Eric Weinstein: The State of American Science, Breakthrough Coverups, and the Danger of Physics

(0:00) Eric Weinstein joins the show! (03:09) Has American science stalled? Cowboy science, Fauci, and the scientific precariat (21:31) Weinstein's fix: Blow a hole in the Civil Rights Act, kill peer review, fund people not ideas (41:36) Ed Witten drove physics off a cliff, and is Renaissance Technologies a secret Los Alamos? (52:49) Boom, Vroom, Zoom: Did stagnant physics save the human species? (01:07:11) UAPs, multi-temporal adversaries, and Einstein's prison (01:16:12) China poaches our best scientists, AI reads the trash can corpus Thanks to our partners for making this possible! As wealth grows, complexity compounds. Between investments, tax strategy and estate planning, coordinating it all can feel like a full-time job. Creative Planning can help with the heavy lifting. https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/trackclk/N2598215.3565131ALLIN/B36182939.452362736;dc_trk_aid=646454825;dc_trk_cid=260464105;dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;tfua=;ltd=;dc_tdv=1 With over nine million acres protected across all fifty states, The Conservation Fund secures the irreplaceable lands we love. Learn more at http://conservationfund.org Follow Eric: https://x.com/ericweinstein Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@allin Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We have become a [BEEP] nation when it comes to science.

• 0:02David Friedberg?

  You were called a fringe scientist.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  And keep saying fringe.

• 0:05David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  I totally disagree with the narrative of the field. I want to blow a giant poll in the Civil Rights Act. The stagnation in physics may have led to the survival of the human species. When we make this jump, the world will become unrecognizable.

• 0:25David Friedberg?

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• 0:51David Friedberg?

  Eric Weinstein, mathematician, physicist, economist, PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard, National Science Foundation postdoc, Owen R. Fellow at Harvard, published a proposed mathematical framework and speculative unified field theory called geometric unity in 2021, formerly with Field Capital, podcast host and guest. Welcome to the All In interview.

• 1:17Speaker 00

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

• 1:19David Friedberg?

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

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Can't believe that Jason has turned tail and ran.

• 1:29David Friedberg?

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

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Opportunity. I'm really excited, meeting with the Department of War. And took the opportunity to stay a couple of extra days. Been talking to Director Kratsios over at OSTP and the White House Science Advisor. Fantastic meeting. Been talking to Jay Bhattacharya, who's an old friend over at NIH. About to talk to Jim O'Neill, who's hopefully coming into NSF.

• 2:04David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 00

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

• 2:16David Friedberg?

  Did Kratsios tell you that I just interviewed him on this topic?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:19David Friedberg?

  Okay, well, I did.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:20David Friedberg?

  You guys are old colleagues, right?

• 2:22Speaker 00

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

• 2:28David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  I guess I was sort of worried that this report, you know, obviously he's filling huge shoes. And I was worried that it was going to be a disaster. And I was stunned at how, how good it was. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but never, never is. And then I told you that. And you said that, well, you and I had been talking and that you had been conveying a lot of these issues to him. And I feel like he's, uh, he's really grown into this role trying to become a student of the American Science Project. And I couldn't be happier at hearing him say things like, we know that we don't know everything. We're just at the beginning. We're just getting started. So it looks like a great blueprint.

• 3:08David Friedberg?

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

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Well, it's a question of which science has stalled. So one of the great things about what Michael's saying is, is that science is a big place and it's not being done in one way. So what I really think is the biggest, if you wanted to sort of fly over and give an idea of what's, what's at risk, it's the absolutely courageous science that we can afford to do as a rich, ruggedly individualistic nation that no one else can afford to do. And so more or less, when, when I see us doing incremental research and doing things that are incredibly careful with low variance and calling it excellence,

• 4:07Speaker 00

  I get depressed because my feeling is, is that what we should be taking on is the bets no one else can afford to take on. It's also the case that our chief geopolitical rivals, China, has a problem with freedom. And quite honestly, freedom is a weapon. It is a, a serious advantage that we can afford to look at ourselves and say, we don't do everything perfectly. And we want to know the truth. I want to know whether Fauci killed 10 million people. I should be able to investigate that as a virologist, as an epidemiologist. I should be able to get answers and, and go through the process of justice. When we have a situation in which our scientists are hamstrung because the conclusion is known ahead of time,

• 4:52Speaker 00

  we limit our own ability to use cowboy science to drive the rest of the world. And, and quite honestly, we're giving away our biggest advantage, which is the middle finger. The American ability to say screw you to a supervisor who tells you what is true and what isn't true. A young person should be able to say, hey, I think my field is going in entirely the wrong direction and I'm willing to bet my career on it. Don't interfere.

• 5:20David Friedberg?

  This was always the biggest question for me is where were all the skeptics? Where were all the scientists that are supposed to question the dogma during the lockdowns, during COVID, during that pandemic? And I talked to Kratsios about this when we did our interview, that if everyone in the room agrees on something, it's probably wrong. Like, you know, there, there has to be some degree of skepticism, but particularly because the fundamental basis of science is to ask questions, interrogate, generate evidence, generate data, and then draw some, you know, conclusion and ask your next question. But it's almost like the asking question stopped. Where did that come from? It sounds like you're saying it's because folks were hamstrung socially, was it economic?

• 6:03David Friedberg?

  What is it that happened that not just in this pandemic, but just broadly, are we seeing this happen more in the 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.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  This is the question. And let me just answer it. This is that 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 two plus three equals five? No, it just is.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  When I hear the word consensus, I get very, very nervous because a consensus is usually an artificial agreement achieved through pressure. The Washington consensus is some sort of a thing where we're all going to go in a particular direction. And if you don't go in that direction, you don't have a job. So when you ask, well, what happens? You know, my question is that the, uh, 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 Barrier Declaration. Now he's the head of NIH. I'm, I knew Jay when he was called a fringe epidemiologist by this loser Francis Collins.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  And, you know, 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 is, well, that's conspiracy theory talk. So my question is, we signed a couple of agreements in the seventies, the Geneva Convention and Bioweapons Treaty. We have a cryptic system. Somehow we chose, in that case, a mysterious Ukrainian, uh, British zoologist to receive huge amounts of money through a hippie dippy charity called the Eco Health Alliance, money from like DITRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The whole thing doesn't make any sense. So if you start doing things through covert operations,

• 8:23Speaker 00

  the problem is, is that scientists can see right through covert operations. If you have great tools, you know, if you say, I, I wasn't at the scene of the crime. I said, oh, well, but we have a 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, is that you've got all of these B minus policy people in Washington, particularly in the covert community, not the intelligence community, but the covert community inside the intelligence community, who don't want kick ass independent scientists because they're telling stories and narratives that are easily exploded. So right now, we don't, don't just have a problem with good science. We have a problem with good journalism.

