Read the full transcript of mathematician and former Managing Director of Thiel Capital Eric Weinstein’s interview on The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett podcast episode titled “Jeffrey Epstein Was A Front! The Collapse Has Already Started!” July 14, 2025.
The Current State of Global Tensions
STEVEN BARTLETT: Eric, you are a particularly captivating individual for the very fact that you grace so many different intellectual subjects as we sit here now having this conversation. I want to know what subjects at this moment in time are occupying most of your thoughts and most of your thinking? We have a strong listenership here, and I think the responsibility that I have meeting someone like you is to understand what we should be talking about.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So top of mind for me at the moment is tropical fruit and physics. I’m not kidding.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Tropical fruit and physics.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. But that’s just because you’re catching me on a particular day. And my local 99 Ranch Market ran out of rambutan, which I’m addicted to. No, I have serious issues with tropical fruit. I’m completely obsessed by it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What about this week? What’s been occupying most of your thoughts this week?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, the apocalypse and physics.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why’d you say the apocalypse? And what do you mean by the apocalypse?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, we’re becoming a nerd to the apocalypse. We just watched hypersonic missiles slam into a modern city on TV, and we’re watching one of the world’s most remarkable civilizations, the Persians, take direct hits from both Israel and the US. And I’m just beside myself.
I mean, this is incredibly dramatic if you think about just the idea of the Jews and the Persians are still here. And one of the things that I find really just painful is that I care about certain cultures that I know well more than others, and these are two of my absolute favorites.
The World in Conflict
STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s going on at this moment in time? Because it feels like there’s more conflict than there’s ever been. I don’t know whether that’s just a bias that I have at this moment, but whether I’m looking at the wrong social media algorithm. But it feels like the world is tense.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, you’re too young for the Cold War, so I don’t know how old you are.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 32.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. So you really missed. I grew up in a different world where things were tense because there were two players and it was more or less the US and the Soviets. And then we decided, one of the dumbest things we ever came up with, a very smart man came up with one of the dumbest ideas, which was “the end of history.”
And, you know, the post World War II order is here to stop us from using the technologies that came out of this. And you know, I talk about this a lot. There was a six month period between November of ’52 and April of ’53 where we unlocked first the power of the nucleus because we could fuse hydrogen.
And the other thing we were able to do was figure out the three dimensional structure of nucleic acid in the form of the double helix. And suddenly, in no time flat, we had access to the two most powerful levers humanity has ever had and perhaps ever will. And so we’re just not in a position to deal with this.
The Power of Modern Technology
STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean? Sorry, in terms of – you said we had access to the two most remarkable things.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, the hydrogen bomb is not something that has ever been used by anyone against an enemy. This is the first full scale test of a hydrogen device. If the reaction goes, we’re in the thermonuclear era.
STEVEN BARTLETT: 3, 2, 1.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So we’re awaiting its first use in war. We did use fission devices, but we didn’t use fusion devices. And they’re at completely different scales. So the Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only two situations in which a nuke has ever been used against a population, civilian or otherwise.
And we don’t know, for example, whether or not – I don’t know, at least Covid had its origins in a bioweapons program. So at some level we’re playing with levers and tools that are so powerful. Do you realize that the key ingredient that made Covid so unique was a four amino acid sequence inserted into spike protein? So that’s 12 nucleotides coding for four amino acids. Shut down planet Earth for a couple of years. That’s how powerful this is, you know, and there are very few things that have this kind of leverage.
In 2017, we had a discovery, a white paper called “Attention is All You Need.” And oddly, many of us dealing with AI and LLMs and talking that language don’t even realize there’s a paper that you can read that changed everything. It’s eight authors out of Google, I think. And that opened up AI.
Satoshi in 2008, 2009, with the solution to the distributed double spend problem, where you could effectively port conservation laws from the physical world into the digital world, giving us digital gold. But just as a beginning, these ideas that have such high leverage are making us powerful beyond any previous world, with no attendant increase in our wisdom, in our ability to use and wield these things.
And right now, you’re seeing the face where we’re unveiling, what does drone warfare look like in FPV?
STEVEN BARTLETT: What is FPV?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: First person, you know, where you’re looking through the lens of the drone as it slams into a personnel carrier. Maybe you’ve seen this on Telegram, where you’re just watching individuals being menaced by mechanical flying birds equipped to kill them.
So we didn’t know what drone warfare looked like.
You know, and by the way, they’re choosing, I think, to not inflict maximal damage. I don’t think that they could have gotten the body count a lot higher if they’d wanted to. They’re trying to speak the language of violence in a very measured fashion.
The End of an Era
STEVEN BARTLETT: So is this a particularly tense moment, or is it just the bias that I have because I’ve not been through these things before? Is there something different?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You’re looking – I can’t even believe the question. You’re looking at the end, man. This is the beginning. This is a slow rollout of a completely different world you’ve been in. We’ve all been in a completely artificially stagnant bubble for decades. My entire life up until now has been in a bubble. The only people who’ve seen real life are extremely old.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Who are those people that have seen real life?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, I would say people who went through the depression, World War II, you know, in China, people who went through Mao’s Great Leap Forward, but most of us have no idea of what, like, a real pandemic, like a Spanish flu or black plague is like. We don’t know what Poland went through, where they lost, I don’t know, 20, 25% of their population to war. Look at the statistics on the battle of Stalingrad. We don’t really understand. We’ve just – our whole life has been in a bubble.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You said, “I’m looking at the end.”
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. Remember all the talk about the singularity, like Ray Kurzweil? “We’re heading to the singularity.” What is the singularity going to be like? You’re in it. This is now. You’re looking at the disintegration of NATO. You’re looking at people who don’t know how to maintain the systems that were engineered by their great grandparents after World War II.
That order that, you know, you’re from the UK – if you think about how the UK woke up to the idea that they had built into their heads that “we are the masters of the world.” So you saw the beginning of the end of this concept of the British Empire. That moment is coming for the US and it may be that it’s coming for Israel, or it may be that it’s coming for Iran.
See, in 1967, the Israelis felt invincible in the Six Day War. And then in 1973, they had the Yom Kippur War. And all the people that they were priding themselves, having beaten these ferocious enemies that were arrayed against them, woke up on Yom Kippur in 1973 and bloodied the Israelis, and they surprised them.
So the Israelis underestimated their enemy, and that changed the entire character of the country. It went from being a triumphal state that felt that David could defeat Goliath to realizing that Goliath was quite powerful. And the same thing is going to happen here.
You saw the celebration that Trump had dealt this blow to the Iranian nuclear facilities. You watch the Persians come back. We’re starting to realize what the boundaries are, as people are more bold in trying things. Maybe Xi’s going to try to cross the Taiwan Strait, I don’t know. But the era of stasis, where very little happened over very long periods of time, is over.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think this is the start of escalation?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: This is the start of the undoing of the post World War II order. The idea that the post World War II order is still in place is astounding.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So what happens next?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We either scare the crap out of ourselves and come to our senses, or we don’t.
STEVEN BARTLETT: We scare the crap out of ourselves and come to our senses, or we don’t. And what does that look like, scaring the crap out of ourselves?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, I don’t know. How did you feel about the hypersonic missiles? Like, we started this, and I’m talking about tropical fruit because I’m trying to figure out whether I should buy a jackfruit and stink up my wife’s kitchen, you know? And on the other hand, I just saw hypersonic missiles slam into the buildings I was just in for meetings in Tel Aviv.
The Nuclear Reality
STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a nuclear threat that weirdly hangs over us. And I almost feel at some deep level, we all understand and feel that threat, that there’s these nine or ten countries around the world that have the ability to basically wipe out all of us at any moment. I feel like that’s almost within us all. That knowing is within us all.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I totally disagree.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. I think about nothing else sometimes, and I still don’t believe. I don’t believe it. There’s a difference between knowing something in your head and knowing something embodied.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. I don’t know if we were able to distinguish whether we know it in our head or whether it’s embodied unconsciously to the point that it’s changing how we act. Do you know what I mean? Because I’m now aware that there’s nine countries, and I’m also aware of that, really. It’s one individual’s decision as to whether those nuclear bombs were to fly. So there’s a part of me that’s – I don’t know, maybe in suspended disbelief or at a deeper level, feels an angst, but…
ERIC WEINSTEIN: But nobody knows what to do with it. And this is part of what Elon is all about, which is that I am convinced that everybody else needs to be talking about this much more, and I need to be talking about this much less. I talk about this all the time.
People are always – I want to survive more than anything else. There’s so many things that I love about this place, and I don’t like the idea that we’re all trapped here with one atmosphere, with nine individuals, if you like, who could all wake up on the wrong side of the bed and say, “today’s the day.”
Part of what I’m so exercised about with respect to the apocalypse is how many things I want to save. This city just went up in flames. It focuses the mind. How many things can I save in one carload if I know that the police are not going to let me come back to my home? Do you save photos? Do you save musical instruments? Do you save financial records? What is it that you save? It was a very focusing question. We’re already over it. We can’t even remember the fires on that point.
The Search for Meaning
STEVEN BARTLETT: Of the things that give us meaning in our lives. Where do you think we’re at as a society in terms of our feelings of meaning and purpose and connectedness to maybe something transcendent or… I was mulling over this idea the other day. I actually posted it on my LinkedIn page, of all places.
I said that I think we need to ladder up to things to feel like anchored and content in life, we start with ourselves and we ladder up to family, then community, then maybe a mission or a purpose, and then maybe to something transcendent. And it feels like because of the design of our lives and the optimization of it, we’re increasingly laddering up to just ourselves.
I think even in my life, I’m wondering whether there’s, like a layer missing, which is the religious layer or a spiritual layer.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Do you pray?
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a good question.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You’ll come over Friday night and pray with us?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’d say I do pray.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That’s pretty weak.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But it’s not the way that I see prayer in movies and stuff.
The Role of Religion and Belief
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So that’s the thing. We have this idea that somebody puts their hands together and they just believe. Yeah, but a lot of time when you’re praying, you don’t really believe. You’re not sure that you’re doing anything sensible. You feel ridiculous. And that’s true even if you’re a believer.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think we need religion?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, said the atheist.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you an atheist?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, but I take religion super seriously. I don’t think we’re meant to live without it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s an interesting conundrum.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t think so. Everybody gets hung up on it. I sort of wonder what their problem is.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Please explain. So you believe that we aren’t meant to live without religion. We’re meant to be orientated by something transcendent, but you don’t believe that it’s real?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think that. You know, there’s this great trick that I learned when I was scuba diving, which is that your need to breathe is triggered by the buildup of CO2 in your lungs. And there are all sorts of things you can do to decrease your need to breathe. One is you can hyperventilate and you can get rid of all of the CO2 that’s residual. You can also inure your lungs to CO2 by smoking. You can also breathe out the precious air that your instincts tell you to hold in.
You can do all these things, and then you can go super deep. You can learn how to equalize the pressure in your ears by holding your nose in these techniques. And suddenly you’re far deeper than you’ve ever been. And you’re exploring the rocks and the fishes, and there’s a turtle and there’s an eel, and you get a message you’re out of air. And you look up and you see I am really far from the surface. This is terrifying.
That’s what happens when you unhook the proximate, which is air hunger from the ultimate, which is the need to breathe. So thirst is proximate to dehydration. Hunger is proximate to the need for nourishment. In part, religion and prayer is there to keep us from unhooking all of these protective things and just turning life into a hoot.
You can have a hoot without religion, but if everybody has a hoot, the whole society collapses. At some point, I think a president of the United States may have said that people who defend this country were suckers. Something like that. And I thought, “God damn you.” Maybe it’s true even. But how many families have received a flag draped coffin and felt pride like “we lost something precious? But we are part of the American tapestry in a way that few families can be.”
And when we outsmart ourselves, when we unhook all of these things, you know, every single young woman has an idea about what the opportunity cost of not going on OnlyFans is. Before, we didn’t know what the opportunity cost. There was no measurement of it. We’re becoming too sophisticated. We’ve got too much information. We’re deranging ourselves. We’re having a blast. And we’re completely undoing all of the superstructure of the world.
