Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1945 - Eric Weinstein
Uploaded: 2023-02-22T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1945 - Eric Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1945 - Eric Weinstein' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-22. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1945 - Eric Weinstein

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
And we're up.
Good to see you, my friend.
Hello, Joe.
So we should tell everybody this podcast came about from, what time in the
morning was it when I called you?
It might have been one of them late night ones, wasn't it?
Well, they all run together, but it was a late night freak out.
UFO conversation.
I was like, dude, we got to do a podcast about this.
Because out of all of my friends that actually can understand physics and
explain it, you comprehend it at a very high level.
So for things like this to be puzzling to you to the point where you actually
want to talk about it.
Well, I don't want to talk about it because I got this one so wrong for years.
I mean, there is no trace of me talking about UFOs, I think, before three years
ago.
Because I can't stand the topic.
Unlike the rest of you, this thing hits very differently.
Well, I should say then, I've gone back and forth.
Yeah, I know.
I've watched your...
I abandoned it for a long time until I watched the Bob Lazar documentary.
When Jeremy Corbell made that Bob Lazar documentary, I was like, God damn it,
they got me back in again.
They drew me back in again.
I don't think...
I don't know if there's ever footage of me saying the words Bob Lazar.
There it goes.
There you go.
I know.
But I would love to facilitate that dinner.
Oh, let's do...
You and Bob Lazar.
I don't know why...
You know, there's always this question about, is Bob Lazar a physicist?
Was he trained at these places?
And I have to imagine that that's an easily resolvable question because you can
tell whether somebody is a physicist pretty quickly.
I would...
That's why I can't.
It's like, you know what it's like?
It's like fake black belts.
There's a lot of fake black belts.
And if you're a real martial artist, you watch it and you go, what the fuck is
this guy doing?
This is hilarious.
But some people who don't have any understanding of martial arts go, oh my God,
this guy has a death touch.
He can just touch you behind the ear and you fall asleep.
And people believe it.
Yeah, I thought I would just skip everything and go right to the five-point
exploding heart technique.
Yeah.
So that is how I am when, you know, physicists.
I'm like, I don't know what you're saying.
I can't verify or deny.
But Bob Lazar is a very impressive person to talk to.
And what's really impressive to me is that he's had the same exact story since
the 1980s.
And the new footage of these crafts that show them rotating 180 degrees before
they take off is exactly how he described.
So how do you want to ease into this?
What got you curious about it?
If you had just decided that it was all horseshit, like what changed your
perspective?
Okay, this is a really weird and interesting question.
I had a different puzzle that I've been working on for years, which has to do
with physics and is important to me and my work and what I care about.
Which is there is this crazy history between around 1953 and 1973 with an
explosion of activity that sometimes goes under the name of the golden age of
general relativity, where general relativity was sort of put in final form in
the teens by Einstein.
And also Marcel Grossman, who never gets the credit for the original papers, I
think, on general relativity.
Isn't that always the case?
Yeah, but-
There's always like some guy behind the scenes that actually wrote for
Shakespeare.
Einstein is the genius, but he had a mathematical friend whose father saved
Einstein.
I think got him the patent job.
So he's in the, and there's like a meeting called the Marcel Grossman meeting.
So he's a shadowy figure on the edge of the Einstein legend.
I don't think he deserves the credit Einstein did, but if you look at the first
paper in general relativity, before Einstein says anything concrete.
The first paper he says something vague, that's 1913, and that's with Grossman.
The next paper he says something wrong.
He publishes the wrong equation.
Then he corrects the equation and it's incomplete because it doesn't have the
cosmological constant.
And I think it's four papers before he has the equation that now dominates our
understanding of the cosmos and the large.
Interesting.
And the, um, so then it goes silent and effectively the smart kids are all
following Bohr because Bohr and the quantum have so many open problems, whereas
general relativity seems like a pretty much a closed book.
And that's until 1953 and something very bizarre happens in 1953, which we can
get to, but then there's 20 years of explosion in general relativity.
Um, which, you know, you've had Roger Penrose, uh, on your program before.
So he comes from that era and Stephen Hawking was, uh, interior to that era.
Um, Richard Feynman of all people, uh, was very active and, um, gave lectures
at Caltech.
So my entry point was that when I was a young guy at the university of
Pennsylvania, uh, when I'd come home to LA for break, uh, I'd go out to Caltech
and I would park in Feynman or Gilman's parking space.
Which I just thought was the coolest thing in the world that these people,
these gods had little, um, you know, stones with their names stenciled on it.
So I would go park in Feynman's space and I would go to the Caltech bookstore
and I found that there was something that was sold there that at the time I don't
think was sold anywhere else, which was like the Feynman lectures on gravitation,
1962 to 63.
And they were effed up.
They, it was like Feynman says, I don't know how Einstein did his thing, but
imagine that you didn't have the insight that this was all geometric based on a
guy named Bernard Riemann's, uh, notion of what differential geometry is, the
sort of the smooth surface geometry of curvature.
And Feynman says, let's just imagine this was an ordinary field theory.