• 9:08David Friedberg?

  Right? They also have to fall in line with the.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Giant narrative.

• 9:12David Friedberg?

  Pride narrative.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Exactly. So there are times when you, when you have to, you know, when the US went to war, Roosevelt was in a wheelchair with these leg braces. And there was a general agreement that we won't report on the state of the president's health. Well, we had the same thing with Biden. Biden was undergoing some form of dementia.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Did anyone think to ask a leading geriatric neurologist, look, examine his gait, examine his speech patterns and tell us where is he likely in his cognitive trajectory? So if you're trying to, to, you know, tell a lie, that's important structurally, you really don't want scientists exploding it. When we did the, and I'm, 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.

• 10:07David Friedberg?

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

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So what I'm trying to say is, is that right now, you're not taking those people who stood up and making them the president of a university or the chairman of a department. You're not giving them a chair. And I just gave a talk on this at, at 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? Where's the ability to put my kids, you know, I want to put three kids through school. I want to participate in the security and the prosperity that we provide to everyone else. And this is the, the key issue. You've created the American scientific

• 10:51Speaker 00

  precariat. That's one of the reasons why you have, you know, such strange political affiliations, where you don't have balance in the professor. You've got this incredibly dangerous situation where we are not participating in freedom. And I will say, in particular, theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is the only profession to have lost free speech because of something called restricted data, where I am not allowed to put pen to paper to write down a physics equation if in any way it affects nuclear weapons. Well, try doing really good physics in a way that doesn't affect, you know, hadrons and nucleons. It's impossible.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  So you have this threat, right? That somehow, um, the law, I'm not even protected by the First Amendment.

• 11:39David Friedberg?

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

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Heterodox.

• 12:11David Friedberg?

  Heterodox.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  If I choose to just go against the orthodoxy, right? I believe that, um, it was insane to take the idea of the Wuhan Institute of Virology off the table when it came to the origin of COVID.

• 12:25David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Okay. Insane. It was clear then.

• 12:28David Friedberg?

  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.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 12:43David Friedberg?

  Because you asked questions that were heterodox.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  I, I came up with a set of equations in differential geometry in 1987, and I was uh, really treated incredibly badly. Those equations took over my field in 1994. And there was never an attempt to go back and say, wait a minute, we just brutalized somebody who got things right and very early. And so, you know, by the same token, it's just a very simple process. You're not allowed to want better for your life. You're supposed to be humble, you know, or, well, true scientists don't care about money. True scientists don't care about security. The, the reward is the work. It's, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all of this absolute drivel. The fact is, is that we are providing your security.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  And I say third homes to be deliberately provocative. I used to say second homes and I'm done with that. You're dealing with a level of prosperity in a world in which the genie coefficients are blowing out. It's almost entirely due to the technology that is derivative of science and the scientists are not participating. So what you're doing is you're creating a collectivist mindset because we can't get paid. We can't win. If we get things right, we're out.

• 14:01David Friedberg?

  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 one out of 10 of those things to be true. And ultimately, the envelope is pushed forward and we find ourselves in a new frontier.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:34David Friedberg?

  Science should follow the same formula as entrepreneurship in the sense, technological or industrial kind of entrepreneurship.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Roughly.

• 14:41David Friedberg?

  Roughly.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:42David Friedberg?

  But where did things change and why? Is this just the natural course of, you know, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote this manifesto where he talked about over-socialization?

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:52David Friedberg?

  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?

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, this, so.

• 15:00David Friedberg?

  Or was there a deliberate external effort?

• 15:02Speaker 00

  The one thing you didn't recite in that list of things, you didn't, you didn't mention my being in, in the physics department, I guess, uh, at Hebrew University, MIT, uh, postdoctoral fellowship. But the, the most important one is that I was the co-chair, co-PI with Richard Freeman of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard in the economics department. Because I was worried that we were, we had been losing this. And there's a very crisp answer to this. And between 1965 and 75, everything went wrong. Right? And, and it's basically from the beginning of the Medicare Act of

• 15:40Speaker 00

  65 to a controversy over something called Mann, a course of study in 1975, that ushered in peer review and the control. But if you wanted to really pinpoint it, it really, 65, 69 and to 71 is particularly brutal. And what happened was, the MIT physics department, I think in 1969, in the spring, walked out in protest of the Vietnam War, including people who had been part of the Manhattan Project.

• 16:09David Friedberg?

  Hmm.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  And the government took one look at this and said, okay, you are wobbly. We can't trust you. We have a, we have a very complicated cryptic agreement with our physicists in particular. You are the most dangerous, most deadly, most intelligent, most successful group, along with the mathematicians. And we've relied on you. And now we can't trust you because you're not, you're not rowing, uh, in the same direction that the country is rowing with the, with the war, because you're joining the protest movement. What happened was, is that immediately, the MIT instrument laboratory, which I think was where lots of government money was being funneled through, was taken outside the university

• 16:50Speaker 00

  and turned into Draper Labs. And the Mansfield Amendment in 6971, named after Mike Mansfield of, of Montana, said, okay, the military can no longer fund blue sky research inside of our university system, unless it has a direct military, uh, express military purpose. That was the disaster. Because what the military had done is they said, look, we want you guys fat and happy, doing blue sky research, which is what you think you should be doing. We trust you guys. We just want to know that you're there for us when we need you. So the military was our best friend. And that was uncomfortable, because quite honestly,

• 17:34Speaker 00

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

• 18:06David Friedberg?

  I didn't even know this.

• 18:07Speaker 00

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

• 18:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  However.

• 18:17David Friedberg?

  It's heretical to acknowledge Ted Kaczynski.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Well, but the point is, 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.

• 18:35David Friedberg?

