're talking about, what is to make this a standalone show. The people that 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?
Eric Weinstein
Okay. So in 2001, I said mortgage backed securities were a great danger to the world. I have one of the first published papers on the danger of illiquid. Of the pricing of illiquid securities. I went on Chris Williamson's show and he asked me who's going to win Biden or. 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 as a committee to replace the president. And I said, like I'm supposed to feel good about that. So I think, well, they told you
Joe Rogan
they put in three people.
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.
Joe Rogan
That's what they said to you?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah. Correct.
Joe Rogan
You would be really happy. So shut up.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
They didn't even tell you who the people were?
Eric Weinstein
I think that they did, and I've conveniently forgot them. One of them might have been the chief of staff.
Joe Rogan
Wow.
Eric Weinstein
But I say this right, 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 string theory narrative is a complete danger. It's not string theory that's the problem. 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.
Joe Rogan
Could you briefly just describe, like, what. What is the pro. So there's not a problem with string theory or string theory not complete? Or is string theory read it has it reaped actual results?
Eric Weinstein
Mathematically, it's reaped results. And string theorists have occasionally done really great work 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 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 New York Deep Tech Week, shout out to those guys. And I put it on the slide as three things. There's boom, vroom and zoom. Easy to remember. Boom is weapons. Physics will create weapons. You'll dwarf everything else with the possible exception of biologicals. Zoom vroom is energy. And the story of energy is basically the story of prosperity and control. 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 capitol. And zoom is everything else. It's propulsion, it's computation, it's communication. And those things, if you take them together, 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. Somehow In November of 52, everything changed and we became. We became too dangerous. The community of physicists is the most powerful group of people made into completely ineffectual humans.
Joe Rogan
And do you think this is by design?
Eric Weinstein
Partially.
Joe Rogan
And what was the purpose of it? But by saying that physicists became too dangerous, the ideas became too dangerous. Is the idea that the weapons would become so immense and powerful that they had to do something to stop and curb that?
Eric Weinstein
Well, we didn't know how to control it. So in other words, for example, 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. They can go right into the middle of an atom because they're not positively charged. So they're not going to be repelled by the nucleus. And they can bust apart atoms that are barely being held together. And that's why you get bullets begetting bullets begetting bullets. And that's what a chain reaction is. The people who were doing that 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 paper got held up and sent back for revisions. And there was no money in it. We secretly set up this thing to shunt real research into the National Resource Council. I think this was organized by a guy named Bright B R E I T. And that was the beginning of this whole peer review control mechanism.
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.
Eric Weinstein
We all want to 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 going to 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 Vegas shooting that never really got sorted out, it's very hard to kill large numbers of people using things like bullets. If you want to really kill a large number of people, you're going to go to biologicals and you're going to 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 bottlenecked on things like centrifuges and by the way, who knows what the next innovation in physics is going to 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?
Joe Rogan
Is this part of your concern about the missing scientists?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, of course.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. So the missing scientist narrative, 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 some of them. It's just.
Eric Weinstein
We're not really up to 15.
Joe Rogan
No. Okay, so what do you think we're actually up to?
Eric Weinstein
I don't know. Probably five or six.
Joe Rogan
But 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. The people that are all involved in very specific types of technological research, different things that are top secret, that all of these people either wind up missing.
Eric Weinstein
There's a lot of murder in math and physics. First of all, people don't really appreciate that, you know, the Unabomber was a famous PhD mathematician.
Joe Rogan
He's a big story, though. There's a lot of stuff.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, sure. There was a guy named Cantor who broke into David Rittenhouse Laboratories in the University of Pennsylvania, where I was an undergraduate, and shot up a seminar. There was, you know, this situation in Iowa where a relative of mine got a seat in the Physics department because somebody was killed by one of the graduate students. I think it became a movie like Dark Matter. So there's an incredible amount of murder. The Balpin Hammer Killing of Carl delou by Strzelecki 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 a really nasty. There's a lot of nasty culture, and sometimes it becomes violent.
Joe Rogan
Why do you think they're close to unhinged?
Eric Weinstein
You spend that much time in your head, I'm amazed that I'm as well grounded as I am. No, seriously, you're just way out in the stratosphere. I completely forget who I am, where I am, that I'm even a human being. When you're using your body as an instrument, as you do in combat sports and training, you become a different thing. You know that archery thing where you have to 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
Joe Rogan
know, what are you talking about, archery thing? That you twist your arm?
Eric Weinstein
If you have an Old style bow. You often get burned by the. Oh, that.
Joe Rogan
You have to twist your arm like that.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Just like you're not like this.
Eric Weinstein
And get hit, but you don't see. But then you twisted your wrist. You keep your wrist straight. Just.
Joe Rogan
I don't do that kind of archery. That's why I'm confused.
Eric Weinstein
Well, okay, sorry. You do real.
Joe Rogan
This kind. You keep your hand like that.
Eric Weinstein
Okay.
Joe Rogan
That's a torque issue.
Eric Weinstein
But like if you're a sniper, you know, there are all sorts of things about breathing in your. How you adjust your eyes. You use your body as an instrument. As a mathematician or physicist, one of the reasons that 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 you're doing, you're doing a very unnatural thing. And that unnatural thing, not everybody can handle it, right? And they see what you're saying and we snap. And also 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.
Joe Rogan
But how does that lead to violence?
Eric Weinstein
You're upset because people are lying. You know, like the Unabomber had really interesting points. He wasn't a dumb guy. He was really correctly. You know, he has 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. It's a great song. Okay. Yeah. We're not comfortable in part with coming back to the half measures and the special pleading that sort of characterizes normal life. So to get back to the missing scientist narrative, I don't think there are 15 missing scientists in this data set. That's bullshit.
Joe Rogan
It seems like they're adding as many as they can. Yeah, they're trying to make connections that don't.
Eric Weinstein
Don't do that. It's like the junkification of the UFO narrative. All of these narratives have a junk to them. So that. And I believe a lot of the junk is affixed to the narrative so that those who want to 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 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 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 JRE and say stuff. I know a lot of stuff that I don't know what it unlocks.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's easy to dismiss anybody who comes on here, sure.
Eric Weinstein
But China is smarter. And by the way, the LLMs, I mean, look, there are a lot of threads here to get back to the physics. And I'm giving a talk tomorrow on 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 a sudden change in the world economy. If you figured out how to do fusion, it would have immediate geopolitical results.
Joe Rogan
So these specific scientists that are missing whatever the number is, five, six, that you think are legitimate, what, what specifically are they working on that's so dangerous?
Eric Weinstein
Well, the fusion guy obviously is at mit. Is anybody who might, I don't know. Fusion isn't my thing, plasma isn't my thing. But that is unquestionably dangerous. If you imagine how much depends on
Joe Rogan
oil 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, 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. Let's say if there's the top five people, it's an energy thing. Let's say if it's an energy thing. Let's say if someone has some new technology that's going to completely disrupt the fossil fuels industry and they go, listen, we can kill this fucking guy and it's still coming down the pipe, but we'll delay it by 10 years and make $15 trillion.
Eric Weinstein
So this is the 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, 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. When it comes to, you know, guitar, the amount of impact that Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen had is just wildly disproportionate. You know, 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 those two guys are sort of the same. They just created so much vocabulary, you can't even imagine it.
Joe Rogan
And Eddie Van Halen doesn't get the credit he deserves either.
Eric Weinstein
Oh, tell me, talk to me.
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 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 notebooks. They made the va.
Eric Weinstein
I remember it.
Joe Rogan
They were awesome and they were so good. And Van Halen 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.
Eric Weinstein
I see it differently.
Joe Rogan
Well, people mentioned Clapton, who of course is a great wizard always. It's number one is Hendrix. Most people have Hendrix as number one because he was so revolutionary.
Eric Weinstein
Well, nobody's gonna say Alan Holdsworth.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I don't know who he is.
Eric Weinstein
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, my point is, is that David Lee Roth kept Eddie Van Halen from becoming Alan Holdsworth. And that's.
Joe Rogan
Who is Alan Holdsworth?
Eric Weinstein
Oh, it's interesting. Alan Holdsworth. Like, if you talk to your hot shit guitarist friends, they will very often, like, everybody will just pause and say, well, yeah, that's Alan Holdsworth.
Joe Rogan
Really?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah. And it's sort of like listening to a modem for normal human beings. Right. That's why it's just not popular. And so Eddie Van Halen was.
Joe Rogan
Who did he play with?
Eric Weinstein
I don't know. Alan Holdsworth.
Joe Rogan
Just by himself.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
Can we just actually weirdly put Alan Holdsworth just like, choose something with it?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, we'll listen to some of his music. So we might have. We'll edit it out of the episode because otherwise we'll get dinged.
Eric Weinstein
Okay, why don't we. Okay, but we'll play it.
Joe Rogan
We'll play it, and then we'll just come right back to it.
Eric Weinstein
All right, let's do that.
Joe Rogan
Give me some. Jamie, was it. Is any specific song that you'd like?
Eric Weinstein
No. At all. It's all mind melting.
Jamie
Checking to see if he's gotten anything popular we might have known. So I could tap into that, but I don't see nothing.
Joe Rogan
Like, is there a song that you like that you could recommend?
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 Alan Holdsworth.
Joe Rogan
Okay, what does that mean? Thank you, Jamie.
Eric Weinstein
I'd rather see some guy flying through the air with, like, his pants on fire than listen to Alan Holtrum.
Jamie
Okay, here we go.
Joe Rogan
Live in Tokyo, 1984. Live in Tokyo.
Jamie
Tokyo Dream.
Eric Weinstein
See if you can use the histogram to figure out, like, where the nerds are going.
