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The Joe Rogan Experience

#2503 - Eric Weinstein

21 May 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What personal experiences does Eric Weinstein share about drinking?

0.031 - 33.517 Eric Weinstein

I was like, there's only one way to do this, I've just not drank for a while, so I took like 8 months off, and then I had like a margarita at dinner once, so I was like, oh I missed this. And then I had a glass of wine here and there. I was wondering how that was going to hold up. Yeah. But I know that you're not captured by it. No, no. Neither am I, but our religious observance requires it.

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34.058 - 55.296 Eric Weinstein

You require abstinence or drinking? No, we drink. When do you have to drink? Shabbat, any Friday. How much do you drink on Shabbat? I probably have two and a half glasses of wine. Is there like a number that you're supposed to hit? No, there's a communal cup. Well, that's Purim. We should get into Purim. We're getting into it. Do we need glasses? You want to have a drink?

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56.737 - 70.93 Eric Weinstein

Usually I tend to go a while, so we usually do that at the end. Well, let's get some ice and some glasses. Are we rolling already? I've been rolling, yeah. Okay. Let's get some. Tell Jeff to get us some ice and some glasses. I didn't know we were. And a bottle of Buffalo Trace.

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71.991 - 74.253 Jamie

Do you want to wait until I get back to start?

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Chapter 2: What religious observances impact drinking habits?

74.273 - 75.674 Jamie

Because we either haven't started or we started.

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75.914 - 93.963 Eric Weinstein

We started. Fuck it. We started. Let's just roll. We'll get Jeff to do it. What's that? I don't even have headphones. Are we rolling still? Are we doing headphone shit? We can. Headphones, no headphones. I don't give a fuck. We mix it up. Okay. Are you more comfortable? You got a nice head of hair. What? See, for me, it doesn't matter.

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94.003 - 112.33 Eric Weinstein

I feel bad when people work on their hair real good, especially ladies, and they get it all nice, and then they have to fucking smush it with this thing. Okay, if you ever have that kind of consideration for me, I'm going to be very disappointed. I thought we were closer. Some people worry about that. No, I worry about the gray hair. That you have gray in your hair? Yeah.

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112.711 - 132.498 Eric Weinstein

Well, you're pretty dark for your age. How old do you know? 60. Yeah, you have fucking dark-ass hair for your age. If I had hair and it grew out like my side hair, it's mostly gray now. Yeah? Yeah. I'm starting to get some gray hair in my eyebrows a little bit. What's that? I should have thought ahead like you did. What, shaved it?

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132.658 - 154.423 Eric Weinstein

Yeah, shaved it when everyone knew it wasn't gray, and then it's just normal. Because it's very clear if I shave it now. I think you can avoid gray hair with proper supplementation. At least that is the thought today, that with enough zinc and copper and that somehow or another that's involved in the diet. I'm talking out of my ass here.

154.403 - 187.145 Eric Weinstein

I don't know that much about what causes your hair to go gray. This is Austin Tapp. This is Buffalo Trace. Older than America. Really? Yeah. This is a distillery from 1773, I believe they started. Wow. Them apples. It's like that Chinese sounding beer, Yunling or something. Cheers, my friend. Buffalo Trace is like, why is their beer really old? Beer really old? Do you have an old beer? Yunling.

188.708 - 190.71 Eric Weinstein

Is it old as fuck? Jamie knows everything.

190.73 - 192.653 Jamie

He knows a lot. 1829.

193.194 - 201.685 Eric Weinstein

You see? People say, I have this AI, I'm using cloud, I'm using chat GPT. I use Jamie. Jamie, for sure.

Chapter 3: How does Eric Weinstein view the state of theoretical physics?

683.468 - 705.554 Eric Weinstein

Right? And then there's no R. So think about all of those blank squares as orders of magnitude that you are away from the energies that would allow you to do experiments that would explain physics. And think about the apostrophe, the L in that pattern, as well as the fact that there's no R, as the standard model of physics.