  So where do those minds go? If they're not enabled or allowed into the institutions, the establishment, the machinery of science in America, are they still around or their brains just blunted out and they're only allowed to say certain things? Or are we taking great scientists and reprogramming them and missing all the alpha? I mean, what?

• 18:57Speaker 00

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

• 19:06David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Both works.

• 19:07David Friedberg?

  Yeah. I'm a, I also do freestyle rap.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Really?

• 19:10David Friedberg?

  Yeah. No. Well, sometimes.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:12David Friedberg?

  We'll talk later about that.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, cool. Um, well, mostly what you're doing is you're spaying and neutering, uh, your best minds. Uh, but the other thing is, is to look at Palmer Lucky. 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.

• 19:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Right? Now, i- if he was in a physics department, um, he could not easily be that guy. But if you wanted somebody who's in still in science, who looks to me like a great scientist, I would point you to 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, you know? Um, my feeling is that there's pretty much been a giant decrease in our effectiveness.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  And I know why. When you kicked Jim Watson out of Cold Spring Harbor, which he built, wha- what are you doing? Do you know that Mark Tashney, uh, is in his mid eighties, uh, guy who wrote a genetic switch on faves lambda, one of the most brilliant irreverent people? You know, at some point, I think I sent a journalist to him and the journalist came back with his tail between the legs and said that, that, that guy's insane. Well, Eric Lander was the White House, uh, 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. You know, i- if you ever saw the movie Whiplash.

• 20:58David Friedberg?

  Love it. One of my favorites.

• 20:59Speaker 00

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

• 21:10David Friedberg?

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

• 21:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:45David Friedberg?

  What does the Civil Rights Act do that makes it difficult for individuals to do what they need?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Well, you know, you, you. My closest friend, uh, from college, we have a group of three, two Jews and a Muslim. And the Muslim is constantly teasing the Jews about, you know, you guys own all the banks, the newspapers, and we, you know, joke with him about him being a terrorist. Now, that is not a model I can explain to anybody, but we've been, you know, incredibly close, uh, since 1982. My claim is, is that you don't understand how high agency people actually form tight cohesive social units. If you have the HR department saying, you know, Eric, I understand you, you are making an inappropriate joke.

• 22:36Speaker 00

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

• 23:06David Friedberg?

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

• 23:08Speaker 00

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

• 23:17Speaker 00

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

• 23:47David Friedberg?

  Throw out the civil rights act?

• 23:48Speaker 00

  No, not throw it out. Poke holes in it because you like the intent of it. It's the letter that's arbitrage against the, the intent, which creates the sort of collectivist thinking. You can't do great work without hyper individualism and without rugged hyper individualism. And so my feeling is, is that that's not an Ayn Randian thing. That's not a conservative thing. If the issue is, is that I'm, I've considered myself left of center and there's no one more individualistic than I am. And so what you need is I, I need not to have peer review. Peer review is a fake story that was retconned into science.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  It is no, you can look it up on Google N-grams, put quote, space, peer review, space, close quote, and you'll notice that there's really no mention of it before 1965. And the reason for that is that the Medicare Act made the government the major payer for medical procedures. The government said, well, why are we paying for all this stuff? Look, the doctors said, we don't want you having oversight over our decision making. So our peer, we will peer review each other. It started in a Utah clinic. And then it wasn't until 1975 when fiscal and social conservatives attacked the NSF over something called man a course of study or Mako's.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Now some, for some reason, the NSF grouped in anthropology as a science. I, I think that's a mistake. I think what we really need is we really need very hard sciences separated. And my feeling is the weaker scientists should go form their own organization and stop using our credit card because they're destroying our credit limit.

• 25:36David Friedberg?

  Those are social sciences and soft sciences versus hard scientists where there's an industrial endpoint.

• 25:43Speaker 00

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

• 25:52David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  And science has become, uh, in the conservative mind, something that the, the market can do well. When it's like, did, did no one take econ 101? Because the, you know, on the first day of school, they're supposed to tell you that markets work really well as long as you're not in a category called market failure. And if you miss that day, you say, well, markets are perfect and they can price everything. But anything that's, uh, inexhaustible and inexcludable, which is exactly the definition of science, can't be priced by a market unless you create an artificial market. So I can't tell you how dispiriting, you know, this is, if I've been kind to the Republicans, here's a place where I'm going to be cruel. You can't have morons who do not understand that markets cannot see everything. There's a reason that we pay taxes for an army

• 26:37Speaker 00

  and it's a technical reason. It's not a, we think that's a good thing. If that, if market, i- if you could make the army, uh, exhaustible and excludable, you wouldn't need to pay for it with taxes. So that your tax dollar has to be used for things that the market can't reach. Homotopy theory is a great case. When I say homotopy theory in the science discussion, people say, well, what is that? My, my, my response is, well, you don't know. It's an incredibly important part of mathematics, pure mathematics. I don't know that it has any industrial applications, but you go after homotopy theory and you're, you're pulling out a Jenga block from an incredibly important ecosystem that you don't understand.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  So my, my feeling about this is I'm going to inject a PhD perspective into this conversation. Cause the, 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, okay, well, if, if they are not going to explain to you why we need homotopy theory and we need to tax people and to, to pay for it.

• 27:45David Friedberg?

  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.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  That's right. And it's completely dysfunctional. And quite honestly.

• 27:55David Friedberg?

  By the way, the statistic I give Kratsios is, uh, Nature did a survey of 2,000 scientists, their readers. Nature being a scientific journal that's widely read and by the scientific community and.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  And by the way, not peer reviewed until the seventies.

• 28:09David Friedberg?

  Right. And 6% of the readers polled, uh, voted for President Trump. 85% or something, Kamala Harris. And then there was an undecided group. But I think it speaks to your point, like Trump is deemed to be so anti-science, the institution of Trump is deemed to be anti-science, that there doesn't even want to be an engagement.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  But assume that you detest Trump. Okay. Assume that you think Trump is the devil. I just met with Michael Kratsios. Great. I, I wanted that role. I put my hat into the ring for that, uh, for that role. I didn't think I would get it because I wasn't willing to pledge sufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. I happened to go to Michael Kratsios. I was very nervous because he, he's not coming from a PhD background. 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 gonna, you, boy, do you deserve exactly what you got? Because I think Michael is trying to do absolutely the right thing. I know Jim O'Neill very well from the Peter Thiel universe, coming in at NSF.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Jay Bhattacharya, absolute gem. If you can't work with these people, is that their problem or is that your problem?

