Eric Weinstein Reveals UFO Physics! (Exclusive Interview)

Peterson, Sam Harris, and last but not least, Eric's brother, Brett Weinstein, badass evolutionary biologist, perennially on YouTube's most wanted list. So, I thought more people should be aware of Eric and his ideas. Thus began a year and a half of meounding him to start a podcast, an effort that eventually became The Portal. Hello and welcome. You found the portal. my brought my producer Jesse Michaels here. I was a pain in the ass to this guy. I did not return his phone calls. I'd get messages from you that would be like, "Well, it's 3 days later and you still don't have a podcast."

The way I describe Eric to people who might not know who he is is if Stephven Hawking and Christopher Hitchens had a baby while listening to a whole lot of love by Led Zeppelin. You need cooling. Eric is a complete polymath. He knows multiple languages. He plays multiple instruments. He can go toe-to-toe with the top physicists in the country. His brain is a rare What is an American tradition? What is it? Something a baby boomer did twice.

We discuss Eric's theory of everything in physics, the institutional and economic headwinds facing young people in this country, artificial general intelligence, and even UFOs. What was that? Please enjoy this special long- form interview with the love of my work life, the bane of my existence, and this week's American Alchemist, Eric very strange time that we're living in. Yeah, I was just trying to measure that

actually. How strange? This morning, let's give people a little history. So gain of function research is basically creating trying to look around the corner on maybe what the next pathogen or virus will be. Creating it in an artificial lab setting so that you can then come up with the cure. Obama actually sunsets it because he thinks that it's too dangerous. Fouchi kind of takes advantage of the chaos of the Trump administration and restarts the gain of function funding that the NIH is

doing in 2017. And we're now giving money to the Wuhan Institute of Viology, which is a lab with a poor safety record. A lot of what this has to do with is bowarfare being something that we're uncomfortable with about uh you know just the way it's like doing chemical weapons research. You have to do the research in a defensive capacity. Everything has a dual role. My point is is that you're listening to Colonel Jessup. You snotty little bastard. You may find my existence repugnant, but you want me on that wall. You want me on

that post, And the fact that you can't stomach what it is, like you may have an idea that it's really important that we be good uh kind stewards of the planet. But you want your burger, don't you? And somebody's got to kill that cow and uh and take the organs out and serve it up so you can pretend that that little piece of protein uh you know came from a protein factory, which it didn't. Well, that's what Anthony Fouchy thinks. It's like for whatever reason, I'm the guy that you've put in this position to handle this really terrible portfolio of things

we're not supposed to be doing, but we have to be doing. Not gain of function. But if you think about it, we we do this with our military. We tell the military what it can and cannot do and then we find out that it uses contractors because they may not be covered under what you can ask the military to do. For example, you might put your secrets inside of an aerospace company because you don't want to hold them inside of government because inside of government they're vulnerable. Lawyer requests and likewise tyranny of censorship. You want that done through private corporations because the government uh is under all

sorts of requirements not to do that. So when people say things like, "Well, it's a private company. It can do whatever it wants." Well, not really. Um, you know, you ever tried to produce food and not say what the ingredient list is? Uh, it's pretty tough to sell Right. Okay. Why don't I know what the ingredient list is in the algorithms that mutate my conversations? I can't see a thing. And at some level, we farmed out tyranny to private Let's talk about what CO exposed. Um, as

China that you're talking about two countries. You're talking about a country that exists, which is China, and a country that has existed in the past that does not exist now. And that what happened in World War II is that we had such a coherence that it took a very long time for the decay function to eradicate the ability of that country to do things. And now we've gotten to that point where we're looking for a disaster to call us into being a country again. That's right. And our elites are inherently trans. Sorry, we don't have any.