Joe Rogan
Histogram?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, it shows you, like, where people spend their time on a video. I would go right into the middle
Jamie
of it or something, checking. What you doing?
Eric Weinstein
So nothing.
Jamie
Sell out or nothing's going on right now.
Joe Rogan
Put it in the middle, Jamie.
Jamie
What?
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Jamie
You've heard this before, though.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Jamie
What is that? A bass? What is the other guitar I'm hearing? Because that is not matching up with what that bass player seems to be playing. Do you hear that extra guitar
Eric Weinstein
that's
Jamie
slower and off time?
Jack
I don't know.
Jamie
That's a bass, I think so.
Eric Weinstein
It doesn't sound like it's playing. My. My guitarist friends will just salivate, and I'll look at them.
Joe Rogan
They won't help. No offense, but.
Jamie
Can't be very.
Joe Rogan
It sounds like jazz, right? So it's like jazz guitar. Like, there's no. There's no singing.
Eric Weinstein
If I put on. If I. No more Jerry, I've had it.
Joe Rogan
Oh, Jimmy.
Eric Weinstein
Jamie, you're gonna have so much nerd hate.
Joe Rogan
He gets that every day.
Jamie
People will agree with me, too, I believe.
Joe Rogan
Oh, 100% more will be in your camp.
Eric Weinstein
That was my point. I think David Lee Roth had had some comment about if it weren't for me, the brothers would be playing biker bars in the Far Valley or something, you know? And so David Lee Roth came up with what we would call the syntactic sugar, the thing that made Van Halen fun and listenable and danceable. Like dance The Night Away just. I didn't like Van Halen. I loved that song. I never liked Van Halen.
Joe Rogan
Oh, how dare you.
Eric Weinstein
Well, but I loved Eddie Van Halen
Joe Rogan
and you didn't like Van Halen.
Eric Weinstein
I didn't. You wanna. I'm not even embarrassed about that. The one I'm embarrassed about. I completely dismissed ACDC in real time because I'm an idiot. I've never been more wrong about something in my life.
Joe Rogan
How did you dismiss acdc?
Eric Weinstein
Good question. They had a dumb thing going on with the school pants and the dirty deeds done. Dirt cheap fucking song. What? Great song. Well, you know, like musically Hot for Teacher is an amazing composition.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
Unbelievable. Right? But. But it's the key thing that they figured out is making things marketable. Right, right.
Joe Rogan
And that's David Lee Roth.
Eric Weinstein
And I think it's David Lee Roth. No.
Joe Rogan
It is so charismatic. And did jumping splits. Yeah. He was amazing, amazing, amazing.
Eric Weinstein
And he had a secret weakness for old timey music. Right, right. Like just a gigolo, ice cream man, all that kind of stuff. So he's like a. Almost a throwback to 1930s for, you know, even earlier vaudeville.
Joe Rogan
He's an odd guy. Have you ever met him?
Eric Weinstein
I've wanted. I've wanted to so badly. I'm so jealous.
Joe Rogan
But 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.
Eric Weinstein
I've seen. I didn't love the way he was my feeling look. I would go the Jewish angle. I would connect to him based on shared cultural heritage. But what I think about Eddie is that Eddie wasn't just a guitarist. 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.
Joe Rogan
Tell me more.
Eric Weinstein
He was the whole thing.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. For sure.
Eric Weinstein
Rockstar.
Judah
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
And so my feeling is that those two guys really, you know, it's one of those things where you have two guys in a band that, you know, both of them are one in a billion kind of people and they happen to meet. 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 won. I had the same mystical thing. What is that? Nothing. Sounds like this. I've almost never had that in music. You know, the first time I heard Smells like Team spirit. What is that? Those. You know, there are these moments where something discontinuous happens.
Joe Rogan
But you heard, like, ain't Talk About Love. And that never got you?
Eric Weinstein
No, Panama. Doesn't get me.
Joe Rogan
Ain't Talking About Love as a fucking jam. When was the last time you listened to it?
Eric Weinstein
This year.
Joe Rogan
And nothing.
Eric Weinstein
It's not that. Well, okay. So part of the thing is, is that. Do you. Do you play an instrument when you play an instrument?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that is a problem. Yeah, I don't play anything.
Eric Weinstein
You know, the thing about Eddie Van Halen is that he accepted the geometry of the neck of the guitar. And very often you see musicians say, I don't care what key it's in, 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 going to 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, if it doesn't cry, weep, moan, I don't care. He wanted all of those noises 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've never wanted a whammy bar on my instrument until I saw Jeff Beck do crazy stuff that just isn't possible.
Joe Rogan
I ever tell you I drove him around once?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had that car on air and that, you know. You've never had Derek Trucks on the program, have you?
Joe Rogan
Tadeshi Trucks.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
No,
Eric Weinstein
that guy would not. A human.
Joe Rogan
Oh, he's amazing.
Eric Weinstein
Amazing. And there's a bunch of different people sing songs, so. Yeah, I. Look, I care tremendously about the guitar. And the funny thing that I realized is that I stupidly mentioned guitars on jre and I got sent amazing guitars, and I had. I had Jamie sent a quad cortex. I should have mentioned, like, Lamborghinis or, like, Jules or something.
Joe Rogan
It doesn't work. I've mentioned all those things.
Eric Weinstein
Okay. But I became friends with, like, the greatest guitarists of our time, and they're all suffering because nobody cares. And I heard, and I haven't seen it, that you had Marcus King on and talked about the death of Rock
Joe Rogan
Well, I talked about the death of rock before, and Marcus reached out, and that's why I had him on. He's like, man, rock's not dead. We're doing it every. Every night. I was like, all right, come on, man, let's talk.
Eric Weinstein
And did you get to the blues, which he excels at?
Joe Rogan
Well, we mostly just. We're talking about just music in general, in his life, and he's in it.
Eric Weinstein
Why? Did he give you a nice guitar?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's beautiful, right? He's a cool.
Eric Weinstein
He's a cool guy.
Joe Rogan
And he's super talented, too.
Eric Weinstein
Never met him.
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. When I was a kid, rock and roll music was the big popular music 100. It was all Rolling Stones, AC DC these bands were huge. Zeppelin. They were fucking huge. They were the biggest bands. That's not the case anymore.
Eric Weinstein
That's right.
Joe Rogan
And that's weird. And I. What I said is, I don't understand how a music genre that's so popular can stop being popular when it's still so good. Like when we have Protect Our Parks, you know, we'll play Freebird. We still go nuts for that guitar solo.
Eric Weinstein
What happened to Freebird? I'm pretty sure if you looked at Google's data, Freeberg was in. It went away for a long time, and then it got resurrected as a meme, right? Because you can feel this insanely long intro, just so luxurious. You can't believe anybody would put up with it anymore. And then two different songs, right? Lord knows I can't.
Joe Rogan
It becomes alive, Right?
Eric Weinstein
Fly high, Free Bird. Yeah. And then suddenly you're on fire.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
You know, it's just like, you want to fly an American flag, you want to shoot lasers. Whatever it is, that feeling I think went away. And I think that Freebird. 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 Freebird, and it brought it back.
Joe Rogan
I think Freebird was brought back by Protect Our Parks. Okay, you think so?
Jamie
I mean, Google trend says it's never really gone away.
Eric Weinstein
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What. What is.
Jamie
There's a peak in a peak around December 9, 2010.
Eric Weinstein
Wait, wait, that's 20.
Joe Rogan
A peak in 2010. That's weird.
Jamie
Something could have happened. We could look it up.
Joe Rogan
I wonder what it was.
Jamie
It probably was in a movie.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it seems pretty steady.
Eric Weinstein
Well, the reason that I said that is that I would make this reference because you used to be able to refer to Freebird. It was a meme. Everybody knew it.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, people would yell at me.
Eric Weinstein
And then there was a period of time where no young person had any clue what I was talking about. And I know. Oh, that's interesting because they still knew Stairway to Heaven, if you remember these, like top 500 songs of all time. And then it would always come down to the last two and it would always be Freebird and Stairway to Heaven. Those would invariantly.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Eric Weinstein
Then suddenly nobody knew what Freebird was and now everybody knows again. So I. Yeah, I will stand corrected. But there was a period of time where young people didn't know it.
Joe Rogan
Well, is this Google Trends? Is that what that is? Jamie? So it's just people looking up.
Jamie
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 to download. And it wasn't only on Napster or something like that.
Eric Weinstein
To go back to the blues aspect of it, it's blues based rock that feels like that thing that you and I relate to.
Joe Rogan
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Eric Weinstein
you know, we're not most. I'm really into the blues. But that's its own controversy because when black audiences stopped showing up to blues shows, the performers got worse because the audience was a huge part of the experience. I tell you about this argument I got into with John Mayer about the blues.
Joe Rogan
No.
Eric Weinstein
So I ran Into John Mayer, San Versetti, Bungalows. And I've been in awe of that guy intellectually. When he talks about music, I get so much out of it. It's just very perceptive, very brilliant guy. And so I was, 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 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 came from the MTV generation and he was the blues packaged for us. Like a genius guy, for sure, but packaged for mtv. He said, but, you know, blues isn't really. Blues isn't a. Isn't a 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.
Joe Rogan
House of Blues. It's literally.
Eric Weinstein
Well, he meant something. So the thing 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 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 see Cadillac Zach's Maui Sugar Mill show every Monday night, I go occasionally 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.
Joe Rogan
Right?
Eric Weinstein
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've got to actually get people back into understanding what it is. So if you picture those huge bands in your youth, stop thinking about the band on stage rocking out and pan in your mind into the audience. And what do you see?
Joe Rogan
Young people.
Eric Weinstein
Young people. What are they doing?
Joe Rogan
Dancing, having fun.
Eric Weinstein
They're dancing. There's some chick in a crop top on some guy's shoulders rocking out.