• 29:27David Friedberg?

  So arguably, this, and 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?

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Jim was a genius with detailed knowledge of pure mathematics. So if you have, you know, Yuri Milner is a guy who has a background in quantum chromodynamics. If you have more of those people.

• 30:12David Friedberg?

  And there are, point is, and I'm not trying to argue with you about it, but my point is shouldn't the market work regardless? That they'll see the value of the science that you're identifying, they'll identify it. Capital will flow to that research, it will get funded somehow. There's a lot of independent institutions out there that get capital. And is, or is that not sufficient for the landscape? And I'll also state like, you know, one of the 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.

• 30:57David Friedberg?

  So I just want to throw those two points out there, like, is there not private market capital that will find its way to solve these problems? And isn't the government getting worse over time at deploying capital and driving returns? And I might be giving you a T-ball here, so.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  I guess, or, or I feel like I should have, 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, 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 churn Simons transgression interpreted as an action functional is the only rival to Einstein Hilbert. And then effectively, he will find, if he, if he pursues this, that churn Simons and Einstein Hilbert are in an equal playing field as daughters of the ultimate theory.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  He didn't know that. So partially, the issue is, is that it is so difficult in my area to know what's going on in the adjacent area. I just got off the phone before the podcast with my good friend Edward Frankel, 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 geometern who's a billionaire, and one who's a representation theorist, another one who's interested in,

• 32:33Speaker 00

  oh, I don't know, category theory, you could do it that way. But this is completely insane.

• 32:38David Friedberg?

  Okay, so government should fund.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Government has to be the basic funder of these things. The next part of this.

• 32:45David Friedberg?

  We have the right people representing the decisions on where we should be funding, what we should be funding.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Correct, and that's what we did previously, is that we sort of had slush funds. And they're very good people, had money. Somebody, years ago, I was at a conference in Birshava 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, those Americans. And I said, in what way? And he said, you know, I never applied for a job in my life. He said, sorry, what do you, 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.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  And so my claim is that when you have administrator types come in and say, well, we need is KPIs. We need to, to drive this on a, I'm data-driven, I want to know what the translation is.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Do you even know what ROI is? Or is it just what you can measure?

• 33:54David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  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, you know, go do whatever you find interesting? Well, if I can pursue what I find interesting, and when you call me up, I'm going to be very friendly to helping my own country, my own nation, I'm going to feel positive about that. If you tell me you should work on this because this thing is what drives the ROI, my feeling is, do you just not understand science?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Do you imagine that your technology mindset is the same thing as my scientific mindset? You want to get paid. I mean, I've spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. I'm not nearly interested, as interested in having a new McLaren as whether my name is going to be discussed 10,000 years from now, if humans are still around. And I, I say that because, you know, Jim Watson just died. My good friends Isidore Singer, Raul Bott are now dead. Those are people whose contributions will be discussed 10,000 years from now. Can you say that about almost anyone? You know, who's doing software as a service? Hard to say.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  You know, as I used to say, what's the difference between Grisha Perlman and Ron Perlman? And so in the modern era, the question is, who's Grisha Perlman? And, you know, a thousand years from now, it's who's Ron Perlman? So my feeling is, is that we have our own toys that we've, we care about. We care about our history, we care about different things. It's, it's not unreasonable to want to Dacha and to want to be able to check into a Four Seasons and to fly business class. But we, we don't need a corporate jet, that, that's your stuff.

• 35:55David Friedberg?

  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.

• 36:13David Friedberg?

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• 36:45David Friedberg?

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

• 37:06Speaker 00

  So we're appropriating modern portfolio theory to science.

• 37:10David Friedberg?

  To science.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 37:10David Friedberg?

  Yes, well, I mean, that's the way it's been operating, is my argument.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:14David Friedberg?

  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?

• 37:24Speaker 00

  So crazy high beta bets?

• 37:26David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Let's do an example.

• 37:28David Friedberg?

  Yes.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Imagine that I have a 1% chance of curing all cancer.

• 37:34David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Should you hire me? Well, 99% failure, that's pretty expensive. But the benefit of killing, 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, is that the government co-invested through things that are poorer than it. So each department says, you know, we can't really afford, we don't get that many appointments. So we're going to go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest outcome. And then we're going to start lying about how important that is. You'll notice that if you ask people, how's your field doing?

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Everybody says, it's never been a better time to be a particle theorist. Well, it's a terrible time to be a particle theorist, right? And, and we can't say that. And, and it's funny because again, in portfolio theory, if you have a balanced portfolio and part of it starts succeeding and part of it'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 you have people who don't even understand modern portfolio theory and don't understand market failure, designing things. It's really important to know basic market theory, and we don't.

• 39:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so if we fix that, do we fund individuals versus ideas? You know, this is the other kind of.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Say more.

• 39:08David Friedberg?

  So the whole story, I, I gave this example to Kratsios. Stuart Butterfield worked on this project for a couple of years. He was down to three million bucks, all the VCs put money in, started, nearly failed. And he calls him up, he called up Ben Horowitz, he just told 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 a intra-company communication tool for our engineering team. Maybe I could pivot into that. He's like, yeah, keep the money, do that, I trust you.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:32David Friedberg?

  You pivoted it, turned into Slack, sold it for $30 billion. The idea being that you back the person, not the idea, that the, the great people, the great entrepreneurs continuously evolve, continuously build, continuously pivot. I mean, here you are with Zuck reinventing that company again and again and again. And if you find the up and comers, is there a way to kind of find the individuals that are emerging in their fields?

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, but.

• 39:56David Friedberg?

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

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 40:10Speaker 00

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

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Fund that guy for now. Because if you're not willing, I mean, if you're, 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.

