“We Don't Know How Long We Have Left” Eric Weinstein On Nuclear Threat To Humanity (YouTube Content)
| "We Don't Know How Long We Have Left" Eric Weinstein On Nuclear Threat To Humanity | |
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| Information | |
|---|---|
| Host(s) | Piers Morgan |
| Guest(s) | Eric Weinstein |
| Length | 00:50:59 |
| Release Date | 7 March 2024 |
| Links | |
| YouTube | Watch |
| Portal Blog | Read |
| All Appearances | |
"We Don't Know How Long We Have Left" Eric Weinstein On Nuclear Threat To Humanity was a discussion with Eric Weinstein hosted by Piers Morgan on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show.
Description
Harvard mathematician and podcaster Dr. Eric Weinstein joins Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss the threat of nuclear weapons, Artificial Intelligence, Putin and the Ukraine War, America’s “grand strategy”, and more.
Transcript
00:00:01
Piers Morgan: Doctor Eric Weinstein is a Harvard-trained mathematician and a titan of the so-called intellectual dark web. They're the big, iconoclastic thinkers who span political divides to challenge mainstream narratives, stoking controversy and debate along the way. Culture-wise, Dean tackles everything from Putin and Ukraine to globalization. And Jeffrey Edge to become a superstar guest on the world's biggest podcast and streaming shows.
00:00:26
Chris Williamson: You met Jeffrey Epstein.
00:00:29
Eric Weinstein: The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. There are people that you need in your dark hours. As soon as they emerge, we tar them with shit.
00:00:37
Piers Morgan: And now he goes uncensored. I'm always surprised when people with your kind of intellect wrestle with any kind of quandary about a Russian dictator invading a sovereign, democratic country.
00:00:51
Eric Weinstein: Powerful nations like Russia have concerns that don't have to deal only with their exact borders.
00:00:58
Piers Morgan: I mean, do you think anyone like Putin, who has 6000 nuclear weapons at his disposal, would want to start a war that would obliterate everything?
00:01:06
Eric Weinstein: And somebody with a pair of nunchucks? They're most likely to knock themselves out rather than to become Bruce Lee. We sit here with a ticking time bomb. We don't know how long we have.
00:01:16
Piers Morgan: The four most overrated things in life are lobster, champagne, anal sex, and picnics.
00:01:23
Eric Weinstein: I don't really know much about champagne. Perhaps the next question.
00:01:27
Piers Morgan: Are there any limits to free speech?
00:01:30
Eric Weinstein: It has morphed more into a question of what? What can I get away with? That might not be true.
00:01:36
Piers Morgan: I've got ten things. Rapid fire.
00:01:39
Eric Weinstein: No, no. Yeah, I decline. No, I'm quite serious.
00:01:46
Piers Morgan: Everyone's too great to have you.
00:01:48
Eric Weinstein: Good to be with you.
00:01:49
Piers Morgan: So I was just checking your Wikipedia a minute ago, and under education is the first.
00:01:54
Eric Weinstein: Reason that.
00:01:56
Piers Morgan: You can challenge this if you like, but I'm the education. It said once he received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1992, and his dissertation Extension of Self Dual Yang-Mills equations across the eighth dimension, Weinstein showed that the dual Yang-Mills equations were not peculiar to dimension four and admitted generalizations to higher dimensions. And I realized at that point, having read that, Eric, that you and I were probably on slightly different intellectual pathways in our lives, and this might be quite a challenging encounter.
00:02:33
Eric Weinstein: You have a different theory about the Yang-Mills equation? By the way, that's the most accurate thing I've heard of in my Wikipedia, and sometimes maybe things are improving.
00:02:42
Piers Morgan: I mean, look, obviously you've got a massive brain. Do you think that's been a force for good or for angst in your life?
00:02:51
Eric Weinstein: I see evil isn't on the table.
00:02:54
Piers Morgan: It can't be. I told you that.
00:02:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I hope it's inspiring to people with learning differences and neurodivergence everywhere. I was a terrible student in high school. So to me, it's quite funny. I mean, I don't know what to say. It's, it speaks to the triumph of will and the power of dyslexia.