Am I Richard Feynman smart enough to figure out the geometry just proceeding as
if I was a particle theorist.
And like, this is a very strange and interesting, wonderful thing to do.
And these, these notes are fantastic.
My question is what happened between 1953 and 1973, because the reason that,
that I'm, um, in part really animated right now is that this month, February 1st
of 2023 is the exact 50th year anniversary of the stagnation.
And particle theory is measured by the movement from the standard model.
So the standard model in general relativity are the two basic theories, the
theory of the very small, the theory of the very large, they're incompatible in
a certain level, but they're very similar looking at a different level.
So this has been driving people crazy.
And I say, you know, in 1973, uh, crocodile rock was the number one song or an
entire real yellow ribbon around the old oak tree.
Imagine that song being at the top of the pops for 50 years with no respite.
That's how impressive this is.
Right.
That's a great comparison.
That's a great.
Right.
So just imagine the platform shoes and going up.
So it doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense.
How did the world's smartest community stagnate this badly?
This has happened once before in recent times between 1928 when Dirac came up
with something called quantum electrodynamics, which is electrons and photons
interacting light and a little bit of matter.
And for almost 20 years until 1947, we couldn't compute with this first quantum
field theory, quantum electrodynamics, otherwise known as QED.
And suddenly in 1947, we held a conference at Shelter Island in the tip of Long
Island.
And they didn't invite the old people as much as they invited the young people
coming after the success of the Manhattan Project.
Now, the Manhattan Project gets remembered by us as a physics project, but it
was really engineering because the theorists were unable to fight their way out
of a paper bag.
So we gave them an engineering project and they completely crushed it.
Right.
They gave us these atomic weapons.
So we had a pretty good idea of who was smart and people like Feynman were
smart.
So we held this this weird, cheap conference at Shelter Island at the Rams Head
Inn.
And Feynman figured out that, along with a guy named Julian Schwinger and
another guy named Tomonaga in Japan, that there was a stupid error, like a
really boneheaded, you know, I can't find my keys for 20 years.
And then you realize, oh, they're in my pocket.
So this thing had to do with the fact that there were two concepts of mass for
the electron.
And if you imagine that this was this table between us was ice.
Right.
And I pushed this cup that we would know about how much the mass of this cup
was based on how it responded to force.
But what if I start putting friction?
Now it's wood.
It appears to be slightly more massive because it takes more force to drag a
cup across wood than it does across ice because of the coefficient of friction.
That number is the effective mass or the dressed mass.
And we thought that that was the real mass.
And we had those two numbers set equal.
And when we realized that they weren't the same number, suddenly the theory
yielded.
So it was a 20-year stagnation that ended because there was a boneheaded
mistake.
So we have some experience with this.
Is this stagnation more confusing to you because everything else has kind of
moved along technologically, innovation?
No, things mostly haven't moved.
Really?
Yeah.
We all have this sense of, oh, my God, the dizzying pace of progress.
Right.
And then I always set this problem this way.
I say if you subtract the screens in our lives, so there are phones, the flat
screen TVs, all that stuff, and you forget about style issues because style
changes.
How do you know you're not in 1973?
More or less.
You know, we don't have George Jetson stuff everywhere.
Style would be a big one.
Yeah, style would be.
But just in terms of technology, like the distance between 1952, where we have
the first thermonuclear device in the test known as Ivy Mike, and 1902, before
we even have powered flight, is like 10,000 years.
It's enormous.
Right.
The difference between 1973 and 2023 is mostly due to computers.
Computers and communication are the two really big expanding things.
Now, I'm not saying you don't have quadcopters, and you don't have-
Right.
But because we interact with that primarily, we think of things as being far
more advanced.
Right.
And like on a broad scale.
Well, this is the issue, you know, the way I used to say it is it was between
electrons and atoms.
The world of atoms stagnated.
The world of electrons went crazy.
It's actually a very good point, too, in terms of one of the major industries
that has to improve every year's automobiles.
Right.
And the problem with that is they're so good.
Like, if you get to like a Tesla level of performance, the idea that you're
going to get faster than that is fucking insane.
You don't want to necessarily get fast.
You don't want to get that fast.
The idea that you could just go to a store and buy a car that will go zero to
60 in two seconds is fucking nuts, man.
I know.
It's nuts.
Well, it's mostly a battery and a computer claiming to be a car.
Exactly.
Keep going.
Exactly.
What I was going to say is they're all reliant on computers now.
Yeah.
Like, I really like old cars.
I really like-
Where you can tinker.
Yeah.
But it's also, I just like that there's a direct connection mechanically.
You feel a mechanical connection to the gears and the steering.
There's something about them that's very satisfying.
They don't even have to be fast.
They don't have to move fast.
Like, driving around normally, it's like driving a ride.
It's very fun.
Whereas, with a Tesla, it's just, you know that if you turn the wheel, it'll
turn the actual wheels that are on the road.
But you don't feel them.
You don't feel that thing.
You're just turning a thing and a thing happens.
You're not directly connected to it.
It's all computers.
Well, it's like-
All the new cars rely on computers.
If you listen to John Mayer, for ex