• 41:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And we know that we haven't really read it. And you know, there's something about somebody saying, look, you're 99.999% going to fail. And I say, care to formalize that? You know, let's have it. Well, I'll bet you $100 that by next year, you haven't gotten full acceptance. And they'll say, that's not what you said. You said that you'd be willing to put up your house to win a dollar from me. And I want to do that at size. You know, so my feeling is, come at me, baby. That would be fun. And let me tell you something. You also listen for things that no one is willing to say.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  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. So the question is, is the one person who noticed that nobody's gone to Stockholm, that the standard model has not changed. The recent conference in string theory, supposedly the only game in town in fundamental physics. Go to Strings 2026 website. There's a list of all the talks. There's a search engine. Put in these following words.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  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 three names. Two of them were pure theorists. I talked deeply with both of them. When I got to the point about how to advance the standard model, which is our notion of all the particles you see in this room. Both of them said, I have no interest in the physical world.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  And I said, well, you're the two leading professors at our major, our most expansive theoretical physics institute, and neither of you care about the physical world. Just openly expressed. This is madness. And you know, I give talks at physics departments and I've now started non-cooperation with the departments who've asked me to come and talk, but will technically deny me a talk. So for example, I've given a talk at the University of Texas, Austin, but I'm not allowed to say that the talk occurred in the physics department.

• 43:48David Friedberg?

  Really?

• 43:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:58David Friedberg?

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

• 44:04Speaker 00

  You keep saying fringe.

• 44:05David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  I totally disagree with the narrative of the field. I just out and out say that when physics in 1983, physics made sense. In 1984, it did not. It was very stark and it was like overnight, more or less three people, Leonard 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

• 44:44Speaker 00

  and Stanislav Ulam created the most terrifying weapons from SU3 cross U1 gauge theory. And you've made it safe. It is now safe to do physics with your geopolitical rivals. You can invite your friends from China to come and become graduate students in your department and you will fill their heads with things about ADS-CFT that couldn't hurt a fly because there's no physics in it. So the question is, did I? Is this a secret program?

• 45:16David Friedberg?

  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?

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Well, this happened before.

• 45:25David Friedberg?

  And you, do you think that there is some community subgroup, set of assets, set of projects that are happening somewhere on earth that are making advances in physics and have been for the last 50 years?

• 45:42Speaker 00

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

• 45:56David Friedberg?

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

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Okay. What happened in 1940 is that something that you've never heard of called the Reference Committee was established inside of the National Research Council. So when the neutron was first hypothesized in 1911 by Rutherford, it was then discovered in the early 30s. A woman named Lisa 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 one. Thereafter, a guy named Wright, 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

• 46:41Speaker 00

  physics to a journal, it got shunted into the National Research Council and they would return it to you saying, unfortunately, you know, these results are really preliminary. We don't see this as being at the level of the journal. Please revise, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, 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

• 47:24Speaker 00

  the ability to earn a living. If you were doing chain reaction physics and you weren't invited into the secret group.

• 47:31David Friedberg?

  Yes.

• 47:32Speaker 00

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

• 47:53David Friedberg?

  And you have a theory?

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:54David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 47:55Speaker 00

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

• 48:01David Friedberg?

  I've heard you say this.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:02David Friedberg?

  But surely there.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Let's look at the cover story.

• 48:05David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  The cover story would be, you know, we are so good at trading that we don't even allow people who know markets into our firm. We only hire people in directly relevant subjects of physics, like particle theorists, like differential geometers, like machine learning experts. And we have a very strange thing that we have a very close relationship with the 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. Okay?

• 48:48Speaker 00

  So you're multiple fields medalists and US News and World Report never ranks this as like 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. Yeah, to me, that looks like Fort Meade when it was still no such agency collecting way too many number theorists.

• 49:09David Friedberg?

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

• 49:36Speaker 00

  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 Raper in a Cleveland newspaper, he broke the story.

• 49:57Speaker 00

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

• 50:23David Friedberg?

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

• 50:28Speaker 00

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

• 50:36David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Speaker 00

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

• 50:40David Friedberg?

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

• 50:47Speaker 00

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

• 50:50David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  They closed the fund to all but internal money.

• 50:53David Friedberg?

  Yes, yes, that's what I mean.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  You know, another interesting story was.

• 50:56David Friedberg?

  But if you leave the firm, you get to, your capital can stay in a medallion fund.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  So my claim to you is.

• 51:03David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Jeffrey Epstein had a story, which is that he only accepted a billion dollars or more invested with him if you gave him power of attorney. These things tend to have some reason that no person outside has money and gets to ask questions, right? Jeffrey Epstein did not run a hedge fund. He told me that he ran a multi-strategy FX hedge fund and then he needed a 727 because it had a trading for, and he filled it with yeshiva students because they were the only ones you could trust. He was extremely specific about using trend following, mean reversion and carry is the three strategy. I think he didn't say, he said he didn't do any gamma trading, uh, you know, or, or

• 51:46Speaker 00

  options trading. That was a lot. It was a cover story that, that was burned and then he became disgraced financier and then he became tax expert Jeffrey Epstein. You're looking at a fake world with cover stories that fail over. If you remember the old get smart line.

• 52:04David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Would you believe, you know, a thousand special agents are going to swarm this? I find that very difficult to believe. Uh, a hundred policemen, you know, not, not true, Max, those hard, two, two boy scouts with a slingshot. This is fake. And my claim is, I don't know what's going on at Renaissance, but Jim Simons is an absolute genius, hardly distinguished in that. We have many, and I don't know anybody who's ever gotten close to these returns. I don't know any information about what that thing actually did, does, claims to do.

• 52:40David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  And I'm saying it has very close relationships with a talent pool, Stony Brook, which is not acknowledged, and then an all national lab.

• 52:48David Friedberg?

  Go back to 83, 84.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:52David Friedberg?

  And assume we did not go into this quantum universe that we.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Not quantum, quantum gravity universe.

• 52:58David Friedberg?

  Quantum gravity universe.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:00David Friedberg?

  And we're in a different universe where we have a sense, what does that physics look like today? If we progress physics, help an audience that's a generalist audience, understand a little bit about what it means that if physics didn't stall out. Before I do that, let me just ask this question. Some would argue that physics has played an important role and maybe it's not fundamental and you could, that might be your answer here. In advancing things like semiconductor manufacturing technology, advanced lithography, material science, we've, we've made tremendous progress in our capacity to drive compute. And that's led to this moment today where we have these tools that we call AI.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:43David Friedberg?

  And all of the underlying advancements in chemistry, material science, physics got us to this moment today.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:50David Friedberg?

