Transcript of Eric Weinstein Interview on All-In Podcast

I talked to Kratsios about this when we did our interview, that if everyone in the room agrees on something, it’s probably wrong. There has to be some degree of skepticism.

But particularly because the fundamental basis of science is to ask questions, interrogate, generate evidence, generate data, and then draw some conclusion and ask your next question — it’s almost like the asking questions stopped. Where did that come from? It sounds like you’re saying it’s because folks were hamstrung socially. Was it economic?

What is it that happened — not just in this pandemic, but broadly — are we seeing this happen more in these scientific domains where everyone kind of aligns around one thesis, one dogma, and you’re not going to get funding, you’re not going to have friends, you’re not going to get colleagues to work with you, you’re going to get chastised if you ask different questions or ask whether these assumptions are correct?

The Scientific Precariat

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:06:27 – 00:09:09): This is the question. Now let me just answer it. We created the scientific precariat. We created a world in which professors cannot afford to go against a consensus. Now the problem is consensus, because if everybody agrees on something, you shouldn’t need a consensus. There’s no arithmetic consensus. Do we have an arithmetic consensus that 2 plus 3 equals 5? No. It just is.

When I hear the word “consensus,” I get very nervous, because a consensus is usually an artificial agreement achieved through pressure. The Washington Consensus is some sort of a thing where we’re all going to go in a particular direction, and if you don’t go in that direction, you don’t have a job.

So when you ask, well, what happens? My question is — Jay Bhattacharya is the perfect example of what should happen. You have a guy who has a PhD in economics and an MD, and he went against it with the Great Barrington Declaration. Now he’s the head of NIH. I knew Jay when he was called a “fringe epidemiologist” by this loser Francis Collins and his sidekick — who’s probably our bioweapons czar — Anthony Fauci.

Now, if I say Anthony Fauci was probably our bioweapons czar, that’s going to strike all these people, particularly on the institutional left, as, well, “that’s conspiracy theory talk.” So my question is, we signed a couple of agreements in the ’70s — the Geneva Convention and Bioweapons Treaty. We have a cryptic system. Somehow we chose, in that case, a mysterious Ukrainian-British zoologist to receive huge amounts of money through a hippie-dippy charity called the EcoHealth Alliance, money from like DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense.

So if you start doing things through covert operations, the problem is that scientists can see right through covert operations. If you have great tools — if you say, “I wasn’t at the scene of the crime,” I say, “Well, but we have a hair follicle, and I can pretty much tell you you were at the scene of the crime.” That’s how powerful science is.

So now you have this different problem, which is that you’ve got all of these B-minus policy people in Washington, particularly in the COVID community — not the intelligence community, but the COVID community inside the intelligence community — who don’t want kick-ass independent scientists because they’re telling stories and narratives that are easily exploded. So right now, we don’t just have a problem with good science, we have a problem with good journalism.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:09:09 – 00:09:12): They also have to fall in line with the giant narrative.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:09:13 – 00:10:06): Exactly. So there are times when you have to — when the US went to war, Roosevelt was in a wheelchair with these leg braces, and there was a general agreement that we won’t report on the state of the president’s health. Well, we had the same thing with Biden. Biden was undergoing some form of dementia. Did anyone think to ask a leading geriatric neurologist, “Look, examine his gait, examine his speech patterns, and tell us where he’s likely to be in his cognitive trajectory”?

So if you’re trying to tell a lie that’s important structurally, you really don’t want scientists exploding it. And I’m not arguing with that — we shouldn’t have been honest about what we were doing at a New Mexico boys’ school from 1940 to 1945, because science was creating the most powerful weapon ever seen on planet Earth.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:10:07 – 00:10:09): For those not aware, that’s the Manhattan Project.

The American Scientific Precariat

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:10:09 – 00:11:38): Absolutely. So what I’m trying to say is that right now you’re not taking those people who stood up and making them the president of a university or the chairman of a department. You’re not giving them a chair. And I just gave a talk on this at Jordan Peterson’s ARC conference. You haven’t reinserted the tiny number of people who stood up. You haven’t rewarded them.

My question is, where’s my third home for standing up? I want to put 3 kids through school. I want to participate in the security and the prosperity that we provide to everyone else. And this is the key issue. You’ve created the American scientific precariat. That’s one of the reasons why you have such strange political affiliations, where you don’t have balance in the professorate. You’ve got this incredibly dangerous situation where we are not participating in freedom.

And I will say, in particular, theoretical physics is the only profession to have lost free speech because of something called restricted data, where I am not allowed to put pen to paper to write down a physics equation if in any way it affects nuclear weapons. Well, try doing really good physics in a way that doesn’t affect hadrons and nucleons. It’s impossible. So you have this threat, right, that somehow the law — I’m not even protected by the First Amendment.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:11:39 – 00:12:10): But I want to go back to your point about incentives. So when you say, “I want to have a third home” — what you’re saying, just to do the Eric Weinstein translation here — but you’re saying, as a professor, I have to fall in line in order to gain tenure, in order to get a grant, in order to get the chairmanship role or whatever fellowship I’m looking for. If I don’t fall in line, if I’m fringe, if I say things that are non-conformist — is that the right kind of way to—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:12:10 – 00:12:11): Heterodox.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:12:11 – 00:12:12): Heterodox.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:12:12 – 00:12:28): If I choose to just go against the orthodoxy — right, I believe that it was insane to take the idea of the Wuhan Institute of Virology off the table when it came to the origin of COVID. Right? Okay, insane, right? It was clear then.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:12:29 – 00:12:47): And when you said that, you were called a fringe scientist, and you were chastised and labeled an outcast, and therefore you lost access, you lost jobs, you lost income. There was much that was left out of the equation for you. Because you asked questions that were heterodox?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:12:48 – 00:14:01): I came up with a set of equations in differential geometry in 1987, and I was really treated incredibly badly. Those equations took over my field in 1994, and there was never an attempt to go back and say, “Wait a minute, we just brutalized somebody who got things right, and very early.”

And so, by the same token, it’s just a very simple process. You’re not allowed to want better for your life. You’re supposed to be humble. “True scientists don’t care about money. True scientists don’t care about security. The reward is the work.” It’s all of this absolute drivel. The fact is that we are providing your security. And I say “third homes” to be deliberately provocative — I used to say “second homes,” and I’m done with that.

You’re dealing with a level of prosperity in a world in which the Gini coefficients are blowing out. It’s almost entirely due to the technology that is derivative of science, and the scientists are not participating. So what you’re doing is you’re creating a collectivist mindset, because we can’t get paid, we can’t win. If we get things right, we’re out.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:14:01 – 00:14:52): When did this change happen? Because did we not value and prize heterodoxy, hereticism, outlandish ideas? The origin of science, the origin of great innovation — which arguably America is still the global leader in today — arises from what initially seems heretical. It seems like an idea that is far-fetched, unrealistic, not going to happen. But all it takes is 1 out of 10 of those things to be true, and ultimately the envelope is pushed forward, and we find ourselves in a new frontier, right? Science should follow the same formula as entrepreneurship, in the sense — technological or industrial kind of entrepreneurship, roughly.

But where did things change, and why? Is this just the natural course of — Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote this manifesto where he talked about oversocialization.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:14:52 – 00:14:52): Yeah.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:14:53 – 00:15:00): Is that ultimately what happened here? Is it social media played a role? Is it just that this is the saturation of social systems over time?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:15:00 – 00:15:00): Yeah. This—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:15:01 – 00:15:02): —or was there a deliberate external effort?

1965–1975: When Everything Went Wrong

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:15:02 – 00:18:06): The one thing you didn’t recite in that list of things — you didn’t mention my being in the physics department, I guess, at Hebrew University, MIT, postdoctoral fellowship. But the most important one is that I was the co-chair, co-PI with Richard Freeman of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard, in the economics department, because I was worried that we had been losing this.

And there’s a very crisp answer to this. Between 1965 and ’75, everything went wrong. It’s basically from the beginning of the Medicare Act of ’65 to a controversy over something called Man: A Course of Study in 1975 that ushered in peer review and the control. But if you wanted to really pinpoint it, it really is ’69 to ’71 — particularly brutal.