So, the elites aren't. Sitting in an elite chair does not make you elite any more than sitting in a pilot seat in a plane gives you the ability to fly it. Somebody once asked George Burns, "Do you play the violin?" He says, "I don't know. I never tried." You want an elite surgeon for your child's heart operation. You want elite commandos to go in and take the bad guys out without hurting anybody else. Mhm. But we don't want an elite anywhere else cuz we keep hearing about the elite, the elite, the elite. Well, they aren't. Mhm. Is it safe to say that Wall Street,

consulting, and big tech are all good examples where the incentives around protecting America, those are after self-enrichment. You've picked three really interesting, weird examples because these are like the only places where smart college graduates can reliably go to earn six figures if they're willing to work themselves to a And you're that's the only way to not have debt basically is to do one of those three things. Well, you didn't mention porn or

Those are also possible new creators. Well, look, I I I did this program with uh Sugar Baby University, and I tried to shock the boomers and say, "You do realize that you're selling your your daughters into gray area prostitution through sugar dating?" And they don't even hear it. They, you know, you ask your kids going to college campuses, how many people do, you know, are sugaring in order to make sure that they graduate without debt? And it's an open secret among the kids.

It's just Jesse. What we're doing is we're watching the decay of things that were built by previous generations and we're not excited to get up off the couch. Is there any way to reboot any of these Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. How do we do that? Well, first of all, you have to pick one. We don't know which one. We don't know how. Yeah. But assume that you could take back one and you gave it the ability to

say no. It'd be very easy, for example, to endow a university to just insulate We're going to take the most dangerous safe thinkers. Who actually have new ideas that are reasonable and not mean-spirited, and we're going to make sure that they're not subject to to market forces so they can do whatever they want and we protect them. But you have individuals who are still not dead. That's a great segue into You've attempted to almost do the impossible, which is to coalesce these

sort of atomized truthteller gadflies where sometimes small disagreements between them make it hard to kind of create a coherent unit. And I think if if I were to create one sort of pin for all of it, you might be it. How do you do that? We try it. It works vaguely, but you need brick and mortar and you need people who are empowered and you need people with stakes in the game. I mean, it's just I get very bored of

saying this because it doesn't do good things for me. Yes, I am trying to coalesce people. But let's be honest, nobody wants to put FU money into people who actually say FU. You're not comfortable with actual heroes. I think that's right. I mean your line on it is Charles Lindberg was our last Well, he was a a scoundrel. He was a scoundrel. He was a scoundrel. Didn't like our people. He did not. But the point was he was a national hero who had the power to lead the country

out of a war orientation and say this is a Jewish British problem. America first. And the idea that an individual would amass that kind of power was something I think that we the government we official learned. we can't have anymore. And it feels like there's a general malaise among my generation and Gen Z to some extent. Millennials own 4.8% of the wealth in this country. Look at a city like LA. Real wages have basically stagnated, maybe risen

slightly, and then cost of living has 20 to 30xed. If you just look at, you know, take like real estate or something like that. Yeah. Doesn't [ __ ] make any sense anymore. You guys need to fall in love with each other and get each other pregnant and deal with the responsibility of the consequences of that those actions. And you're not And as as I'm fond of saying, I love you guys not as much as I love Gen Z. Gen Z is my children, So you guys are my audience, but Gen Z is my kids. So I love you, but not as

much as Gen Z. Your parents don't love you as much as I love you guys. And that's what kills me. All of that is basically algorithmic. And it's the algorithms that break your heart. You don't realize that Paco Bell is emotional because it's not even music. It's math.

So, the reason that it's your parents' wedding song is that your parents wanted people to feel. So, they chose an algorithm. Talk about boomer neglect. Who understands these people? No one. You had to go through what they went to understand their crazy mindset. And I and I don't mean to say that we don't have lovely relationships with them. We do. But they went through something. What what did they go?

Because it I mean it feels like in some sense they went through nothing. They benefited from massive growth post World War II. You know 46 through 64 is the rough sort of range. And so that I feel like creates all sorts of weird psychological dynamics where you're given if you were to buy real estate between the you know 50s and the 80s and like on the coasts. The amount of wealth you acrew just through that right. Our whole story is off one. The

greatest generation, which supposedly won World War II by fighting the Germans handtoh hand and blah blah blah, always ignores that the Soviets did a ton and the physicists finished it off in in Japan, you know. So yeah, we took casualties and people went through things and they saw things, but we didn't go through Stalenrad, you know. So first of all you have this problem that a lot of gis came back home as the conquering heroes who didn't see the kind of action let's say that the Soviets saw. Then you have the silent

generation that follows the greatest generation which actually you know Joe Biden comes from that generation. We've gone backwards from boomers into the silence now. Um and they sort of grow up with this postworld war II prosperity that they can't get to work. So Joe Biden begins as a 29-year-old senator in Right. And then the boomers are like after this and they're set to be the first generation that can't get the American dream to work.