The number of people who don’t have children or want children. My kids make fun of me. I just go around telling people to make babies. And it’s the most normal thing in the world. I meet parents who don’t harass their own children to get married and have families. Like, what are you doing?
The Collapse of Superstructures
STEVEN BARTLETT: The superstructures of the world.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah.
STEVEN BARTLETT: One being family.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. Traditions.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Things that ground that connect you to.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what are the symptoms of that? Unhooking from the superstructures of the world.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: How much do you care about things? How much do you care about people saying your name four generations out?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Me?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re probably asking the wrong person. Because I just don’t think legacy matters. Because I’m going to be dead.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That’s right. But you’re. I’m asking all of you who believe that.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That it’s so sad, it is so weird that no one cares about their legacy because they don’t see a future. So what I’m trying to say is I’m desperate to get you a future so that you care what needs to.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Happen to get me a future.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Something remarkable. Something utterly remarkable. Because it’s not going that way. And that’s what the physics part is. I talk about physics constantly. Physics is the only thing that’s going to get your future.
The Physics of Survival
STEVEN BARTLETT: How?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, right now the big problem is that we share one atmosphere.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So everything that can. All the really bad things, whether it’s pathogens, like imagine something COVID like, but far worse, or climate or radiation, all of these things don’t know anything about borders. To an extent. There’s a southern and a northern hemisphere that are separate, but even that’s not a great border. So we can draw all the borders on land that we want, but we still have basically one or two atmospheres, and I would really say one. And we’ve now gotten powerful enough to really screw it up.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And so through nukes or through carbon.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Emissions, all three of those things. Right. Everything that you care about is on one sphere with one atmosphere. And I think Elon is 100% right. We got to get to another sphere. I can’t believe that he’s focused on Mars. I mean, sure, focus on the moon, focus on Mars, focus on chemical rockets, but throw a couple billion towards physics, for God’s sakes, and let us get it. Let us get serious about exploring the cosmos.
This is our womb. This is not our home. You know the song “Closing Time”?
STEVEN BARTLETT: No, I don’t.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: “Closing Time.” “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” I think it’s about birth. Yeah, it’s time to be born. You can’t stay here. This is completely obvious to me and I am the only person who talks this way. And so I sound like a lunatic and I get tired of it. But there real reason, you know, it’s about the mangoes, it’s about the rambutan, it’s about the music, it’s about all the things that I love.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So why would you want to leave?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I want to take it with us. And I want to see what else is out there and I want to meet people.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why don’t you just stay here and fix this planet?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Because you can’t. The odds of fixing one sphere for a permanent future. You’ve already talked about it. You don’t care about the future.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t have children yet either, so I don’t. Yeah, I don’t have that, but I.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: My children don’t have children and their children don’t have children. And I care about them and they’re not even here.
The Unraveling World Order
STEVEN BARTLETT: We’ve got some time left here, though.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, we did. If you looked what’s happened in the last month, it’s coming undone. Pakistan and India.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you really think this is the start of the end?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I. I have no idea where I am. Of course it is. The World War II order was keeping. It’s like control rods keeping the world from going super critical.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Can’t we just put the rods back together?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Have you looked at who we had an election with? Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris in the US Tell me what’s going on in the UK what are we doing in the mayoral race for New York? I don’t know if you’re watching what I’m watching. Look at the mess that’s going on in Gaza. Russia is nuclear. Israel is presumably nuclear. Pakistan and India are nuclear. The US Is nuclear. Iran is almost nuclear. China is pissed off about Iran because it was trying to make a play through the region. North Korea is watching. Oh, and look at the UK in turmoil. UK is a very nuclear country, to say nothing of France. This is not going to go well, by the way.
Look at how much is happening with AI. Right? Everything was really stagnant. So I have this famous challenge that I give people, which is go into a room and subtract the screens and forget about style. How do you know you’re not in 1973? Drones are the beginning. Imagine I needed a refill on my coffee and you did something, and a drone brought me a coffee. To not interrupt the flow, we’d know we weren’t in 73. But in general, drones aren’t a big part of our lives. These robots. I’ve never seen a humanoid robot actually doing anything other than on YouTube where it’s like doing the mashed potato.
So in general, yeah, things were just really stagnant for a really long time. And during that period of stagnation, we had this crazy narrative, which is like “the dizzying pace of change is making it almost impossible to keep up” while things were incredibly stagnant. And so it just shows you sort of this weird way in which our minds can be programmed to completely ignore what we’re experiencing.
The Christian Substrate
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there not chance that we’ll just continue to.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay, if you want to go with chance. Look, until you’re worried about your great, great grandchildren, I don’t want to have this conversation with you. I want you to start caring about that. I want you to go to church. You’re heir to a great tradition. One of the most important traditions in the world has to be Christianity, because both Judaism and Islam are screwed up over the law or legal traditions. Christianity, not so much. I think first time somebody crystallized that for me was Sam Harris. That’s a really important point.
But you’re heir to an incredibly powerful and important tradition. And if we don’t have a Christian substrate, we’re in real trouble because all of our society is based on an assumption of a Christian substrate.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re advising me to be Christian in tradition, but not necessarily in belief.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, this is the thing. You’re alienated because you think that you have to be a believer in order to go in. Otherwise you’re faking it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Get over yourself. That’s not how it works.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s true. That’s me. Just me being honest. I do think that if I went to a church and I sung and I prayed and stuff and I didn’t believe, I would. That I’d be like. It’d be fake.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay. Do you imagine that all those people who go to church are just sitting there 100% sure that there’s a Jesus to pray to? Do you know any Christians?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. They’re not like that. They sneak off and do bad things if they were confident that Jesus was watching everything that they were doing and they were constantly talking about how they sin. “I’m a sinner.” Right. It’s a very complicated, interesting piece of kit. And my claim is that, you know, I said the Lord’s Prayer as part of going to high school. I sat in a church, a chapel at a high school in LA that had a stained glass window with an American soldier trampling a Nazi flag into the stained glass window. It was amazing.
Faith vs. Action
STEVEN BARTLETT: How does this link to me? I was about to say computer, don’t you have faith that we’ll just be able to kind of keep this? It feels like a bit of a standoff thing.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So you’re the one with the faith? I’m the one who’s nervous. Look, you’re the believer. I’m not going to trust that. No, no, no. I’m going to get my hands dirty and try to do something about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you know what? I think, in part, it’s because, as you said, I’ve been alive for 32 years, and through that time has been relative peace, especially in the Western world. So it’s all I’ve ever known. So I’m born with this assumption that this is just kind of how it goes, that there’s always threat, but we kind of figure it out.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Come to the Pacific Palisades. It looks like Gaza.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got some friends that lost their.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Houses there, you know, Checked out Lahaina in West Maui recently. No, it’s an absolute disaster.
AI and Revolution
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is AI a protagonist in this story? Is it?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Sure.
STEVEN BARTLETT: In what respect?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, what do you think about it, we’re going through a wild revolution at the moment, and I just hear people saying the dumbest things about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What do I think about it? I’m scared I might say something dumb now.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, let’s try, because I’m going to say.
The AI Revolution and Human Intelligence
STEVEN BARTLETT: Something dumb, I think. When I look at both sides of the coin and I look at the opportunity and the threat, my concern when I hear about the CEOs of the biggest AI companies in the world talking about this fast takeoff is that the transition will be too quick for us to adjust. And when they say fast takeoff, they mean that AGI arrives and the rate of its learning accelerates so quickly that it really disrupts the need for human beings to do a lot of the sort of jobs we’re doing today that are centered on intelligence.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Which jobs require intelligence?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Pretty much all of them these days, because we’ve had the Industrial Revolution where we’ve outsourced a lot of labor to machines, but I don’t think so.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Really. Yeah. I think a large portion of our conversation was actually in LLM. We didn’t actually get to the stuff outside of the LLM. You and I are two chatbots for the most part. You’re a good one.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m on a huge platform again, you know? But my claim is that that’s the really disturbing part, that more or less, we’re LLMs, more or less. We don’t do a single intelligent thing all day long. And the reason that they’re able to mimic us is because we don’t realize that intelligence is a last resort for us. We try to automate.
If you think about greetings, your assistant was very kind. I got out of a black car that you guys sent around, and I was greeted with the phrase, “there he is, the man, the myth.” And I knew what was coming next. “The legend.” Right. Because that is a sort of humorous way of giving an intimate greeting, but it’s still an LLM.
And I’m not saying that your assistant is an LLM. I’m saying that, more or less, what we do all day long is LLM interactions. “Hey, buddy. How are you?” “Good, good. Things have been really busy. How about you?” “Well, I got some travel coming up. Kind of excited about it, but I have to get through some work first.” I understand that’s an entirely scripted conversation.
That’s why I’m trying to say that I want to do podcasting that is outside of the LLM model. I don’t want to do just dangerous, stupid stuff. But I want to talk about things that I’ve never explored where I don’t have something ready.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think AI will ever break out of the LLM or will it expand?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I don’t think the LLMs will see. I think that waiting for AGI as the problem is a bad idea. I think the problems are going to get here far before AGI. I think even that the AGI expectation is something we’re trained to do. Do you think AGI is coming? Do you think we’ll survive AGI? Will AGI be good or bad? All of that’s pre programmed into you.
Why are you waiting for AGI? Did you not alphafold3? Did you track that? Do you know about this?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Was that the chess game?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, it’s the chess game that became the protein folding game. And you want to talk about great games. Protein folding. Now that’s a game.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I have no knowledge of this at all.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay, what do you know about proteins?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Very little.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay. Think about proteins as tiny machines.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
The Protein Folding Revolution
ERIC WEINSTEIN: There’s copying machine, there’s scissors and a shearing machine, there’s a light making machine, all sorts of things. And all of those machines are weirdly coded. Imagine that you had like a children’s show and a bunch of girl superheroes and they all had necklaces with 20 different kinds of beads around their neck.
And so when they needed a machine, they’d take off the necklace and they’d throw it into a thing called a ribosome. The ribozone would take these 20 kinds of pearls and suddenly it would build you a car or a spaceship or a gun or who knows what. Well, that’s the story of DNA, RNA and protein.
The only thing is, isn’t it weird that a linear sequence suddenly crumples up into a three dimensional object that does something? So, for example, I don’t know. Have you ever seen these Turkish rabbits that glow in the dark?
STEVEN BARTLETT: No.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay, so they took green fluorescent protein out of jellyfish.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: And they spliced them into the nucleic acids of rabbits. And the Turks bred all of these glow in the dark bunnies. And what that is is a structure. So there’s something called secondary structure in protein where sometimes you get these spirals called alpha helices. And then sometimes you get a two dimensional sheet that’s made from taking a switchback in strings of amino acids.
And then if you wrap that around, you don’t have a beta sheet, you have a beta barrel. And these beta barrels are the glow in the dark aspect of Green fluorescent protein. Okay. And what we didn’t know was how a series of acts and GS could code for sequences of amino acids could form three dimensional structures. So if you just read DNA, you didn’t know. Well, that’s going to be a sports car.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Alphafold figured it out. For the most part, to an enormous extent, humans were stuck there.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what does that mean?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It means that you could. I don’t know, you could target your enemies that have particular regions on their cell surfaces, and you could come up with proteins that only attach to them and attack. It could mean anything. It could mean nanorobots. I don’t know what it means, but my point is that that’s already here and you’re not focused on it. And you’re thinking AGI. And the funny part is that’s your LLM that got programmed to wait for AGI.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I heard people that I think are very smart, much smarter than me, talk about the don’t listen to them Elon.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Sure.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, he says that it’s our biggest existential threat is AI.
The Elon Phenomenon
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Elon has become the outsourcing for much of our intelligence. And if Elon means anything to you, he’s really saying to you, don’t listen to me, do something remarkable. He’s saying, where is everybody? Why is there only one Elon? There used to be lots of them. Where?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why is there only one Elon?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, not the right question. Where did all the other Elons go?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Same question, is it not?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, I think that “why is there only one Elon?” makes Elon feel more singular. You know, if you ever get a chance to go to Cappadocia or Bryce national park in Utah, you see what happens, which is that you’ll have a stone that was resting on the soil, and suddenly the wind starts to erode everything except the compactified soil right under that stone.