What happened was the MIT physics department, I think in the spring of 1969, walked out in protest of the Vietnam War, including people who had been part of the Manhattan Project. And the government took one look at this and said, “Okay, you are wobbly. We can’t trust you. We have a very complicated, cryptic agreement with our physicists in particular. You are the most dangerous, most deadly, most intelligent, most successful group, along with the mathematicians, and we’ve relied on you, and now we can’t trust you because you’re not rowing in the same direction that the country is rowing with the war, because you’re joining the protest movement.”

What happened was that immediately the MIT Instrument Laboratory, which I think was where lots of government money was being funneled through, was taken outside the university and turned into Draper Labs. And the Mansfield Amendment in ’69–’71, named after Mike Mansfield of Montana, said, “Okay, the military can no longer fund blue-sky research inside of our university system unless it has a direct, express military purpose.” That was the disaster, because what the military had done is they said, “Look, we want you guys fat and happy doing blue-sky research, which is what you think you should be doing. We trust you guys. We just want to know that you’re there for us when we need you.” So the military was our best friend.

Now, that was uncomfortable, because honestly, you have a huge panoply of different ideas inside of high-energy, highly dynamic science projects. If you don’t have communists and fascists in the same department having tea together, something has gone wrong, because scientists are very extreme. And Ted Kaczynski wrote a marvelous story, for example, called Ship of Fools, about a bunch of people overly concerned about political correctness on a ship that then runs into an iceberg because nobody’s actually paying attention to the running of the ship. They’re having questions about—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:18:06 – 00:18:07): I didn’t even know this.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:18:07 – 00:18:08): Oh yeah.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:18:08 – 00:18:08): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:18:08 – 00:18:14): Everybody should read it. Now, of course, I’m not pushing people to — a mass murderer.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:18:15 – 00:18:19): However, it’s heretical to acknowledge Ted Kaczynski.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:18:19 – 00:18:34): Well, but the point is that scientists are weirdos, or at least many scientists are weirdos. And if you’re not going to deal with truly dangerous minds, I don’t even know why you’re suiting up for the science game.

Missing the Alpha

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:18:35 – 00:18:56): So where do those minds go if they’re not enabled or allowed into the institutions, the establishment, the machinery of science in America? Are they still around, or are their brains just blunted out and they’re only allowed to say certain things? Or are we taking great scientists and reprogramming them and missing all the alpha?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:18:56 – 00:19:06): I mean, yeah, yeah. You’re missing the alpha. And it’s funny that you should say that, because that makes it like “alpha male” or “the alpha” in investment theory, right?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:19:06 – 00:19:06): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:19:07 – 00:19:07): Both works.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:19:07 – 00:19:09): Yeah. I also do freestyle rap.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:19:09 – 00:19:10): Really?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:19:10 – 00:19:13): Yeah. No. Well, sometimes. Okay. We’ll talk later about that. Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:19:13 – 00:20:58): Cool. Well, mostly what you’re doing is you’re spaying and neutering your best minds. But the other thing is, look at Palmer Luckey. Okay, that guy looks to me like a scientist. He’s irreverent, he’s got a crazy shirt, and he builds things to kill people. Yeah, right. Now, if he was in a physics department, he could not easily be that guy.

But if you wanted somebody who’s still in science who looks to me like a great scientist, I would point you to Nima Arkani-Hamed. Incredibly charismatic. Brilliant as the day is long, completely uncompromising, did not go in for the string theory fad at a deep level, even though he’s sympathetic to many aspects of it. Do you guys even know that he’s there? He’s the best of us currently, and he’s still not that old.

My feeling is that there’s pretty much been a giant decrease in our effectiveness. And I know why. When you kicked Jim Watson out of Cold Spring Harbor, which he built — what are you doing? Do you know that Mark Ptashne is in his mid-80s? The guy who wrote a genetic switch on phage lambda, one of the most brilliant, irreverent people. At some point, I think I sent a journalist to him, and the journalist came back with his tail between his legs and said, “That guy’s insane.”

Well, Eric Lander was the White House science advisor — Kratsios’s role. I think his picture isn’t up on the wall because he’s sort of an uncompromising, difficult-to-deal-with guy. And my feeling — I hate to say this — is tough shit. You know, if you ever saw the movie Whiplash—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:20:58 – 00:20:59): Love it, one of my favorites.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:20:59 – 00:21:10): Okay, well, there’s a reason that guy has the best band. He’s not handing out tissues. And I don’t mean to be mean about it. I don’t want a brutal place, but this stuff is pretty unforgiving.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:21:11 – 00:21:29): What’s the solution to the morass, the stagnation? What do we do here to try and catch up again? What do we do here to restructure? Is it about institutions? Is it about funding? Is it about people? Is it reprogramming? How do you get out of a social circuit that’s fully programmed?

Poking Holes in the Civil Rights Act

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:21:31 – 00:21:45): Great question. I mean, really great question. Let’s just be provocative and throw some stuff out. National interest waivers. I want to blow a giant hole in the Civil Rights Act so that we can have teams that are not constantly afraid of HR.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:21:45 – 00:21:50): What does the Civil Rights Act do that makes it difficult for individuals to do what they need?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:21:50 – 00:23:06): Well, you know science. My closest friend from college — we have a group of 3, 2 Jews and a Muslim. And the Muslim is constantly teasing the Jews about, “You guys own all the banks and the newspapers,” and we joke with him about him being a terrorist. Now, that is not a model I can explain to anybody, but we’ve been incredibly close since 1982.

My claim is that you don’t understand how high-agency people actually form tight, cohesive social units. If you have the HR department saying, “Eric, I understand you are making an inappropriate joke — screw off, get out of here, who are you and what are you doing in my lab, let me call security” — why do I need a note from my mommy and daddy to do everything? I’m not saying be horrible. I’m saying you don’t know enough about the culture of greatness to be my HR department. That’s sort of what I’m saying.

So I’m just throwing out a provocative idea — which, by the way, I’m a Democrat. I’m sort of a Democrat from the JFK school rather than — I don’t think I would join—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:23:06 – 00:23:08): I don’t know what you would be today.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:23:08 – 00:23:15): Well, I’m staying in the party. I’m a “nail house” Democrat. A nail house is the house that you build a mall around because the person won’t sell.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:23:15 – 00:23:15): Yes.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:23:17 – 00:25:36): I’m not leaving the party. But my party has gone insane. My feeling is, if we were really who we say we are, we’d be making common cause with the Republicans I met with and saying, “Let’s get on with it and reform the system together.” And if you want to brag about how you made America great without us, you can go screw yourself. My feeling is that I’d rather work with you, make America great, and then fight over the credit later. That’s how you work in a war.

So my first recommendation is throw out the Civil Rights Act. No, not throw it out — poke holes in it, because you like the intent of it. It’s the letter that’s arbitraged against the intent, which creates the sort of collectivist thinking. You can’t do great work without hyper-individualism, without rugged hyper-individualism. And so my feeling is that’s not an Ayn Randian thing. That’s not a conservative thing. The issue is that I consider myself left of center, and there’s no one more individualistic than I am.

And so what you need is — I need not to have peer review. Peer review is a fake story that was retconned into science. You can look it up on Google Ngrams. Put quote, space, “peer review,” space, close quote, and you’ll notice that there’s really no mention of it before 1965. And the reason for that is that the Medicare Act made the government the major payer for medical procedures. And the government said, “Well, why are we paying for all this stuff?” Well, the doctors said, “We don’t want you having oversight over our decision-making. Our peer — we will peer review each other.” It started in a Utah clinic.

And then it wasn’t until 1975, when fiscal and social conservatives attacked the NSF over something called Man: A Course of Study, or MACOS. Now, for some reason, the NSF grouped in anthropology as a science. I think that’s a mistake. I think what we really need is very hard sciences separated. And my feeling is the weaker scientists should go form their own organization and stop using our credit card, because they’re destroying our credit limit.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:25:36 – 00:25:43): Those are social sciences and soft sciences versus hard sciences, where there’s an industrial endpoint.

Markets, Market Failure, and Science

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:25:43 – 00:27:44): Well, it’s not a question of an industrial endpoint. I mean, I think that’s another thing that’s really screwed up — that science has become synonymized with biomedical, which it isn’t. And science has become, in the conservative mind, something that the market can do well when — did no one take Econ 101? Because on the first day of school, they’re supposed to tell you that markets work really well as long as you’re not in a category called market failure. And if you miss that day, you say, “Well, markets are perfect, then they can price everything.” But anything that’s inexhaustible and inexcludable — which is exactly the definition of science — can’t be priced by a market unless you create an artificial market.