And because of the culture of personal responsibility, the idea of just failing at the American dream doesn't it's like not an option. So China becomes the source of the American dream. Right. It's really the Chinese dream of getting wealthy Americans to sell things off to China so that they can pretend to live better than their parents in a weird way. So then what's Gen X? We we're we're the jetwash generation. We follow the boomers and the silence. We

get a chance to see the world that they sort of saw. We're the last ones who have any vision of, you know, functional like journalism. I remember functional journalism from when I was five in Um, and we we grow up in a 75 year peace you know, so we don't know reality. You guys know less about reality because you didn't even see the tail end, of functional society.

And Gen Z is looking at all of us and saying, "Are you all just effing crazy?" Yeah. So if if something close to 40% of the wealth that millennials hold is in one set of hands of a guy who's on a hydrooil with an American flag for July 4th saying, "Hey, we've got a terrible labor shortage. Please give me all the visas so I don't actually have to pay my You can't do that. Because that's an advertisement for

redistribution of wealth. If you want an unequal society as I do where different levels of ability and different levels of drive and risk management are rewarded at different levels, it can't be this dumb. This is an argument for communism. Our current capitalism is an argument for communism. We need a capitalism that is an argument for capitalism. Is there a point at which if you're, you know, a burgeoning tech entrepreneur and

you start to scale and you start to make money and you start to connect with people at high levels of society, you just sort of become co-opted and all of your ideas go out the window. Well, nobody plans for what success is going to do to them. We talked about this earlier on the car ride over. It's sort of a sila and kuribbdus a young person has to face and on the one hand it's work on scholarly academic things but don't get any

support you can't really do too many interesting things or it's you know go into commercial activity try to make as much money as possible but lose the plot what are you doing I'm attempting to marry confuse them the two I know and it's uh very it's a tightroppe act and I don't know if I'm going to pull it off that's why I'm Thank you, Eric. No, because this is an amazing idea. If you can not get sucked in to doing cool stuff that gets you clicks, and keep in mind, you're going to get captured by

your audience. If you can fuse these two things, then you can potentially do something financial that creates the monetary input to allow you to do something scholarly that allows you to gain insight to inform your ability to make more money. If you can get that figure eight thing going, that's the holy grail. Let's talk about another example of this in Elon Musk. I think you both have the same premise, but then come to almost vastly different conclusions as to what

to do about that premise. He seems to think that we need to get off this earth with physical rockets. No, no. He thinks that we need to get off this earth. Let's start there. Yes. Same premise. The same premise. We don't know if he thinks that it's with rockets or rockets is the best he can do. If you believe that humans have to diversify because a single planetary surface effectively creates one synchronized experiment, you'd have to ask how many different ways are there of

getting off of this planet. And there's getting off with the chemistry and physics that we know, which is rockets. And we know that that's good enough for the moon and marginally it may be good enough for Mars. super tough to imagine that working, but okay, you can imagine a space station or two. You can even go crazier and imagine Titan around Saturn. But Elon's a physics guy. He's he's got a physics background.

exactly where it lives. Now, that's an insanely exciting prospect. And you went on Joe Rogan and presented this to the world. This is all very hard for the average person to follow. But I think it's not about person. I understand that. But I'm saying I think it would be incredibly valuable just release it for the average for to everybody. Yeah. And this is my cursory understanding, but it's like it feels like there are what, like five people on Earth or something who could even try to like read this stuff. Maybe there are no

people on Earth. I don't know. How How do you get this stuff out? People don't understand what I did or why I did it because it's it's different enough and it was weird enough that they didn't grasp it. It wasn't about teaching Joe Rogan physics inside of a It's about the fact that there is no way now to go back and take that theory away because there's a record of when it