  And that we have made progress and it has been applied and that would be one argument. And so maybe tell me why that, that kind of misses the point. And then we can talk a little bit about kind of what would the world look like today if we didn't go off track in 1983, 84?

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Great question. Let me try to engage that and then feel free to redirect me if I'm not answering the question. In the theory we have of, which I'm going to call it the, the frontier model, which combines general relativity and the standard model of particle theory. We know certain things that we can't use. We found out that there was three 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, uh, 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.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  We've known about it since 1968. So sometimes you don't get to use something for an extraordinarily long period of time. But what happens if some advancements, maybe we're never going to pull a quark out of a proton, maybe it's impossible. What if there are other things we might be able to do had physics actually advanced? So for example, in the mid 1970s, the two gentlemen called Abdussalam and I forget Patis, first name, so put forward the Patisalam model. I believe that the Patisalam model will be found to be the correct first order grand unification above where we are.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Problem is, is that it has something called SU4 rather than SU3. And the SU3 is what generates the force that keeps all those protons from running away from each other inside of a nucleus because obviously like charges are want to repel. That's why we were able to take out two Japanese cities in 1945 is that we got control of the strong force and then that allowed us to use the electromagnetic force to generate completely destructive, um, power, but it didn't destroy protons and neutrons. What happens when you have SU4 is, is that you see that the electron and the neutrino are the fourth color that we associate with the up quark and down quark, which make up

• 56:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:41David Friedberg?

  In fact, they don't interact.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Well, they do.

• 56:43David Friedberg?

  But very, very.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Very weak, very, very weak. Only through the gravitational and weak forces, which are the two incredibly weak ones and gravity is so weak, it's not worth talking.

• 56:52David Friedberg?

  Enough neutrinos concentrated, you can.

• 56:54Speaker 00

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

• 57:03David Friedberg?

  Just explain what you mean by when you say rotate. What does that mean? So those new, these neutrinos are the subatomic particles. They don't really interact well, but what does it mean to rotate them?

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Well, let's take.

• 57:13David Friedberg?

  And, and, and I think a large amount of the energy produced in the sun is neutrinos that.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:18David Friedberg?

  Actually come out, like if you actually.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  But it's fun. You and I are being irradiated.

• 57:22David Friedberg?

  By neutrino.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  By billions of neutrinos. And the only reason that we're not dead is that, you know, imagine.

• 57:28David Friedberg?

  They don't interact with our atoms.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Well, they barely interact. Once, once in a blue moon they do.

• 57:32David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  So, you know, at night, the sun is streaming this through the earth. It's passing through a hollow.

• 57:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  But it, when it gets to us, it goes, it, it keeps going. You know, you can shoot it through, I forget what it is, a, a light year of lead and you know, you very rarely.

• 57:46David Friedberg?

  Correct.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  What happens with the rotation is in the sort of internal sense. So it's 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, is that 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.

• 58:21David Friedberg?

  So just to be clear for the audience, a neutron can turn into a proton and release an electron at, at the same time.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:27David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  But that turned out to be the wrong model because what it really did is, is that you, there were three quarks inside of it and one of the down quarks, so a neutron is down, down, up. So a down quark let off, it's 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.

• 59:10David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  And that turned out to be the neutrino. And so what happens is, is that a neutrino and an electron have the same relationship as an up and a down quark. You can transmute them using these W, uh, W particles. The danger of this is, is that when you have more force particles than we know currently, things that are to all intents and purposes, stable now, might not be stable in that new regime. So you could disintegrate a mountain potentially if SU5, uh, is present. SU4 is more stable than the SU5. I don't think SU5 is relevant, but what I'm saying is, if you think about physics, think

• 59:51Speaker 00

  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, if you want to think about it, you've been denied for, let's say the standard model got finalized more or less 50, 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.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  I can't tell you whether that's true or not, but it means that you don't have any room and zoom from the new stuff that could have occurred. And so we have to be honest, I want, I want the, the zoom in particular.

• 1:00:46David Friedberg?

  We could probably.

• 1:00:50David Friedberg?

  Make the case that no one on Earth got there and everyone has aligned around the distraction, the disinterest in the pursuit

• 1:01:03David Friedberg?

  because of that absolute risk. Because if someone did actually make advancements and they could access the bigger boom.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12David Friedberg?

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

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't agree with this at all.

• 1:01:26David Friedberg?

  Great, okay.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  So I spent two years indoors being hounded to be vaccinated

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  because of four amino acids being spliced into spike protein of coronavirus.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  Now, my guess is that that's pretty easy, right? Think about it. You need 12 nucleotides to code for four amino acids at the exact right place in spike protein. And that's enough to shut down Earth.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  These are, 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, like, what the hell was that that caused that massive explosion? I forget whether it was lead azide or mercury fulminate or one of these extremely volatile compounds. Do you have any idea how easy it is to make black powder?

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  I, I, I asked modern audiences. Nobody knows that it's 75% saltpeter, 10% sulfur and 15% charcoal. The anarchist cookbook has gone out of discussion. The, the power of science, the leverage of science is so profound that we should at least ask the question. What if you had nuclear weapons that didn't require centrifuge?

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  What if there are easy things to do?

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  That high school students could do. You, you remember this guy who scavenged the americium in the smoke detectors to build a working reactor and I think it was Brooklyn.

• 1:03:24David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

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

• 1:03:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  So my claim is that if you want to think about Walter White as a paradigm, you have to go back to something called the United States versus progress, the progressive magazine in which the Teller Ulam design for 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, is that if you're going to use a fission device, chemical shell compresses sub critical 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?