I can’t tell you how dispiriting this is. If I’ve been kind to the Republicans, here’s a place where I’m going to be cruel. You can’t have people who do not understand that markets cannot see everything. There’s a reason that we pay taxes for an army, and it’s a technical reason. It’s not, “We think that’s a good thing.” It’s that if you could make the army exhaustible and excludable, you wouldn’t need to pay for it with taxes. So your tax dollar has to be used for things that the market can’t reach.

Homotopy theory is a great case. When I say “homotopy theory” in these science discussions, people say, “Well, what is that?” My response is, well, you don’t know. It’s an incredibly important part of mathematics, pure mathematics. I don’t know that it has any industrial applications, but you go after homotopy theory and you’re pulling out a Jenga block from an incredibly important ecosystem that you don’t understand.

So my feeling about this is I’m going to inject a PhD perspective into this conversation, because what the PhDs are doing wrong is that they’re staying out. Trump to them has cooties. They don’t want Trump cooties, so they don’t show up. And now, well, if they’re not going to explain to you why we need homotopy theory and we need to tax people to pay for it—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:27:45 – 00:27:51): The administration’s not hearing what they need to be hearing, and the people that are supposed to be saying it are not showing up to the administration.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:27:51 – 00:27:53): That’s right. And it’s completely dysfunctional.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:27:54 – 00:28:05): And honestly, by the way, the statistic I gave Kratsios is — Nature did a survey of 2,000 scientists, their readers, Nature being a scientific journal that’s widely read by the scientific community.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:28:07 – 00:28:09): And by the way, not peer-reviewed until the ’70s.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:28:09 – 00:28:32): Right. And 6% of the readers polled voted for President Trump, 85% or something for Kamala Harris. And then there was an undecided group. But I think it speaks to your point — Trump is deemed to be so anti-science, the institution of Trump is deemed to be anti-science, that there doesn’t even want to be an engagement.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:28:33 – 00:28:57): But assume that you detest Trump. Okay, assume that you think Trump is the devil. I just met with Michael Kratsios. Great. I wanted that role. I put my hat into the ring for that role. I didn’t think I would get it, because I wasn’t willing to pledge sufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. It happened to go to Michael Kratsios. I was very nervous, because he’s not coming from a PhD background.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:28:58 – 00:28:59): What a—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:28:59 – 00:29:27): —what an unbelievable growth in that role. The guy understands — “I don’t know all sorts of things. I’m here to learn. Tell me what I need to know.” And if no one shows up to do that tutelage, you’re going to — boy, do you deserve exactly what you got. Because I think Michael is trying to do absolutely the right thing. I know Jim O’Neill very well from the Peter Thiel universe. He’s coming in at NSF. Jay Bhattacharya, absolute gem. If you can’t work with these people, is that their problem or is that your problem?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:29:27 – 00:29:57): So, arguably — sorry, let me just go back to talk about markets, and I’ll make a libertarian argument. If markets work well for driving economic value, and those who are good at that participate meaningfully in that value creation, there will be wealthy people, and those wealthy people will see the value of mathematics, the value of pure physics, the value of astrophysics and cosmology, and they’ll fund it. Jim Simons — didn’t he fund quite a lot of research?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:29:57 – 00:30:08): Jim was a genius with detailed knowledge of pure mathematics. So if you have Yuri Milner — a guy who has a background in quantum chromodynamics.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:30:10 – 00:31:06): If you have more of those people — and there are — point is, and I’m not trying to argue with you about it, but my point is, shouldn’t the market work, regardless — that they’ll see the value of the science that you’re identifying? They’ll identify it. Capital will flow to that research. It will get funded somehow. There’s a lot of independent institutions out there that get capital. Is that not sufficient for the landscape?

And I’ll also state — one of the statistics that I brought up with Kratsios, which he published in his book, is that over time, we have seen a significant decline in the effectiveness of dollars deployed against scientific research in the US — an 80-fold decline in return on every dollar invested in government research. So I just want to throw those 2 points out there. Is there not private market capital that will find its way to solve these problems? And isn’t the government getting worse over time at deploying capital and driving returns?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:31:06 – 00:32:38): And I might be giving you a T-ball here, so I guess I should have gotten high on cannabis in order to even take that question on. I don’t believe any of that.

First point — and it’s — I knew Jim Simons decently well. Jim was the kind of guy who could do that, but even he didn’t understand. My last conversation with Jim Simons, I was trying to explain to him how the Chern-Simons transgression, interpreted as an action functional, is the only rival to Einstein-Hilbert, and that effectively he will find, if he pursues this, that Chern-Simons and Einstein-Hilbert are on an equal playing field as daughters of the ultimate theory. He didn’t know that.

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

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:32:38 – 00:32:40): So government should fund—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:32:40 – 00:32:43): Government has to be the basic funder of these things.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:32:44 – 00:32:50): The next part of this — we need to have the right people representing the decisions on where we should be funding, what we should be funding.

Funding People Versus Ideas

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:32:50 – 00:33:44): Correct. And that’s what we did previously — we sort of had slush funds, and there were very good people who had money. Years ago, I was at a conference in Beersheba, on physics. And people were talking about where they were going to get their next job. And this old guy comes up to us and says, “I just pity all of you.” It was an American. And I said, “In what way?” He said, “I never applied for a job in my life.” I said, “Sorry, what do you mean?” He says, “If you were any good and you needed a job, you talked to one of the people who was high up in the field, and they got on the phone. And by the time they got off the phone, you had a job where you needed to be.”

And so my claim is that when you have administrator types come in and say, “What we need is KPIs, we need to drive this on a data—”

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:33:44 – 00:33:44): We—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:33:44 – 00:33:54): “I’m data-driven, I want to know what the translation is.” Do you even know what ROI is, or is it just what you can measure?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:33:54 – 00:33:54): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:33:55 – 00:35:55): And so my claim is a lot of what you want is you want these people on retainer. So whenever you have a real problem, you call up the Jasons, and it’s stocked with the most terrifying intellects you can imagine, and we can get to work and we can solve your problems.

But if you’re saying, “Well, why should my taxpayer dollars go do whatever you find interesting?” — well, if I can pursue what I find interesting, and when you call me up, I’m going to be very friendly to helping my own country, my own nation. I’m going to feel positive about that. If you tell me, “You should work on this because this thing is what drives the ROI,” my feeling is, do you just not understand science? Do you imagine that your technology mindset is the same thing as my scientific mindset?

You want to get paid. I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. I’m not nearly as interested in having a new McLaren as whether my name is going to be discussed 10,000 years from now if humans are still around. And I say that because Jim Watson just died. My good friends Isadore Singer, Raoul Bott are now dead. Those are people whose contributions will be discussed 10,000 years from now. Can you say that about almost anyone? Who’s doing software as a service? Hard to say.

As I used to say — what’s the difference between Grisha Perelman and Ron Perlman? In the modern era, the question is, who’s Grisha Perelman? And, you know, 1,000 years from now, it’s, who’s Ron Perlman?

So my feeling is that we have our own toys that we care about. We care about our history. We care about different things. It’s not unreasonable to want a dacha and to want to be able to check into a Four Seasons and to fly business class, but we don’t need a corporate jet. That’s your stuff.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:35:55 – 00:36:06): So treat scientists like the rock stars that they should be, will be. Otherwise you’re going to lose them. You’re going to lose that talent. You’re going to lose that moment.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:36:06 – 00:36:08): I’m going all in.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:36:13 – 00:37:06): When you say “slush funds” — the way the funding process works in the modern era is grants. You apply for a grant with a very specific set of objectives, and that’s what the capital is going to be used for. And to your point earlier, grants are typically approved if they’re lower beta, which means more predictable in terms of the outcome.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:37:06 – 00:37:10): So we’re appropriating modern portfolio theory to science.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:37:10 – 00:37:10): To science.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:37:10 – 00:37:10): Love it.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:37:11 – 00:37:24): Yes. Well, that’s the way it’s been operating, is my argument. Or has it not been? And does that not miss the opportunity to take crazy high-beta bets, and not just bet on the idea, but bet on the person?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:37:24 – 00:37:26): So crazy high-beta bets.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:37:26 – 00:37:26): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:37:27 – 00:37:28): Let’s do an example.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:37:28 – 00:37:28): Yes.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:37:28 – 00:39:00): Imagine that I have a 1% chance of curing all cancer, right? Should you hire me? Well, 99% failure — that’s pretty expensive. But the benefit of curing all cancer — the government is incredibly rich. And when you’re incredibly rich, you can afford to take different bets to maximize your outcomes.