And you get what’s called a fairy chimney or a Hoja. And so the claim is that sometimes you get these isolated structures, and the key point is everything else eroded away. We’re supposed to have tons of Elon and everybody else got taken out.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What or who took them out?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Look at how much trouble Elon has being Elon Musk. Look, we keep hearing about him. You know, he’s on drugs. Great. Take drugs. No, I’m not kidding. Do you know how many amazing people take drugs? If you care about jazz, jazz is a whole history of drugs. Whenever I’m listening to Ray Charles, I’m hearing heroin, okay?
What are they doing at Burning Man? They’re trying to live luxuriously under oppression simultaneously. Luxuriously and as dirty and disgusting as you’ll ever be. Hopefully. They’re having tons of eye opening, mind bending experiences, chasing some way of getting out of the LLM.
And my feeling about this is it’s not even honest. I believe that Elon, for example, does understand that population and growth is really important. But I also think he just enjoys making babies. And in a weird way, this idea of “I’m going to have an empire of my children” is a forbidden concept. Try explaining that to HR. You know, it’s like, what did you say at work? So the key point is Elon is barely able to be Elon Musk.
The True Impact of AI
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think we’re overestimating the impact AI is going to have? Because a lot of people see it as this really fundamentally transformative?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You don’t think we’re underestimating it?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think it’s going to be. I think that what AI means to us is bizarre. We’ve come up with this whole script about AGI and it’s going to take everything we do that’s repetitive is on the chopping block. And since almost everything we do is repetitive, we don’t need to get to AGI. We just need to do things where lots of people create lots of repetitive data.
And then we tokenize it and we train the AI on the tokens. And then for the most part it says, you know, it doesn’t matter, it can be a photograph, it can be music, whatever it is, amino acids. Just give me a large enough data set and let me add it and take a hike for a little while. I’ll train on it and then I’ll know how to do that.
You know what, it’s bad at things where there isn’t much data. So I just found out about these orphan proteins where everybody’s got a different version of hemoglobin, but the quaternary structure of hemoglobin, Hemoglobins, these four heme groups, four different proteins around a central element. What happens when you have a protein that has no analog anywhere else? The system doesn’t have the ability to learn it.
If I train you on the blues and you find out what a 12 bar blues progression is, then you find out that there’s a variation where the second bar goes to the fourth rather than just staying on the one for four bars and then sometimes the fourth bar has a seven in it to create tension. Okay, so it’s going to learn every single form of the blues like that. And because there’s a large corpus of that stuff, it’s going to get really good at blues music.
But if you take something that basically never happens, it’s not going to have an easy ability to train and give you more. So I think that AI is almost certainly going to transform the economy because everything that we know how to do through education creates repetitive behaviors. We don’t know how to educate for creativity and genius. We know how to educate for doing higher level things.
So radiology is a great example. Radiologists are some of the first in the crosshairs. I’m going to stare at some imaging and I’m going to say, I think that’s a tumor. I think that’s benign. And it’s going to say, just give me all of these tokens. Like, well, they’re X rays, they’re CAT scans. No, no, no. They’re just tokens.
So, yeah, it’s going to start to automate away every repetitive behavior, and then what’s going to be left is the tiny number of things that aren’t really highly repetitive or things where we really care that a human does it. Very interesting what’s happened with chess. I don’t know if you’ve been following chess.
The Chess Analogy
STEVEN BARTLETT: I loosely understand it mainly because I’ve spoken to a lot of AI experts and they often reference chess as an example where it’s one of the first things that humans did that we really cared about that fell. So they’ve been longer in the AI tractor beam than any of the rest of us in some sense. How did it fall through Deep Blue and IBM and Garry Kasparov.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But does that mean that people aren’t interested in chess anymore? What are you saying?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, no, no. That’s the whole point. So Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player of our time and perhaps of all time, was on Joe Rogan. And Joe asks him the simple question, “can your phone beat you?” He’s like, “yeah, easily.”
So the point is, we can’t compete with, I don’t know, Stockfish or whatever, the top chess programs of our time. I don’t know anymore. But nobody cares about those programs except for AI experts. We care about the drama of Anand versus Carlson.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Two humans.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Two humans. Because it’s about us. We’re very narcissistic in this way. And so there was a period, and this is something that my wife tried to popularize, so she said this thing about the Golden Age of AI complementarity where the AIs aren’t good enough to take over from us, but they’re amazing tools.
And so there’s a period where we’re teamed up, you know, the prompt engineering revolution. They’re not good enough to come up with their own prompts. And a great example of this that Chi and I have been talking about is the cyborg chess era, which is a period where humans and the AIs could form teams that would do better. But at some point, the AI just looks at the human and says, “you’re just holding me back.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve got two children.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah.
Career Advice for the Next Generation
STEVEN BARTLETT: When they’re thinking about their career prospects, with all that you think and know and believe about the future that we’re heading towards, what kind of career advice would you be giving to them?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Oh, I’ve given them terrible career advice. I gave them somewhat different career advice. So to my son, my advice was, do the hardest, most technical thing you possibly can do and be prepared to use that ability, that facility in different ways than you’re honing it, but train yourself.
With my daughter, I think she cares deeply about people, and this is a typical male, female divide. And by the way, I’m not going to talk overly much about them because I try to keep them out. But she is somebody who is taking the same level of analytic ability, but putting it in the service of the law and trying to help people who are really unfortunate. She’s very idealistic.
And so at some level, the law is not going to allow us to have AI lawyers for quite some time. It’s not going to trust anything. We’ve got jury trials and judges and a legal system that’s written into our founding documents.
To the average person, I would say, get your board in the water and prepare to paddle. Like all get out. The tsunami of a lifetime is coming, and nothing your elders have seen is going to prepare. There’s no good advice to give that’s specific.
Let’s put it this way. One of the things when people tell me about their moving from one city to another, I have a phrase that nobody likes, which is, “every place is over.” Oh, I’m moving to Austin. Yeah, it’s over. Miami, it’s over. Nashville, over. All these places are over.
And every occupation that is named is over. I’m going to be a dentist, radiologist, accountant, teacher. These are all over. Whatever’s coming, get flexible, get good. Get good on a bunch of different stuff. Learn how to think across disciplines. I have no idea what’s going to be left for us, but somebody’s going to come out on top.
And I hate to tell people that you should try to come out on top of. I don’t think it’s healthy to have everyone trying to be world class. I think you should be able to just have a life. I have a golden retriever. I don’t know that it’s the greatest golden retriever in the world. Sometimes I think it is, but he does a lot of dumb stuff. But he’s my golden retriever.
I just don’t think it. I think that this mania for optimization, if you look at your own videos, you’ll find some of the best performing videos are “This is how to succeed. This is how to get anyone you want. This is how to get out of a bad situation.” People just want capacity, but for what? Okay, you’ve optimized your day, you’ve optimized your health, your social media is optimized. Now what?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Now what? I don’t know what should be. Then say, you know, is it time to just. One would say, well, now I. One would incorrectly say, well, now I can play with my golden retriever. And then one would say, well, you should have been playing with your golden retriever the whole time.
Finding Meaning in Simple Things
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Let me put it a little differently. Through some bizarre accident, I have gotten a chance to meet incredible people that I don’t even talk about who I’ve met. I’ve gotten a chance to see the world. I haven’t seen South America, but I’ve seen most of the other continents other than the Antarctic. I’ve had a really rich life.
Take somebody who hasn’t had those opportunities, but they got a chance to have three kids. I’m not sure I wouldn’t trade places. I so enjoyed raising my children. It’s available to everyone. It’s such a strange thing that we’re talking about optimization, all this stuff.
I get to think about the substrate of the universe, theoretical physics. I dream about visiting the stars. I dream about multiple dimensions of time, meeting aliens, all sorts of things. I still think having kids was unbeatable. I’m so sad that it’s over. I’m so sad that they moved out.
I cannot believe that I was dumb enough to live in a society that doesn’t believe in having your kids with you your whole life. The idea that we look at places where kids live at home as backwards is beyond me. And shout out to the entire Indian subcontinent. Family is everything. They drive me crazy, but it’s just meaning is available for you.
And again, every time I got a chance to eat a rambutan. It’s one of my favorite fruits. Mangoes, rambutans, jackfruit, sitafal. If you can get custard apple. The amount of pleasure I get. I’ve never had a good custard apple in the entire time I’ve lived in the US. Not one. I’ve had a frozen one imported from Taiwan. You get this Cherimoya. Just get out of here, Cherimoya. You’re not good. Great custard apple. Great Sita, fal or ramfal. What a pleasure to be on this earth. And it’s available to almost anyone.
I just think that you can find meaning. For God’s sakes, go to Spotify if you have a connection, if you can afford a connection to Spotify and put in Pablo Casals’ version of the Bach Cello Suites, you’re as rich as you need to be. I’ve flown private. I’d much prefer to listen to Pablo Casals playing the cello suites in economy than to be deprived of real luxury.
I don’t know, I just. To me, meaning is everywhere. I can’t swing a cat without hitting meaning.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you always been like that? Or is that something that you’ve cultivated? The point about being able to swing a cat and find meaning, so many people that would be listening now could swing a hundred mile stick and wouldn’t hit meaning in their lives. But you seem to be able to find it in the purer things, the more simple things. And I’m wondering if that’s something that we can all cultivate with a change of perspective, or if it’s just the way that you’ve always been.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Why is Joe Rogan such a big deal? You ever listen to Joe Rogan talk about pugilism? Two gentlemen beating the crap out of each other as poetry, as chess. I could listen to Joe talk about MMA for days. The story of Mighty Mouse, the guy trapped in some flyweight division with unbelievable skills, who never gets to meet a formidable enemy.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think that’s a privilege? Do you think that there’s a privilege in being able to craft a story? Because so much of the meaning you’re describing there comes from these great stories. And not everybody is able to craft the story. Upon seeing something, you probably look at this item in front of me, this glass, and create a story about it that drives meaning, that makes you feel something.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I worry about its manufacture. How is it that we got a surface of revolution. What is the industrial process? How do I take a picture of this and get it a photograph of the machine that made it? You know that fly that has been buzzing around us this entire interview?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Do you remember when Obama had a fly?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And he caught it and. Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: The confidence of that man. See, I’d try that and I’d miss and I’d screw it up in front of millions of people. It’s like I took so much meaning away from that fly.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Were you trying to. Or is that just a sort of predecessor?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We all did.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Not everyone. Some people would have gone, how was.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It that you knew exactly what I was talking about? Because he captured a moment. He was the girl in the red dress. Now, there’s this thing that women say, “not every woman can wear a red.” Well, not every man can grab a fly with confidence. I think we all see this. I think we all see beauty everywhere.
Remember that movie American Beauty with the plastic bag that gets in the air, funnel going up? And the key point is the ability just to see beauty wherever you find it. Everything behind you means something to me. The letter B is strange to me that there’s only one phonetic alphabet and that every phonetic alphabet is descended from it. I basically view everything as a hyperlink. I just want to click on the world and see what it goes to.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Not everybody does, though.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: But we do.
STEVEN BARTLETT: They don’t make the step, is what I’m saying, because people would see the B and nothing would cross their mind.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You know what’s funny? There’s an absolutely horrible account that has been just dogging me for years, trying to make my life miserable.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And a social media account.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. Doesn’t matter.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: And the person said, “you know, one thing I just never understand is he’s not. He’s not hawking a book. He’s just talking. Why are his numbers high?” And the answer is, everybody cares about this stuff. They want an invitation.
One of the funniest things that gets said about me on social media is “he goes on forever and he never says anything.” And then I look at the word clouds of things that I’ve talked about, and people are just Googling everything incessantly. If you didn’t know who Pablo Casals was, now you do. Now you know what a real cellist sounds like.
I don’t know. I just. I can’t believe that I’m so far through this life and that there’s so little left. I can’t believe this doesn’t go on forever.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Does that bother you?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: My people just got hit.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And.