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  The only thing that can reach that tertiary stage past enough is light. You have to figure out the geometry. Because it's the, the detonator is going to rip apart the entire assembly if it doesn't get. Now, that secret got published and the only reason the government didn't go after um, Howard, what is it? Howard Morland? Is that we stupidly declassified all sorts of pieces and shards of this. And he went to the Los Alamos library and he pieced it together. So my claim is, if you don't know the story of John Aristotle Phillips, the substandard um, physicist who in his Princeton PhD thesis is the Princeton mascot,

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  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. Freeman Dyson said, I will give you no help, but I'll tell you whether it will work. So the substandard physicist put together this and he submitted his junior thesis. And I forget whether it's page 24, but that, that thesis is not in the library and the government removed the page that has the plan. The fact is that this stuff is readily present.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  And we've never seen an atomic weapon used since 1945, mostly if we don't use this power.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  But if it turns out that it's easy to do. And, and by the way, if the US fails with Iran, you're going to see a proliferation of countries acquiring nukes. Because we trusted the US. But you've got, you are the world's policeman. Petro dollars aren't Petro dollars. They're violence dollars. The US was supposed to have the violence needed to secure the oil. And the oil backs the money. We're watching the disintegration of that regime in real time as the US goes through its Suez moment. Right? You know, whether, whether you think Donald Trump should have gone into Iran or not, and I, I happen to think that he was courageous and did something that we should have done in 1981 or 82 or something.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  We have to win. We, we have to win. Because if you have a world that decides that there is no world's policeman,

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  everybody's going to want their own nuke.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  And you can go back to the Tom Lehrer song called Who's Next? And you'll, you'll, you'll find that more or less you're going to have a world in which you can't figure out the game theory because it's no longer dyadic, it's multipolar.

• 1:06:50David Friedberg?

  Imagine a world beyond nukes.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  True.

• 1:06:52David Friedberg?

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

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:07:01David Friedberg?

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

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  Oh, there's definitely something there there.

• 1:07:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 00

  That's something there there. By the way, maybe China. It may be us. It may be a fake story, but there, there's definitely something there.

• 1:07:31David Friedberg?

  Based on the videos and the first person accounts.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  It's not the videos. I, I've never cared about the videos.

• 1:07:39David Friedberg?

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  I've talked to too many smart, sober people, too many similar stories. There are definitely special access programs.

• 1:07:47David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  That are all about this.

• 1:07:48David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  The only thing that we learned from uh, that, that works for to keep secrets is compartmentalization. And so we are so compartmentalized that almost no one can piece this story together. Maybe that the, the so-called stove piping is such that we can't figure out what we know because we can't talk to each other.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  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, is that I'm worried about multi-temporal adversaries.

• 1:08:23David Friedberg?

  Time traveling.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  Hmm, time's travel.

• 1:08:25David Friedberg?

  Times.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Everybody says time travel because they think that time can only be one dimensional. But imagine, for example, that you put a giant gun on a rail car. The rail car can only move in one dimension. Now somebody puts a giant gun on something like a tank and you go to the Bonneville salt flats. Now you can move in two dimensions. Now you put it on an A10 Warthog and you can move in three. Those are all spatial dimensions. Why do you think there's an arrow of time? It's because you believe time can only be one dimensional. I don't think time is one dimensional.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  And I, if you meet an adversary who has access to multi-time, it's like you're trying to compete with them with an A10 Warthog and you've got your only gun on a on a track, except with time rather than with space. If I could sneak up behind you in time, knowing your intent, I mean, this is terrifying stuff to me. And it's also like, I would love to have this over our adversaries. But I don't want to meet anybody who knows how to do this kind of stuff, not on a level playing field. Let me say another one. The solar system is an escape room and Elon is focused, was focused on Mars. I said that Mars is a red herring. It's a MacGuffin. Tonight's focused on the moon.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  He is our only adult, so far as I can tell, uh, crazy and mad as he is. And he uses that to motivate engineers because Mars is barely doable. These are the only rocks that are potentially habitable. It's not enough diversity if we have this much power in this, these few spheres with, which we could put atmospheres. So assume that you could put atmospheres on the Mars and on the moon. And you could get back and forth between them with chemical rockets. You'd have three places to screw up. We need tens of thousands, if not millions of places before we figure out how to civilize ourselves. So we have to get out of here. It's too expensive to leave the solar system. So my claim is that in an Einsteinian world, you're never going to.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  If Einstein is left to be in force, the speed of light is too brutal. So you go to Alpha Centauri, four light years away, you come back, you do it at nearly the speed of light.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Everything is eight years advanced by the time you get back home. Nobody wants to do that. And that's just the first star. My claim is, is that we have been too long in Einstein's prison. General relativity really begins in 1913. It's really due to Grossman and Einstein, not just Einstein alone. I don't know why we say that. Uh, it's not really Einstein. Hilbert is really Einstein Grossman. But more or less since 1915, 1917, the equations haven't moved. They're going to break because of what's happening in Southern Arizona. TIPPEAK 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,

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  is going to break because it's not constant. The only reason that you have lambda times the metric, which is this term, is the product rule, if you take a derivative called divergence.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  You have to take the derivative of lambda times the metric left alone, plus lambda times the derivative of the metric. The derivative of the metric has to vanish. That term is the only possible term that can go there because of something called Lovelock's theorem. If you're within general relativity, you're trying to do this geometrically. My claim is, is that that's going to break. We're going to get to five sigma if we aren't there already. I haven't kept up with the news. And then we're going to realize that the dark energy, the most important generally.

• 1:12:08David Friedberg?

  Makes up 60, 70, 80% of our universe.

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  We have the wrong formula for it.

• 1:12:13David Friedberg?

  We have no contemplation of what it is.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  Well, I, 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, 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. It, come on, this, this is preposterous. Getting back to policy, give me some money and get rid of these people. I don't want them reviewing anything that I'm doing. Give me somebody competent to talk to.

• 1:12:48David Friedberg?

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

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:12:57David Friedberg?

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

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  We know that general relativity is not the last. We know general relativity is wrong.

• 1:13:18David Friedberg?

  It is a view, it is a derivative.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  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 Bing Bang, nor is there a singularity in the, in the center of a black hole called the Schwarzschild singularity.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  That's, that's where our ignorance shows. We have two singularities. We can't get rid of inside the theory. So you have to go outside of it.

• 1:13:45David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  But the thing is, it's so perfect.

• 1:13:47David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  That nobody can figure out, you know, sort of in the first four seconds of a physics talk, you say, let X 13 be a spacetime manifold. Well, okay, it's over.