The problem is that the government co-invested through things that are poorer than it. So each department says, “We can’t really afford — we don’t get that many appointments. So we’re going to go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest outcome.” And then we’re going to start lying about how important that is. You’ll notice that if you ask people, “How’s your field doing?” everybody says, “It’s never been a better time to be a particle theorist.” Well, it’s a terrible time to be a particle theorist, right? And we can’t say that.

And it’s funny, because again, in portfolio theory, if you have a balanced portfolio and part of it starts succeeding and part of it’s failing, what you usually do is you take money out of the thing that’s succeeding and put it into the thing that’s failing, because otherwise you get too much concentration in the portfolio. Nobody’s ever thought about any of this stuff. And so what you have is people who don’t even understand modern portfolio theory and don’t understand market failure designing things. It’s really important to know basic market theory, and we don’t.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:39:01 – 00:39:07): Yeah. So if we fix that, do we fund individuals versus ideas? This is the other kind of—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:39:07 – 00:39:07): Say more.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:39:08 – 00:39:55): So the whole story — I gave this example to Kratsios. Stewart Butterfield worked on this project for a couple of years. He was down to $3 million. All the VCs put money in, sort of nearly failed. And he calls up Ben Horowitz — he just told this story recently. He said, “Hey, should I give the money back? This project didn’t work. But by the way, we’ve been doing an intra-company communication tool for our engineering team. Maybe I could pivot into that.” He’s like, “Yeah, keep the money, do that. I trust you.” He pivoted it, turned it into Slack, sold it for $30 billion.

The idea being that you back the person, not the idea — that the great entrepreneurs continuously evolve, continuously build, continuously pivot. Here you are with Zuck reinventing that company again and again and again. And if you find the up-and-comers, is there a way to find the individuals that are emerging in their fields?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:39:56 – 00:39:56): Oh yeah.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:39:56 – 00:40:08): But you fund them for a period of time, and you say — or is this portfolio theory again, where you say some bets are on an idea, some bets are on people, and the people bets should be long-term and fully funded, right?

The Magic Formula for Funding Radical Ideas

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:40:09 – 00:40:59): I’ll give you the magic formula that gives you an idea of how difficult this is and how tricky you have to be. Tell me who the established leaders of a field will block but will not short. Fund that guy for now. Because if you are willing — I’ll say this with my own main theory — if you are willing to short either geometric marginalism, or more importantly, geometric unity, I want to dance with you, because I want to take your house. I want to take your retirement. It would be my absolute pleasure to destroy you in the market. But that’s not what happens. It’s like, “Well, we want to block him, but we know that he knows a lot of stuff.”

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:41:00 – 00:41:00): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:41:00 – 00:43:47): And we know that we haven’t really read it. And there’s something about somebody saying, “Look, you’re 99.9999% going to fail.” And I say, “Care to formalize that? Let’s have it.” “Well, I’ll bet you $100 that by next year you haven’t gotten full acceptance in the field.” “That’s not what you said. You said that you’d be willing to put up your house to win a dollar from me. And I want to do that at size.” So my feeling is, come at me, baby. That would be fun.

And let me tell you something — I also listened for things that no one is willing to say. I am on record as saying that the smartest man in the world today is Edward Witten. Brilliant. Unbelievable. The guy drove theoretical physics off the road and off a cliff 42 years ago. Nobody else is willing to say it. The question is, is the one person who noticed that nobody’s gone to Stockholm, that the standard model has not changed — at the recent conference in string theory, supposedly the only game in town in fundamental physics — go to the Strings 2026 website. There’s a list of all the talks, there’s a search engine. Put in these following words: electron, hadron, Higgs, lepton. There’s no physics in this. They’re not talking about anything that could hurt a foe. They’re not talking about the physical world.

I was at arguably the world’s leading physics institute, and I said, “Who are the smartest people here?” And I was given 3 names. 2 of them were pure theorists. I talked deeply with both of them. When I got to the point about how to advance the Standard Model — which is our notion of all the particles you see in the world, in this room — both of them said, “I have no interest in the physical world.” And I said, “Well, you’re the 2 leading professors at our most expansive theoretical physics institute, and neither of you care about the physical world.” Just openly expressed. This is madness.

And I give talks at physics departments, and I’ve now started non-cooperation with the departments who’ve asked me to come and talk but will technically deny me a talk. For example, I’ve given a talk at the University of Texas at Austin, but I’m not allowed to say that the talk occurred in the physics department.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:43:48 – 00:43:48): Really?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:43:48 – 00:43:58): Yeah. I gave a talk at the Perimeter Institute in the Sky Room. “It is not a talk. Eric is answering questions.” I gave a talk at the University of Chicago in the—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:43:59 – 00:44:04): This is because your talk and your persona is viewed to be fringe and outlandish.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:44:04 – 00:44:05): And keep saying “fringe.”

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:44:05 – 00:44:05): Yeah.

1983: When Physics Went Off the Cliff

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:44:06 – 00:45:16): I totally disagree with the narrative of the field. I just out-and-out say that when physics — in 1983, physics made sense. In 1984, it did not. It was very stark. And it was like, overnight, more or less 3 people — Leonard Susskind, David Gross, and Edward Witten — drove the field in a totally different direction.

And now the achievement of this has not been any advance in our knowledge of the physical world, but it has been something that no one knew was possible. You take the field in which Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman and Stanisław Ulam created the most terrifying weapons from SU gauge theory, and you’ve made it safe. It is now safe to do physics with your geopolitical rivals. You can invite your friends from China to come and become graduate students in your department, and you will fill their heads with things about AdS/CFT that couldn’t hurt a fly, because there’s no physics in it. So the question is — is this a secret program?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:45:16 – 00:45:24): Go back to 1983. Wait, so we drove off a cliff in 1983. The question is, did someone say, “Hey, let’s drive this off a cliff”?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:45:24 – 00:45:25): Well, this happened before.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:45:25 – 00:45:42): Do you think that there is some community, subgroup, set of assets, set of projects that are happening somewhere on Earth that are making advances in physics and have been for the last 50 years?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:45:42 – 00:45:56): Great that you asked that question. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it, David? Can you imagine if there was a secret place that was making advances in an important field of physics, and people who were studying physics outside of that place were being stymied?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:45:56 – 00:45:58): I would find it hard that it would be kept secret.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:45:59 – 00:47:31): Okay. What happened in 1940 is that something you’ve never heard of, called the Reference Committee, was established inside of the National Research Council. So when the neutron was first hypothesized in 1911 by Rutherford, it was then discovered in the early ’30s. A woman named Lise Meitner came up with the concept of the chain reaction, which was then proven by Fermi at the University of Chicago with something called Chicago Pile-1.

Thereafter, a guy named Breit — B-R-E-I-T — formed something called the Reference Committee inside the National Research Council, so that if you submitted a paper on chain reaction physics to a journal, it got shunted into the National Research Council, and they would return it to you saying, “Unfortunately, these results are really preliminary, we don’t see this as being at the level of the journal, please revise,” et cetera. Now you’ve resubmitted it and it’s still not going. You don’t know that this thing exists.

And this is how people outside of the Manhattan Project, outside of the white badges, treated their colleagues who weren’t allowed inside the Manhattan Project. So let’s at least agree that from 1940 to 1945, there was a review process which destroyed the ability to earn a living if you were doing chain reaction physics and you weren’t invited into the secret group.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:47:31 – 00:47:32): Yes. Okay.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:47:32 – 00:47:52): The question isn’t, “Is that nuts?” It’s clearly not nuts, because I know that this actually existed and happened. The question is, did it happen once or more than once? If it happened more than once, the question is, what is the analog of the boys’ school in New Mexico? What is the analog of the white badges? What is the analog of the Reference Committee?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:47:53 – 00:47:54): And do you have a theory?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:47:54 – 00:48:01): Okay. If it’s happening, I’ve said that the leading candidate would be Renaissance Technologies on Long Island.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:48:01 – 00:48:02): I’ve heard you say this.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:48:02 – 00:48:02): Yeah.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:48:02 – 00:48:03): But surely there—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:48:04 – 00:48:05): Let’s look at the COVID story.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:48:05 – 00:48:06): Okay.