World War 3 and Global Tensions
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You want to talk about the river and the sea, that river is not the Jordan river, and that sea is not the Mediterranean. The Arab world stretches from the Atlantic with Morocco right up to the Shatt al-Arab waterway that divides Iraq from Iran. And I don’t think this is stable. There is no way in which we should be fighting like this. This is ridiculous.
Trump used the F word, and he’s taking a ton of crap. “Why would you use the F word?” Well, isn’t it interesting that people view Trump as so tacky? He’s got this queen sort of bluster. He doesn’t reek of finalist clubs at Harvard or Skull and Bones or whatever. No, Trump doesn’t use the F word for a reason. That he needs it. Once in a blue moon and it better mean something.
And he said this to Iran, and he said this to Israel. “These two countries have been fighting for so long, they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” He didn’t make a mistake. The rest of the world has just forgotten how to calibrate. Where do you see Trump in. How is he clothed? He’s almost always in a suit and tie, and he almost never says the F word. And it’s carefully calibrated to get everybody’s attention.
And we’re so frightened asleep that we don’t even hear it. This is World War 3, and it’s already started. Biden was there in the Oval Office, non compos mentis. And I was being told, “don’t worry, there’s a committee that’s replaced him.” Because I was talking about the fact that he can’t be president.
I just don’t know what we’re doing. I’m so mystified by everybody else. It’s like, Elon makes sense to me. I’m not Elon. I’m a very different person. But at least Elon makes sense to me. Not 100%, but 98%. Elon makes sense to me. It’s everybody else that I’m completely confused by.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What part of what Elon is saying makes so much sense to you?
Understanding Elon Musk
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Oh, geez. Everything. One, we have to have babies. We have to keep going. Two, it can’t all be about problems. You have to be excited to be alive every morning. You have to work your ass off your whole life.
You want to know one of the most beautiful things that ever happened? Somebody telling Elon that he was the world’s richest human being. He said, “huh, that’s interesting. Okay, back to work.” Amazing, right? There’s no reward that he can’t have more of by stopping work and enjoying his wealth except doing stuff.
And I was born in this country. My parents were born in this country. My grandparents on one side were not, but my grandparents on the other side were. Elon is so American, that cowboy spirit that he does all sorts of stuff I can’t stand. I don’t want to see one more of those Pepe memes ever. I really don’t. What the fuck is his problem? Okay, I don’t know him at all.
But Elon at his best is the United States. Anything is possible here and we just waste our lives on interpersonal drama. He wastes his life to an enormous extent as a troll. I cannot. The part of him that I don’t understand is one why he’s not focused 100% on physics. I think he sees it as going through grok and AI. He doesn’t want to trust humans.
I think he sees Mars as energizing to engineers and the stars are innovating to engineers because the science. There’s no amount of engineering you can’t engineer your way to the stars with the science we have. But he’s being a complete pussy when it comes to science, and he’s being a total hero when it comes to engineering. But he is the quintessential American.
The Continuation of Life and Legacy
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Can’t believe my story doesn’t go on forever. Look, I’ve never died before so I have no experience with it. So as far as I know, I’ve always been alive and it’ll always go on that way. But there’s another thing that I’ve talked about occasionally which is I’m not the most public spirited human being. I am somebody who will take the last rambutan. I know that you’re not supposed to do that in almost any culture on earth, but sometimes it’s just sitting there and it bothers me.
Okay, so I’m not the classiest person on earth, but I’ll tell you something. If you have a kid and you have a choice about eating the rambutan yourself or giving the rambutan to your child, it’s a no brainer. You’re going to enjoy the rambutan so much more if you give it to your kid. And you’ll see. And that’s the way in which this goes on forever. It’s great. I mean, just how many young people do I have to yell at? “I don’t know if I want to have kids. I don’t want to bring anyone into this horrible world,” have kids.
STEVEN BARTLETT: It bothers you. I can see it personally bothers you.
The Middle East Crisis and Global Implications
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Do you have any idea how much hate there is right now for Israel? Do you have any idea how destabilizing this action against Iran was? Do you have any idea how many people have suffered for how long under the mullahs? We are being cheated of Persia. I’m not talking about Iran for the Persians. I’m talking about we are cheated of Persia, the entire planet, one of the greatest societies on earth. Taken offline.
Look, you’re catching me on the wrong week. I don’t want to dwell on it. This is just incredibly irresponsible. We’re not going to survive this. Israel is certainly not going to survive this. If the Abrahamic world does not get its head out of its ass, if the Christian world does not start to stand up for itself without becoming this “Christ is King” nightmare.
You know, I was in Tel Aviv before this all happened and I just said it from the stage, “make the Middle East Christian again.” Does nobody understand their role is sort of my question. How can you have Bethlehem without a strong Christian presence? Have you ever been to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?
STEVEN BARTLETT: No.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Can I give you another assignment?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Get off your ass and go. You got the money? Walk the Stations of the Cross and for God’s sakes, stop with the issue about belief. You can pray like the rest of us. We’re not sure if we’re praying. We’re not sure if the thing is hooked up and anyone’s listening. You have the right to go back, even with doubt, even with knowledge, and you have the right to believe about it. Tomorrow you know where you’re not going to be, but people are going to be mentioning your name.
STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say that your people are under attack, who are you referencing as your people?
Identity and the Jewish Experience
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I would. In general, there’s several groups of people that I would describe as my people. The Jews would be one, dyslexics would be another. Americans would be another. Scientists would be another. It depends on what these things. But right now I’m thinking about the Jews and I’m thinking about the fact that the social media businesses have lost complete control of the bot farms.
And we’re just seeing this unbelievable. I feel like I’m living through the 1930s again. We’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well. You know, what happened in Gaza is an unbelievable tragedy. And that tragedy was partially architected by the United States of America shoving a two state solution down the throats of Palestinian Arabs who absolutely do not want a two state solution.
And the creation in part of the situation where Israel has a hand, the US has a hand, the Palestinian Arabs have a hand, the creation of Hamas and the promotion of this just unbelievable genius, Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, who is continuing to best Bibi Netanyahu from the grave. You know, it’s just an amazing feat nobody reads anymore. As you know, there’s an old Sherlock Holmes story called “The Problem at Thor Bridge.” Ever heard of it?
STEVEN BARTLETT: No.
The Sinwar Strategy: A Modern Thor Bridge
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So you’re British. Sherlock Holmes gets called in on a case in which there’s a murder. The murder is traced to this gentleman who still exists. What Sherlock Holmes figures out is that it’s not a murder, it’s a suicide in which the gun will fall into the river at Thor Bridge because it’s tied to a weight and the person uses the suicide to frame someone else. You know, it’s just one of these genius little vignettes. And that’s what Sinwar was. He was a genius. He knew he was going to die.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Who was Sinwar? Sinwar’s the person who’s committed suicide.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Sinwar’s suicide was an IDF assisted suicide. I wrote about this almost instantly after the October 7th invasion. It didn’t make any sense that Gaza would undertake such an act against Israel, given the asymmetry and what this mirrored was that before the 1990s.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think Sinwar committed suicide to then cause the people of Gaza to invade Israel?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, no, no, no. Sinwar would be happy enough for all the Gazans to die. And so what he did was he architected a situation in which Israel would be compelled to respond using the wrong tools. He tricked Israel. And, you know, I’m very confident to talk about this, because if you check my old tweets, I say “IDF assisted suicide” and “Munchausen by proxy” and “Zugzwang,” right?
And I said, these are the concepts. Familiarize yourself, because Israel is going to invade Gaza. And I knew what was going to happen because it took me, like, why would you do this? It doesn’t make sense from first order logic, but third and fourth order logic, you’re like, oh, of course it makes sense. This is hybrid war. The most important thing for Sinwar is video.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?
Hybrid Warfare and the Power of Video
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Look at the effect of the video. The video of Gaza has turned the world to an extent against Israel that’s sort of inconceivable. There’s a doctrine called hybrid warfare, and I think it came out of the US in the early 2000s, and it says that the kinetic component of warfare, the killing, the actual shooting and the planes and the bombs and all this kind of stuff is not the major component. The social media is really important. The video is important. The memetic complex is important.
And Israel has an advantage over the Gazan Arabs in kinetic warfare. And Sinwar knew that, and he was like, brilliant. All we need to do is force Israel to come after us. And this is this thing I was going to say, before the 1990s, we had a spate of killings of policemen firing on people who had pulled toy guns on them. And we would say things, and I remember this, like, “whatever you do, don’t point a toy gun at a policeman. Don’t you realize what’s going to happen?”
And then somebody coined the phrase “police assisted suicide.” The policeman is the instrument. That’s what I knew was going to happen. And for better or for worse, Bibi just couldn’t figure out where he was. And Bibi was dumber and Sinwar was smarter.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any way back from here? Cause you said this is World War Three.
The Path Forward: Saudi Arabia and Iran
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, the way there is, but it’s slim and it’s evaporating. I mean, almost everything depends on Saudi Arabia and the Iranians and the Persians. If the Persians didn’t take this opportunity to rise up against their oppressors, I don’t know what they’re waiting for? Yes, you’re going to get killed in some numbers, but you have to figure out whether you’re interested in tyranny or not.
So the Persians are absolutely falling down on the ground, on the job, not rising up against the mullahs. This is a coordinated moment. Like, you know, there’s a moment for a prison break. This would be it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Who are the mullahs in this?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: The ayatollahs, the.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The government of Iran.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Khomeini. Yeah, the theocratic government of Iran.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So the rulers of Iran, basically, the people that are.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Okay, so I don’t know if you know a ton of Persians. They’re varied in their religiosity. But there’s a, you know, there’s an underground gay scene in Tehran. There’s super hyper modern people just like you and me who can’t stand these guys.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And so you’re saying that if they.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Rise up, that would be one of the parts of the solution. The other thing is Saudi Arabia, and I have to be very measured and careful here. You can’t fantasize about the Middle east becoming Western Europe overnight. Every time we do this, we make a terrible mistake. When you have a modernizer like MBS.
STEVEN BARTLETT: In Saudi Arabia, he’s the ruler of Saudi Arabia, right?
The Middle East Crisis and America’s Historical Responsibility
ERIC WEINSTEIN: De facto, he can’t suddenly become a modern person. So, you know, if we end up talking about Khashoggi and murders and murdered journalists and all this stuff, the whole conversation will derail. But he’s a modernizer, and there was a moment where he needed to not condemn Israel publicly and thank it privately, but to say we’ve all been terrorized by this country and Israel did what everyone needed. We needed to rise up against the mullahs. Because you can’t have a nuclear theocracy. You can’t have a highly developed notion of heaven, where this is the anteroom where you’re waiting to get into the real room.
That issue of needing to be rid of an aspiring nuclear theocracy, something that Israel undertook. Now, something that I’m going to say there are three words in Yiddish which you may have heard or may not. Schlemiel, Schlamazel, and Nebbish. So there are three unfortunate people. You don’t want to be any one of those three, but the subtlety is that the schlemiel is a klutz and the schlemiel spills hot soup on the schlamazel. So the schlamazel is the unfortunate person to whom bad things happen. And the nebbish is the weak, ineffectual person who decides that it’s his job to clean up the message. So the schlemiel spills the scalding hot soup on the schlamazel and the nebbish cleans it up.
Now in the US we’ve got this terrible sort of Christian nationalist problem that we’ve developed, which is what sometimes people call the woke, right? Where we have a bunch of people who’ve been badly treated. White Christian Americans have been badly treated in the woke era. They’ve been forced to salute everybody else’s, you know, yay for, I don’t know, Honduran Lesbians Day. And it’s like, okay, enough, we don’t want to do that anymore. We’ve also done great things and I absolutely think that they’ve been mistreated and they’ve gone sort of metastatic and their attitude is no more wars for Israel. America first.
Operation Ajax and the Creation of Modern Iran
What I was getting to with the schlemiel, schlamazel and nebbish is that most Americans don’t have any idea who Kermit Roosevelt was. Do you have any idea of who Kermit? So the US and the UK jointly overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran through something called Operation Ajax. We installed the Shah. And then there’s this period where everybody stupidly celebrates the miniskirts and the jazz that was going through Tehran, which was a bridge too far. In other words, the miniskirts were a really bad idea because they were ready for some amount of modernization and they weren’t ready for that. And so we pushed it too far. And so we got the mullahs for 40 years.