Joe Rogan
Free Bird.
Eric Weinstein
When hot chicks stop dancing to your music, it starts to enter its death throes.
Judah
Damn.
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 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.
Joe Rogan
Maybe you are.
Eric Weinstein
That's not my shit.
Joe Rogan
You have no idea. Jamie, what do you think?
Jamie
Dude, honestly, you guys sound old as shit right now. There's so much music and rock music and arenas right now that's selling out.
Joe Rogan
What does rock?
Jamie
I mean, just like, there's a bunch of bands I can. Like Bad Omens. Beartooth Corn just posted a video in front of, like, Sao Paulo, Brazil. 50,000 people going crazy.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, like me, sugar.
Jamie
It's out there. Yeah, but it's not what you got. You guys don't like it either, you know?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, but it's not. Is. It's not the big popular music that it was when I was a kid.
Jamie
There's only five artists in the world that are popular, like, all over the place.
Eric Weinstein
That's right, because it's now micro. Right, right.
Joe Rogan
Because there's too many bands, there's too much music.
Eric Weinstein
The control of the institutions to tell us what we like has slipped. Right. And so, in part, you know, like, it was our version of Payola that, you know, when I was growing up in la, it was KMET and KLOS that Determined, or kroq. Those are the three stations that mattered. And they told us, here's the offering, boys. This is what's on tap right now. You know, Are you into Math Core?
Joe Rogan
Do you think that's it? It's the death of cause.
Eric Weinstein
Wow.
Joe Rogan
Now that you're saying that, I'm thinking the death of radio and the death of rock and roll, they sink. Because radio really stopped being a thing. Early 2000s. Early 2000s, radio stopped being a thing.
Eric Weinstein
Well, remember when Limewire came through and everybody could get all the songs that they wanted?
Joe Rogan
Right. That was an issue. But it felt like, if anything, I thought at the beginning, when, like, Metallica was railing and 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.
Eric Weinstein
Yep.
Joe Rogan
You're gonna have to adapt. But they still love you. And, you know, don't you make most of your money touring or. I don't know. I don't know what the economics of it are, but they're gonna change. This is a new thing right now.
Eric Weinstein
Micro markets, you know, just. In prog metal, there's so many different Flavors.
Joe Rogan
I understand. But what we're getting at is that the radio sort of dictated what became popular in a lot of ways. Now video games, now things become popular in more of a sense of a viral way.
Eric Weinstein
Sure. Well, one thing is that these clips, if your clip gets picked up by TikTok and Instagram Reels, that's some tiny fraction of a song is the catnip that leads everyone to your door.
Joe Rogan
100%. I've downloaded many, many songs that way.
Eric Weinstein
But I was hanging with Misha Mansoor, who was making the Jamie claim like, you got old grandpa. And his point. Yeah, the thing is, I have at least the courage to hang out with actually cool people. He said his point was, you're just not even watching it. And I said, what do you mean, Misha? He said, video games. Video games. The music in video games matters much more than you imagine. And it's like, totally.
Joe Rogan
Right, that makes sense.
Eric Weinstein
And so you know what we are thinking about in Get Off My Lawn mode is there was something lost and it hasn't been reborn anywhere. So that's the part that young Jamie 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.
Joe Rogan
That makes sense.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah. Right.
Joe Rogan
And then, like, that's where guys want to go. Where the dancing hot chicks are, they will follow anywhere.
Eric Weinstein
Right, right. And. And you know, that's the whole. I was in.
Joe Rogan
What's this, Jamie?
Jamie
This is EDC Vegas 2026. This is just the example of what you're saying.
Joe Rogan
Like, is this electronic? Yep. Yeah.
Jamie
This is like as big as it gets. But look at the stage. Look at all these lights.
Joe Rogan
I wonder if Molly didn't exist, how much of this would be? I mean, it's a good question, right?
Jamie
LSD didn't exist. How much of that music wouldn't have gotten big too?
Joe Rogan
Oh, a lot. Yeah.
Jamie
But yeah, this is where all the girls hang out.
Eric Weinstein
Right. So, like, I found myself in.
Jamie
In Vegas, except for Ella Langley now, sort of antithesis. Antithesis to that. But what is Ella Langley?
Joe Rogan
What's that?
Jamie
She's biggest country artist and almost ever now first female with like 2 top 100 songs ever.
Joe Rogan
How am I so out of the loop? Because Texas. Oh, I know that song. Yeah, that song's great.
Jamie
Yeah, she's got another one now. And.
Joe Rogan
And she been around for a long time.
Eric Weinstein
Nope.
Jamie
Pretty new. She's like 24 and she's killing it, murdering it.
Eric Weinstein
So 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's tracking the whole thing. Right.
Joe Rogan
And why country, though? Why is country exploding the way it's exploding?
Eric Weinstein
Well, because we're all in a meaning crisis. If you think about the way in which country music, for example, can develop a story through tropes very, very quickly.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
Right. And so, in part, the idea is that story, songs and a return. Try that in a small town is transgressive. Try that in a small town is a really powerful message. 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, we just don't know how to get back to her.
Joe Rogan
Right. We don't want a wholesome existence.
Eric Weinstein
You know, I got a barbecue stain on my white T shirt. That's Tim McGraw. Right? Like, you know, she's killing that miniskirt. You know, heart, don't forget something like that. Beautiful story very, very quickly told. That's old now, but the point being, hip hop and its storytelling and the return to spoken word and poetry and the legacy of the talking blues had a great run spread worldwide. You know, you talk about whites taking over. What do you mean? Whites? Like Tamils and, you know, indigenous Peruvians have taken over hip hop in their local sectors. So hip hop was just this great platform that once every local culture figured out some version of that. I talk about when I entered Bollywood, there was a song, Amadek Terumunda Bikrajay. You know, mama, look, your child is being ruined. And it has this like, hey, mom, hey, dad, don't moan and groan why don't you learn to live with the times and please leave us alone?
Joe Rogan
And it goes every generation's message.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, but it's like, it's delivered in, you know, boogie woogie, reggae, rap, rock and roll, and bhangra, you know, and it's like trying to. It was the first lame attempt at rap that I saw in a Bollywood film with Jackie Shroff. And they've all made it theirs. And so I was hanging out in India now with a DJ on his program Untriggered. And it's changing the developing world 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 personal expression and liberation for fifth for American males in the 50s. So, yeah, 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, I look to see which of my friends are following the great guitarist. And it's other great guitarists. It's none of my normal friends. Like, how many of my normal friends know who Tim Henson is? A great Texas guitarist? I do this, man.
Joe Rogan
Do you?
Jamie
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
What kind of music?
Jamie
I can't even explain it. He pretty much invented a genre that only he mastered and is can explain.
Eric Weinstein
It's like Tex Mexico melodic. 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. 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 onto the next thing, and it's just angular and fragmented and sewn together and beautiful and inspiring.
Joe Rogan
Give me something, Jimmy.
Jamie
Yeah, I have to play it for you. Because the drummer and bass player, also awesome, but pretty much revolves around the guitar.
Eric Weinstein
And you see, the thing is that they're so tight with each other that, you know, a better example even than this would be this thing that they released called Goat, which was the thing that put him on the map. And
Joe Rogan
that was great.
Eric Weinstein
Right? Also, Tim is just like the loveliest human being.
Joe Rogan
Boy, it's him before he got all the crazy neck tattoos.
Eric Weinstein
Oh, Well, that's just broken out.
Jack
I don't know.
Eric Weinstein
It's not Tim, is it?
Jamie
They posted it.
Eric Weinstein
This is. This is a different, different human.
Joe Rogan
Let's hear the song. Okay. I think that's someone posting a riff.
Jamie
That was their account.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I know, but maybe he just put it up there.
Eric Weinstein
By the way, do you hear the Mexican influence?
Joe Rogan
Yeah, definitely. So, like, this is very unique. Very unique sound.
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, what, like Antoine de Patrane that's taking over the world is basically. You hear the Middle east, but these guys are basically into microtones. If you take 24 beats, you can divide it by sixes, you can divide it by four fours. So the mathematics of rhythm, you know, the stuff that, like, only Vinny Cayude 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 it's like this violent birth of people bored by standard western forms. And 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, particularly this Quebec kind of thing that broke out with these guys in costume. Huh? You don't know this? Antoine de Poitrain, something like that. There's something Quebec costumes. What do you think? You remember the residents who were this art group from San Francisco, and 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.
Joe Rogan
I missed that too.
Eric Weinstein
Okay.
Joe Rogan
Did you miss it? I don't know where we were going.
Eric Weinstein
So Antoine de Patrane is this thing that took over, which doesn't sound like anything. It's like that new thing. So you know, you. Because. So look at that. Guitarist friends. Now the mathematics, okay, Jamie, the mathematics of this is that there's this freak fact, which is that if you take the octave which is doubling a frequency, you take the 12th root of it, break it into 12 semitones, and then take 19 of them stacked two to the 19 over 12 is equal to 2.996 something. It's almost three. And that means that you can force people into this quantized music where you come up with this 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 complete tripling of frequency. And because of that, we've been in even tempered music since the time of Bach. And these guys are breaking us out together with Jacob Collier. They're saying, why would you accept that as a prison?
Joe Rogan
And so how does stuff like this become popular? Is it just viral? Yeah, yeah.
Eric Weinstein
Because suddenly you see two guys in costumes that don't look anything like anything, you know, making music. 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.
Joe Rogan
And also, if any of these guys get cocky, you could just swap them out, put a mask on some new guy, get him in there.