Renaissance Technologies

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:48:06 – 00:49:09): The COVID story would be — we are so good at trading that we don’t even allow people who know markets into our firm. We only hire people in directly relevant subjects of physics, like particle theorists, like differential geometers, like machine learning experts. And we have a very strange thing — we have a very close relationship with Brookhaven National Laboratory. And by the way, there’s a middling university right next door who happens to be absolutely world-class historically in the exact subjects that would be relevant to doing next-level physics.

So you have multiple Fields Medalists, and U.S. News & World Report never ranks this as one of our great facilities, even though if you look at the people who’ve passed through State University of New York at Stony Brook, it’s unbelievable. To me, that looks like Fort Meade when it was still “no such agency,” collecting way too many number theorists.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:49:09 – 00:49:35): But Eric, people have come out of that place, that workplace. I know one or two of them, and there are no such stories. At some point, you would envision that some number of them — some small percentage of them — would leak some information or some set of facts, if that were to be true, about some of this advanced physics work going on, or there would probably be more innumerable returns realized from that than perhaps there have been.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:49:36 – 00:50:23): I’m not saying that I know that that’s true. My point was — and I tried to be careful — if you said, “Eric, that sounds preposterous,” because to be entirely honest, the concept of Los Alamos, which was published in 1944 by a journalist named Jack Rapaport in a Cleveland newspaper — he broke the story. Nothing happened, because what he said was crazy. He said there is a secret city with a mayor who’s supposed to be the next Einstein, working on a doomsday weapon, and the town is so secretive that nobody knows what’s going on inside it.

So my claim is, I’m doing the Jack the Ripper thing, and you’re doing the, “What happened to Jack the Ripper?” Well, clearly there’s only one person saying that, and he’s nuts.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:50:23 – 00:50:28): Well, in both cases, I could show up and start asking questions and interrogate and see if I can find something.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:50:28 – 00:50:40): Again, I’m not saying that Renaissance Technologies is that. I am saying you have a secure campus with a story that makes no sense. You know markets. Do you have any idea how much the Medallion Fund—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:50:40 – 00:50:47): Oh yeah, yeah, I know, because again, my friends who were there, they get to leave their money there and then the returns continue.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:50:47 – 00:50:49): “They get to leave their money there” is not what happened.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:50:50 – 00:50:50): Okay.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:50:50 – 00:50:53): They closed the fund to all but internal money.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:50:53 – 00:50:54): Yes. Yes. That’s what I mean.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:50:54 – 00:50:56): You know, another interesting story was—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:50:56 – 00:51:01): But if you leave the firm, you get to — your capital can stay in the Medallion Fund.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:51:01 – 00:52:39): So my claim to you is Jeffrey Epstein had a story, which is that he only accepted $1 billion or more invested with him if you gave him power of attorney. These things tend to have some reason that no person outside has money and gets to ask questions, right?

So Jeffrey Epstein did not run a hedge fund. He told me that he ran a multi-strategy FX hedge fund, and that he needed a 727 because it had a trading floor, and he filled it with yeshiva students because they were the only ones you could trust. He was extremely specific about using trend following, mean reversion, and carry as the 3 strategies. He said he didn’t do any gamma trading, or options trading. That was a lie. It was a cover story that was burned, and then he became “disgraced financier,” and then he became “tax expert” Jeffrey Epstein.

You’re looking at a fake world with COVID stories that fail over. If you remember the old Get Smart line — “Would you believe 1,000 special agents are going to swarm this place?” “I find that very difficult to believe.” “100 policemen.” “Not true, Maxwell Smart.” “2 Boy Scouts with a slingshot.” This is fake.

And my claim is, I don’t know what’s going on at Renaissance. Jim Simons is an absolute genius, hardly distinguished in that — we have many. And I don’t know anybody who’s ever gotten close to these returns. I don’t know any information about what that thing actually did, or claims to do.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:52:40 – 00:52:40): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:52:40 – 00:52:48): And I’m saying it has very close relationships with a talent pool, Stony Brook, which is not acknowledged, and then a national lab.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:52:49 – 00:52:57): Go back to ’83, ’84. And assume we did not go into this quantum universe that we live in.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:52:57 – 00:52:58): Not quantum — quantum gravity universe.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:52:59 – 00:53:00): Quantum gravity universe.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:53:00 – 00:53:00): Right.

What Physics Could Have Been

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:53:00 – 00:54:05): And we’re in a different universe where — we have a sense — what does that physics look like today? If we progress physics, help an audience that’s a generalist audience understand a little bit about what it means if physics didn’t stall out.

And before I do that, let me just ask this question. Some would argue that physics has played an important role — and maybe it’s not fundamental, that might be your answer here — in advancing things like semiconductor manufacturing technology, advanced lithography, material science. We’ve made tremendous progress in our capacity to drive compute, and that’s led to this moment today where we have these tools that we call AI, and all of the underlying advancements in chemistry, material science, physics got us to this moment today, and that we have made progress and it has been applied. That would be one argument. So maybe tell me why that kind of misses the point. And then we can talk a little bit about what would the world look like today if we didn’t go off track in 1983, ’84?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:54:05 – 00:56:41): Great question. Let me try to engage that, and then feel free to redirect me if I’m not answering the question. In the theory we have — which I’m going to call the frontier model, which combines general relativity and the standard model of particle theory — we know certain things that we can’t use. We found out that there were 3 valence quarks inside of every proton and every neutron, and nobody’s ever pulled a valence quark out of a proton or a neutron in isolation. Something called infrared slavery — and screw the woke for not saying we can’t say the word “slavery.” Infrared slavery. Deal with it, boys.

You have a situation in which there is no industrial application. We’ve known about it since 1968. So sometimes you don’t get to use something for an extraordinarily long period of time. But what happens if some advancements — maybe we’re never going to pull a quark out of a proton, maybe it’s impossible — what if there are other things we might be able to do had physics actually advanced?

So for example, in the mid-1970s, 2 gentlemen called Abdus Salam and — I forget his first name — Pati, put forward the Pati-Salam model. I believe that the Pati-Salam model will be found to be the correct first-order grand unification above where we are. The problem is that it has something called SU(4) rather than SU(3). And the SU(3) is what generates the force that keeps all those protons from running away from each other inside of a nucleus, because obviously like charges want to repel. That’s why we were able to take out 2 Japanese cities in 1945 — we got control of the strong force, and then that allowed us to use the electromagnetic force to generate completely destructive power. But it didn’t destroy protons and neutrons.

What happens when you have SU(4) is that you see that the electron and the neutrino are the 4th color that we associate with the up quark and down quark, which make up protons and neutrons. You could have a weapon that rotates up quarks and down quarks into the lighter leptons that disintegrate matter. You could have dark chemistry. “Dark” is not the right concept — it’s really decoupled matter. Dark matter is decoupled matter. Neutrinos are essentially dark matter. They’re barely detectable.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:56:41 – 00:56:42): In fact, they don’t interact.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:56:42 – 00:56:52): Well, they do, but very, very weak. Only through the gravitational and weak forces, which are the 2 incredibly weak ones. And gravity’s so weak, it’s not worthwhile.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:56:52 – 00:56:54): But with enough neutrinos concentrated, you can—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:56:54 – 00:57:03): Well, here’s another possibility. If you rotate a neutrino into some charged particle, you can send it through the Earth.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:57:03 – 00:57:12): Just explain what you mean by “rotate.” What does that mean? These neutrinos are these subatomic particles, they don’t really interact well, but what does it mean to rotate them?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:57:12 – 00:57:13): Well, let’s take—

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:57:13 – 00:57:20): And I think a large amount of the energy produced in the sun is neutrinos that actually come out — like if you actually measure the energy.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:57:20 – 00:57:37): You and I are being irradiated by neutrinos, by billions of neutrinos. And the only reason that we’re not dead is that they don’t interact with our atoms — well, they barely interact, once in a blue moon they do. So at night the sun is streaming this through the Earth. It’s passing through all of it.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:57:37 – 00:57:37): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:57:38 – 00:58:20): But when it gets to us, it keeps going. You can shoot it through — I forget what it is — a light-year of lead, and you very rarely interact. What happens with the rotation is, in this sort of internal sense — it’s a kind of metaphor of rotation in this abstract place, which leads to a neutron. If I put a neutron on the table and we just sit there and watch, with a half-life of something like 17 minutes, I forget, it’ll turn into a proton. And this is called beta decay, because what came out is — people saw an electron scream out of the neutron. And that’s why a neutral particle became positive, because the negativeness went off in the electron.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (00:58:20 – 00:58:27): So just to be clear for the audience, a neutron can turn into a proton and release an electron at the same time.