And now we chop off people’s fingers and we pluck out people’s eyes and we put homosexuals on ropes and dangle them from cranes. They’re barbaric. They’re horrible human beings. These are really bad men, the mullahs. And we did that. So the scalding hot soup is revolutionary theocratic Iran. And we spilled it all over the Middle East, which is the schlamazel. We spilled it on Saudi Arabia, we spilled it on Iraq, we spilled it on Israel. Everybody suffers from having these people installed because of the US and the UK instituting a problem back in the 50s.
And who’s the nebbish who cleans this up? Israel volunteers for this job. And then Saudi Arabia pretends, “Oh my God, this is terrible. Our Muslim brother is being attacked by our Jewish barbarian.” I just can’t believe anybody’s dumb enough to fall for all of this. Like we’re involved in a story where nobody can sort things out. There’s no talking heads anyone believes in.
Understanding Iran’s Strategic Communication
And if I didn’t understand this, then how is it that I have a tweet from 10 days after October 7th or I appeared on Trigonometry? I’m telling you, Israel hasn’t even walked into Gaza yet. And I know what the strategy is. Iran sent hypersonic missiles into the ground in Israel as a message. Violence is a language and they spoke it well. The mullahs may be crazy, but they’re still Persians. They’re extraordinarily skilled.
And so what they did is they wasted some of their arsenal saying, “You have no Iron Dome and we’re not going to kill you. We’re going to put our missiles, we’re going to waste our missiles by sending them into your earth and try to kill no one.” And the Israelis, these brilliant, genius Israelis who pull off all sorts of things that the world can’t believe are dumb enough, some of them to say they sent all these missiles and they couldn’t even hit anyone. And I’m just thinking, do none of you understand anything? I just don’t even know where I am. And I’m looking at, you know, I…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Know Tulsi, Tulsi Gabbard there.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, Tulsi’s amazing.
STEVEN BARTLETT: She’s the head of the intelligence program for the United States.
Tulsi Gabbard and the Reality of Modern Warfare
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Director of National Intelligence. Right. Tulsi has seen the devastation not of war, but of US action abroad. Like, we haven’t really had full wars, but we get involved in Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever and you know, people die and there are firefights. It’s not like it has nothing to do with war, but full on war is a very different thing. We say the Iraq War, but I want to be very careful about the language. War usually involves you getting rocked at home, not just your troops abroad.
I don’t think she appreciates the gravity of the situation. That somehow what we need to do is we need to stabilize this thing for 50 to 100 years while we desperately try to figure out a long term solution. This idea of like just we’re not taking responsibility for the world, we already screwed up. I don’t want to send Americans, you know, I’m not an Israeli, I’m an American. I don’t want to send my fellow Americans to die in foreign battles that we have no business being in. But we have to take ownership of our history with oil and energy in the Middle East.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And what does that look like?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Taking ownership, recognizing that we created the…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Mullahs and doing what about it?
The Two-State Solution Problem
ERIC WEINSTEIN: And wait, wait a second. Not just that. And that we also created a lot of the heartache along with Sinwar and to a much lesser extent, Israel by foisting this two state solution on people who would never put up with it. Like, I lived in Israel for two years. You would have conversations with Arabs, some of whom are Israelis, you know, and they would say, “Look, you know, you just don’t understand the West Bank and you don’t understand the difference between the West Bank and Gaza.” And they would tell me straight up, “You’re going to get us all killed with this two state solution. Stop it.”
And, you know, it was very hard for me to hear, but we’re just having a child’s conversation about the Middle East. And I will say this about the UK. The British Foreign Service had a different failure mode than the US they really learned the regions, they learned the dialects of the languages of the countries that they were involved in. The British Empire took many places that they were involved in seriously. And they have a very complicated legacy.
I spent a lot of time in Bombay, and there’s a lot of debate among very educated Indians about figuring out how to think about the British legacy. All of the great institutional structures that were built, all of the prejudice and bigotry. Why was such a small country able to colonize such a large land? Basically working with the locals. It’s a rich conversation. We’re having childlike conversations about all of this.
I’m sorry if I’m going on about this, but it’s just a very weird thing that we can’t get anybody’s attention. You can’t even get my attention. I’m watching hypersonic missiles slam into the places I just was. And then I’m watching a cat video, and then I’m trying to figure out what to order through Uber Eats. And it’s just like, I can’t stay focused. It’s really important to put this right. And the US screwed up the Middle East along with the UK really good. And we have a lot of responsibility. And if we want to go isolationist, I understand that. But you first have to put back the chicken soup that you spilled.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And how’d you do that?
The Challenge of Leadership
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m not sure. I’m not the Director of National Intelligence. I’m not the Secretary of Defense. I’m not in the Oval Office. I mean, you know, it’s very weird. I was workmates with J.D. Vance, you know, these are people who are, you know, Bobby Kennedy lives one canyon over from me in Los Angeles. The people around power in the U.S. godspeed, just wish them well. I don’t care what party you’re in. But to try to sabotage Trump or sabotage Tulsi or sabotage Pete Hegseth, these guys need to figure this out and they need to be at a totally different level.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And he’s figuring out peace in the region.
The Reality of Cold Peace
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You know, the peace between Egypt and Israel is a shitty, crappy, horrible peace, but it’s peace. It’s not a loving relationship. It’s not a question of everybody going back and forth between the two countries saying, you know, “We used to be enemies, now we’re friends.” It’s a lousy, cold peace. I’ll take it.
We need to have peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs who can live in peace, and we need the people who cannot live in peace. We need to find someplace else for them to be. It is absolutely imperative. And by the way, this goes for the Israelis. There are a small number of hardcore Israeli settlers who cannot live in peace with their neighbors. And it’s very important that they, the people who cannot live in peace, not be there.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do we need to go to. Are you suggesting that we focus on regime change in Iran?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That is really the responsibility of the Persians.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So I want to get clear on what you see as a solution. Because you’re saying the Persian people have to rise up, the US need to care, but not get involved in that regime change.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m saying that a bunch of things need to happen if we’re to have a long term solution.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I make you president tomorrow.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I hate when people do this, but…
STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s the clearest way of understanding the actions you would…
The Art of Strategic Communication
ERIC WEINSTEIN: First of all, if I was president tomorrow, I sure as hell wouldn’t be on a podcast discussing strategy with you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Trump does it?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, I decline to answer all sorts of questions on camera.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Fair.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. So my feeling is that you do a lot more behind closed doors and this idea of just handing people, “You’re the king of the world, what do you do tomorrow to stop…” You know, it’s like, don’t do that to me. Because it’s just, it’s a no win question.
If I was going to, I’d do a lot of Straussian communication. I’d meet with people in private, I’d use lots of carrots and sticks. I try to use long range thinking. And I wouldn’t tell you what my plan is. And by the way, I very much respect Donald Trump in certain ways, one of which is that this confuses our friend Sam Harris no end. Sam is always like, “Well, he’s not being truthful. He’s not making sense.” He’s a negotiator. You don’t sit down to a negotiation with an open book saying, “Let me make sense to you.” You sit there saying, “You don’t know what I’m going to do next. You don’t know how big the stick is. You don’t know how much carrot there is. Maybe I’m prepared to give you more. Maybe my stick isn’t as big as you think. Or maybe it’s twice as big.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think anyone has good answers?
The Challenge of International Relations and Nuclear Physics
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’ll be honest. I think that Trump is, in part, respected because he has some intuitions about this stuff. His intuition is not to say everything. His intuition is that negotiation is more important than transparency. And at a time when everybody’s craving transparency. “Tell me everything.” No, I’m not going to tell you everything. I’m going to try to save some children today. I’m going to threaten, I’m going to cajole. I’m going to do all sorts of things. And that’s what I’d do.
I would assemble the best people around me. I would stop giving so many press conferences. I wouldn’t tweet every four seconds. I’d be extremely strategic about it. But, you know, the situation in Tel Aviv and in Gaza makes me sick to my stomach. And in Ukraine, almost all of my DNA comes from Ukraine. At least passed through it. I’ve been there. And, you know, Russians in Ukraine. Ukraine used to be known as Little Russia. How are we sitting here watching this?
What moron decided in 2004 that we were just going to hand full Article 5 status to former Soviet republics without consequence? It is not the case that I don’t. I would love to have Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in NATO. Not at this cost. Look, the world is a brutal, brutal place. We’ve gotten really bad at international understandings. I can’t stand what’s happened to Europe. Europe has been completely denatured. We’re playing with fire everywhere.
And I just. I don’t know how to talk about it, because every time I talk about things where I’m the only person who sounds like this, it’s bad for my life. Look, if you’re in general a Ukraine hawk and you say we need to make sure that Ukraine is completely supported so that they don’t give an inch of territory, yeah, you’ll take a lot of crap, but you’ll be in a large group. And if you basically have the idea that Russia was minding its own business and the US was encircling it and good Russia, bad us, you’ll have a lot of company for that perspective.
I don’t sound like any of that. The most important thing is to stabilize the world again, and we’re not going to get another chance like World War II if we’re not smart. We’re crazy to give up this order that we have. And again, one more time, I’m talking about this stuff, and I don’t want to be talking about this stuff. Elon is 100% right. We can’t talk about problems all the time. It’s cheap, meaning there’s an entire universe to explore. And we’re sitting here focused on our own drama always, and I’m getting sucked into it. I don’t want it. I want to be talking about traveling through time and space using Easter eggs and hidden features of what we thought was the space time continuum.
The Hidden Dimensions of Reality
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve got this picture that I came across.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Tell me.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I’d love you to tell me. This is the flower of life geometric model. And I was reading through some of your work and I came across this sentence that said you’d kept a secret for 30 years in terms of your belief about the nature of the reality that we live in and that you thought maybe it was more than just the dimensions we experienced. Maybe there was 14 dimensions. I’ve always, I wonder this a lot, you know, because we’re fixated on problems. We’re fixated on what we see and what we hear and what we feel. But I wonder sometimes if even that is an illusion. I’ve spent a lot of time actually thinking recently about the simulation theory. And is this whole reality just some simulation on some kid’s video game in another dimension? So I thought, you know, you’re a.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Physicist, do me a favor. Put that in a triangle pattern here. Okay, so we have three mugs. Think of those as vertices of a tetrahedron. And think of this coaster floating here as the fourth vertex.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Mm.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: For every two vertices. So the number of vertices we would agree is four.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. What’s this vertice mean?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Points.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. 1, 2, 3, 4.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Idealize these three things in this as points. Draw a line segment between all of these four vertices. How many line segments are there?
STEVEN BARTLETT: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Six.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yep. So there’s six edges, four vertices. How many triangular faces that have three vertices on them?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, four.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah. This is how to think about the actual dimensions that we have open to us. The four faces we know about. The key point that I was trying to get at is I don’t believe that you just have the four dimensions. I believe that you have all six edges are dimensions. And all four vertices are also dimensions. I’m talking about a hidden world.
It’s very interesting. Physics has gone stagnant in terms of how we usually measure progress. The way we measure progress is the change in something called the action, or the Lagrangian, a specialized device. And that used to change a lot. And then in 1973, it stopped changing. The major thing that we have is we have no new ideas about how to change the Lagrangian that anybody finds that exciting or interesting. So there’s been no progress. Nobody goes to Stockholm to get a Nobel Prize because they changed the Lagrangian of the world.
Understanding the Lagrangian
STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the Lagrangian?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: The Lagrangian. So you probably think about physics in terms of equations, like Maxwell’s equations or the Einstein equations or whatever. Think about an equation as being not the primary thing that physicists think about. So I give this example. The Beatles had four basically different configurations. When Ringo was the front man, he was singing “Octopus’s Garden.” George Harrison is singing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” You know, Paul is singing about “Penny Lane” and John is singing about “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Those four equations, those would be those different configurations of the Beatles with one of them front and everybody else backing. The front man would be the equations, but the Beatles would be the Lagrangian. It’s the thing that generates the four different configurations, okay?
