English transcript

So why did I buy a ranch in New Mexico in 1993?

So that gives you some sense.

So I would have funded it in 1990.

Los Alamos, which was the high energy lab up in New Mexico,

was losing all its scientists.

And Los Alamos, it was where Oppenheimer and a lot

of the nuclear weapons were, the bomb.

That's from the Manhattan Project.

Manhattan Project was Los Alamos.

And you bought your property out in New Mexico to be near that?

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.

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

I don't remember exactly why.

It was because, again, people thought

that physics and high energy physics really

wasn't that important.

Because that was about nuclear weapons.

No, it was because they decided it was maybe not right.

This was the same time that Murray Gell-Mann came up

with the term quark, Q-U-A-R-K. He picked it

out of an old poem, the word quark.

But it was something, it was mysterious.

So they were starting to understand in the 90s

that in our world of the physics world,

there was things that were just unexplainable.

They called it strange things.

You gave it a name.

You gave it some characteristics.

You called it, it had charm, was one of the terms.

It had a charm.

It had a flavor.

It had a color.

But nobody really, no one, Mr. Bannon,

understood what it was, just like the financial system.

And you wanted to investigate that?

I wanted to see if we could build tools

so others smarter than me could help investigate it.

And that was the beginning of your concept

of the Santa Fe Institute?

Yes.

The foundational thought, the organizing principle

of Santa Fe and the high physics lab at Los Alamos,

which had been the headquarters of Manhattan

and the Trinity Project, right, the bomb.

Yes.

So you're talking about the elite, the high priest.

Of physics.

Of physics.

Yes, sir.

Which high priest of physics,

some subset of that is also mathematics.

Yes, they're both similar.