00:03:18
Piers Morgan: The intellectual dark web is cool. I've interviewed many people from MIT, Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Professor Steven Pinker, and so on. And the common theme seems to be people who just decide that they're not going to accept everything that the mainstream media pumps out to the public. They want to challenge, you know, what I would call groupthink?
00:03:40
Piers Morgan: They want to challenge tribalism, certainly fueled by social media. They just want to be, I guess, annoyingly curious and combative about stuff that we're told collectively we have to believe.
00:03:54
Eric Weinstein: I think it's a lot more than that. I mean, I never explained who was in it, nor what it meant. So people try to wrap ideas around it, and one of the reasons that it gained currency was that no one had a description for the fact that many smart people were not going along with the sort of intellectual hegemony of the mainstream, which should represent a huge diversity of viewpoints.
00:04:20
Eric Weinstein: But in fact, that's only honored in the breach. I think that one of the things that is not frequently thought about in terms of that project was the importance of civility. It's incredibly difficult to tease out our differences when we're yelling at each other, calling names, and in point of fact, I believe that we've lost the ability to have good fights.
00: 04:45
Eric Weinstein: Our fights are terrible.
00:04:46
Piers Morgan: I totally—
00:04:46
Eric Weinstein: Agree. We can't get good people to sit down because without intellectual Queensberry rules, all you get is eye gouging. And while there's a segment of the internet that's always looking, you know, for somebody to rip off an arm and lose a digit, most of us want to live to see another day and continue to develop our points and even concede when the other person has a better one.
00:05:11
Eric Weinstein: So I, you know, the dirty little secret of the intellectual dark web is that even though we were across the political spectrum, we were pretty darn good to each other for a long time. And I think that that's the key to getting great fights.
00:05:23
Piers Morgan: What I've noticed is that Ben Shapiro still has a pinned tweet, I think, "facts don't care about your feelings." And I've definitely noticed in debates that people go ad hominem very quickly and very abusively, normally to mask the fact that their actual argument is devoid of fact.
00:05:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, when you don't have a point, it's an excellent tactic.
00:05:50
Piers Morgan: Where are we in the world right now, Eric? I mean, you know, you've written and spoken so much about the state of the world. But, you know, I always say to people that if you actually look at it statistically, this is the best time to ever be alive. You know, we're living longer, we're living healthier, there's less child poverty, there are fewer wars and so on and so on, by every conceivable metric, this is arguably the best time to ever be alive.
00:06:14
Piers Morgan: And yet so many people seem so angst-ridden. Young people have an epidemic of anxiety. A lot of people have real problems just dealing with life, when in fact, compared to all their ancestors, they've got a good why?
00:06:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, see, you've got to stop drinking with Steven Pinker. Pinker, I think—
00:06:36
Piers Morgan: It was actually him that said that. You're right.
00:06:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Well, this is a terrible idea that was spread by Steven Pinker. And what it is, you know, to borrow from my physics and math background, is you can't understand the conservation of energy if you don't have terms for both potential and kinetic energy. So if you think about what you're talking about, you're talking about the cessation of all kinds of, in some sense, human kinetic energy from the early part of the 20th century with all of the, you know, two terrible wars, horrible pandemic, etc.
00:07:12
Eric Weinstein: We don't see that much in the world. Only Mao's Great Leap Forward, I think, rises to that level of atrocity. So that has been a huge improvement. The problem is why that is the case, which is largely because in 1952, 53, over six months, we acquired the secrets to both the atom and the cell. So with the first hydrogen bomb, named Ivy, making the Pacific and Watson and Crick elucidation of the double helix structure for nucleic acid, we became godlike in terms of our power.
00:07:46
Eric Weinstein: And as a result, we acquired, for the first time, the ability to end the human project. And I think it's the loss of an indefinite human future that has to be restored, and no one can figure out how to do it. So we sit here, effectively, with a ticking time bomb.
00:08:04
Eric Weinstein: We don't know how long we have. And things are very pleasant. I mean, you can sit in a coffee shop and have a perfectly good life. But you never know when the end is coming. Whereas in a previous era, you didn't know how often you were going to be conscripted into a war.