Eric Weinstein
No, but it's. It's anti Egoic. It's anti egoic. Right, right. So in part, 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 idea of, you know, it's very funny. Tim Henson, I think, has a song called Ego Death with Steve Vai. Ego death is really hot because people erasing themselves is what everybody isn't trying to do. Who's chasing clout and people like that. Yeah. Because it's a form 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.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Eric Weinstein
I'm trying to get that bag. So what they don't want is somebody saying, like, Bill Gates. Right.
Joe Rogan
I'm just clout for humanity and global health. So 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.
Eric Weinstein
We're going to administer vaccines involuntarily through ticks.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And mosquitoes.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah. So all of this stuff really bothers people. It's the disingenuous.
Joe Rogan
Also, he doesn't have any friends, you know, and he can't get any pussy anymore because he keeps getting caught.
Eric Weinstein
You can get it,
Joe Rogan
but if we were smart, we'd feed that guy pussy. We did keep him happy.
Eric Weinstein
We did.
Jamie
We.
Joe Rogan
I wasn't involved.
Eric Weinstein
Neither was I. Yeah, allegedly. What do you mean, allegedly? I didn't go to that island.
Joe Rogan
You didn't?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Steve Bannon
No.
Joe Rogan
You're one of the people that saw through him right away.
Eric Weinstein
No. But he offered me partnership, and I didn't take it. And I regretted that for a while
Joe Rogan
because you would have been cha Ching.
Eric Weinstein
I would have been made rich or deceased.
Joe Rogan
Probably both.
Eric Weinstein
Probably both. Yeah. 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. 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. Oh, yeah.
Joe Rogan
So he'd own you? Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
You know, it's like, show me that you're.
Jamie
I don't want to sidetrack this or I'll come back, but These two are 333 year old aliens, Time travelers. Yeah, so they cannot be easily replaced.
Joe Rogan
Yes, they can. That's horseshit.
Eric Weinstein
Look, I'll make a prediction. If these guys haven't been unmasked, I don't even know that you're gonna unmask these guys and you're going to find out that they've got Middle East.
Joe Rogan
Well, please don't unmask them. They already unmasked Banksy.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Can't we have some mysteries? Damn it. I think they're cool. I like that music. That was fun. That was fun. I like viral things, too. I like things that just spread just from weirdness. You know, someone sends it to me. That's 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'd 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. What's that app? Shazam. Shazam. If I'm at a, you know, pool hall or something, something cool comes on. Like, what is that?
Eric Weinstein
See, I do that, but then I 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 young nerd.
Joe Rogan
You're a music nerd. Listen, that's your algorithm. There's nothing wrong with that. Okay.
Eric Weinstein
You're a mixed martial arts nerd.
Joe Rogan
I am.
Eric Weinstein
I know.
Joe Rogan
And also, there's a lot of things that are way more boring than that pool. I watch professional pool probably three or four hours a day.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. That's how I escape. I escape in the geometry and the movements, the patterns.
Eric Weinstein
Dude, you should have seen the comedians in the physics department yesterday. Oh, it was hysterically funny.
Joe Rogan
Must have been amazing.
Eric Weinstein
Duncan.
Joe Rogan
Duncan and Kurt together, first of all. Together. They are the dynamic doer. They are such a good duo because they're both sarcastic and they're both like.
Eric Weinstein
They were heavily. So well behaved as far as they could. Yeah. But then I don't know whether I can tell these stories.
Joe Rogan
Tell these stories. Tell them what happened. What did Kurt do?
Eric Weinstein
So part of the.
Joe Rogan
I love that guy. He's so awesome.
Eric Weinstein
So real person.
Joe Rogan
Whenever he comes into the mothership green room, like, yes, give me a dose.
Eric Weinstein
He gave me some wild anti Israel stuff, I think. I couldn't tell whether it was pro or anti he. So at the end, there was an experimentalist who was like, come to my. Come to my parlor. I'll show you my 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. You can tell the difference between the theory floor and the part where they actually do things. And these guys were just, you know, were effectively at 77 degrees before, above absolute zero, with conditions that only occur in deep space inside of this thing, coated in, like, tin foil. So these guys are cracking jokes about growing weed and what happens if you put hydroponic weed in that ch. But the other thing is that comedians are really. They're really intellectual nerds. And a lot of them, not all of them. Those two guys are for sure. For sure. Yeah. And they really wanted to know, okay, what is it that you guys are doing down here? And how do I understand?
Joe Rogan
The good ones are very.
Eric Weinstein
Duncan's amazing.
Joe Rogan
Very curious.
Eric Weinstein
Although he drew it completely pornographic.
Joe Rogan
I know. Yeah. We send it to Jamie because Kurt said it to me. This is the notes Duncan was taking during the physics.
Eric Weinstein
Because I'm, like, doing battle a little bit with the. There's one extremely smart string theorist in the audience named Jacques Dissler. And so almost all the interactions between Jacques and myself were. We were both being very collegial, but it was, you know, it was pretty hot.
Joe Rogan
I sent it to you, Jamie.
Eric Weinstein
And so he says, while you were doing that, I did a little sketch of you. I can figure out your exact anatomy. It's a gift.
Joe Rogan
Well, you need something like that.
Eric Weinstein
That's the last talk he's ever coming to.
Joe Rogan
No happen back to every one of them.
Eric Weinstein
No, actually, I was really trying to hook.
Joe Rogan
So here he's taking notes.
Eric Weinstein
Oh, no, please give me some volume, Joe. Thank you, Jo. Hey, guys, I got some other things to do this afternoon. It's been great.
Joe Rogan
Okay, bye. Oh, my God.
Eric Weinstein
So.
Joe Rogan
Oh, Jesus.
Eric Weinstein
But, yeah, I wanted. You know, C.P. snow did this famous essay called the Two Cultures, and it was about how literary intellectuals and scientific intellectuals used to be one group, and then 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 seven scientists we see on all of the talks on the podcasts, but, like, choose who you want to talk to, who's doing cool shit. The comedians belong in our science departments. Otherwise, how are people gonna know what's going on? There's this funny shit happening.
Joe Rogan
Well.
Eric Weinstein
And by the way, the UFO thing that's now blowing up.
Joe Rogan
Mm.
Eric Weinstein
There's gonna be some crazy science collision with the UFO narrative. There's no way of stopping it at this point.
Joe Rogan
So you've turned a corner on this talk about that because I saw you on Jesse Michael show and you were talking about how just a few years ago you thought that the entire narrative was complete nonsense.
Eric Weinstein
Probably five, six years ago by now.
Joe Rogan
And what changed?
Eric Weinstein
There was no way to explain. So Jesse was going on and on about. I said, Jesse, you're a smart guy. And I often would call him the back alley scholar. So he knew a lot of stuff that was sort of forbidden knowledge and he wouldn't be quiet about it. So I said, okay, I'm going to 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, one or more. There's no way to synchronize that number of people who've had experiences that are so similar. And there's a lot of stuff that I couldn't make sense of. And what attracted me in a certain sense was I couldn't come up with any explanation 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 also the fact that the government outreach to me and to Sam Harris and to Lex Friedman and you know, there was this thing where these guys who checked out said there's going to be a massive disclosure and we need people to disseminate these things to the public. And you have a share of the public who listens to you and we need to get you informed so that you can help mediate the disclosure.
Joe Rogan
So what prompted this change in narrative?
Eric Weinstein
What's going on behind the government? Yeah, we don't know. We don't know. Look, we don't know what the thing or things is are yet. Some of it is again so low quality that it's embarrassing to be seen with it. So my colleagues who don't want to take this seriously use that like, okay, so you're now on the little green men train. And I said, no, I'm on the special access program trade. There is, there's for sure special access program or 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.
Joe Rogan
And what. What prompted you to change your opinion and decide that there is some sort of a special access program.
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.
Joe Rogan
Like, what kind of crazy things?
Eric Weinstein
Let me take somebody who's public. Brandon Fugal, for example, was at a dinner where he started talking about being visited by a craft a few feet over 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 joke, of course, is that the secrets of skinwalker rants or, you know, whatever, this. Right. 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 one is funding the other. So I don't know what that is, but, like, some of these injuries are real and, you know.
Joe Rogan
Injuries?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, like Gary Nolan talking about people reporting. You know, Gary Nolan told me a 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 that when I inspected the tissue, there was a path of necrosis that can't be explained, like something that shows up on imaging. And 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.
Joe Rogan
Well, he's also done some very strange work on material science, Right. Where he's analyzed particles or little pieces of metal and alloys that have come from wreckages from the 1970s and 60s.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah. That. I don't know the providence. Like, he'll carry around a little thing and I'll show it to me. I'll say, no, you know, there's no combination of materials and alloys 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 have no. At this point, I have no primary 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 and American Alchemy, boy, did that get a response inside the government. That particular episode how so? 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. I was like, oh, okay. There was a huge discussion inside. And the first. Without getting into particulars, the first official outreach. Like, really official outreach. The checks in the wake of that episode. And I'm not under any NDAs, nobody's told me anything that I can't discuss that may change. One thing that's very clear to me is that when I hear something from many sources, I don't need to protect it anymore. It's already out. Okay. I have now heard the White Sands story from many sources.
Joe Rogan
This is the one where the crafts hovered over the base, shut down the nuclear program. Is that it?
Eric Weinstein
I'm just gonna say what I can say. That's fuzzed out. That can't be traced to anybody.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
I was very upset with the shutdown of the El Paso airspace.
Joe Rogan
That was recently.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, it was supposed to be. Supposed to be. We had a problem with cartel drones, right? 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 in El Paso? I think we have a problem that we've lost control of our airspace.
Joe Rogan
You think this was part of what happened in New Jersey as well?
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.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
People have said things about New Jersey that is. All right.
Joe Rogan
All right, so there's El Paso here,
Jamie
White Sands, right above it.
Joe Rogan
How far away is that?
Eric Weinstein
My guess is about an hour by driving.
