Eric Weinstein

One, we have huge amounts of power.

The United States is terribly configured because we pretend that we're okay doing everything through our university system, which shouldn't be done in an open setting.

You have to be honest about the fact that we're badly configured.

What do you mean by that?

We didn't know how deadly physics was.

When Rutherford in 1911 said that there's a neutron...

Nobody, I'm sure nobody said to him, oh my God, you've ended the planet.

Now new humanity is doomed.

So it used to be the case that physics was something that was like interesting and fun.

But now it's like the most deadly thing you can imagine as well as being interesting.

And a quick timeline too, if you stop and think about that.

41 years.

Yeah.

So literally, yeah.

41 years.

So my claim is that we are walking around right now

with all of these extremely deadly ninja priests in our physics departments, in our math departments, who don't even know that they're deadly ninja priests.

They've never worked on something classified.

They've never solved problems for our government.

But in part, we fund our scientists as part of a complex cryptic arrangement worked out by Vannevar Bush that is now remembered by essentially no one.