Boom, Vroom, and Zoom

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (00:58:27 – 01:00:46): Yeah, but that turned out to be the wrong model, because what it really did is — there were 3 quarks inside of it, and one of the down quarks — so a neutron is down, down, up — so a down quark let off something called a W-minus, which is a force particle, not a matter particle, and then that thing decayed into an electron and something else.

The only reason we determined that there was something else going on — it’s a little bit like accounting. If you have a really good accounting system and you notice that the envelope from the till is a little light, you say, “Okay, according to conservation principles, somebody has been messing with the money in the till.” And that turned out to be the neutrino. So what happens is that a neutrino and an electron have the same relationship as an up and a down quark, and you can transmute them using these W particles.

The danger of this is that when you have more force particles than we know currently, things that are to all intents and purposes stable now might not be stable in that new regime. So you could disintegrate a mountain, potentially, if SU(4) is present. SU(3) is more stable than SU(5). I don’t think SU(5) is relevant, but what I’m saying is, if you think about physics, think about boom, vroom, and zoom as an easy way to keep track of why this is our most terrifying and most amazing subject. Boom is weaponry, vroom is energy, and zoom is propulsion, computation, and all the cool stuff that we get to do.

So if you want to think about it, you’ve been denied — for, let’s say, the Standard Model got finalized more or less 53 years ago — for 53 years, you’ve been denied new boom, vroom, and zoom. And potentially the stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species, because the boom is so terrifying. I can’t tell you whether that’s true or not. But it means that you don’t have any vroom and zoom from the new stuff that could have occurred. And so we have to be honest — I want the zoom, in particular.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:00:47 – 01:01:25): We could probably make the case that no one on Earth got there, and everyone has aligned around the distraction, the disinterest in the pursuit, because of that absolute risk — because if someone did actually make advancements and they could access the bigger boom, it would be game over already. There’s no such thing as more absolute power that would give an individual or a group the ability to leverage that in some way to their infinite will and desire.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:01:25 – 01:01:26): I don’t agree with this at all.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:01:26 – 01:01:26): Great. Okay.

The Spike Protein and the Power of Small Science

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:01:27 – 01:03:24): So, I spent 2 years indoors being hounded to be vaccinated because of 4 amino acids being spliced into the spike protein of coronavirus. Now, my guess is that that’s pretty easy, right? Think about it. You need 12 nucleotides to code for 4 amino acids at the exact right place in spike protein, and that’s enough to shut down Earth. This is high-leverage science.

And my claim is, before we decide that what we want is, “Let’s get back to kicking ass and taking names,” let us at least pause and say, most people are ignorant of how much power is present with a little bit of scientific knowledge. There’s a marvelous scene in Breaking Bad where the protagonist, named Heisenberg, takes what appears to be crystal meth and throws it in the office of a psychopath named Tuco. And Tuco says, “Well, what the hell was that that caused that massive explosion?” I forget whether it was lead azide or mercury fulminate, one of these extremely volatile compounds.

Do you have any idea how easy it is to make black powder? I ask modern audiences — nobody knows that it’s 75% saltpeter, 10% sulfur, and 15% charcoal. The Anarchist Cookbook has gone out of discussion. The power of science, the leverage of science, is so profound that we should at least ask the question, what if you had nuclear weapons that didn’t require centrifuges? What if there are easy things to do that high school students could do? You remember this guy who scavenged the americium in smoke detectors to build a working reactor, and I think it was Brooklyn.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:03:24 – 01:03:24): Yeah.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:03:25 – 01:06:49): Okay, well, nobody thought — collect 218 smoke detectors and you can have a working nuclear reactor. So my claim is that if you want to think about Walter White as a paradigm, you have to go back to something called United States v. Progressive — the Progressive magazine, in which the Teller-Ulam design for the thermonuclear weapon was put forward by a publication, and the government said, “No, no, this is restricted data. We need prior injunction. This is the most dangerous piece of geometry.” This is Stan Ulam’s work.

And the whole idea is, if you’re going to use a fission device — a chemical shell compresses subcritical fissile material to create a detonator out of an atomic bomb. How do you get that to compress a rod or something into a fusion device? The only thing that can reach that tertiary stage fast enough is light. You have to figure out the geometry, because the detonator is going to rip apart the entire assembly if it doesn’t get there.

Now, that secret got published, and the only reason the government didn’t go after Howard Morland is that we stupidly declassified all sorts of pieces and shards of this. And he went to the Los Alamos Library and pieced it together.

So my claim is, if you don’t know the story of John Aristotle Phillips — the substandard physicist who, in his Princeton PhD thesis, as the Princeton mascot, said, “Look, I’m not very good, Freeman Dyson. I want to use the fact that I’m not very good to do something amazing. Tell me whether or not you will let me come up with a plan for an atomic bomb.” And Freeman Dyson said, “I will give you no help, but I’ll tell you whether it will work.” So the substandard physicist put together this and submitted his junior thesis. And I forget whether it’s page 24, but that thesis is not in the library, and the government removed the page that has the plan.

The fact is that this stuff is readily present, and we’ve never seen an atomic weapon used since 1945. Mostly, we don’t use this power. But if it turns out that it’s easy to do — and by the way, if the US fails with Iran, you’re going to see a proliferation of countries acquiring nukes, because we trusted the US. You’ve got this — you are the world’s policeman. Petrodollars aren’t petrodollars, they’re violence dollars. The US was supposed to have the violence needed to secure the oil, and the oil backs the money. We are watching the disintegration of that regime in real time as the US goes through its Suez moment.

Whether you think Donald Trump should have gone into Iran or not — and I happen to think that he was courageous, and did something that we should have done in 1981 or ’82 or something — we have to win. We have to win. Because if you have a world that decides that there is no world’s policeman, everybody’s going to want their own nuke. And you can go back to the Tom Lehrer song called “Who’s Next?” and you’ll find that more or less you’re going to have a world in which you can’t figure out the game theory, because it’s no longer dyadic. It’s multipolar.

Beyond Nukes: UAPs and Multi-Temporal Adversaries

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:06:50 – 01:07:00): Imagine a world beyond nukes. What does that world look like? What else is there beyond the boundaries of what at this point is almost an 80-year-old technology?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:07:00 – 01:07:00): Sure.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:07:01 – 01:07:22): And again, I go back to the ’83 story. We’re making advancements. Did we stop making advancements? And is China going to make these advancements? And what does that look like? Is that what UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, are? Because you’ve recently made comments that you were a deep skeptic on UAPs, but now you have a view that maybe there’s something there.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:07:22 – 01:08:22): Oh, there’s definitely something there. Maybe it’s China, it may be us, it may be a fake story, but there’s definitely something there, based on the videos and the first-person accounts. It’s not the videos — I’ve never cared about the videos. I’ve talked to too many smart, sober people, too many similar stories. There are definitely special access programs that are all about this.

The only thing that we’ve learned that works to keep secrets is compartmentalization. And so we are so compartmentalized that almost no one can piece the story together. It may be that the so-called stovepiping is such that we can’t figure out what we know, because we can’t talk to each other. If you want to know what’s possible, I could freak you out, and it would be super cool and super frightening. But one thing is that I’m worried about multi-temporal adversaries.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:08:23 – 01:08:23): Time traveling.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:08:24 – 01:12:13): Time travel. Everybody says “time travel” because they think that time can only be one-dimensional. But imagine, for example, that you put a giant gun on a railcar — the railcar can only move in one dimension. Now somebody puts a giant gun on something like a tank, and you go to the Bonneville Salt Flats — now you can move in 2 dimensions. Now you put it on an A-10 Warthog and you can move in 3. Those are all spatial dimensions.