And the reason that Joe Rogan's program is so important is it has so many eyeballs on it. So, I think that there's a famous scene in one of the Mission Impossible movies where Tom Cruz has to meet with people who want him dead and he chooses to meet in a public square and he's got the only copy of the information inside of his head so that killing him will destroy the Right? In in essence, that's the sort of a problem academics has become so poisonous, so focused on enforcing the

rules that nobody can afford to think you in order to get things right, you have to get things wrong. And we won't allow people to get things wrong unless it's part of a program that's been blessed. So that was a timestamped, ubiquitously That was the point of it. People didn't understand it. The other thing is is that um there are no protections inside of science for taking somebody else's work and putting another person's name on it and this was a good protection.

Well, and I put something saying that I choose to be an entertainer rather than a scientist and therefore it has copyright protection. So where do we go from here on GU in terms of is going to have to actually grasp the ideas inside of GU. But here's the thing, Jesse. I don't really care about the inner person. I I want a nice life. I want my family left alone, right? And I want to be insulated so I

don't need to worry every day. But it's the ideas. If the ideas in GU are wrong, then they're just wrong. If the GU ideas are right, but they're small errors, as there have been every time anybody's accomplished anything in this kind of a way, not a big deal. Let's fix some errors. But people have this these like weird things that they want to do. They want to turn this into drama. So for example, Einstein and Hilbert

supposedly, you know, Hilbert almost scooped Einstein, but Einstein pulled it out of the No, nothing like this remotely happened. Einstein and Grossman were on general relativity. Hilbert did something. Even if Hilbert had gotten there first, it wouldn't have mattered. The ideas were from Einstein. We want to create moronic horse races because it's exciting. You have like eight different frames. Like you can go Yeah. You could talk to a biologist, you can talk to a

physicist, you can talk math. Uh you're a cultural commentator. And so, you know, I might have annoyed the [ __ ] out of you in the process of trying to get you to start the portal. That just No, come on. The issue was I didn't want to become famous. Yeah. I wanted my ideas to become famous and I wanted to be the owner of those ideas. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't know that the problem isn't getting the ideas out there. You can get the ideas

out there. The problem now is that the ideas are like seeds that need to find soil and rain and the proper temperature. And we we don't have that at the moment. We we have a world in which um you can teach a person to fish. You're not even giving them fish. You can teach them to fish and they will starve for lack of like they won't understand that when you're gone they have to go fish. We don't have culture that's proper. Like it's really important to understand how counterintuitive the the US where we

live is as an intellectual system. We expect you to not take advantage of all of the freedoms that we give you. The purpose of freedom is not understood by people. And I I often compare it to thing like freedom, potential, and You're not supposed to use all of it. Right. So, you have potential. You could do anything in your life, but you're not going to both become an opera singer and a Formula 1 driver uh and a nutrient uh company CEO and

etc., etc., etc. You're not going to get to do everything. Every life is about the foregoing of opportunity. There's something about the hard choice thing that seems lost on my generation. We seem to all have an illusion of Well, and that's what that's all you've been given. You've been given your future because you're not being given your present. And the future that you're being given is largely elucer, And that thing is making me crazy because I would rather deal you guys in

on a future that's real. My favorite tweet that I let off recently was something about for all of you who decided to have a kid during I have to be careful not to tear up on camera, but people started sending me ultrasounds like we've got two in the in the oven and you know we have to thank you for telling us to have kids and I realized nobody's yelling at you guys get married, have the babies. Yes, it's all it all sucks. You don't have the money. Don't waste your fertility windows. Don't waste your ability to to to form

families. Yes, it's tough and there is divorce and things go wrong and people come to hate each other. But you know what? A lot of those dysfunctional doable. But it is barely doable. And quite honestly, I want to see you guys delt. And you know, for me, the um I think that the thing I like least about being famous is having a family

