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2026 RHP/SS Alex Weingartner (St. Augustine Prep, NJ) Penn State Baseball Commit Cold & windy day: 49 but felt like 38🥶. The No 1 RHP & No. 2 ovr player in NJ had no problem adjusting. Attacked w/ his firm FB, predominantly glove side. CB got him ahead &... show more
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!["Very often what happens is that the architects die, and they leave a zombie. We seem to be in a zombie era." The whole time I was watching the discussion between Jesse Michels and Eric Weinstein and Eric Davis, I felt like there was some darker thing lurking beneath the surface that connects the seemingly intentional stagnation of physics as a scientific discipline, the extreme secrecy surrounding the alleged UAP crash retrieval/reverse engineering program and the lack of any theoretical physicists working the problem, and the government's stated intention to control (per Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸) the future of AI -- a future where there's no point investing in AI startups because “we [the government] are going to make sure that AI is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no startups.” And there's the other part Andreessen recounted from his White House meeting. He was told by the [Biden] administration that "During the Cold War, we [the federal government] classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community — entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. If we decide we need to [for AI/math], we're going to do the same thing." Take a minute and think about that, because it's actually chilling. A clear precedent has been cited here -- one none of us knew about before Andreessen brought it to our attention -- and it raises two big questions: 1) Why? 2) HOW? Weinstein returns multiple times in this episode to the diminishingly small number of people who have the capacity to operate at the highest levels of physics and math. And whenever you have a small number of people who act as the natural gating function for something incredibly powerful, it's not a leap to imagine an additional layer of control being placed on them by pressure from outside. Whether that's through legal threats like "born secret," NDAs, direct threats of physical harm, money, regulation, etc., there are ways to lock down the gatekeepers so that they never do the thing -- at least not in public -- that the most powerful people in the world don't want them to do. Weinstein kept saying, about both the seemingly intentional stagnation of physics and the lack of physicists working the UAP problem, "this makes no sense." But it does make sense if you shift the frame to, "they don't want us to find the answers and are actively trying to stop us." The feeling I kept getting as I watched this fascinating discussion was that the legacy crash retrieval program used to have a lot more direct oversight and funding decades ago, but that the compartmentalization and secrecy around it turned it into more and more of an oxbow lake, and that as it got cut off from the conventional scientific community and defense establishment, it became more secretive, less well-funded, and less coordinated. So it kind of became its own siloed-off thing that fewer and fewer people knew about, but the people who did still know protected the territory fiercely. And then came the era of AAWSAP and AATIP and UAPTF, and without the deep, secret, institutional knowledge held by members of the legacy program, they tried to piece together what had happened in the past while not being able to penetrate the sort of firewall that existed partially because of controlled secrecy, and partially because of the firewalling effect of time. They were doing a lot of cold case file work, while running into the deepest of deep state secrecy efforts. That secrecy, at least based on my reading of the situation, was instituted decades ago, when the atomic-era scientific community (mostly the same group of geniuses that were at the top of the Manhattan Project) got together and -- probably at the behest of of the US government -- decided physics was becoming too dangerous if it continued down the path that it was on. So, as my spitball theory goes, they intentionally beached the entire enterprise on the shoals of string theory and quantized gravity and all the stuff Weinstein talks about everywhere he goes -- the "dogs that won't hunt" that are also "the only game in town." The very theories that have, in the real world, run physics aground. So let's come back to Andreessen's point here: they classified entire branches of physics and took them out of the research community, while real physics went off on a wild goose chase that has yielded precious few demonstrable results in the past half century or so. The effect is that the physics community has been off the scent for so long that anyone old enough to have held the knowledge that was shoved back into Pandora's proverbial box through extreme secrecy measures is now dead. And their taking of that knowledge to the grave may well be a critical part of the secrecy effort. Dead physicists tell no tales. I have this eerie sense that we scared ourselves shitless with certain discoveries (likely knowledge that followed from nuclear physics, which is itself still highly protected and curtailed) and decided that the only way to stop our headlong rush into world-ending catastrophe was to literally bury the knowledge and wait until everyone who had it died off. The government looks, at least to me, to have cauterized a destructive branch in the scientific timeline like they were the Time Variance Authority from Marvel comics. 80 years of claimed zero-progress in reverse-engineering alleged crashed or recovered UAPs. 40+ years of dead-ended physics. Only two or three major AI companies, one of which is now in a fight to the death with the Department of War. And the rumors that AI has "plateaued" or even "dead-ended" in its progress that keep springing up has potential echoes in the AI world of physics being diverted into String Theory. I'm not a mathematician or a physicist. I can't examine all the deeper particulars because I have neither the knowledge or the training. I only have surface level pattern recognition, and that tells me it all feels connected. The problem for the gatekeepers is that you can't bury knowledge that has been discovered once indefinitely. It's certain that all of this will be figured out again. And as Weinstein pointed out about a couple of non-physicists who figured out how to piece together nuclear weapons based on declassified information and publicly available knowledge, it IS happening. But it seems that at least on the individual basis, those green shoots are being pruned. Weinstein asks why none of the people who funded his education are "interested" in his Grand Unifying Theory. Weinstein is too well-known and too well-respected to just be taken out of play. They can't buy him off. They can't make him disappear without drawing more attention. So maybe they just hope that Geometric Unity will die on its own. Maybe they are behind the attacks on GU as something totally unserious. Maybe