#1945 - Eric Weinstein

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Good to see you, my friend. 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?

Joe Rogan (0:25)

Well, they all run together, but-

Joe Rogan (0:28)

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 comprehended 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.

Joe Rogan (0:47)

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.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

Well, I should say that I've gone back and forth.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

Yeah, I know. I've watched your...

Joe Rogan (1:08)

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.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

I don't think... I don't know if there's ever footage of me saying the words Bob Lazar.

Joe Rogan (1:23)

There it goes.

I know. I would love to facilitate that dinner.

Joe Rogan (1:31)

Oh, let's do...

Joe Rogan (1:31)

You and Bob Lazar.

Joe Rogan (1:32)

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.

Joe Rogan (1:48)

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's a death touch. You just touch him behind the ear and you fall asleep.

And people believe it.

Joe Rogan (2:08)

Yeah, I thought I would just skip everything and go right to the five point exploding heart technique.

Joe Rogan (2:13)

Yeah. So that is how I am when, you know, physicists. I don't know what you're saying. I can't verify or deny.

Well, so but Bob Lazar is a very impressive person to talk to. And what's what's really impressive to me is that he's had the same exact story right 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.

Joe Rogan (2:42)

So we how do you want to ease into this?

Joe Rogan (2:46)

But what got you curious about it if you had just decided that it was all horseshit?

Joe Rogan (2:50)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:50)

Like what changed your perspective?

Joe Rogan (2:53)

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 in 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.

Joe Rogan (3:32)

Isn't that always the case? There's always like some guy behind the scenes that actually wrote for Shakespeare.

Joe Rogan (3:39)

Einstein is the genius, but he had a mathematical friend whose father saved Einstein, I think, got him the patent job. 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.