because you can't protect your there's so many psychopaths in the world. And it doesn't mean that there's like tens of thousands of psychopaths. But it just takes a small amount of psychopathy to get you to really come to look at this fame question differently. I think it's very interesting to think about media as sort of not a loss leader. Maybe it's a loss leader, maybe it's it's break even, but um you're creating a lighthouse for really young high agency people. And

then you invest in them and venture economics might be riskier, but they're a whole lot better than ads and the BuzzFeed model. And so is the media company of the future actually media as kind of the the front and then the back end is investing. Well, that's the funnel theory. And you know, my belief about this was there's clearly a rollup play where you take the people that people want to listen to and you put them inside a container and then

you let the rest of the system hate on it. And it's not Fox News because it's not conservative. It's an easy play. I don't know why it doesn't happen. I don't understand where we are. I just don't know the people who want to do it. We should do it. Let's do it. Okay. I want to talk about UFOs. A subject which if I brought this up with you three years ago, you probably would have said Jesse, shut the hell up. Well, you did try to bring it up. What did happen? You said Jesse, shut the hell up. Yeah, except I didn't use the word hell.

No, you didn't. But you you know I think you were like this is wacky and crazy it's dumb. It's dumb. It's incredibly dumb. The idea that you would have phenomena that can only be seen by special people and that there's no good video of it and we have a world full of smartphones. We've got video of absolutely everything is completely stupid and insane. And I was wrong. What's changed since? Nine pages came out from the Pentagon.

Six of which are relevant. Three, I think, you know, it's like a a cover and a back page. I don't know what it is. And it's very clear in that report that that report was meant to be as dull as is humanly possible about the most exciting thing that you could possibly imagine, which is that either we're engaged in an incredible psychological operation coming out of the Pentagon or some people inside the Pentagon believe with near certainty that we've been contacted and observed by extra

uh visiting Earth. That's pretty insane. And what's really crazy is that the data is locked up. You just said we talked about the government is not attracting our best and brightest scientists. Why are the top physicists in the country? Why are the top astronomers in the country not looking at nobody that I know who's very good at physics or astrophysics or astronomy or anything knows what the hell's going on.

this, Jesse. I thought you were completely wrong. This is a situation where you would not come off of this point. And I was convinced that you were brain damaged on this one issue. No, I really was. It's fair. And you were right. I was wrong. I appreciate that. I don't understand it. It doesn't really The key thing is whatever is going on is We're not in a situation we all have equal access to the same thing. Either it's a scop and almost nobody has

information about it or there's something out there that fits this paradigm that is not trying to be noticed. And I've given the example of North Sentinel Island where India manages North Sentinel Island but doesn't land there. And in such a circumstance, there would be a fermy paradox among the natives of North Sentinel Island. Why why don't we see anybody almost ever, And the answer is, well, you're sort of owned and you're being protected from anybody landing on your shores. Now, if

that's what's going on, that's astounding. That's astounding. On the other hand, if human if humanity has a future, and I'm right, so I'm happy to give you your due, but give me We we have a future because we got off this planet and we diversified. Now, if we got off this planet and diversified and that's how we survive, then it means anyone else out there could come here. And not with rockets. We're pretty sure that they're not on the moon and they're not on Mars in secret colonies, I would

Do you have a sense on the genetic stuff? It feels like a lot of people are just waiting for the data to come in and they talk a lot about biioinformatics and as long as we it's just a big sort of pattern matching issue and as long as we have you know uh genetic sequences and we're matching them with phenotypes and we get this big harmonized database right now it's a exist in a bunch of silos you know you have BGI UK bio bank whatever we just put them all together and then we know exactly the genetic

code I tend to think that's not the case. It's not just a data collection problem. Do you have sort of an opinion on that? It's very interesting what's going on with machine learning on something like protein folding where if you manage to attack something with machine learning, you don't always understand why you were able to solve what your machine was able to solve. It's very hard to interpret a successful neural net, right? Yes. What did it find? What did it understand? Black box somewhat. Maybe we'll get to the point

where you can inspect the black box. I don't know. But one thing you can say is that okay, if you can get better at protein folding using some sort of a deep learning then there's probably something there that can be understood analytically. Um, so I'm excited about some of the data science, but people are really looking for data science to replace Totally. Same. And it's very interesting because the old issue with artificial