And there’s this bizarre force field that anybody who wants to talk about physics and doing something new in particular, leaving or traversing time or multiple dimensions of time. Anything that’s really close to what might be possible gets slammed. We don’t know why, because it’s very cheap to explore ideas and we have no new ideas. But the only thing about a new idea in physics is that a new idea changes the balance of power in the world. Remember the thing I was saying about AlphaFold 3?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
The Most Dangerous Thought in History
ERIC WEINSTEIN: AlphaFold 3 changed the balance of power in the world. Bitcoin changed the balance of power in the world. The Diffuse proposal from the EcoHealth alliance changed the balance of power in the world. If that was the source of the COVID virus. Anytime somebody has a really big idea and the biggest idea, and I talk about this, people don’t grasp it.
Probably the most dangerous thought anyone has ever had was Rutherford in 1911 saying, “I wonder whether there’s a neutral version of the proton.” It doesn’t sound dangerous, but it’s hard to send a proton into a bunch of protons, because it’s positively charged, and a massive nucleus is really positively charged. And so there’s a repulsion if there’s a neutral version of the proton.
And these things are barely stuck together with a strong force, even though they’re trying to scream away from each other because they’re all positively charged, you can send a neutral version of the proton right into the center tap. And just imagine you have a bunch of magnets that are trying to flee from each other, and the Velcro around them is barely holding it together. So now you have a bullet in the form of a neutral proton, a neutron, and it hits this thing where the magnets want to come apart, and the Velcro is barely holding it together. Well, that idea led to the chain.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Reaction and the nuclear bomb.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, that was the fission bomb. And then a geometer. So I’m a geometer and not a physicist, and a physicist named Edward Teller, and the geometer was named Stanislaus Ulam, said, “I wonder if there’s a way to take the chemical bomb that creates the fission bomb and use the fission bomb as the detonator for a fusion bomb.” So bomb number one, bomb number two, bomb number three.
And what they figured out was that the only way to create that is to reflect light in a particular way, to compress hydrogen into helium and release energy. Because anything other than light wouldn’t get to the tertiary stage fast enough before the atomic bomb. Like you’re using a Hiroshima Nagasaki as a detonator. That’s how crazy it is.
So that chain of ideas, which is maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton, maybe I can send that into the middle of an atom that’s very heavy. That was built in a stellar collision. Maybe if I have a bunch of those uranium or plutonium type things, each one, when they break apart, will have more neutrons inside, that is more neutral protons, that will hit more nuclei, that will release more energy, and maybe that can then focus the light, the gamma radiation that comes off of this thing, or who knows what, to compress a narrow rod to create fusion, which only occurs on the sun, in the sun, but do it on Earth.
So we’re going to take a little bit of the sun on Earth. That chain of ideas was the most dangerous thing anybody’s ever thunk. And that’s why when you try to do physics, you don’t know, why are people making fun of me? Why are they being mean? Why are they dissuading me from talking? I don’t know.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You have a suspicion.
The Forbidden City of Los Alamos
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, there was a guy named Jack Raper, unfortunately, named Mr. Jack Raper, who was a reporter in Cleveland, who, for some reason, during the war in 1944, decided to vacation in New Mexico. So he goes to New Mexico and he comes back and he says, “I’ve got a crazy story. There’s a city that nobody knows about with a mayor who’s supposed to be the second Einstein, and it’s the most secretive city in the world, and the mayor is working on a doomsday weapon, and even the people who live in the city don’t know what it is.”
And he writes the story of Los Alamos and publishes it in 1944. The scoop of the millennium, to say nothing of the century. Nobody knows about this article, and it’s called “Forbidden City.” We pretended that it never happened.
STEVEN BARTLETT: For those that don’t know, Los Alamos is where the atomic. The nuclear bomb was, I guess, conceived and brought to life and tested.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, it was really designed there. And most of the nuclear processing took place at other sites, whether Hanford or Oak Ridge, I’m not sure. And it was tested a short distance away at the Trinity site. So go watch the movie Oppenheimer, if you will, but this is why physicists are the only occupation in the country that doesn’t have full free speech.
The Hidden Physics of Government Secrecy
STEVEN BARTLETT: So are you suggesting that there’s dangers in believing in more dimensions, that maybe some people might not want to be known in the same way that we didn’t want the.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: My point is, I don’t think our government knows the real secrets of physics. If I had to make a bet tomorrow, I don’t think there’s a secret government office that knows physics. I think that there were a bunch of very smart people who knew how dangerous physics was, and that the idea that we would continue to do it in public struck them as insane.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Because it could lead to destruction.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: When I tell you that the most dangerous idea in human history is maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton, that’s supposed to sound insane, but the entire chain of ideas results in nuclear fusion happening on Earth at the direction of the President of the United States.
And that’s what I’m trying to get at, which people don’t understand, which is you probably don’t even realize that the Department of Energy is really the Department of Physics because we pretend that it’s the Department of Energy. Like we had a War Department that became the Department of Defense.
STEVEN BARTLETT: We’re scared of the possibility of physics.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We don’t even want to talk about it. Literally no other occupation has lost free speech like physics. There’s a special doctrine called restricted data that says you cannot write physics on a napkin even if you have nothing to do with the government.
I think even if you’re not an American, if it has anything that could possibly have to do with nuclear weapons, in other words, any advance that might have to do with nuclear weapons, you have to recognize that the instant you put pen to paper or you start talking to somebody, you’re committing a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.
And if you think that’s crazy, start exploring the words restricted data. 1917 Espionage Act, 1946 and 1954 Atomic Energy Acts. The doctrine of bourne secret. It is illegal to pursue Q clearance data if you don’t have a Q clearance. But if you’re creating Q clearance data out of your own head as a byproduct of trying to do physics, you are actually potentially committing a capital offense.
The Theory of Everything and Its Implications
STEVEN BARTLETT: And your theory of everything, your theory, the theory you just talked to me about there, what does that mean for the average person that’s listening to this in terms of.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We don’t know.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That they should.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, this is my point. Did Rutherford know what he was doing?
STEVEN BARTLETT: No.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So I talk about this a lot, but I do think it’s probably one of the greatest lyrics ever in any song. And unfortunately, it occurs in a song that got way too popular. “The baffled king composing hallelujah.” That line. A baffled king does not realize what he is doing when he composes. Rutherford was a baffled king. Maybe there is a neutral version of the proton he was composing the end of the human race.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And your ideas about the nature of reality.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m a baffled person.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And your proposal.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I am baffled. I don’t know what it leads to is what I’m trying to tell you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: But your assertion is that there’s more than this dimension that we understand and more than ourselves.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m telling you that I can name for you what particles there are left to be found. And what comes back to me is you don’t have any predictions. And I’m thinking this doesn’t even make sense. Literally. I’m telling you there are. Maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton. Doesn’t begin to talk about all the things that I’m talking about, about so many new forces, so many new particles, ways to go in. There’s no longer an arrow of time in my theory.
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you could live forever, theoretically.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: What does it mean if you think about a final theory? And again, by the way, I just want to say something? I say my theory sometimes when I’m having to defend it, but it isn’t mine. It just is.
You know, Everest didn’t belong to Sir Edmund Hillary or to Mallory, or even to the surveyor for whom the mountain is named. When you chose to make the first ascent on Everest, you just chose a route, and then you either did or did not traverse the route. We don’t know whether Mallory may have succeeded.
But my point is that this isn’t my theory. There is a theory that’s there. It might be wrong. It’s possible I may have screwed it up, but it’s got so much in it that I have no idea what it means.
Understanding Hidden Dimensions
STEVEN BARTLETT: And the simple way to understand this theory is that there’s dimensions that exist beyond the ones that we know.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We already know from Einstein that these dimensions are implicitly in Einstein’s theory. Every single dimension that I’m talking about is being constructed out of the four that we began with. When I put the cups here and the coaster, the edges were calculated from the vertices and the faces were calculated from the edges.
My point being, these dimensions are already here. And because the dimensions are already here, they were already present in Einstein’s theory all along. When you ask for what Einstein’s real equation is, we actually don’t think about it that way. We call it the Einstein field equations, plural. How many of them are there? 10. Why are there 10? Because there are six edges and four vertices that weren’t accounted for. They’re already in Einstein’s theory. We just didn’t take them seriously as directions you could go in.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve heard about this simulation theory, haven’t you?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Why? I don’t want to talk about it.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Well, again, it’s the LLM problem. The really interesting thing comes from. I don’t know. And maybe the cosmos is traversable. Maybe times travel replaces time travel. You see, if I flip all of the dimensions of time and space, so I have one of time, three of space. In Einstein’s theory, the time dimension gets a minus sign. The three spatial dimensions get a plus.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Sign, and the three spatial dimensions are.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: X, Y and Z. Yeah, Z. Forgive me.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is for a simple person.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Depth, width and height.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, you can go forward, backwards, up, down.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Right? So we have three dimensions there, and then we have one of time. Because the conversation takes place over time. You’re moving around. Now flip the time dimension to being plus when it was minus before, and all the plus dimensions to being minus. So now I have three time dimensions and one Space dimension, it would look exactly the same. The one space dimension would take the function of time and the three time dimensions would have the function of space.
We don’t even teach people the idea that there is not necessarily an arrow of time if time is not one dimensional. The only dimension that has an arrow is one. If something has one dimension, you can say, I tried to do this on Rogan. I said, if you have a cassette tape and you want to go back to an earlier song, again, your younger listeners will have no idea what we’re talking about. You have to go back through all of the songs before, but if you have a stylus on a turntable, some of them will be hipsters with vinyl in their own homes. You can lift the stylus up and it doesn’t need to go back and unplay each song in reverse.
You may be able to go back in time without going back through time. I don’t know what this means, but it’s a lot like saying maybe there’s a neutral version of the proton.
The Hidden World of National Security
Now, what I’m concerned about is that essentially none of my physics friends know that there is a doctrine of restricted data. They’ve never heard of the 1946 and 54 Atomic Energy Acts. They don’t know that the Department of Energy that funds them is really the Department of Physics. They don’t know the extent to which we went to hide all of this stuff. They don’t know that they’re not allowed to talk to foreign nationals from hostile nations on our own soil because of a doctrine called deemed exports.
There’s an entire hidden world of national security. And the penalty for talking about national security with people who don’t live that is that you’re a conspiracy theorist. It’s like, do you have this terminology? Do you know the acts? Do you want to Google it? Well, you’re.
This is also just something that’s really interesting about the UFO, UAP world. We had this admission recently that the government knew that at a minimum. And again, I don’t think this is by anywhere close to the full story, at a minimum, there were secret, fake special Access programs. Do you know about special access programs? Super secret programs are called Special Access programs.
Then there’s a further category called Unacknowledged Special Access Programs, or usaps, which is you can know that a Special Access program exists. Like maybe Warhead Recovery might be a known one, but then there might be an unacknowledged Special Access program, which is like theft of foreign nuclear warheads, which it’s not even on the books. Only the super secret lawmakers in the Gang of eight, or whatever it is can know that that exists.
And then there are further designations of secretness. There’s waived and bigoted so you could have like a wave bigoted, unacknowledged special access program. And you don’t know any of this language. And then there’s this chorus of morons who the instant you start to educate people about the existence of the super secret Squirrel Club, rise up and say this is all conspiracy theory.
And you’re saying, wait a second. We just admitted in UFO UAP land that we have a fake special access program, which I predicted on Joe Rogan. I said we may be faking a UFO situation. The cost and the penalty at a personal level for letting people know how the government keeps secrets is personal destruction.
The Fake UFO Program Revelation
STEVEN BARTLETT: The US faked a UFO program?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yes. Correct. You don’t know about this? I think the Wall Street Journal had an article about it. So these guys knew when they filed their reports on the UFO UAP, that there actually is, at a minimum, a fake UFO UAP program.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why would they want to fake UFOs?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: This is so weird. Did you happen to watch Joe Rogan Episode 1945 where I talked about the whole history of the golden age of general relativity and its relationship to UFO, UAP, antigravity research and the atomic bomb?