Jamie
Let's see, it's probably 60, 70, 80 miles, most.
Eric Weinstein
Okay, so I don't know what's going on, but my. My guess is. So on Piers Morgan, I said this thing, which is that New Mexico is the connector of the nuclear story, the Epstein story, and the UFO story. They're all going to come together. Remember when we were only talking about the island? 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.
Joe Rogan
I've seen it.
Eric Weinstein
Okay.
Jack
It's very weird.
Eric Weinstein
So he says, You want to know about why I got Zorro Ranch in New Mexico? Can we play this clip? Can you find. I think Jesse repackaged it after I pointed it out. But this is the story that, like, somehow 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 are going to 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. One of its facets.
Joe Rogan
It's one component.
Eric Weinstein
It's one component. 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.
Joe Rogan
It's not publicly a big issue.
Eric Weinstein
That's correct.
Joe Rogan
And he clearly had a big interest.
Steve Bannon
So why did I buy a ranch in New Mexico, 1993. So that gives you some sense. So I would have funded it. In 1990, Los Alamos, which was the high energy lab up in New Mexico, was losing all its scientists.
Eric Weinstein
And Los Alamos, it was where Oppenheimer. Where the.
Steve Bannon
Where the.
Eric Weinstein
A lot of the nuclear weapons program, the bomb.
Steve Bannon
That's where the Manhattan Project.
Joe Rogan
Manhattan Project was. Yes, that's Los Alamos. And you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that.
Steve Bannon
Yes, because the scientists were going to. They cut the funding for high energy physics. But the people who worked in Los Alamos would still be in the Santa Fe area.
Judah
They cut that because the end of the.
Eric Weinstein
This was the Cold War dividend. Right.
Steve Bannon
I don't remember exactly why it was because, again, people thought that physics and high energy physics really wasn't that important
Eric Weinstein
because that was about nuclear weapons.
Steve Bannon
No, it was because they were trying. They decided maybe not. Right. This was the same time that Murray Gellman came up with the term quark. Q U A R K. He picked it out of an old poem, the word quark. But it was something. It was mysterious. So they were starting to understand in the 90s that in our world of the physics world, there was things that were just unexplainable. They called it strange things. You gave it a name, you gave it some characteristics. You called. It had. Charm was one of the terms. It had a charm, it had a flavor, it had a color. But nobody, really, no one, Mr. Bannon, understood what it was. Just like the financial system.
Judah
And you wanted to invest in.
Steve Bannon
I wanted to see if we could build tools so others smarter than me could help investigate it. And that was the beginning of your
Eric Weinstein
concept of the Santa Fe Institute.
Steve Bannon
Yes.
Judah
And Santa Fe Institute was founded to
Eric Weinstein
do study in this type of.
Steve Bannon
Can you. Can these areas of strange things be described by some form of mathematics?
Eric Weinstein
Okay, now what you're seeing there is fascinating. Like just take, 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 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, like people said to me, eric, you said he was an idiot. He's clearly very knowledgeable. You can see there that you were wrong. That is an actor that is not anyone smart with proximity to Murray Gellmon and others. Like, he knew Murray Gellmon. Well, Murray Gellmon didn't name Quarks in 1990. This goes back to like the 60s when George Zweig called them aces and Gellmon called them quarks. Three quarks for muster Mark. That came out of James Joyce. So 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 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'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 3, 4 and 5 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. There was a different guy named Benedict Gross. Dick Gross was an expert in number theory. And 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.
Joe Rogan
And when you say listening posts, like, what do you mean he's gonna hold?
Eric Weinstein
No, no, no, no.
Joe Rogan
He just remained in contact with these people.
Eric Weinstein
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. You 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 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 first class ticket is all it takes to get people to start talking.
Joe Rogan
Jeffrey Epstein was CIA. The communications network at Zorro Ranch prove it. The DOJ's own file 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.
Eric Weinstein
So remember, Jeffrey Epstein is a construct. 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.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, no one can accuse you of not talking about it. If they can, they're just being ignorant.
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.
Joe Rogan
So what do you think that was though? This satellite? Encrypted.
Eric Weinstein
All right, let's go there, but I'm a little bit Nervous? 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, okay? Just be careful, okay? What happens when you become a billionaire? I don't know. Not there. Nowhere close. What happens 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? Peter? You've got to be kidding. Now he's got one. So the first thing is that you find 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, this isn't what I signed up for. I wanted to be rich. 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 going to take drugs, you're at risk of having everybody want to tell the story. If you want to have, you're at the same risk. So the question becomes, what do I do 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? 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 who has the ability to build something? The CIA 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.
Joe Rogan
That he would provide them with experiences.
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 normal human beings. The very rich are very disappointed. Epstein felt rich, as I said before, in a movie set 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 think he's a wild guy. I'm up for wild guys. I want cowboy billionaires, cowboy physicists, cowboy everything. 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.
Judah
Right?
Eric Weinstein
But if you want to go take drugs, take drugs. If you want to have a Minaj, have a Minaj, fine. I don't want to hear about it. Don't spill the tea. I can't stand this culture. 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. Did the people who were in his direct orbit have an unusually high number of disappearances around them?
Joe Rogan
Did they?
Eric Weinstein
I don't know, but it's a dangerous question. I've never investigated it, but that's. Have you ever seen everybody talks about Eyes Wide Shut now you notice that nobody talks about crimes and misdemeanors where Woody Allen is directly in his orbit.
Joe Rogan
God, I don't even know if I've seen that movie.
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 wealthy ophthalmologist or something like that. That. And he has a brother who's a starker. Starker being the Yiddish word for a tough guy. And it's one of the most. Can we find Jerry Orbach? Martin Landau, Crimes and misdemeanors is the most blood curdling. So well done.
Jamie
Which the scene description, though, you didn't really get to it.
Eric Weinstein
Well, they're only in one. If they're only in one scene together, they'll Be at a. I haven't seen it in ages, but 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. Is only called to the house occasionally. Right. And it's this way in which the gentile and the people who can get things done that you're not allowed to do 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 Starkers. And I actually knew his old. Woody Allen's old producer is the father of a friend of mine, a guy named Jack Grossberg. And Jack Grossberg was 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. I think that in part, Woody Allen is writing about what Jeffrey Epstein was providing, which was a measure of silence. No, no, no, no. We're looking for Martin Landau and Jerry Orbach in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Yeah, I don't know.
Jamie
It's gonna be hard to find because it's.
Eric Weinstein
That one. Yep.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
I think that this is the scene that nobody's talking about.
Judah
I don't know, but she's killing me.
Jack
But want me to have somebody talk to her?
Steve Bannon
Like what?
Jack
Straighten her out.
Eric Weinstein
What do you mean, threaten her?
Judah
That's all I need.
Jack
How else do you expect to keep her quiet?
Joe Rogan
Can you turn that up?
Jamie
As long as I can get it, unfortunately.
Joe Rogan
Okay,
Jack
well, Price.
Judah
Jack, what are you suggesting?
Jack
What did you call me for?
Judah
I don't know. I. I hope you'd have more experience with something like this.
Jack
You called me because you needed some dirty work done. That's all you ever call for.
Judah
Look how bitter you are.
Jack
You've staked me plenty of times. I don't forget my obligations.
Judah
Threatening will only make it worse, Jack.
Jack
Okay, forget about it. What do you want me to say?
Judah
How the hell can I forget about it? I'm fighting for my life. This woman's gonna destroy everything I built.
Jack
That's what I'm saying, Judah. If the woman won't listen to reason, then you go on to the next step.
Eric Weinstein
What?
Joe Rogan
Threats?
Jack
Violence?
Judah
What are we talking about here?
Jack
She can be gotten rid of. I mean, I know a lot of people. Money will buy whatever's necessary.
Judah
I'm not even gonna comment on that. That's Mind boggling.
Jack
Well, what did you want me to do when you called me?
Judah
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 out of ideas. I don't know what I expected from you, Jack.
Jack
But you know, you're not aware of what goes on in this world. I mean, you sit up here with your 4 acres and your country.
Judah
I don't want to hear about myself
Jack
and your rich friends. And out there in the real world, it's a whole different story.
Eric Weinstein
Come on.
Jack
I've met a lot of characters from when I had the restaurant.
Judah
I have. I've heard these stories before.
Jack
From 7th 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 when you come to me with a hell of a problem.
Eric Weinstein
And then you get high handed on me.
Judah
Jack, I don't mean to be high handed. I haven't been sleeping nights. I'm irritable.
Jack
Okay, okay, okay. Forget I said anything.
Judah
Let me just get something straight here. Am I understanding you right? I mean, are you suggesting getting rid of her?
Jack
You won't be involved. But I'll need some cash.
Judah
What will they do?
Jack
What'll they do? They'll handle it.
Judah
I can't believe I'm talking about a human being. Jack. She's not an insect. You don't just step on her.
Jack
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 is isn't just gonna go away.
Judah
I can't do it. I can't think that way.
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. 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.
Joe Rogan
And blackmail.
Eric Weinstein
Blackmail is a lot like we're over indexed on. In my opinion. Again, who am I? I'm just a guest. But.
Joe Rogan
But this is this assumption.
Eric Weinstein
Well, I was very early saying he was a construct. When nobody would listen. 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, 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 would be talking to Woody Allen and saying, what did you mean by that scene?
Joe Rogan
Look, because you think that scene is directly connected to Woody Allen's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?
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. What is the mafia? We watch all these mafia pictures. Right. 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.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
You have to use muscle. So we use genteel. Like he says, she can be taught. You want me to talk to her? We can handle it. 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.
Joe Rogan
Okay, so his connection to scientists though, what was the purpose of that?
Eric Weinstein
We don't know.