• 1:13:59David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  That's the sarcophagus and you're already in an Einsteinian frame of thought. And so we know that it's wrong and nobody can figure out how to make it wrong. And that is what keeps us stuck here. There's a marvelous demonstration around 2003 at a TED Talk of this guy showing a surface. And he's got some sort of display and he does this. And suddenly everything enlarges. And then he does this and everything gets smaller. And this is the beginning of a multi-touch gesture called pinch to zoom that we all use. My claim is, is that we don't realize that pinch to zoom is probably built into the thing that we're confusing for spacetime.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  So we don't know to do this. And when you do that, you change the distances. So you don't need to break the speed of light. So this is just, again, you're asking somebody who can't come in to the physics establishment, who is in the physics. I am in the physics establishment. This is, we're, we're in some sort of crazy world in which people who have radical ideas can't do the radical ideas inside of the institutions. Like a radical idea is, is that male and female are mostly determined by the S R Y complex on the Y chromosome. If I say that, I can't be in a meeting because I'm a bigot. Okay.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  I can't be in a physics department because I don't, I think Ed Witten drove the field off of cliff.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  Nobody said, nobody else is saying it. Clearly the one person who's saying that has to be wrong.

• 1:15:42David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Now, this is the whole thing is that I have the first, uh, 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 that says four years of dimension, dimension. When people say something different, do you, do you force them back into this consensus? Well, that's what [bleep] nations do. And we have become a [bleep] nation when it comes to science.

• 1:16:11David Friedberg?

  Talk about China.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13David Friedberg?

  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?

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's, let's talk about that. First of all, France is historically the world's greatest mathematic, mathematical country. China, we're, we're always taught to be, you know, so scared of the Chinese in math, couldn't buy a base hit until very recently. Now, what they're doing is, is that they're looking at us with our absolutely ridiculous collectivist fictions. And they're, they're sidling 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.

• 1:17:10David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  And our people are going there.

• 1:17:13David Friedberg?

  American scientists are going to China.

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  American scientists, Russian scientists, all sorts of scientists are going to China for some prestige, some money and some freedom.

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:17:40David Friedberg?

  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?

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  Let me tell you what I really believe on that.

• 1:17:56David Friedberg?

  Yes.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  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 Invenzione's and the Al's and the Journal of the American Math Society. These are where the narratives of the fields are held. Okay. The trash can is also a corpus. Take all of the ideas that have been poo-pooed and laughed at and call that the trash can corpus, the TC corpus. The AIs are going to start reading all of the things that our, quote, leading physicists have laughed at.

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  Look out.

• 1:18:43David Friedberg?

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

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:19:18David Friedberg?

  And the AI will get there.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  The AI will get there.

• 1:19:21David Friedberg?

  And when the AI gets there, we have.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  Everyone who has an AI that can do this. Again, I'm, I'm saying completely radical things because quite honestly, that's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to have John von Neumann's and Richard Feynman's and Paul Dirac's and it, 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 five-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.

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  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, are you so confident that I'm wrong? Given this obvious huge amount of knowledge that most people have never heard?

• 1:20:37David Friedberg?

  Well, I, I think the question is, can you really distinguish? And can you really cage the AI? I mean, at the end of the day.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  Say more.

• 1:20:49David Friedberg?

  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.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:21:00David Friedberg?

  Is apparent to everyone. The AI can be directed from anywhere. And it's probably a conversation about what does humanity look like?

• 1:21:11David Friedberg?

  And I think that's a conversation with humanity, not with nation states per se.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

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

• 1:21:29David Friedberg?

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

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  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, very intelligent.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:22:24David Friedberg?

  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.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:22:40David Friedberg?

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

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  It's gonna be a hell of a ride.

• 1:22:52David Friedberg?

  It's gonna be a hell of a ride.

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53David Friedberg?

  I just want to hear your, your one assessment. Cause I, I wonder if this is a glimmer. What, what do you think UAPs are today? Is that really the first window in what's happening? If there's something there, the question for you is what do you think today UAPs are?

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  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 there? It's not just a question.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  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 weapon system.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  I think that there's been some breakthrough, particularly in 1970s. No, sorry, in the 60s. There's a 1971 Australian intelligence document where Australia, which was the testing ground for nukes that of the, of the United Kingdom started seeing all these UAPs near their nuclear tests, just the way we see them near ours.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  And the Australians revealed that all of our best people, not all of our best people, many of our best people and many of our top institutions were doing anti-gravity, technically gravity shielding research. And the cover story was the golden age of general relativity, where suddenly general relativity was hot from the early 50s to the late 60s, early 70s. The claim from the, that 71 document is no, no, no. The only reason everybody went towards gravity is that there were, there was interested gravity shielding, anti-gravity, et cetera, 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 cheer to tilt, and that means that we can leave our solar system.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  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, we're, the odds that we are the most advanced life form is laughable. There's no point in worrying about them. So if we can leave, I think they're here. And I think we can leave. And I think the thing, the scenario to worry about is North Sentinel Island, that everybody who lives in 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.

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  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, the atomic boys. And there was this magenta

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  incident under Mussolini. Somehow UAPs are very tied

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  to nukes. And I believe that a nuke is the sign that you become advanced enough that the next thing you figure out how to do is to leave and traverse through propulsion. We don't realize that yet because we've never seen that happen. But my claim is, is that almost every civilization before it gets to using the profound propulsion game, which is these multi-touch gestures, first lets off a nuke and that we alerted whatever India is in this analogy. We're almost ready to come out and we're so pathetically unevolved that we're a danger to any other civilization.

• 1:27:18Speaker 00

  If there's so much power in the next theory, which I, I believe geometric unity is the next theory. Now that will cause a certain percentage of your audience to say, oh, it's just self-promotion as opposed to, no, no. That's what you're supposed to do. If you have a theory, you talk about, yes, I think, I think that there are all sorts of things that you can do. I think there's multi-temporal movement. I think that there's dark chemistry. I think that there's dark light. I think that there are two other families of chiral matter left to discover at a luminous level. Spin three halves matter exists. I believe that SU4 cross SU2 cross SU2 is the next grand unified theory that we'll find.

• 1:28:04Speaker 00

  There is so much more to do that when we make this jump,

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:28:25David Friedberg?

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

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  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, 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 went in the Persian Gulf and it's very important that the scientific community recognizes that despite their feelings about Donald Trump, we've got four or five individuals with the science portfolio who are much, much better

• 1:29:47Speaker 00

  than the PhDs think. And before you turn up your nose at this, consider doing what I did, which is to come for a few days to Washington DC and utter the dangerous words, how can I help?