The Exchanges

Q 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 the golden age that Kratzio has 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?

A Well, it's a question of which science is stalled. Um, 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, 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. Ten million people. I should be able to investigate that as a virologist, as an epidemiologist, I should be able to 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, we limit our own ability to use cowboy science to drive the rest of the world. And, …

AI assessment note: “when I see us doing incremental research and doing things that are incredibly careful”

Q 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? Or was there a deliberate external effort?

A The one thing you didn't, uh, recite in that list of things, you didn't, you didn't mention my being in the physics department, I guess, uh, at Hebrew University, MIT, uh, postdoctoral fellowship, but the most important one is that I was the co-chair Co-PI with Richard Freeman of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard in the Economics Department, because I was worried that we were, we had been losing this, and there's a very crisp answer to this, and between 19 65 and 75, everything went wrong. Right. And it's basically from the beginning of the Medicare act of 65 to a controversy over something called man, a course of study in 1975 that ushered in peer review and the control. But if you wanted to really pinpoint it, it really 65, 69 to 71 is particularly brutal. And what happened was The MIT physics department , I think in. In the spring walked out in protest of the Vietnam war, including people who had been part of the Manhattan project. And the government took one look at this and said, okay, you are wobbly. We can't trust you. We have a, 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, ah, in the same direction that the count…

AI assessment note: “there's a very crisp answer to this, and between 19 65 and 75, everything went wrong”

Q It's gonna be a hell of a run. Yeah. 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?

A 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 a 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 worked with Peter Thiel, and I don't think he's the devil, and he's a close personal friend. Now you're asking me the question of how many of the remaining doors would you like to close, Eric? It's not just a question. I know how these people think, and I know how terrified they are. Let's answer it anyway. If general relativity is really the last word, I think that these UAP, UFO things are nation states' experimental weapons system. I think that there's been some breakthrough, particularly in the 19 seventies, no, sorry, in the sixties, 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. And the Australians revealed that all of our best people, not all of our best people, many of …

AI assessment note: “I think that these UAP, UFO things are nation states' experimental weapons system.”

Q underlying advancements in Chemistry, material science, physics got us to this moment today, 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?

A 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 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 the boys. Um, you have a situation in which there is no industrial application. We've known about it since. 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 cork 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-nineteen seventies, the two gentlemen called, uh, Abdus Salam and, uh, I forget Patti's first name. So put forward the, uh, Patti Salam model. I believe that the Patti Salam model will be found to be the correct first order grand unification above where we are. Problem is, is that it has something called SU four rather than SU three. And SU three is what genera…

AI assessment note: “What if there are other things we might be able to do had physics actually advanced?”

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

A Well, you know, 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 all know all the banks of 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. 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 w I don't think I would join.

AI assessment note: “If you have the HR department saying, you know, Eric, I understand you, you are making”

Q against scientific research in the U.S., an eighty-fold decline in return on every dollar invested in government research. 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'm, I might be giving you a t-ball here, so.

A I guess, or, or I feel like I should have, I should have gotten high on cannabis, uh, in order to even take that question on. I don't believe any of that first point. Um, and, and it's, I knew Jim Simons decently well, uh, Jim was the kind of guy who could do that, but. Even he didn't understand my last conversation with Jim Simons. I was trying to explain to him how the Chern Simons, uh, transgression interpreted as an action functional is the only rival to Einstein Hilbert. Um, and that effectively he will find, um, if he, if he pursues this, that Chern Simons and Einstein Hilbert are an equal playing field as daughters of the ultimate theory. Uh, 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, uh, 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 Uh, and one who's a representation theorist, another one who's, uh, interested in, um, oh, I don't know, category theory. You could do it that way, but this is completely insane.

AI assessment note: “I don't believe any of that first point. Um, and, and it's, I knew Jim Simons”