Joe Rogan
But I keep saying, what's your assumption?
Eric Weinstein
My assumption is that he was a clearinghouse, that somebody set him up at fair expense. I'm going to 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 multi billionaire. 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 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 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 confused with a sex scandal and a blackmail operation. We're all sort of taking the bait.
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 or some high end scientist guy, they don't have Access to this. They probably never been with a beautiful woman in their life. All of a sudden they're having a good job. I'm not talking about you, bitch.
Eric Weinstein
No, I'm not talking about me either.
Joe Rogan
I'm sure you're fine.
Eric Weinstein
Ain't talking about love.
Joe Rogan
Let's. But let's be realistic. Most these guys aren't. They're not hot, right. And then all of a sudden they're around tens who are giving them back massages and drugs are being used and there's this feeling of anonymity, of safety. You can get away with this. Everybody else is doing it. It's been going on for decades. It's fine. This is the place you go and it's fun and they look forward to it. And they probably also do have intellectual discussions because you are surrounded by who
Eric Weinstein
wouldn't want in, Right? Right.
Joe Rogan
And so that's how he ropes you in.
Eric Weinstein
That's right.
Joe Rogan
So what is his why scientists and what would be the benefit of having access to these scientists and having this place on Zorro Ranch and being able to talk to these people?
Eric Weinstein
Think about it from the perspective of who is doing the constructing rather than the constructed. So he's the construct.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
He's an incompetent. He just lied to Steve Bannon. You see him touch his face, classic tell of lying.
Joe Rogan
Touching your face is a classic tell of lie.
Eric Weinstein
If you looked at what he just did the way he did, answering the question 100%.
Joe Rogan
So he's lying about the information or he's lying about his knowledge?
Eric Weinstein
Yes, he's lying about his death. Depth of knowledge. So how did I know he was a construct in part? One of the things like they're dumb tells that we give away. One of his was he was supposed to be a currency trader. And when we 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. So in other words, if I do a euro trade, it's really a dollar euro trade and you and I are going to trade dollars for euros and we agree to do it in two days time. And then if you want to keep the position on, you exchange that contract for a contract that will follow to erase that contract and form a new contract which pushes it out two days. You call that rolling things over?
Joe Rogan
Okay.
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 currency trading would have known that. Or I forget whether he didn't know that that trading pounds for dollars is called cable in the business. So there were just dumb tells that he didn't know about foreign exchange. So he's claiming to be an FX hedge fund manager to me. And there were stupid tells like that. And then he knows way too much about my exactly particular specialty in mathematics. Like the number of people could come from would be five or fewer. 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 have been, you know, 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 Cyberguitten 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 met him through Jess Staley, who was at JP Morgan. 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. 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 when I got married, the rabbi came from Harvard Hillel, which was a building now called Rosofsky hall, which he put together with Les Wexner's money. 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.
Joe Rogan
Why do you think that is?
Eric Weinstein
Because we're interested in the exact same thing.
Joe Rogan
And what is that?
Eric Weinstein
The most powerful stuff in the universe.
Joe Rogan
Why is he interested in that if he doesn't know the science?
Eric Weinstein
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 evolutionary theory. I care about mathematics that goes like geometry, like the geometry of elliptic curves, but really more in differential geometry. I care about physics every time that I care. And I care about 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, 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.
Joe Rogan
Meeting in your offices meaning he went to your office and met with who?
Eric Weinstein
With Peter. That's in the records about you? No, I don't know. Hopefully not. I know that I'm in an email that he sends Peter late in the story, but I'm not going to discuss specifics. But no, I was telling Peter not to deal with him and Peter thought I was overblowing the danger. He scared me because I know what element he came from that was not a refined person. That was a scary, scary person. That was a person who came, you know, like the Hesch character on the Sopranos or Mo Green in the Godfather. That's that element.
Joe Rogan
And you recognize that immediately.
Eric Weinstein
That was my point in bringing up crimes and misdemeanors. It's not like I don't know people.
Joe Rogan
I understand all this, but what do you think his purpose was? 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.
Eric Weinstein
Can I get another drink?
Joe Rogan
Absolutely.
Eric Weinstein
Thank you.
Jamie
Sir, can I share this article with you?
Joe Rogan
Please do. Okay.
Jamie
This was the one I just pulled up a second ago.
Eric Weinstein
If we could get another ice cube too, that would be great.
Jamie
Watch this.
Joe Rogan
Jeff can get us an ice cube, please.
Jamie
I would just. Down here. This kind of. This is a long article. I believe this. Most of this comes from the Epstein files that came out on the DOJ's website. This the woman who wrote this, she's a former Boston Globe and New York Times reporter, also LA Times. The summary here is what I was kind of getting at because it kind of. It's two or three paragraphs, but it explains a lot of what you're asking here.
Joe Rogan
Standard framing of Jeffrey Epstein as a Mossad asset is well supported. Robert Maxwell Glenn's father sold Israel backdoored Promise software to Sandia national laboratories. In 1980, his eldest daughter, Christine Maxwell built the FBI's Post 911 Counterterrorism Data Warehouse through her company Chiliad. Isabel Maxwell, Christine's twin sister, co founded Calm touch with Israel Unit 88200 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 Zoro 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 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 the Epstein died or didn't in its custody.
Jamie
Bill Barr and his father.
Joe Rogan
So that's referring to 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.
Eric Weinstein
Hmm. So this is what I've been trying to say all along. The only country that I'm absolutely positive is behind Jeffrey Epstein is us. You can't operate here. Look, right now we are in the middle of the endless anti Semitic Christmas just goes on forever. And you can you look at Jeffrey Epstein. I have no question he was directly connected to Israel. You know, but first and foremost I believe that he. And 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. 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 becomes deniable. You know, so like there's a concept of knock, non official cover. You know, if you say somebody you know is a knock and you guess the wrong distinction, they can say no, he wasn't. Was he an asset? I'm sure that has a technical meaning. You don't mean it technically. You mean was he in any way affiliated with the intelligence community? And it's not just the intelligence community. One of the ways that the intelligence community functions 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 we give them a free pass all the time. No, those are the guys who do the wet work. That's a paramilitary organization.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Eric Weinstein
So my claim is that Epstein is a major piece of structure having nothing to do with the actor that they hired.
Joe Rogan
Okay, so you think Epstein is essentially just a construct figurehead of an intelligence gathering organization? No, no.
Eric Weinstein
Epstein is a construct. First. First of all. Second of all, there is an intelligence part of the intelligence community, and there's a covert operations part of the intelligence community.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
Covert operations is not intelligence. I know. It's under that roof. That is totally wrong.
Joe Rogan
Got it.
Eric Weinstein
Right.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
So if you want bad things to happen to somebody, you don't call intelligence, because that's just human intelligence or signals intelligence or whatever you're not going to call a cryptographer to make a problem go away. Right.
Joe Rogan
What does this have to do with the science community?
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 setting. Like, you have to be honest about the fact that we're badly configured.
Joe Rogan
What do you mean by that?
Eric Weinstein
We didn't know how deadly physics was when Rutherford in 1911 said that there's a neutron. Nobody. I'm sure nobody said to him, oh, my God, you've ended the plan. 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.
Joe Rogan
And a quick timeline, too, if you stop and think about that.
Eric Weinstein
41 years.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
So literally, yeah, 41 years. So my claim is that we are walking around right now with all of these extremely deadly ninja 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 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 DEVGRU. You're SEAL Team 6 of the Human Mind. You're Delta. And most of the time, you're going to teach classes. It's like Indiana Jones, an archaeologist with a bow tie, and then he's running around with a whip and killing people and. Right, 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.
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.
Eric Weinstein
Boom, vroom and zoom. And that changed the economy. It changes the ability to compute. 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 is 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, the Indians are some of the most aggressive string theorists on Earth. And my question is, do we import them in such large numbers so that they'll go home and be ineffectual?
Joe Rogan
That's crazy. So that's a real possibility.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
That string theory exists as a distraction.
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?
Joe Rogan
Not so good.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
I would imagine in a free thinking world.
Eric Weinstein
Not in a free thinking world. I would say, Ed Whitten, you're full of shit. Who talks like that? 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?
Joe Rogan
Sir, I want to bring you to one of the weirdest theories that you have. All right, 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.
Eric Weinstein
Suny, Stony Brooks, Mathematics Department and Physics Department.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
This is a weird one because it's attached to a hedge fund that does Bernie Madoff type numbers.
Eric Weinstein
Bernie Madoff is a loser piker, Joe. Bernie Madoff was regular. And that's why they called him the Jewish T Bill.
Joe Rogan
T bill? Yeah, it's a T bill.
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 lost. There were like almost no down months. Renaissance Technologies is like, like. No, no, no. Hold my beer. We're just going to make numbers like nobody's ever made in human history. There's nobody in second or third place relative to Renaissance Technology Medallion fund.
Joe Rogan
And how is it connected to this university? And what do you think is going on up there? One, I don't know, but something weird.
Eric Weinstein
It's weird as hell. 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 you can't swing a cat in my world without hitting a genius. So he was great, but he wasn't that much smarter than every other genius at that level. So I would say top hundred minds in mathematics and physics, clearly better than that. Jim started off working for the dia, the Defense Intelligence Unit. Supposedly quit out of outrage over Vietnam. Becomes the super young chairman of the SUNY Stony Brook Mathematics Department. Holds a lunch 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 specialty, and C.N. yang's 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 is his name? James Axe. Not Keating. 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 going to hire financial experts. We're only going to hire math physics people. So we're going to hire geometers, we're going to hire particle theorists, general relativists, and machine learning people who came up with this story? Do you buy this story? This is so strange because 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? You'd look for indirect evidence. Jamie, can you call up an article called forbidden city from 1944 by a guy named, unfortunately, Jack Raper? R, A P, G, R. Change your name, bro. I know, right?