00:08:23
Eric Weinstein: But on the other hand, there was no chance of humans extinguishing themselves. So I think you really have to broaden that concept. And I would agree with you in terms of the realized terror that has engulfed the world. In fact, most of it is potential terror.
00:08:40
Piers Morgan: Did you watch Oppenheimer, the movie? Sure. What did you think of it?
00:08:47
Eric Weinstein: It's very tough. I don't think people remember that we have this power and that it was unleashed by science and, in particular, was unleashed by, effectively, my former colleagues. So, you know, when you see a cameo appearance by Richard Feynman, let's say, or at least, you know, someone portraying him, you have to recognize that these are the people who unleashed the doomsday scenario.
00:09:19
Eric Weinstein: And for me, because we ceased exploding atmospheric nuclear weapons in 1962, I believe, we've really grown far too—I don't know how to say it—we were too unconcerned with the danger in which we live. And for me, it was an attempt to reawaken our self-knowledge and to remind ourselves how important science is, how? You know, currently we say that scientists are feeble.
00:09:50
Eric Weinstein: They don't live in the real world. I promise you, you'll be living in their world for the rest of time. This is very much the real world. And it was painful in part, but it was a very intriguing film.
00:10:03
Piers Morgan: I mean, when Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear saber, which he does regularly as a form of trying to intimidate the West in particular, do you think he means it? I mean, do you think anyone like Putin, who has 6000 nuclear weapons at his disposal, is ever—I don't know whether the word stupid is the right word—is ever going to be in a position where he would want to start a war that would obliterate everything?
00:10:33
Eric Weinstein: You can ask the same of us.
00:10:35
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:10:37
Eric Weinstein: But I'm quite serious. In terms of a cultural difference, the Russians regularly use nuclear explosions for engineering purposes. They have a comfort with nuclear weapons that we lack. I think that many Americans do not really understand the cultural difference between Central and Eastern Europe and the modern West, which is, you know, frankly, terrifying. I really see cross-cultural miscommunication as a potential start to a nuclear scenario.
00:11:11
Eric Weinstein: And as we've seen from the Cold War, there have been many situations in which, if there's a glitch in the system and you believe that somebody is firing upon you, you're forced to make a very tough decision. Quite honestly, humans are just not good enough to play this kind of game theory. And remember that with the Cold War, it was basically a bipolar conflict.
00:11:34
Eric Weinstein: You're about to move to multipolar game theory, and I can assure you that it's a much less stable scenario where you're trying to figure out what eight different players are doing with regional conflicts and unannounced nuclear powers. And during the French—
00:11:49
Piers Morgan: Do you worry more about nuclear Armageddon or AI becoming sentient?
00:11:56
Eric Weinstein: I worry about people trying to make a more pressing problem than nuclear weapons. A lot of the cool kids in Silicon Valley have developed a meme, which is that, oh, AI is far more dangerous than nukes, and that may be in the long run, but at the moment, it's not even close. However, it feels kind of passé to worry about nuclear weapons.
00:12:20
Eric Weinstein: Five years ago or so, I think I started publicly calling for rare atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. Because I think the greatest danger at the moment is that fear of nuclear weapons is seen as out of vogue, and we have to reacquaint our viscera with the danger in which we live.
00:12:40
Piers Morgan: I mean, I did the last interview with Professor Stephen Hawking before he sadly died. And I asked him, what's the biggest threat to mankind? And he said, when artificial intelligence learns to self-design, the implication being that when it does, the first thing it would do is probably conclude that humans are completely pointless and irrational and useless in many cases, and they just get rid of us.
00:13:02
Eric Weinstein: I don't think that's his best work.
00:13:08
Piers Morgan: But really, you're not as concerned?
00:13:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, in the long run, I think that it's a huge concern. But if you look at what large language models are and how quickly humans have confused large language models for general intelligence, it tells you that maybe more humans need to spend time coding and understanding the transformer architecture, which enabled this recent mini revolution. I mean, it's absolutely astounding, but mostly what these machines are doing is feeding us back to us.
00:13:39
Eric Weinstein: And once they've read all our books and read all our papers, it may quite—it's easily possible that this model and this architecture may plateau.