they have found a way to make other members of the physics community willing to look away. So, my question about this larger hypothetical operation to stop dangerous science and math is this: was it really just a massive kicking of the can down the road. Did they hoped it would buy us time? And if so, to what end? What are they waiting for? Can this game really be played forever? Maybe they think it can. Maybe they have an ongoing directive to keep suppressing this knowledge for as long as possible, and perhaps there's some secret core group whose job is to be the perpetual gatekeepers of potentially civilization-ending secrets. Maybe the Epstein connection to all of this was precisely because he was part of the operation to discover who was doing forbidden work and assess their progress. Maybe that's why, when he met Weinstein, he knew so much about GU. It's impossible to say with any certainty, but as a theory, it does have some real explanatory power. I find myself thinking of the fictional Brothers of the Cruciform Sword in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- a small, ancient, secret society whose job it was to keep tabs on people looking for the Holy Grail and stop them, so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Are we following the same track here? Could this, as crazy as it sounds, be the missing connective tissue in this mystery?](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2031031356260524185/amplify_video_thumb/2031017929995612160/img/cpYRNKtLEZOG4Acm.jpg)
![This episode is about a once-in-a-generation mind working on what may be the most important problem in history. It's based on the new book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby. (0:00) This is the most crazy, ferocious corporate battle that we've ever seen. (2:21) Intelligence is fundamental; it is the root of all else. (3:27) When Demis founded DeepMind almost every investor turned him away. (4:50) Demis is a missionary entrepreneur and out-of-the-box scientist who, through brilliance and extraordinary drive, emerges as the right person for a particular moment. (6:20) I sit at my desk at 2 a.m., and I feel like reality is staring at me, screaming at me, literally screaming at me, trying to tell me something if I could just listen hard enough. That's how I feel every day, so you can see why I'm trying to build AI. I've felt that since I was very young that there's a deep, deep mystery about what's going on here. (7:10) Demis, who blazed the trail followed by rivals, is decent and public-spirited and wants the best for humanity. He has ego; he is fearsomely competitive, but his goal is scientific enlightenment, not money or power. (9:49) Demis has an extraordinary level of determination, unlike pretty much anybody. Astonishing, incredible determination. That's his most defining characteristic: just unbelievable determination. He works, sleeps, eats, breathes the mission 24 hours a day to a degree that I haven't seen with other people. (10:48) There is no 50% mode in Demis. There is not even a 99% mode in Demis. There is only 100%. (14:39) The slightly warped way I took that was: how do you know you've done your best? The only way I could know is basically if I push myself to the point just before death, because that is literally when you have done your best. (19:07) When he signed up for a game he liked to feel that he could win. (20:44) He saw no reason not to start a company and so he did. (22:40) Demis on what losing feels like to him: It's like my soul is on fire. (25:34) Demis was an extreme case of an authentic entrepreneur, not a mercenary who starts with a desire to get rich from a startup then casts around for a plausible idea, but rather a missionary who feels compelled to work on a particular challenge then starts a company as a way of tackling it. (25:57) The good thing about missionaries is that they never quit. Even if they have to work around the clock and pay themselves nothing. They will keep obsessing about the problem. (26:08) Peter Thiel on Demis: “I always say that people aren't really entrepreneurs in the abstract, but there's maybe one great company that somebody has in them. It was Demis's destiny to build this one.” (26:30) "If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence so machines can learn, that would be worth 10 Microsofts." — Bill Gates (32:09) We only wanted hardcore believers. We would go to conferences and tell people we are starting an AGI company. 80% of the people would roll their eyes at us, literally roll their eyes at us and turn around and walk away. We figured that this was a very efficient way to discover who we should be talking to. (32:50) Blessed are those who believed before there was any evidence. (34:17) The way Demis saw things, true general intelligence would make almost anything possible, surpassing the internet, the printing press, or even the industrial revolution in importance. (35:22) Elon had declared that humans needed to colonize Mars in case disaster struck Earth. Demis had countered that killer AI robots might be one such disaster, but that the AI could obviously follow humans to Mars if it wanted to. (36:25) Peter Thiel felt instinctively suspicious of a fellow chess player. A man who had spent his formative years mentally crushing opponents should be treated with caution, Thiel reckoned. (37:07) I'm talking about the biggest invention ever, and investors keep coming back to "Where's the widget?" and I'm like, "I'm going to revolutionize all widgets, so I can pick you a random widget if you want me to, but you obviously haven't got the point if you're asking me this." (37:42) He [Larry Page] was basically telling me, maybe you could build a company like Google, but it would take the best part of your career. If my real mission was to build AGI, then why don't I use all the resources that he's accumulated? I thought that was a pretty good argument. (38:50) Elon tries to buy DeepMind (42:33) Sam Altman emails Elon: "I've been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI. I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first." (43:18) If you have powerful people who are able to understand the impact of the technology, they're not just gonna sit on the sidelines. (44:08) Humans had not understood how little they had understood. (44:31) As Peter Thiel said of Demis, "Geniuses are seldom brilliant in a general way. They tend to be brilliantly suited to a particular mission." (46:50) Demis was far more original and far more of a contrarian than most of the self-identified contrarians of Silicon Valley. (48:11) When Demis solves something big, he doesn't pause to spend much time savoring the achievement. (48:49) You definitely can't crack a hard problem if the person leading the team thinks it's not possible. (54:05) This is my whole life's work. I have to do what's necessary. The mission is in me; it's infused in me. You can't separate it from me. (54:28) Demis's core theme is that money and power were not ends in themselves. They were a means to scientific knowledge.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2039458365559251121/amplify_video_thumb/2039443603676909568/img/72ctyYwmX5Rh0e7g.jpg)