Joe Rogan
Just call yourself rapper, add a P or something.
Eric Weinstein
So in 1944, the craziest thing in the. What?
Joe Rogan
G? Graper.
Eric Weinstein
Right, exactly.
Joe Rogan
There it is.
Eric Weinstein
Okay, so this article appeared Monday, March 13, 1944, Santa Fe, N.M. the story of a secret city with a mayor who is the second Einstein working on a doomsday weapon where nothing leaks.
Joe Rogan
And this is from what year?
Eric Weinstein
1944. Okay, 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. Really, dude? How can we not know this? Joe? Wow.
Joe Rogan
And it's all about Oppenheimer. Residents must stay. Dr. Oppenheimer is a Harvard graduate, attended Cambridge, receives a PhD from Gottingham University in Germany. Germany. 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.
Eric Weinstein
Uncle Sam has placed the city in charge of two men, the men who command the soldiers. I can't read it.
Jamie
See that? The garbage and rubbish are collected, the streets kept up, the electric light and plant and the waterworks functioning and all other 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, called the second Einstein by the newspapers of the West Coast.
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 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 just going to 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. I'm telling you, Renaissance Technologies doesn't make sense.
Joe Rogan
So these different. What?
Jamie
Another widespread belief is that he's developing ordnance 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 hurt.
Eric Weinstein
Oh, that Jack Raper with his overactive imagination. The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they say the darndest things. Joe.
Joe Rogan
Okay, so. So what do you think they're working on, these people at this upstate New York University?
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.
Joe Rogan
Okay. How so?
Eric Weinstein
I don't know. He won't meet with me. Well, it's okay.
Joe Rogan
Maybe because you call him a pussy.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, no, but maybe he's busy.
Joe Rogan
Maybe he's trying to make chicks pregnant.
Eric Weinstein
No, something he does to with recreation. Elon's a genius. And Elon is trying to. To replace scientists with Grok. And one of the things that I was on an Indian podcast called, the guy's name is Beer Biceps Guy. Ranveer. He's the Joe Rogan of India. And what's his name? Ranveer Alabadia. Can you find him?
Joe Rogan
Shout out to Ron Veer.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah, so Ron Veer is a friend of mine in Versova. And I went on his podcast and I. Before SpaceX and Xai merged, 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, because they're weak. So he's building his own scientist from when. When we were strong. He's going to 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 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.
Joe Rogan
So this implies some sort of a new propulsion system.
Eric Weinstein
This implies new science. Stop thinking technology. There's no way that you can't engineer your way out of a science problem. You have to science your way out of it.
Joe Rogan
What would be that science?
Eric Weinstein
Post Einstein, post relativity. That's what I do.
Joe Rogan
And how would that apply to us leaving the solar system?
Eric Weinstein
We don't live in space time. Space time has a speed limit.
Joe Rogan
Explain that.
Eric Weinstein
If you can only go the speed of light at your best and you can't even get anywhere close to that, how are you gonna get to something four years light years away in a fantasy world by the time you go and come back? Even assuming all no everybody be doing 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 going to cost you eight years to go and come back.
Jack
Right?
Eric Weinstein
Okay, I don't want to do that. If I'm going to explore the cosmos, I don't want to use, I don't want to live in space.
Joe Rogan
So what are the alternatives?
Eric Weinstein
The Observers, the successor to space time, I'm happy to predict this on your show will be named the Observers, which is a combination of, of not just using a four dimensional space time manifold, but a 14 and a four dimensional space simultaneously. This was what I was talking about at the university yesterday.
Joe Rogan
And how would that like when you say the difference between science and technology, how would that science be applied?
Eric Weinstein
If we look at the surface of this table, I can't do this to
Joe Rogan
it, can't spread it apart, move it.
Eric Weinstein
It's called pinch to zoom. 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. Your phone, Right? So imagine that this is space time, okay. And this is the Observers. So if I want to go to a distant star, there's no way I'm going to just go really fast, right? That's dumb. And I need an energy source and I need to do things that we can't normally do. You have to jailbreak space time. If Einstein is in force, we all die. If we go beyond Einstein, some of us will live and some of us will die.
Joe Rogan
And what would be the energy that you would need in order to do this?
Eric Weinstein
So how do you unlock this one is maybe it's not that energetic to do these things. Energy is 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 multi dimensional. The only dimension that has an ordering is one dimension. So in other words, if I say to you, 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. Okay, time is like that in one dimension. There's an arrow, there's an ordering. We call it. It's like a well ordered set or something. In two dimensions, all bets are off. And two and higher, the number of dimensions in total is going to 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 time has multiple dimensions, you can talk about multiple forms of energy just the way you can talk about 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 space time. 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.
Joe Rogan
Haha.
Eric Weinstein
Just like Forbidden City was. 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? What a loon, that guy. What an idiot. Ha ha. That's what's going on, Joe.
Joe Rogan
So how do you think that technology could be applied to these ideas in order to create some mode of travel?
Eric Weinstein
Pinch to zooms, Joe.
Joe Rogan
Right, but how, how would that be done?
Eric Weinstein
So right now we're in a four dimensional world, call that flatland. Okay, imagine that there are ten perpendicular dimensions called symmetric two tensors. Four of those are spatial directions and six of them temporal. Or four of them are temporal and six of them spatial. I can't tell you one of those two.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
But they're additionally either four 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 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 star small, so I can go with reasonable speed
Joe Rogan
or instantaneously.
Eric Weinstein
I don't need it instantaneously. If I have something four light years away and I can make it 100ft away, I can walk 100ft easily enough. I can push something. So the idea is if I can gain access to the fiber, the distance becomes relatively immaterial.
Joe Rogan
So if you think that these physicists are working on this and all these.
Eric Weinstein
No, I didn't say that. I think that. I'm saying if anybody is working on this, one of two things is happening. Either we have become the stupidest nation on earth, destroying our own ability to do physical. We gave away the store. We're morons. That's possible. Or we're doing it in private.
Joe Rogan
And you feel like it's possible to hide all this from the general public.
Eric Weinstein
Well, my point is, you're not going to hide it. 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. 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, despite the fact that you have complete blue chip credibility. How would you organize a secret team to get control of our adversaries, the world and the ability to traverse the cosmos? I sure as shit wouldn't build a chemical rocket company. That's dumb. But I do it as cover. And I sure as shit wouldn't do things in an Open University department. Here's what I 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.
Joe Rogan
God wouldn't you love to have access to what they're doing.
Eric Weinstein
No, because I'm gonna do it myself.
Joe Rogan
How are you gonna do that?
Eric Weinstein
Because I know. I know really smart people, Joe.
Joe Rogan
Don't you need, like, insane amounts of money in a laboratory somewhere?
Eric Weinstein
You know, it's funny. Like, Sam Altman is racing. Dario Amadai is racing Elon Musk for super intelligence. So I asked myself, if you could have premium subscriptions to Grok Gemini Xai. Sorry, Grok, Gemini, Claude, all of them. Or you could have Edward Frankel's home phone number, which would you choose? I choose Ed Frankel's home phone number. So I get to call Ed Frankel whenever I want to. That's smart. Look, 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.
Joe Rogan
Is that literally what you're trying to do?
Eric Weinstein
Oh, yeah.
Joe Rogan
And how are you doing it?
Jack
I don't know.
Eric Weinstein
I stayed with Ed for five days in Berkeley. I got him and another colleague who's also terrifying. I'm using Soviets, Joe. Ex Soviets.
Joe Rogan
Okay?
Eric Weinstein
Because those guys haven't. Haven't lost the magic. And, you know, I had Frankel and a guy named Misha Kapronov come down for five days to kick the shit out of my theory. It was crazy. Absolutely crazy. We're drinking vodka at, like, 10:00am, having insane meals, and just working our asses off the way we're supposed to. How'd it go? Amazing.
Joe Rogan
What'd they think about your theory so far?
Eric Weinstein
All systems go, Joe. Okay, so in other words, the story. Can we just pull up? I just want to do this 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.
Joe Rogan
No problem.
Eric Weinstein
Yeah. Love you.
Joe Rogan
Love you, too. What is it? Let's go to it real quick.
Eric Weinstein
So, first of all, I want to show off the header. Can we go up to the top of the header before we do that? Those two formulas, the bottom1 says CFJ, C is Sean Carroll. The middle F is Fields, and J is Roman Jakiev, a professor at mit. Sean Carroll's second most cited paper 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 parenthesis P on the bottom line, not the second from the bottom is Sean's relativity violating 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 fully. Well, this portrayal of the situation is nearly constant for reasons that completely elude me.
Jamie
Sean, the good news is I have read Eric's paper. Here it is.
Joe Rogan
I actually have it here. Right here.
Jamie
First thing you gotta do is make sure that your theory makes contact with modern physics as it is understood.
Joe Rogan
If you have a new paper out,
Jamie
businesses are gonna look at it. They're gonna look for, you know, where's Lagrangian?
Joe Rogan
So this is for people that are just listening. This is showing that you have Lagrangians in your.
Eric Weinstein
These showing Sean Carroll lying.
Joe Rogan
Right. Did you. Did you. Their interactions are in there as well. But you caught. Did you call him out on this, on the show?
Eric Weinstein
I couldn't believe that he'd do this.
Joe Rogan
So you didn't say anything?
Eric Weinstein
I'm stunned.
Joe Rogan
Proton stability, that's in there as well. So essentially, he's lying to make it seem like your theory doesn't work when you have all the things he's saying.