00:13:50
Piers Morgan: But isn't it the same kind of situation with nuclear weapons, where in, you know, decent hands, supposedly decent hands of people who have a moral code, a code of ethics who don't want to do the wrong thing, nuclear weapons can be controlled and can be safe, but in nefarious hands from people with evil intent, they become incredibly dangerous?
00:14:15
Piers Morgan: And I would say it's the same argument with AI, isn't it?
00:14:20
Eric Weinstein: I don't agree with the premise, so maybe ask that to someone else. I believe that if you take ten very moral people and very intelligent people and you give them all nuclear weapons and the ability to annihilate each other, you can play all sorts of game-theoretic experiments and find that we're simply not wise enough to solve coordination problems and signaling problems.
00:14:43
Eric Weinstein: I just don't agree with this idea that it's our morality and our intellect which makes nuclear weapons dangerous. It is simply the power. It's like handing a lightsaber to somebody in a Star Wars film and, you know, watching them learn by slicing off a leg and an arm within the first five minutes. And somebody with a pair of nunchucks, they're most likely to knock themselves out rather than to become Bruce Lee.
00:15:11
Piers Morgan: Yeah, but if you have Mother Teresa with a finger on the nuclear button and Adolf Hitler, the chances are more likely that it'll be the bad guy that presses it.
00:15:22
Eric Weinstein: You took two people. One is much worse than the other, but those aren't my favorites. Mother Teresa, we don't need to relitigate the Christopher Hitchens point. I would say that I just don't know if any of these good people can steward nuclear weapons. It's simply too much power.
00:15:47
Piers Morgan: One of your—
00:15:47
Eric Weinstein: Big—if you think about it in terms of systems, a democracy is capable of having a string of, you know, ten moral, ethical leaders, and then it gets itself into a period of distress, and suddenly it elects somebody completely unfit for the office. We don't have the ability to live with this amount of leverage.
00:16:07
Piers Morgan: I had a good relationship with Christopher Hitchens. I employed him as a columnist when I was at the Daily Mirror, and he once sent me one of my favorite emails ever, which was, he said, the four most overrated things in life were lobster, champagne, anal sex, and picnics.
00:16:25
Eric Weinstein: Oops. I don't really know much about champagne. And some of the other items on your list don't appeal to me for this conversation. Perhaps the next question.
00:16:38
Piers Morgan: One of your big thoughts is that Western institutions, including politicians, scientists, the media, are actively lying to us, and we've seen this exacerbated by things like the pandemic, like modern warfare, and all the propaganda that flies around it. How much of your belief that they're lying to us is driven by, I guess, the social media element, where everything is amplified in real time to the public in a way it never used to be?
00:17:10
Piers Morgan: In other words, information used to flow to us in a far slower and more controlled way, whereas now everything is coming at us 24/7 in real time.
00:17:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, I hold an unpopular view, which is that public-spirited fictions are essential to proper governance. The problem isn't that they're lying to us. The problem is that the lies are not public-spirited. They are not competent. They're not adult-level fictions, and they're not minimal. You want to lie as little as possible.
00:17:51
Eric Weinstein: A French philosopher once said that a nation is a collection of people that have agreed to forget something in common. So, in part, you know, if you were to resolve the contradictions, let's say, in the United States First Amendment, you might find that you had no Constitution. The problem is the nature of the lies, and they are not at all level.
00:18:13
Eric Weinstein: And I don't mean to boast on your program, but I have an IQ above 40. So I find this really distressing that I'm constantly asked to believe things that no child should be asked to believe.
00:18:25
Piers Morgan: I mean, you tweeted the other day about Ukraine and Putin: "I can't tell you my position on US strategy in Ukraine if I don't know more. All I know is in a democracy, I'm being lied to and pressured to support something I don't sufficiently understand. That's it." I mean, you could take that argument in 1939 and say, you know, when Hitler invaded Poland, I don't know enough about it.
00:18:47
Piers Morgan: I haven't been told enough about it by my government. Therefore, I can't take a position about Adolf Hitler. I would say that what Putin is doing in Ukraine is not dissimilar, actually. And but his aspirations may not be quite as heinous in terms of global domination as Hitler, but I don't know. But I would say his aspirations are heinous.