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707.016 - 727.325 Eric Weinstein

So right now, what you have is a debate about whether or not we should buy more and more letters with higher and higher energy. Or like should we build bigger accelerators and spend more treasure trying to collide particles? Or should we just Caitlyn our way out of this? So Caitlyn Burke is my model of what I think we're supposed to be doing. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

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727.305 - 741.724 Eric Weinstein

: So an exceptional mind with an ability to see or propose things that other people aren't seeing. Peter Van Doren, Jr. : I guarantee you that if we studied this, if we spent a month with the world's smartest people on this puzzle,

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741.704 - 760.185 Eric Weinstein

we'd learn that there are certain things that were present, that the frequency of certain, the fact that there's a single letter there that almost certainly is I or A. She took a tiny number of clues. But here's the really important thing. Jamie, can we show the filled-in puzzle?

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765.127 - 792.49 Eric Weinstein

So you'll notice that the word this could be changed to that because the only letter that's been excluded is an R. So that is what the issue of unique UV completion is. In other words, a unique UV completion would say there's only one phrase that fits there. She guessed. She couldn't have known it isn't I've got a good feeling about that or I've got a nice feeling about this or that.

793.01 - 820.276 Eric Weinstein

So it's actually not... Or I'll get a good feeling about this. But all of those were much less probable because they're just not as natural. So this is a combination of science, guesswork, and raw courage. Like the most marvelous thing about that exchange is she says, can I solve this? And there's like, he's not even sure he's hearing her properly.

820.296 - 838.57 Eric Weinstein

And then finally he says, okay, that's gatekeeping. Can I put this article on the archive? Can I give a seminar in your department? I wanna solve the puzzle. And a lot of what we're arguing about is that the string theorists are the only ones who have the right to try to solve the puzzle

839.663 - 860.086 Eric Weinstein

at the moment, so imagine that somehow there's a rule that only Rick, poor Rick, who guesses that there's an R, imagine that he's the only one allowed to solve the puzzle, and when she asks, may I solve the puzzle? No, no, no, you can't, that's pseudoscience. You're a charlatan. That is crank physics.

861.308 - 886.225 Eric Weinstein

So that's what the problem that we're facing is, is that we've got one group that got control of the gatekeeping, who is very good at mathematics, extremely bad at physics. And they've redefined what physics is and what good science is, where they're the only ones who are guessing the puzzle. They can't guess the puzzle. And everyone else is like, here's a crazy story from yesterday.

Chapter 4: What concerns does Eric have about the current scientific narrative?

1649.045 - 1664.197 Eric Weinstein

And that was the beginning of this whole peer review control mechanism. And this control, do you think is this ego-based, that the people who are the gatekeepers want to remain in the position of – We all wanna survive, Joe. I mean, this is a real problem.

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1664.698 - 1689.694 Eric Weinstein

So you and I can hate on the institutions all we want from the safety of the JRE, but what are you gonna do when it becomes really, really easy for people to commit mass murder? If you think about all the really bad mass, like the Vegas shooting that never really got sorted out, it's very hard to kill large numbers of people using things like bullets.

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1691.446 - 1712.015 Eric Weinstein

If you want to really kill a large number of people, you're going to go to biologicals and you're going to go to nuclear. And what happens when that becomes easy? Like maybe it's a lot easier to build these weapons than the way we currently do it. Right now we're bottlenecked on things like centrifuges. And by the way, who knows what the next innovation in physics is going to bring?

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1712.156 - 1728.082 Eric Weinstein

So I always say this thing about if you're not tracking everybody at my level, what are you doing as an intelligence service? Is this part of your concern about the missing scientists? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the missing scientist narrative for people that aren't aware of it, I think they're up to 15 now.

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1728.102 - 1746.808 Eric Weinstein

And a lot of people say that some of these connections are baseless and that some of them, it's just- We're not really up to 15. No. Okay. So what do you think we're actually up to? I don't know. Probably 15. Five or six. But I saw someone online did a breakdown of it, and essentially they were saying that the odds of this being a coincidence are off the charts.

1747.769 - 1772.141 Eric Weinstein

That the people that are all involved in very specific types of technological research, different things that are top secret, that all of these people either wind up missing. There's a lot of murder in math and physics, first of all. People don't really appreciate that. You know, the Unabomber was a famous PhD mathematician. He's a big story, though. There's a lot of great stories. Yeah, sure.