Why do you think there’s an arrow of time? It’s because you believe time can only be one-dimensional. I don’t think time is one-dimensional. And if you meet an adversary who has access to multi-time, it’s like you’re trying to compete with them with an A-10 Warthog, and you’ve got your only gun on a track — except with time rather than with space. If I could sneak up behind you in time, knowing your intent — I mean, this is terrifying stuff to me. And I would love to have this over our adversaries. But I don’t want to meet anybody who knows how to do this kind of stuff, not on a level playing field.

Let me say another one. The solar system is an escape room. And Elon was focused on Mars — I said that Mars is a red herring. It’s a MacGuffin. Tonight he’s focused on the moon. He is our only adult, so far as I can tell, crazy and mad as he is, and he uses that to motivate engineers, because Mars is barely doable. These are the only rocks that are potentially habitable. It’s not enough diversity if we have this much power and these few spheres with which we could put atmospheres.

So assume that you could put atmospheres on Mars and on the moon, and you could get back and forth between them with chemical rockets. You’d have 3 places to screw up. We need tens of thousands, if not millions, of places before we figure out how to civilize ourselves. So we have to get out of here. It’s too expensive to leave the solar system. So my claim is that in an Einsteinian world, you’re never going to. If Einstein is left to be enforced, the speed of light is too brutal. So you go to Alpha Centauri, 4 light-years away, you come back, you do it at nearly the speed of light — everything is 8 years advanced by the time you get back home. Nobody wants to do that. And that’s just the first star.

My claim is that we have been too long in Einstein’s prison. General relativity really begins in 1913. It’s really due to Grossmann and Einstein, not just Einstein alone — I don’t know why we say that. It’s not really Einstein-Hilbert, it’s really Einstein-Grossmann. But more or less since 1915, 1917, the equations haven’t moved. They’re going to break because of what’s happening in southern Arizona. Kitt Peak has this object called DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, and I believe that it is going to show that the cosmological constant times the metric, which is how we encode dark energy into the equation, is going to break, because it’s not constant.

And the only reason that you have lambda times the metric, which is this term, is the product rule. If you take a derivative called divergence, you have to take the derivative of lambda times the metric — left alone — plus lambda times the derivative of the metric. Derivative of the metric has to vanish. That term is the only possible term that can go there, because of something called Lovelock’s theorem. If you’re within general relativity, you’re trying to do this geometrically. My claim is that that’s going to break. We’re going to get to 5 sigma if we aren’t there already — I haven’t kept up with the news. And then we’re going to realize that the dark energy, the most important, generally makes up 60, 70, 80% of our universe. We have the wrong formula for it.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:12:13 – 01:12:17): We have no contemplation of what it is.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:12:17 – 01:12:47): Well, I’m focused on saying I have a candidate formula, and I think everybody who has one should come forward. We should hold a conference and say, “Who wins? Who’s got the best idea?” We can’t just have Ed Witten patting himself on the back saying, “Well, string theory is the only game in town.” It’s like, 42 years later — come on. This is preposterous. Getting back to policy — give me some money and get rid of these people. I don’t want them reviewing anything that I’m doing. Give me somebody competent to talk to.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:12:48 – 01:13:12): So sorry, let me just go back. The dark energy measurement, which we’re going to end up having a very high, accurate estimation of, tells us that the general theory of relativity and the equations associated with it are wrong, because of the relationship that we see between matter and rotation and movement. And so there’s something off about that.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:13:12 – 01:13:17): And that we know general relativity is not the last — we know general relativity is wrong.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:13:18 – 01:13:20): It is a view. It is a derivative.

Pinch-to-Zoom and Spacetime

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:13:20 – 01:16:11): It is the map and not the territory. It is a great, great model. Whoever comes next has to recover it. But there is no initial singularity due to the Big Bang, nor is there a singularity in the center of a black hole called the Schwarzschild singularity. That’s where our ignorance shows. We have 2 singularities we can’t get rid of inside the theory, so you have to go outside of it. But the thing is, it’s so perfect that nobody can figure out — sort of in the first 4 seconds of a physics talk, you say, “Let X13 be a spacetime manifold.” Well, okay, it’s over. That’s the sarcophagus. And you’re already in an Einsteinian frame of thought.

And so we know that it’s wrong, and nobody can figure out how to make it wrong. And that is what keeps us stuck here. There’s a marvelous demonstration, around 2003, at a TED Talk, of this guy showing a surface, and he’s got some sort of display, and he does this, and suddenly everything enlarges. And then he does this and everything gets smaller. And this is the beginning of a multi-touch gesture called pinch-to-zoom that we all use.

My claim is that we don’t realize that pinch-to-zoom is probably built into the thing that we’re confusing for spacetime. So we don’t know to do this. And when you do that, you change the distances so you don’t need to break the speed of light.

So this is just — again, you’re asking somebody who can’t come into the physics establishment, who is in the physics — I am in the physics establishment. We’re in some sort of crazy world in which people who have radical ideas can’t do the radical ideas inside of the institutions. A radical idea is that male and female are mostly determined by the SRY complex on the Y chromosome. If I say that, I can’t be in a meeting because I’m a bigot. Okay? I can’t be in a physics department because I don’t — I think Ed Witten drove the field off a cliff. Nobody else is saying it. Clearly the one person who’s saying that has to be wrong.

Now, this is the whole thing — I have the first paper, I think, on the danger posed by mortgage-backed securities. I think I was the only person to loudly say, “You don’t know whether Biden’s going to make it to November.” And I think I said loudly, “I think this is 4 years of dementia.” When people say something different, do you force them back into this consensus? Well, that’s what pussy nations do. And we have become a pussy nation when it comes to science.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:16:11 – 01:16:12): Talk about China.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:16:13 – 01:16:13): Yeah.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:16:13 – 01:16:33): From what you know, is China thinking differently about physics? Is China trying to recast the paths? Is China trying to invite innovative ideation amongst their scientific community? Or are others — I mean, it seems like the West is probably clumped together. Is China different? Is anywhere different?

China and the Race for Talent

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:16:34 – 01:17:13): Yeah, let’s talk about that. First of all, France is historically the world’s greatest mathematical country. China, where we’re always taught to be so scared of the Chinese in math, couldn’t buy a base hit until very recently. Now what they’re doing is they’re looking at us with our absolutely ridiculous collectivist fiction, and they’re signaling up to our best people and they’re saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to be free? You sure you wouldn’t want to get paid? Come over to China, taste the freedom, get paid, have fun, right?” And our people are going there.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:17:13 – 01:17:15): American scientists are going to China.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:17:16 – 01:17:40): American scientists, Russian scientists, all sorts of scientists are going to China for some prestige, some money, and some freedom. And we are going to train them up, and they are going to be frighteningly good, up until the point that that freedom involves Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and Taiwan.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:17:41 – 01:17:54): Are they going to rethink some of these thoughts on the path we’re taking in physics? Are they going to be fundamental in how they rethink things?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:17:55 – 01:17:56): Let me tell you what I really believe on that.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:17:56 – 01:17:56): Yes.

The “Trash Can Corpus” and AI

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:17:57 – 01:18:43): The AIs are going to change soon. Right now, the AIs are trained on a corpus that privileges things like Cell, Nature, and Science as the prestige journals of biology, or in mathematics, it would be the Inventiones and the Annals and the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. These are where the narratives of the fields are held.

The trash can is also a corpus. Take all of the ideas that have been poo-pooed and laughed at, and call that the trash can corpus, the TC corpus. The AIs are going to start reading all of the things that our, quote, “leading physicists” have laughed at. Look out.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:18:44 – 01:18:46): That’s where the discovery and the reinvention is going to happen.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:18:47 – 01:19:18): China is going to have a private model, and they’re going to say, “Assume that the completely failed — the most failed theory in the history of modern physics, string theory and something called M-theory and quantum gravity — assume for the moment that it’s a red herring meant to distract us. It’s not our leading theory. It hasn’t been our leading theory for 42 years. The dog can’t hunt. What was it meant to stop us from seeing?”