00:19:08
Piers Morgan: And I'm always surprised when people with your kind of intellect wrestle with any kind of quandary about a Russian dictator invading a sovereign, democratic country and murdering loads of people and helping himself to loads of land, and why that shouldn't be in everyone's interest to repel.
00:19:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, I would like to think that's because you misunderstand my position. But it could be a failure of intellect on my part. We're in a very long-running post-Cold War strategy where in 1999, I believe, we extended Article 5 NATO status to Poland, which was not former Soviet Union but was Warsaw Pact.
00:19:53
Eric Weinstein: I didn't have a problem at that point. I think it was in 2004 where we extended Article 5 status to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. And at that point, I clearly felt that I didn't understand what we were doing. I believe that, you know, Riga is within a thousand miles—km, I don't even know—of Moscow. And, you know, because the Cuban Missile Crisis was very much top of mind during the part of the Cold War that I saw and its aftermath, I very well remember the concept of American spheres of influence.
00:20:29
Eric Weinstein: Cuba was not considered a sovereign nation that could choose to do whatever it wanted because it was simply too close to the United States. I think that, in part, it's the desire to only put on one pair of glasses, one set of lenses. The sovereign nation lens clearly suggests that Putin is a madman and that his crossing of the border of Ukraine, it's a slam dunk.
00:20:57
Eric Weinstein: So it's not that I don't understand your point, but then again, there's another set of glasses, which is the spheres of influence glasses, and that says that, in fact, powerful nations like Russia have concerns that don't have to deal only with their exact borders. And if you look, for example, at a time lapse of the borders in Central Eastern Europe, you'll notice that they've been fluid for forever.
00:21:20
Eric Weinstein: If every time there is a border readjustment we go to the brink of nuclear war, that's game over. Furthermore, there are very complicated relations in Central and Eastern Europe, and I don't think that Americans are particularly adept at discussing them. And forcing us to say "Slava Ukraine" as a slogan, you know, we're not allowed to say glory to anything, but we're supposed to be 100% on board.
00:21:49
Eric Weinstein: This is a long-running statecraft-level narrative. Clearly, there was an idea in place as far back as the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't understand what the strategy is. It might be the right strategy. I certainly am not supporting Putin as an absolute brutal thug. That's not in question. The problem is that we are now the stewards of a thermonuclear planet.
00:22:14
Eric Weinstein: And the simple application of an idea that he crossed the border of a sovereign nation after everything we've been doing in Ukraine and all the games that we've played, I don't think that this really makes sense. And the problem, as I understand it, is that we keep telling the audience, the electorate, if you will, that these incredibly simplistic lenses with which we choose to view everything are sufficient to actually form grown-up opinions, and they aren't.
00:22:44
Piers Morgan: I mean, the irony, of course, is that if Ukraine had not been encouraged to give up its nuclear defense, then Putin is highly unlikely to have invaded it.
00:22:56
Eric Weinstein: There are so many choices that we have made in terms of how we've handled the post-Cold War former Soviet Union countries and Warsaw Pact countries. I think you have to understand that this is part of a long-running grand strategy, and it's not shared with me—this whatever. I'm not even positive that today's State Department officials are really 100% in that they have good knowledge of what this extended plan is.
00:23:29
Eric Weinstein: Very often what you find is that the architects of a multi-decade plan die, and they don't teach their successors what the actual strategy was.
00:23:36
Piers Morgan: When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, did you think it was right that American boots were put on the ground to kick him out, given it wasn't a NATO country?
00:23:50
Eric Weinstein: Kuwait, in some sense, is in part created as a bloc so that Saddam Hussein, that Iraq, would have the tiniest seafront, the creation, in some sense, of states by colonial powers or accident of history. I think the problem here is that Saddam Hussein was an absolute brute. But he was a brute in a region in which one has to become brutish.
00:24:22
Eric Weinstein: It is astounding the extent to which many Iraqis, who were relatively middle-class and knew the difficulties of governing in that region, viewed him as an absolute brute but were appreciative of his efforts at keeping Iraq relatively secular. That's not to say that I'm in some sense supportive, far from it. It's just to say that we keep communicating very strange things into these regions.