1772.181 - 1797.711 Eric Weinstein

There was a guy named Cantor who broke into David Rittenhouse Laboratories in the University of Pennsylvania where I was an undergraduate and shot up a seminar. There was, you know, this... Situation in Iowa where a relative of mine got a seat in the physics department because somebody was killed by one of the graduate students. I think it became a movie like Dark Matter.

1798.366 - 1825.993 Eric Weinstein

So there's an incredible amount of murder. The ball peen hammer killing of Carl DeLue by Struleski at Stanford. So first of all, there's just a lot of death because mathematicians and physicists are somewhat close to unhinged. And it's a really nasty. There's a lot of nasty culture and sometimes it becomes violent. Why do you think they're close to unhinged?

1828.387 - 1853.196 Eric Weinstein

You spend that much time in your head? I'm amazed that I'm as well grounded as I am. No, seriously, you're just way out in the stratosphere. I completely forget who I am, where I am, that I'm even a human being. When you're using your body as an instrument, as you do in combat sports and training, you become a different thing. You know? You know that archery thing where you have to...

Chapter 5: What prompted the discussion about special access programs?

4872.035 - 4896.248 Eric Weinstein

There's no way to deny that there's like a giant lump under the carpet. And what what prompted you to change your opinion and decide that there is some sort of a special access program? When I started coming in contact with totally sober people from reasonable walks of life who would say the craziest things to me, and a lot of them checked and they didn't yet know each other.

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4896.489 - 4923.568 Eric Weinstein

Like what kind of crazy things? Let me take somebody who's public. Brandon Fugel, for example. was at a dinner where he started talking about being visited by a craft a few feet over his head that came over the mesa. And his head of security was catatonic, standing in the back of a pickup truck, unable to move. And it was just way too specific.

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4925.59 - 4950.757 Eric Weinstein

and a shared experience that multiple people had had, right? And so, you know, the joke, of course, is that the secrets of Skinwalker rants or, you know, whatever this is. There's real stuff going on there, and there's nonsense BS that the History Channel has packaged to come up with a salacious series, and one is funding the other.

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4951.578 - 4978.547 Eric Weinstein

So I don't know what that is, but, like, some of these injuries are real. And, you know, like Gary Nolan talking about people reporting, you know, Gary Nolan told me the story that somebody had said that a ball of energy would come and enter the body and move around and then leave. And he said, you know, the craziest thing is, is that when I inspected the tissue and

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4980.383 - 5007.174 Eric Weinstein

there was a path of necrosis that can't be explained, like something that shows up on imaging. And Gary's a really smart, serious guy. I can check a lot of the things that he says scientifically. Why would he say something like that? I mean, I didn't see it myself, but Well, he's also done some very strange work on material science.

5007.695 - 5007.955 Unknown

Right.

5008.336 - 5032.589 Eric Weinstein

Where he's analyzed particles or little pieces of metal and alloys that have come from wreckages from the 1970s and 60s. Yeah, that I don't know the providence. Like he'll carry around a little thing and he'll show it to me. I'll say, you know, there's no combination. of materials and alloys that this matches, that we know how to produce. And I say, okay, it doesn't mean anything to me.

5032.669 - 5044.1 Eric Weinstein

Again, it's just, it's all, I have no, at this point, I have no primary contact with anything anomalous. I just have all sorts of secondary stuff.

Chapter 6: What are the implications of reported UFO sightings near military bases?

5044.14 - 5068.946 Eric Weinstein

And by the way, the thing that you saw with the Jesse Michaels in American Alchemy, boy, did that get a response inside the government, that particular episode. How so? I had a lot of people who had stopped talking to me about UFOs who suddenly, you know, I had like eight calls immediately after it aired. Hey, Eric, just thought I'd catch up with you. I was like, oh, OK.