intelligence was trying to get something to be intelligent. The dirty little secret is intelligence was needed for almost nothing. So with mere deep learning, you were able to do all sorts of things that we previously thought may have required intelligence. Yes. I think a line I have on AI is it's like the Daff Puck song. Uh harder, better, faster, stronger. And that's all it can do. It can do what humans can do. And sometimes it's harder, better, faster, stronger. Sometimes it's not even as good as as humans. But that is

different than innovation. Brute force is different than innovation. Whenever I see a startup that says we're resting on some data set or AI to create I'm always fairly skeptical of it just being sort of a data collection problem. I think real innovation is interdomain knowledge and consilience. GU for you is interdommain knowledge. And so I I don't think a AI is very good at that right You know, it's it's not a morality play. You see, we'd like I I love the romance

of science where Jim Watson and Francis Crick are able to figure this thing out that Lionus Pauling cannot. And that's one thing, but sometimes you can easily imagine the problem wasn't what you thought it was. It was much easier or you could prove that it's it's undecidable or something like this. So, you have to sort of not overlay what is true with what is meaningful. It would be great if human intelligence

had a place going forward for the rest of eternity, but I I think that you'll get to the point where the songs that you love are written by computers and it's going to flip you out. And then the question is going to be, well, do you start caring less and less about music the way we care less and less about Um, you know, what does it really mean if two chess machines go at it? Do we do we really want to play through this as if this is speaking to the human soul? I don't know about that. I do think that

none of this really matters. We have a very brief window to to save ourselves. And the way out is super romantic. It's but we're not motivated. It's like nobody wants to follow David Gogggins. Nobody wants to follow Jaco Willink. Those guys want to get up at 4 4 in the morning and start training. And I don't see that on on behalf of our scientific community. And I don't think the machines at least can search while

everybody else uh you know pops an edible and watches Netflix. Maybe AI which is one of the few areas where people say things are accelerating is actually just a form of learned helplessness and outsourcing our agency. I think it is. I think that at some level um we're going to find that it's not good enough to know whether things are true or that something can do them. We're going to want to know why things are true. And I think

I think that that's part of the game is what what if we can actually predict protein folding fairly well, but nobody has any idea of how we're able to do that. How much is that going to actually hold us back? And so I I do think that we're going to get to a point where we've learned some things and we're now angry that we don't know why the things that we know how to do, we we just don't know why. We know how. And I I think that that kind of ruthless

problem. We'll be too powerful with too little wisdom. We're going to have all sorts of things that we know how to do that we're going to have unintended consequences of because we don't know how it's working. We don't understand the bedrock I agree with you, sir. Okay, let's go eat. Let's go eat. Uh, it's American cheese. Can I get a hamburger with lettuce only?

Thanks. But you going paleo. You got a lettuce wrap. I don't know what I got. about recently. An ironic effect of Snowden is there are all these You had Prism, Buller Run, Heartbeat. The NSA has a back door into everything was the revelation. and then we can't we didn't do anything about it. And think about the panopticon

effect that that ends up having on an individual where it's like we know that they can hear and listen to everything that we do and say and it's indexed and and then you also we're not really doing anything about it. The halfsed mirror only works if the people behind the half silvered mirror rarely if ever intrude into your life in a distinct identifiable fashion.

I think that the new thing that we believe is different. I think that the new thing that we believe is yes they're watching us but for some reason they can't afford to let us know what they So most of the information they have is because you'd be crazy to sacrifice the whole program to go after somebody with an unpaid library fine. excited about that doesn't involve

I think there are certain anomalies and uh I'm not excited about those things in their current form, but I want to I want to do them in more rigorous ways. So like the UFO thing like stuff stuff like Make 12 figures just to be safe. 12 figures. we can put that back there. First of all, my friend, yeah, there's a way in which growing up in Los Angeles, the primary association is that home is