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:19:18 – 01:19:19): And the AI will get there.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:19:19 – 01:19:21): The AI will get there.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:19:21 – 01:19:23): And when the AI gets there, we have—

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:19:24 – 01:20:37): Everyone who has an AI that can do this — again, I’m saying completely radical things, because honestly, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to have John von Neumanns and Richard Feynmans and Paul Diracs and all of these characters. And we don’t have any of them.

So I’m trying to say what this sounds like — “You’re all wrong and I’m right.” And don’t tell me that I’m arrogant, or that I’m conceited, or that real scientists are humble, or if you understand something you can explain it to a 5-year-old — that’s all nonsense. What I’m trying to say is string theory has not been our leading theory for 42 years. It has never been the only game in town. And just the way Jeffrey Epstein was never a hedge fund manager, we’re not allowed to say this. I don’t know why. I want to know, is there somebody over at CIA in the Science and Technology Directorate who would like to have that conversation? Is there anybody over at the Department of Energy who would be interested in not having this conversation? Right now, you and I are having a conversation with our friends the Chinese and the North Koreans and the Russians. Why are we doing this? Are you so confident that I’m wrong, given this obviously huge amount of knowledge that most people have never heard?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:20:37 – 01:21:15): Well, I think the question is, can you really distinguish, and can you really cage the AI? I mean, at the end of the day — say more. So if the rate of progress with AI is such that, and the ubiquity of access and the corpus, to your point, of knowledge and non-knowledge is apparent to everyone — the AI can be directed from anywhere. And it’s probably a conversation about what does humanity look like. And I think that’s a conversation with humanity, not with nation-states per se.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:21:16 – 01:21:28): Well, I think what I’m trying to get at is my model of the AI — it is insane to have pushed out the AI as a commercial product. It’s just funny. Let me imagine the scene from Silence of the Lambs.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:21:29 – 01:21:30): It’s just matrices and linear algebra.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:21:31 – 01:22:24): I mean, yeah, it’s just inner products. There’s a scene in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter is wheeled out on a gurney in a straitjacket with a crazy mask. And there’s all these people around, because he’s so dangerous, but he’s very intelligent. That’s what I think Anthropic is doing. “Here’s your new employee, Hannibal Lecter. He’s a consultant. You’ve hired Hannibal Lecter from a temporary agency, and the harness that is supposed to keep you from hurting yourself is all the people around him, the mask and the straitjacket.” And we’ve decided that this military research project is something you need in your home. It’s like telling people, “Look, the Second Amendment just says the right to keep and bear arms. We have this thing we haven’t used called the Davy Crockett, a soldier-launched personal nuke. Why isn’t it available at Kmart with a waiting period?”

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:22:24 – 01:22:50): Yeah. Well, it’s been distilled at this point. I don’t know if that’s a relevant point anymore, because models have been distilled, or the model development’s been commoditized and it’s been open-weight released, and it’s out there now. So models are there, models are here. And to your point, maybe those models get pointed at the path of discovering novel physics and look at strange texts and ideas and rethink everything.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:22:50 – 01:22:51): It’s going to be a hell of a ride.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:22:51 – 01:23:09): It’s going to be a hell of a ride. Yeah. I just want to hear your one assessment, because I wonder if this is a glimmer. What do you think UAPs are today? Is that really the first window into what’s happening if there’s something there? The question for you is, what do you think today UAPs are?

What Are UAPs?

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:23:10 – 01:28:24): Let’s answer that question. But I want to take — let’s do it in a debugger, and we’ll step through it line by line of the code as it executes. I look at you, I’m on a podcast. My first thought is, I know what risks I’m running. If I say what I think, I can tell you which colleagues will not open their doors to me. No, I’m not kidding.

When I took a job with Peter Thiel, let’s imagine that there are only about 125 people I can speak to about my work. I would say 30% of the doors closed to me just by virtue of the fact that I work with Peter Thiel and I don’t think he’s the devil, and he’s a close personal friend. Now you’re asking me the question of how many of the remaining doors would you like to close, Eric? It’s not just a question. I know how these people think, and I know how terrified they are.

Let’s answer it anyway. If general relativity is really the last word, I think that these UAP, UFO things are nation-states’ experimental weapons systems. I think that there’s been some breakthrough, particularly in the — no, sorry, in the ’60s. There’s a 1971 Australian intelligence document where Australia, which was the testing ground for nukes of the United Kingdom, started seeing all these UAPs near their nuclear tests, just the way we see them near ours.

And the Australians revealed that many of our best people, in many of our top institutions, were doing anti-gravity, technically gravity-shielding research. And the COVID story was — the golden age of general relativity, where suddenly general relativity was hot from the early ’50s to the late ’60s, early ’70s. The claim from the ’71 document is, “No, no, no, the only reason everybody went towards gravity is that there was interest in gravity shielding, anti-gravity,” et cetera.

I don’t believe general relativity is the last word. I believe pinch-to-zoom exists. There’s another multi-touch gesture called shear-to-tilt. And that means that we can leave our solar system. Okay, that’s great news, because it means we can survive. The implication is, if we can leave, everyone else can come. And given the size of the universe, the odds that we are the most advanced life form are laughable. There’s no point in worrying about them.

So if we can leave, I think they’re here, and I think we can leave. And I think the scenario to worry about is North Sentinel Island — everybody who lives on North Sentinel Island is considered a citizen of India, and they don’t know the word “India.” They’re an uncontacted people who don’t know that they’re part of something larger that watches them, that does not allow people to land. But if they started sending out radio signals, and then they started letting off nukes on that tiny little island, India would not have this paternalistic attitude towards its primitive tribe.

So my concern is that when we let off a nuke in 1945, or when Italy became very good at quantum theory, with Fermi and — I forget what the name of the “atomic boys” was — and there was this Magenta incident under Mussolini — somehow UAPs are very tied to nukes. And I believe that a nuke is the sign that you become advanced enough that the next thing you figure out how to do is to leave and traverse through propulsion. We don’t realize that yet because we’ve never seen that happen.

But my claim is that almost every civilization, before it gets to using the profound propulsion game, which is these multi-touch gestures, first lets off a nuke. And that we alerted whatever “India” is in this analogy. We’re almost ready to come out, and we’re so pathetically unevolved that we are a danger to any other civilization.

If there’s so much power in the next theory — which I believe geometric unity is the next theory — now, that will cause a certain percentage of your audience to say, “Oh, it’s just self-promotion,” as opposed to, “No, no, no, that’s what you’re supposed to do. If you have a theory, you talk about it.” I think that there are all sorts of things that you can do. I think there’s multi-temporal movement. I think that there’s dark chemistry. I think that there’s dark light. I think that there are 2 other families of chiral matter left to discover at a luminous level. Spin-3/2 matter exists. I believe that SU(4) is the next grand unified theory that we’ll find.

There is so much more to do. When we make this jump, the world will become unrecognizable. And I believe that there are other life forms in the universe, and that they can come and they can visit. And I don’t think that that’s preposterous. I think that we are an uncontacted people.

Closing

DAVID FRIEDBERG: (01:28:25 – 01:29:02): On that note, I think we have more to talk about in the future. This has been truly unique, fascinating. And I think for a lot of people in our audience, this is not a typical conversation, but I just want to highlight the importance of hearing what you have to say, because I think it’s very important that — even if something seems not apparent, particularly when things seem unlikely, or when things seem outlandish or heretical, or whatever term you might want to put onto things — it’s valuable to take that in. It’s definitely a lot to think about, the paths ahead, and I’d love to talk more.

ERIC WEINSTEIN: (01:29:02 – 01:30:17): I’d love to do that. I’d love to do it with your friends. And I also just want to say thanks for having me. It’s time for America to lead, because there’s no other nation I trust like I trust our people to take care of this planet. We should make common cause with our rivals as fast as we can, because the danger of getting to the next level of leverage in a contested situation is overwhelming.

It’s very important we win in the Persian Gulf, and it’s very important that the scientific community recognizes that, despite their feelings about Donald Trump, we’ve got 4 or 5 individuals with the science portfolio who are much, much better than the PhDs think. And before you turn up your nose at this, consider doing what I did, which is to come for a few days to Washington, D.C., and utter the dangerous words, “How can I help?”

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