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5068.966 - 5100.699 Eric Weinstein

There was a huge discussion inside. And the first without getting into particulars, the first official outreach. Like really official outrage that checks in the wake of that episode. And I'm not under any NDAs. Nobody's told me anything that I can't discuss. That may change. One thing that's very clear to me is that when I hear something from many sources, I don't need to protect it anymore.

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5100.719 - 5132.036 Eric Weinstein

It's already out. I have now heard the White Sands story from many sources. This is the one where the crafts hovered over the base, shut down the nuclear program? Is that it? I'm just going to say what I can say that's fuzzed out that can't be traced to anybody. Okay. I was very upset with the shutdown of the El Paso airspace. That was recently. Yeah.

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5132.076 - 5158.063 Eric Weinstein

It was supposed to be we had a problem with cartel drones. Right. I don't believe that. I think Texas is another name for New Mexico. I think El Paso is a name for White Sands. Can we get a map of the United States that can focus on White Sands and El Paso? I think we have a problem that we've lost control of our airspace. You think this was part of what happened in New Jersey as well?

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5161.25 - 5166.216 Eric Weinstein

I can't say as much because what I know, no.

Chapter 7: How does the conversation connect Epstein to U.S. intelligence?

5167.257 - 5191.016 Eric Weinstein

What happened around New Jersey, I don't have from as many sources that I feel comfortable saying that this is fuzzed out. I can fuzz out the El Paso story. Nobody has told me that El Paso was shut down because of the problem at White Sands. People have said things about New Jersey that is... All right. All right. So there's El Paso. El Paso here, White Sands, right above it.

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5191.156 - 5193.701 Eric Weinstein

How far away is that? My guess is about an hour.

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5194.843 - 5198.911 Jamie

By driving? Yeah, let's see. It's probably 60, 70, 80 miles at most.

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5199.453 - 5230.983 Eric Weinstein

Okay. So I don't know what's going on, but my guess is... So on Piers Morgan, I said this thing, which is that New Mexico is the connector of the nuclear story, the Epstein story, and the UFO story. They're all going to come together. Remember when we were only talking about the island?

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5231.684 - 5231.824 Unknown

Mm-hmm.

5236.411 - 5264.985 Eric Weinstein

Somehow, I think I was the first person to seize on this. There's this thing that isn't an interview, which is Steve Bannon trying to train Jeffrey Epstein how to respond to rehabilitate it. And if you can find this, this is... I've seen it. Okay. It's very weird. So he says... You want to know about why I got Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. Can we play this clip? Can you find?

5265.005 - 5280.103 Eric Weinstein

I think Jesse repackaged it after I pointed it out. But this is the story. Like somehow we're so hung up about sex.

Chapter 8: What is the significance of the scientific community's relationship with funding?

5280.269 - 5305.635 Eric Weinstein

We're either angry about trafficking or we're getting off on the idea that all these rich people are going to get their comeuppance. We keep turning the Epstein story into something other than a scientific espionage story, which is one of its facets. It's one component. It's one component. But it doesn't excite us that this is a guy spying. Control of science, Joe.

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5306.476 - 5334.492 Unknown

is not something that is officially a big issue and it is a massive issue it's not publicly a big that's correct and he clearly had a big interest so why did i buy a ranch in new mexico 1993 so that's gives you some sense so i would have funded it in 1990. uh los alamos which was the high energy lab up in new mexico was losing all its scientists

0

5334.843 - 5340.929 Eric Weinstein

And Los Alamos was where Oppenheimer and where a lot of the nuclear weapons, the bomb.

0

5340.989 - 5342.151 Unknown

That's the Manhattan Project.

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5342.251 - 5347.396 Eric Weinstein

Manhattan Project was at Los Alamos. And you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that?

5347.536 - 5356.986 Unknown

Yes, because the scientists were going to be, they cut the funding for high energy physics. But the people who worked in Los Alamos would still be in the Santa Fe area.

5357.327 - 5360.53 Eric Weinstein

They cut that because the end of the, this was the Cold War dividend, right?

5360.932 - 5367.668 Unknown

I don't remember exactly why. It was because, again, people thought that physics and high-energy physics really wasn't that important.

5367.688 - 5369.111 Eric Weinstein

Because that was about nuclear weapons.

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