In some sense, I don't feel like I'm home unless I'm in a place of of alienation. Sort of like I've likened it to growing up in a Durico painting, some industrial landscape where you've abandoned everything. There's a child with a hoop running down the street. There's nothing. And for me, in a weird way, the the Doors are are maybe the quintessential LA band. Of course, you had the Birds and all that kind of Yeah. Speaking of The Doors and Great Music, you know, I live in Laurel It's a pretty amazing music history

there. Are you aware of it? Some of it. I mean, I I I definitely go to the store where the creatures meet and uh I'm familiar with the romance of Wonderland Avenue and Carol King's Tapestry has been a place of pilgrimage for myself and my daughter where she wrote it. Uh Laurel Canyon and Tanga Canyon are to the extent that LA has spiritual energy, probably the two places that have the strongest spiritual It was such a weird place, too. I mean,

I know Jim Morrison's dad, Rear Admiral Steven Morrison was in the Navy and in charge of the Gulf of Talin. Really crazy. That's a very strange one. Um, and as you point out, Lookout Mountain is a CIA facility in Laurel Canyon and the whole history of drugs and the government and Vietnam and espionage and all this kind of stuff. Very hard to sort out. It's hard to sort out. Very weird. There are all these sort of anomalous bizarre facts. It feels like LA was a crazy

place in the 80s. It was dangerous. It was exciting. Now it feels like a weird Instagram hologram thing. You go to Boa Steakhouse and there are tick tockers everywhere. Saddle ranch. Feels like a weird Every place is over. And I mean that. You can't move to New York and say it's happening in New York. It's going down in Austin. No. No. You're not getting it, man. We're going to move to the Black Rock Desert. Burn Burning Man's Burning Man's going to be 365.

None of that's true. No place is happening. There are things that are happening, but they're happening between Sometimes they're happening between people who have never actually met in person. But I've always thought that secretly this was an incredibly Yeah, I think it's both. I think there are many LA's and that lack of identity as frustrating as it can be to deal with makes me hopeful towards creating a laurel canyon

of tech science out there ideas and cool [ __ ] I detect a spark of inspiration. I think in a weird way I've come back after 37 years away. I was conceived in Laurel Canyon. I was born in what is now the Church of Scientology. It used to be Cedars of That's amazing. And I ran away from this place at 16 so hard and so fast. I never thought I would be back.

Um, and I explored the world and I lived in places that I needed to. I went back to Philadelphia, which was my family's ancestral seat to the extent that you can claim something as immigrants in the US. went to Boston, which I thought was the center of academics and science. Moved to New York, which was hot for hedge funds, at least it could support creativity and rulebreaking. Moved out to San Francisco to do tech. Went to Jerusalem and for two years because it's belly button of the universe.

And I think I came back to LA not quite sure why I was here anymore. What I' what I think I've put together is it's not happening It's happening wherever you happen to be and wherever you can make it happen. And there's no point in in city chasing, right? Like, you know, something is pulling me towards Austin. Somebody else is saying, "Come to Montana. Come to And I think at this late stage in the game, I'm actually back home. I'm from

this place. My son is the fifth generation now of Los Anelenos in our family, which effectively never And you know, whether it's the the flood from the the dam that burst in Baldwin Hills or whether it's the 71 earthquake or the Bair fire, you know, in some sense there was somebody from my family here for all of those things. you know what I said to Brad Eastston

Ellis is LA is this weird town where everybody has lived here because if you've consumed media, so much of it is shot in Los Angeles that you actually have a feel for this place whether you live here or not. Yeah. And even though it sort of feels vapid and and random and pointless at times, I think about several different things. It's an oil field. We live on an oil field. It's an aerospace place. It's like the home of

the rain corporation. It's not really clear that it's just an entertainment entertainment. Yeah, once upon a time maybe that was really really But in a certain sense it's just a big canvas and maybe maybe a laurel canyon of heterodoxy for different things for science for uh future pointed culture that isn't so easy to to pin down to popular music. May maybe it's time and maybe it can be

done here. But uh but I think I'm home. I I can't follow that. Eric, thank you for doing this, man. That was beautiful. Let's Let's end on that note. Jesse, thanks for a great day. I love you, man. You, too, man.