STEVEN BARTLETT: I didn’t.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: When we invaded the beaches of Normandy on D Day, that was called Operation Overlord. We had an entirely fake invasion planned of Norway called Operation Fortitude. That was part of Operation Bodyguard, which is part of just total deception. And why? Because we were building up troops to do something huge.
So we tried to convince. We planted plans for the invasion of Norway on dead bodies to wash up on beaches so the Germans would find them. We fake stuff all the time. That’s what we do. And you can’t talk about what we do that is deceptive without being ruined by what are called covert influence operations.
You watch my Twitter account, you’ll see all sorts of accounts descend on it. Fraud, charlatan, grifter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some of that is just people being mean. But you’ll notice that if I really start talking about physics and I start talking about security and I start talking about things that anyone can Google and most of us don’t think to do it, suddenly it gets really, really intense. And the whole point is it’s supposed to be untraceable.
It’s supposed to be a way in which almost certainly we know a ton about what happened in the Wuhan Institute of Virology because of two bioweapons conventions that we were signatories and which we ratified the Geneva Convention and a bioweapons convention in the 1970s. But that’s not top of mind for ordinary people. They just watched their great grandma die and watched their children get sick and they watched their own brain fog. They can’t know whether that was a bioweapon that we were working on coming out of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with Ralph Baric’s lab. You know, we’re up to constant secret stuff.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Why would they fake the UFOs, though? What was that distraction?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You ever seen the B2 bomber?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: What if you saw that before we were ready to say it existed?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, you’d think it was a UFO or something.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: So wouldn’t it be better if we had a UFO story ready to go when we had cool aerospace?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay, so you’re saying they’re working on something which they didn’t want you to know.
The UFO Deception Strategy
ERIC WEINSTEIN: What’s more, what if we convinced China or Russia or Iran that we had incredible powers that they don’t have? Then they might be very reluctant to strike us. Or they might waste a tremendous amount of money developing anti-gravity technology when there’s no such thing. There are plenty of good reasons to fake such things. Why would we fake an invasion of Norway if we weren’t going to invade?
STEVEN BARTLETT: But if that’s a distraction technique, do you have any hypothesis as to what was going on there?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: But that’s not my job.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Because as soon as you do that, I know that the quality of my guessing is not going to be at the quality of my detecting when we’re up to bullshit.
In other words, if you ask me why is physics stagnant? I can say I don’t know. But there’s a decent chance that we know how dangerous physics is and that it’s crazy to do it in an open university environment. We’ve taken precautions. We have a system of national laboratories which are effectively our secret university system where you have to be an American.
So we’re using our regular universities and the whole world comes through it. We have Chinese people learning physics side by side with our own people.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And I guess you’re saying that you don’t know if UFOs exist, but you’re sure now that they were faking the science.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I am absolutely positive that we have unacknowledged programs that have “UFO” written on the side of them.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: In other words, the number of people who repeat strikingly similar things, who appear to be completely sober in every other respect, with no known acting ability. There is no way in the world that these people just spontaneously have decided to destroy their sanity, their career, and their reputation.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve got you.
The Intelligence Community’s War on Its Own People
ERIC WEINSTEIN: At a minimum, we’re faking. I think we are doing a lot more than faking a UFO program. I don’t know what it is, and I also would not be talking about this on a large podcast, but for one thing, I have a particular hatred for one aspect of our intelligence community.
And I don’t mean that I disagree or don’t like or I’m not uncomfortable when our Secret Squirrel Club inside the intelligence world, and inside in particular, covert operations, targets our own people who are not read into these programs for personal destruction, reputational destruction, mental destruction, economic destruction.
We take our best people and we make fun of them and we belittle them and we destroy their families, their lives, their ability to earn. I have a very strong sense that you never destroy your best people.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think you’re under attack?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Let me talk about Leo Szilard instead. Leo Szilard is the father of the…
STEVEN BARTLETT: Manhattan Project, which was where the nuclear bomb was created.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That’s right. He was not allowed to go inside the Manhattan Project because they didn’t trust him. He was a genius. He was the idea for the Manhattan Project. He and Einstein made sure that it happened. The government barely trusted Oppenheimer, if you saw the film.
What they did with Leo Szilard was they minded him. They knew how good he was. They knew how important he was. They listened to him and they didn’t destroy him. He undoubtedly knew that the program was going on, but he wasn’t allowed inside the program. I think that’s okay.
I think it’s okay that our security state recognizes that some people are not cut out to keep secrets. Some people are not cut out to die with certain facts that have to be kept hidden. That’s fine.
The desire of our government to destroy people who have no idea what they’ve tripped over because our government isn’t good enough to keep its own secrets. This is an abomination. You cannot destroy your A team.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Who are you referring to when you say people are being destroyed? Are you referring to people like yourself?
Jeffrey Epstein: The Construct
ERIC WEINSTEIN: If you look at, for example, Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein conducted a conference called “Confronting Gravity.” I don’t know who Jeffrey Epstein was, but I would certainly bet money that he was a product of at least one or more elements of the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, those are ours. Department of Homeland Security has some of the stuff. Geospatial Intelligence has some of this. It’s a large network.
I’m talking about people like David Grusch. I’m talking about people potentially like David Fravor. I’m talking about people like Jake Barber. I’m talking about scientists like Leo Szilard. Imagine if Leo Szilard didn’t know that the Manhattan Project was going on. Or Jack Raper, a journalist who broke a story. These people all think that they’re doing their jobs.
I desperately want to know why Jeffrey Epstein knew so much about my work and I want to know why he was connected to my graduate program. I was in the Harvard Mathematics Department. Jeffrey Epstein was absolutely connected to the Harvard Math Department. I want to know why.
STEVEN BARTLETT: How was he connected to the Math Department?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You’re pushing me to say things I’m not going to say, but I don’t mind.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m curious. I’m not trying to push you out.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I understand, but I’m just not going to do it. I’m saying that anybody who wants to can check this out.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You say he was connected to the Math Department, to the Harvard Mathematics Department.
STEVEN BARTLETT: How did you know he was connected?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You can Google it. You could Google it right now. This is not… I can point at all sorts of stuff that’s hidden in plain sight.
STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll take your word for it. And the assertion that I’m picking up on is that Jeffrey Epstein was planted in your world to keep…
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m not saying he’s planted. I don’t know who he was. I don’t know who ran him. He certainly was not a financier in any standard sense.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Really.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: That was a cover story.
STEVEN BARTLETT: The way that we know Jeffrey Epstein in the UK especially is just this guy who was this rich guy who had this island, who brought people there and then did these despicable things.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: “Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, that’s what we… That’s the story.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: “Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.” It’s called perseveration. He was a disgraced financier. What kind of a financier? A disgraced one. What was his name? Oh, he was “Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.” They perseverate that into your mind so that you autocomplete that in your LLM life. Do you believe that? That’s what Jeffrey Epstein was.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You met him?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, I can tell.
STEVEN BARTLETT: That financier.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: He wasn’t a financier the day I met him.
STEVEN BARTLETT: What was he?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: He was a weird guy who didn’t seem to know a lot about currency trading, claiming to run a multi-billion dollar FX hedge fund.
STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say a weird guy, what made him weird?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Same stuff I’ve said on Chris Williams. I’m not going to go back through that. My point is you’re getting a different interview.
So what I’m trying to get at is Jeffrey Epstein knew a tremendous amount about my work when nobody knew anything about my work. And he had a pipeline into me that I didn’t understand, which is that he was connected to my graduate program. And you can check out the conference called “Exploring Gravity” and hosted a physical workshop called “Confronting Gravity.”
STEVEN BARTLETT: “Confronting Gravity,” that’s right.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: In March 2006.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. What is Jeffrey Epstein… Jeffrey Epstein is very focused on gravity.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Was it a gravity conference? It was about gravity, yeah. What the fuck was he doing talking about bloody gravity if he’s a financier?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: It was very important to get Nobel laureates and some of the smartest people on Earth to come to the Virgin Islands and talk about gravity. Stephen Hawking was there, David Gross was there, Lawrence Krauss was there. Lisa Randall was there right before his conviction. And I’m telling you, he was very focused on the Harvard Math Department. And he knew all about me in ways that he wasn’t supposed to.
The Multi-Program Construct
STEVEN BARTLETT: I have to be clear. I have to be clear on my understanding of what you’re saying, from what I understood. And you can say, “Steve, I’m not going to answer that,” whatever. But I just have to… Because you’ve opened up a curiosity hole in my mind. So let me try and fill it. Even if it’s the conversation you had with Chris, I’ll just evade you if you… Fine.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, fine.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Fine. You’re within the right to evade me. And I hold the right to ask, which is… So is what I’m hearing is you believe, and I’m just going to say it how I think it is. What I’m hearing is you believe that Jeffrey Epstein was not a financier. He was planted in some way to influence…
ERIC WEINSTEIN: He was a construct, is what I said.
STEVEN BARTLETT: He was a construct in some way to mess with the progression of physics.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Jeffrey Epstein, apparently, I think some… I’ll tell you what I said when I met him. When the meeting was over, I immediately called my wife and I said, “I have just met a construct.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “This person is not who they claim to be. Somebody has constructed this human being to be something that they are not, which is a hedge fund genius, somebody who could understand the euro and the yen like nobody else.” Bullshit. Not true.
I believe that whoever constructed Jeffrey Epstein was running multiple different programs through the same thing, having put in a large initial investment. It wasn’t about one thing. If you build a mall, you don’t just have clothing stores in the mall. You have a food court in the mall. You have jewelry in the mall. You have all sorts of different things in the mall.
Jeffrey Epstein was a construct of something that was running multiple things. One of those things was science. And I don’t think that the science and the pedophilia were necessarily in the same bucket. He was funding all sorts of people. I don’t think everybody at that… Part of the problem with calling his plane the “Lolita Express” and calling his island “pedophile island” is that you just can’t see all the different things that were going through this guy.
I don’t think almost any of those scientists are exposed to anything really horrible. I think he was trying to keep a periscope on everything that was interesting. And I think that his girlfriend’s father, Robert Maxwell, was all through scientific publishing, and I think Pergamon Press was in part a control mechanism for making sure that revolutionary discoveries were taking place within a framework.
Anybody can look, you can write a substack article and you can hit post, and suddenly the world has access to your substack article. That is a nightmare. What if somebody posts weaponized anthrax? What if they do the equivalent of saying, “What if there’s a neutral proton?”
STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think he was controlling science?
The Reality of Managed Society
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think that Robert Maxwell was in part trying to control science. I think Jeffrey Epstein was in part trying to fund science, trying to control it. I don’t really know. Again, part of the problem with why conspiracy theorists have a bad name is that they’re not content to live in ignorance. And I am.
I know something is really off with this story. If you look at me saying things like, “you don’t know whether Biden is going to make it to November.” Ha ha ha. Eric. What an idiot. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, then he has a debate, he doesn’t make it to November. I’m not Nostradamus. I’m just dumb enough to say something in public that makes sense.
Let me say something in public that makes sense. Our national security people suck at their jobs. The people who are in charge of the Department of Energy, which is masking the Department of Physics, which is masking the Department of Nuclear Weapons. Right. The Atomic Energy Acts, which are really about atomic weaponry, recast as atoms for peace or who knows what. Jeffrey Epstein, who is not a disgraced financier. The newspapers that have always had a national interest component and have liaisons so that they can work with the CIA and the State Department and they do each other’s bidding and scratch each other.
This whole network is what I’ve called managed reality. We live in managed reality. We are all in some version of the Truman Show. And you can look at it, you can Google it, I can give you a million search terms. And every time I give a million search terms, you’ll watch my reputation get torn apart.
Are you going to blame me that you didn’t know what the “whole of society approach” is? Because you didn’t know that Daniel Inouye, center for Security in the Pacific, came up with an idea for soft fascism to fight hybrid wars. You didn’t know what hybrid warfare. Look at my talk at ARC, Jordan Peterson’s group, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It’s at almost 2 million views. And why is it? Because people are saying, “I didn’t know these terms.”