Eric Weinstein
Your theory doesn't have one of two lies. We don't know which lie.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
There's a lie that says, I read your paper. I'm willing to entertain the fact that he's lying that he read my paper.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
And I'm willing to entertain the fact that he's lying that he read my paper and he's going to deny that these things are in there. But he's. What? I don't know which lie he's telling. Right.
Joe Rogan
One of them's a lie.
Eric Weinstein
One of them.
Joe Rogan
Either he lied saying he read your paper, or he lied saying he definitely lied, saying those things aren't in there because he did say those things aren't in there. That's a lie.
Eric Weinstein
Right. He just says there's none of that. None of that, none of that. Okay, so my claim is, how didn't you respond?
Joe Rogan
Like, right there, Joe, what am I just.
Eric Weinstein
Let's just. One more second. I'm in a world that makes absolutely no sense, and I don't want to 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.
Joe Rogan
Okay. I Understand that?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
When he's saying, I don't know what to do, you just didn't know what to do in the morning.
Eric Weinstein
I mean, what do I want? Do I want a legal battle? I've got a defense contractor. One of the world's largest companies is a defense contractor which has a campaign against me for reasons I don't understand. Just no clue why anyone would say, you don't have a Lagrangian and so
Joe Rogan
he's attached to a defense contractor.
Eric Weinstein
No, no, no. But there's a. There's a. By virtue of the fact that the conspiracy against me, and I literally mean technically, a conspiracy, is organized through these Discord servers. And 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 published on the archive, which is where physicists share their stuff. So the engineer will say, how about you do a talk at Google? Sabina Hassenfelder. And Sabina Hassenfelder will come to Google and she'll be given her thing if he will be allowed to post an anti Eric screed or paper or whatever you want to call it, against me. So what I'm trying to say is I'm acting as Jack Raper in some way.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
I'm doing stuff and saying stuff like, Epstein is a construct. 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 we have the particles that we do is that there's a 10 dimensional fiber in 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 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 because 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, 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.
Joe Rogan
I want to bring you back to the technology that's involved. So when we're talking about this program that may or may not exist, right. And we're talking about UAPs, for lack of a better term, do you think that these are connected and do you think that.
Eric Weinstein
Yes.
Joe Rogan
So one, one of the things that I've suspected, and I'm not the only one, many people 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.
Eric Weinstein
That's right.
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.
Eric Weinstein
Right?
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I mean, this is what Ryan Graves experience. 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?
Eric Weinstein
Right. Because they know.
Joe Rogan
Because this might be ours.
Eric Weinstein
So some of this is ours.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
Some of this is foreign nations and some of this is not understood. That's what I believe.
Joe Rogan
Okay. So some of these things, there's things they're seeing is a part of some undisclosed program.
Eric Weinstein
I believe that, for example, some of this is not craft, but the ability to create the illusion of craft.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
Some of this, I believe, is craft.
Joe Rogan
So the ability to create like a hologram.
Eric Weinstein
I don't know, like a hologram, Like.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, projected plasma. That's right. Okay. Which we know they can do. So we've seen them, we've shown videos,
Eric Weinstein
we've seen limited versions of this. Imagine that those things scale up.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Eric Weinstein
Okay. If there were no aliens or craft, I would want to create a program. If I was in the disinformation business, I would want to create one of these things.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Eric Weinstein
Because there's a God shaped hole in all of our souls and minds, and so aliens and spacecraft fill that hole.
Joe Rogan
Right?
Eric Weinstein
So there's like a chop.
Joe Rogan
It's God for atheists.
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 this, 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 lead in aircraft carrier groups is not what we thought it was. So we can get to Iran in a second, if you like. But what I believe is that 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 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 with very high probability.
Joe Rogan
And you think that's what San Antonio is about?
Eric Weinstein
San Antonio?
Joe Rogan
No, I'm sorry, El Paso?
Eric Weinstein
Yeah. I believe that El Paso is not about cartel drones. That's true.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
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 in El Paso to deal with cartel drones.
Joe Rogan
Right. So what were the experiences that people were reporting? And like what? Like what do you know about what happened in El Paso?
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. Okay, So 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. One group is putting our drones or something in the air.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Eric Weinstein
And another group is being told. How would you deal with this problem? We've lost control of our airspace, but something is going on in New Mexico.
Joe Rogan
What was the descriptions of these drones? What does it say? Airspace. At the center of the brief but highly publicized incident, February 11, 2026, FAA abruptly announced 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.
Eric Weinstein
It's. The story doesn't hang together.
Joe Rogan
That part doesn't hang together.
Eric Weinstein
Well, that's the thing.
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, Joe. But I don't know.
Eric Weinstein
You and I both have at least 105 IQs. These are like 65 IQ stories.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they. Well, the Mexican drone cartel one seems
Eric Weinstein
like a dopey narrative, but maybe there are actually Mexican drone drones.
Joe Rogan
I'm sure the cartels have drones.
Eric Weinstein
Cartels have drones. And we're going to use the fact that El Paso is close to White City.
Joe Rogan
But what was the reported drone activity? Do you know anything about it? Like what? What supposedly? Yeah.
Eric Weinstein
Not going to say. Ooh, no.
Judah
Mysterious.
Eric Weinstein
Hardly being mysterious. I'm saying as much as I can. I understand, but here's the thing.
Jack
Joking around.
Joe Rogan
Okay, But I mean, I'd like to know, like, what?
Eric Weinstein
Right. But I'm.
Joe Rogan
Tell me later.
Eric Weinstein
No, no, it's not like that. Look. Oh, fuck you both.
Joe Rogan
Let's play that awesome music again.
Jamie
There's a video from the AP put out just four days ago that says there is a cartel attacking lots of people.
Joe Rogan
Well, I'm sure there's cartel drones.
Eric Weinstein
What I'm trying to say. Every single person who knows how to keep a secret knows how to use the truth to hide a lie.
Joe Rogan
Right? Of course. And that's always been done.
Eric Weinstein
So the thing that I'm doing is 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 can't stand it. So I'm going to. With all 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 to my dying day. And so I'm not going to say what I know.
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.
Eric Weinstein
Whatever, okay?
Joe Rogan
Who knows?
Eric Weinstein
Bullshit.
Joe Rogan
As many stories as you could spin, right? Throw them all out there, right? Throw a bunch of them.
Eric Weinstein
Look, our press was a 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 Severodes 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 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 MF's. 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.
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 was what the shutdown was.
Eric Weinstein
I believe that somebody may have leapfrogged us as they have leapfrogged us in drone technology,
Joe Rogan
so they may have leapfrogged us in some propulsion technology.
Eric Weinstein
I believe that there is a nation in Asia, China, which puts on amazing drone shows and buys up our academics who aren't being paid because we're sitting around bitching, 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 created your economy, you stupid bitches. We're the baddest of the bad. 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. I have no words for. Also the new crop of tech billionaires who were bitten by Covid.
Joe Rogan
What do you mean by that?
Eric Weinstein
Well, they think that Anthony Fauci was a scientist, and so they believed in science before Fauci, and now they don't believe in science. I don't understand what you're saying. Oh, my God.
Joe Rogan
I literally don't understand what you're saying.
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 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 Daszek are menaces to the credit of science. The credit rating of science went into the toilet with Silicon Valley, and a new idea was born, which is that the engineer is everything. The scientist is nothing. Everything should be a for profit, not a nonprofit. If artificial intelligence should replace our best people, I mean, this is the spell that many of our. 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 Mark say? What does Elon say? Everybody who's talking their book is now our public intellectuals. And quite honestly, they're all brilliant, but they're all highly motivated.
Joe Rogan
That's fact.
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 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.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's not just private chats.
Eric Weinstein
Well, what is it?
Joe Rogan
I think they attach monetary gain to success and above and beyond needs, so it becomes a way of measuring success. They look at numbers above and beyond everything else.
Eric Weinstein
My craziest, brilliant friend, who's completely insane is a guy named Michael Vassar. Michael Vassar 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 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 Amadai was, like, a really important person. I needed to pay attention to him when I. He was just some guy that I knew. 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 cherry topping going on top of it. Quite honestly, we're a different game. We're a different species. You know that song, One Night in Bangkok? It came from a musical about chess. And he says in the lyrics to that song, which we don't remember, he says, I'd have something like, I 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 Fisher do to Spassky? 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. I love these guys. They're my friends.
Joe Rogan
I think you're right.
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, Bill Gates, you know, is he just buying farmland for Right to Be? He wants to make sure that we have a steady supply of food, of something. We've got to stop the addiction to billionaires as the only people we trust, because at least they're rich.
Joe Rogan
Let's end it there. I gotta wrap this up, but I appreciate you very much. This is very good. Yeah, yeah, it was a good one.
Eric Weinstein
Great seeing you, Joe.
Joe Rogan
Great seeing you too. And I think you're. The last point is that should resonate with a lot of people instead, right?
Eric Weinstein
Look forward to seeing you soon.
Joe Rogan
Maybe we'll go to another planet together.
Eric Weinstein
Love it.
Joe Rogan
Bye, everybody.
This episode features mathematician and thinker Eric Weinstein in a wide-ranging, unfiltered discussion with Joe Rogan. The conversation explores the state of theoretical physics, institutional gatekeeping, the nature of scientific innovation, missing scientists, the suppression of dissent in academia, the changing landscape of music and culture, technological secrets, and the implications of government and intelligence agency involvement in scientific discovery, particularly through the lens of figures like Jeffrey Epstein. The tone is candid, critical of conventional narratives, and deeply questioning of power structures in science and society.
Eric and Joe present a dire but inspiring call to protect scientific curiosity, openness, and institutional courage. They warn that current power structures—academic, economic, political—are hampering genuine discovery and may be hiding world-changing scientific developments in plain sight. The episode is a wide-ranging meditation on how innovation dies, and how rare “mutant mutineers” remain our only hope for a leap into the unknown.