Human Terrain and Information Warfare
Did you know what the Human Terrain Project is? Do you know about human terrain? You’re a mountain, I’m a valley. And instead of war planners figuring out how do we use that valley to capture that mountaintop because it gives us an eagle’s nest to snipe from or whatever they say. Okay, this is the second most powerful podcast in the world. Second to Joe Rogan. How do we capture him?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Leave me alone, please.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, but that’s what I’m trying to say. You’re human terrain.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: When the human terrain wakes up and says, “wait a minute, I’m human terrain.” Well, my feeling is, if you don’t want me to talk about this on a podcast, then keep your terms separate. Nobody knew the term “pre bunked malinformation.” Do you know what pre bunked malinformation is?
Malinformation is information we don’t want to get out. Technically, people try to pretend that it’s information that will be misinterpreted, but really it’s real stuff that is deleterious to the narratives that we’re trying to push forward and what we’re trying to do. And pre bunked means discredited, so we knew it debunked. We have to debunk disinformation. We get that. But you didn’t know that we had to pre bunk malinformation, which is we have to destroy truth tellers.
The Challenge for Independent Media
STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you think that means for people like me as podcasters, you know? Cause we’re doing these long form conversations.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I take you’ll snap back, you’ll say, “that was a really interesting talk.” And then you’ll have somebody else on who’ll be talking about the importance of melatonin and how we don’t understand the role of sleep. And you’ll have somebody else on with who will be talking about how do you do a clothing brand from scratch and turn it into a billion dollar unicorn. You’re not going to stay here on this topic. This is your time with me. And it’ll have some effect and it’ll start to fade. And that’s what this is.
I’d love to be doing my podcast. I just don’t know how to do it safely. I want to talk about taking our lives back from the intelligence community. I want to talk about taking our lives back from Silicon Valley, even though those people are my friends. I want to talk about taking my life back from the phone, from despair, from not having a future.
I want to talk about having a glorious existence that is not mediated by morons who sit inside the Beltway and play with large budgets and hurt people, particularly really good people who are good at their job, who are trying to figure out how to advance humankind, their family, the national interest, and get foul.
I did not ask for Jeffrey Epstein to fall into my life. I met him once, but it was enough to know, “Holy cow, the Harvard Math Department can’t be what I think it is.” Why was he there? I didn’t even know. I never heard his name when I was there.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that where you met him?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: No, no, no, no. I think very powerful people at JP Morgan told me I needed to meet him. He didn’t want to talk about finance, he wanted to talk about science.
Living Under Surveillance
STEVEN BARTLETT: You can’t do your podcast safely.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: My employer was a special informant to the FBI. He’s like one of my closest friends. I’m not going to say who it is.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Your employer?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yeah, and one of my closest friends. I live under a periscope. Proctoscope is really what I meant, but yeah, I don’t. I want to do physics, man. I’m really, really good at it, you know? And if we have an idea that we shouldn’t do physics in public, I would like to have a call from somebody inside. “Hey, Eric, we need you to come in.” Okay, great. What’s up? But I didn’t use your resources. I didn’t use your Grants. Nobody ever informed me.
My God, nobody ever informed me about restricted data. How many people on Earth know that there’s a doctrine that says physicists don’t have free speech? We can execute you for doing your job. It’s never been tested in the courts, and I hope that the Supreme Court will not allow that. But, you know, if we have a problem that is so serious in theoretical physics that it needs the world’s largest exemption from free speech, we need to amend the Constitution.
You can’t just do this as a sneak attack where you reserve the right casually to hook the 1917 Espionage act up against the 1946 and 54 Atomic Energy Acts. I’ve canvassed my physics colleagues. One of the memes against me, which is very funny, is that no physicists take me seriously when I’m in their offices all the time. I just don’t know what my life is.
And with this latest advent of war in the Middle east, are you really going to pretend that if you can Google all of these things that I have no idea what I’m talking about? I’m looking to have a conversation with my own government. I’m looking to have a conversation about theoretical physics, and I can do it quietly, but I have rights. And I do not believe that the 1946 and 1954 Atomic Energy Acts are constitutional. Try me. There is no restricted data. You can’t do that to an American. And you can’t just keep mounting covert influence campaigns.
You know, I just spent five days in the physics department. I’m not allowed to say that it was five days in the physics department as a visitor, I gave a talk. I’m not allowed to say that I gave a talk. I don’t know what this is.
STEVEN BARTLETT: And.
The Corruption of Scientific Institutions
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I’m tired of it. You know, it’s just like, if you’re managing the Middle east this badly, if you’re managing physics this badly, if you’re managing the national economy this badly, if you screwed up Covid this badly by getting inside of the Lancet and Nature. You know, peer review is this fake thing that supposedly stretches back to the founding of the Royal Society. And it’s very clear from the scholarship around it that it comes out of a period between 1965 and 1975 initiated by the Medicare act, predicated on the need for editors for the journal expansion, founded by Pergamon Press and Robert Maxwell.
By 1975, there’s a giant battle between the NSF and both fiscal and cultural conservatives against something called a course of study, or macOS, where Peer review was born in a Utah clinic, came out of the medical literature because the federal government in 1965 with the Medicare act, picked up the need to pay for so many medical procedures. They wanted to say, “why are we assigning this many medical procedures?” The doctors circled the wagons and said that we will peer review each other. Then by 1975, the NSF was under the microscope and they used peer review as a self defense of last resort to say, “we will be reviewing each other.”
Peer review is a myth. The scholarship is clear as day. I can’t keep going on the world’s largest podcasts saying everything that can be googled and figured out and just constantly have as my reward that the government refuses to have a conversation with me and sends its gaggle of idiots to harass me.
STEVEN BARTLETT: You think it’s doing that? It’s sending a gaggle of it.
The Power of Science and Its Suppression
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Yes, I do. I do think. I think that some of them are actual idiots who just enjoy causing problems. But I think more than anything, we have a real problem. Science is too powerful. If you wanted to just cut to the ultimate core of this. If four amino acids can shut down planet Earth, if. What is it? A nine page paper, solving the double spend problem can create a new currency not backed by violence, but backed by mathematics. If the concept of an inner product in a large vector space generates something you can’t tell isn’t a human being in 2017? Do you have any idea what the power of the human mind is at this point?
Linear algebra can create something that you would fall in love with. It can create the most beautiful music you can imagine, or it can animate a photo of a dead relative so that you can actually have the experience of having some video of you with a great grandparent you can’t even remember. Science is the most amazing, powerful, crazy stuff possible. And we spend a fortune trying to convince people that scientists are worthless, that scientists are incapable. And in large measure, they’ve convinced the scientists themselves.
My colleagues, the supposed physicists, will spend their entire lives pretending to do physics and retire without ever having actually done any. I was in this physics department. I was just in. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent that long as a visitor. The top people in this physics department professed that they had no interest in the physical world, that they only cared about the mathematics that they were doing. And I just thought, “you’re in a theoretical physics group and you profess openly that you have no interest whatsoever in the physical world.” Well done.
I don’t know who you were. I don’t know how you did it, but it took you four decades to get the physicists to stop caring about the physical world. Somehow what we did is we stopped the world’s most powerful and the world’s most important group from making progress. And why Elon Musk is not out here saving this by just throwing a few billion at it? Elon, if you’re out there, it’s Ad Astra, yes or no? Mars is a stopgap message. Do you want to go to the stars? Is there something we don’t know?
A Call for Transcendence
To the Department of Energy. Do you want to have conversations? Is there anyone at all out here? That’s my question. That’s why I do the podcasts. And it’s. By the way, I’m repeating myself. I’ve said this before. Send lawyers, guns, and money. There’s no one out here.
But I will say this. If we could get out of here, you know, in terms of transcendence, in terms of things that are really exciting, there’s nothing that I had greater pleasure at as a father than taking my children for meteor showers. We take the dog. We go to a secret location outside of Los Angeles that’s quite dark. We just lie under the sky and watch for hours, you know, and look up at the heavens and think, “my God, that’s a destination. That’s some place I could go.”
I don’t think that there’s a more inspiring thing than to figure out the infinity of space, all of these galaxies, and the deep field photographs of these space telescopes filled with worlds, and we’re stuck here. It’s like, it’s enough already. Time to go. Let’s have some fun. That’s really what I’m excited about. Been great to be here.
Final Advice for Living Better
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you for being here. Super fascinating. And it spun my brain in several different directions at the same time. I want to bring it back to the person who’s got to the end of this conversation, and they’re sat at home in their box of shorts, maybe listening on their iPhone as they fall asleep wherever they are in the world or on a train or plane or whatever, and allow you to offer them some kind of closing message that might make their life better in some way. It’s a broad brief, but I think it’s the most important brief, which is, you know, having heard everything we’ve talked about today, what advice would you give the listener? An actionable piece of advice so that they could live a subjectively better life?
Life Advice and Recommendations
ERIC WEINSTEIN: The songs of Tom Lehrer are pretty terrific, as are the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. You might want to explore the Azores as well as the Indonesian archipelago. Indonesian is one of the easiest languages to learn because it’s been denuded of most of the complexity that screw up people who have a hard time learning other languages.
Buy a poster of tropical fruit and make sure that you visit every single one on that poster before it’s time for lights out. Consider Bach’s B Minor Mass and the Cello Suites, particularly by Pablo Casals. And take a serious listen to Eva Cassidy singing “Stormy Monday” in an album called “Live from Blues Alley” to see if you really know how to feel things.
I think Professor Longhair’s “Big Chief” is one of the most brilliant pieces of piano music. It’s absolutely inspiring. And if you really like that, James Carroll Booker III has an album called “The Resurrection of the Bayou Maharaja.” Seriously, think about visiting the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic.
Take a look at Kurt Jaimungel’s channel. He’s doing amazing stuff being done by no one else on earth. I think that Chris Buck is really amazing. And if you think that “Crossroads” is good, have a listen to his version of “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones. An incredible groove and I didn’t really appreciate it the first time I heard it.
I think that the people making spark amps at Positive Grid and my friends at Neural DSP with the Quad Cortex will blow your mind with how much great audio equipment you can make. You can get a good electric guitar for a few hundred bucks thanks to advances in China. Put it into an open tuning and buy yourself a slider. Just slide a glass along it and you’ll be able to play most songs that you’d care about within a minute or two, maybe three, because you only need three chords.
Get married. It may not work out. It may be miserable. Have some kids. There’s nothing else great to do on this planet. At least give it a try and if your parents won’t pressure you to do it, I’m happy to do it. Try to keep this thing going. Try to dream big about legacy. Don’t feel embarrassed about wanting to conquer the world or leave a permanent stain. Get out of this moment where everybody’s worried about narcissism and drama.
Listen for meteor showers. They’re announced regularly. Nobody actually does anything about them and it’s worth inconveniencing yourself with people you love and take the dog really seriously.
Think about whether you want to pile on when you see what is almost certainly a federal or other campaign targeting people who are standing up for you, whether they’re trying to figure out where Covid came from, trying to figure out who was behind Jeffrey Epstein. Recognize that almost everything you’ve been taught to do in terms of hating Israel as part of somebody’s campaign out of Qatar. The situation in Gaza is incredibly dire. Don’t stop caring about the people who are living under that. Recognize that the Persians are not the mullahs.
Get involved. Wish your country’s leadership well, even if you didn’t vote for them and you think that they’re horrible people. They’ve got very hard work to do. Be good to each other. Try it’s a grand adventure and make sure you have some fun before it’s lights out. That’s it.
The Final Question
STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question that was left for you. I love this question. What is the problem that you are doing the most mental gymnastics to avoid?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Pass. I know the answer. It’s not appropriate for your audience. One of the things about being in the hot seat on podcasts is that it is not right to force anyone to respond to a question. I know how to falsify an answer to that and I’m not going to do that and I’m not going to share the answer to that question because it’s not appropriate. But it’s a great question. Feel free to leave it for someone else. This doesn’t seem fair. Whoever you were, thank you for the question.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Obviously, my reaction was just tremendous curiosity, which would be a natural reaction to what you just said.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Thank you for a great interview.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you. It’s so unbelievably fascinating and you’ve given me so much. Unfortunately, you’ve given me a lot of answers, but you’ve given me even more questions, and maybe that’s the product of a good conversation.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: You live in LA?
STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: We’ll do it again.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Appreciate you.
STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you.
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