00:24:49
Eric Weinstein: For example, when I think it was George Herbert Walker Bush told the Marsh Arabs in the south of Iraq to rise up and then got them slaughtered. We have to be very careful in our communications in incredibly different regions from our own.
00:25:04
Piers Morgan: But do you think it's really in America's national interest that Vladimir Putin could win in Ukraine, could just seize a vast chunk of that country and claim it as Russian, as he did with Crimea and is, of course, after invading Georgia as well? I mean, do you think it's in America's national interest that a Russian dictator expands the power and geographical land of Russia?
00:25:34
Eric Weinstein: No, no, I very much don't want Vladimir Putin to taste victory. I don't want him to try to reassemble the former Soviet Union.
00:25:46
Piers Morgan: How do you stop him?
00:25:47
Eric Weinstein:
00:25:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, in part, you might want to cooperate. You might have wanted to have cooperated with him more, and it's very difficult. Look, my family comes from the region. Almost 100% of my ancestors came from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Latvia. I'm very hesitant to talk in Western media about the realities of the region because I don't think that Americans have been prepared for quite what the pressures are in this area.
00:26:26
Eric Weinstein: And it is incredibly important that we understand just how dangerous this region is, in part because of the skill level of the players. Vladimir Putin may be a brute, a butcher, but he's also incredibly skilled. And you have to remember that America's nuclear power, effectively, came from a bunch of émigrés from places like Lvov, which is now called Lviv, which I think of as a Polish city, which is now claimed to be Ukrainian.
00:26:53
Eric Weinstein: We have to appreciate that this is a region that is incredibly skilled, incredibly dangerous, a source of intellectual horsepower, which built America's own atomic arsenal, refugees from the area. So I think that you just have to understand that most of us are way out of our depth. If we don't have great information, we don't have cultural and historical understanding of the tensions between these people.
00:27:21
Piers Morgan: I'm going to just change tack to free speech. In your estimation, are there any limits to free speech?
00:27:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, it depends. If you know, people say free markets, and there are all sorts of limits on free markets. Usually, when we say free speech, adults know the limits. You know that there are libel limits. There's, you know, Brandenburg versus Ohio. There are all sorts of things that you can't say or do. We have export controls. In fact, in physics, there's a concept called restricted data where, if you have an idea and you're not a federal employee and you don't have security clearance, if the idea touches nuclear weapons, you may not share it at all because it is born secret.
00:28:11
Eric Weinstein: There are huge limits on speech that are part of free speech. So when we say free speech, I'm 100% for free speech. But that is an understanding that that's a reserved term of art. It's not unrestricted speech. It has never been, and it can't exist as such.
00:28:31
Piers Morgan: I mean, you and I, I think, are both big fans of Elon Musk. I had an interview planned with him at the start of the year, which he unceremoniously canceled when he found a clip of me on the show mildly criticizing his decision to let Alex Jones back on to X, having previously said he would never let him back on.
00:28:49
Piers Morgan: And he wouldn't let people who stand on the graves of dead children on the platform. And I thought he was wrong to change his mind about Alex Jones. But I found it quite ironic that Elon, who, you know, is a constant promoter of free speech, particularly on X, would not want to engage in an interview with me because I criticized him over something like that.
00:29:11
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, everyone wants to date free speech, but when free speech wants to date other people, we always have second thoughts. And I'd like to think that I'm at least self-aware enough to realize that most of the things that we stand up for—truth, ethics, free speech, etc.—when they bind on us, we as humans are very likely to change our mind.
00:29:34
Eric Weinstein: That's why we try to enshrine this in law. It's sort of a Ulysses contract that I know that I'm going to be against free speech when it's used in a way that I don't like. I bristled when you said you read my Wikipedia entry because I have idiots who constantly try to deface it. On the other hand, because I'm locked into a free speech mentality, it stays my hand when I try to say that that's something that shouldn't be permitted.
00:29:58
Eric Weinstein: Effectively, I have to put up with the empowerment of idiots and dangerous ones at that. If I'm really signed up for the free speech project, and, you know, there you have it.
00:30:09
Piers Morgan: I was interested in Wikipedia. I mean, my eldest son noticed—I don't have, you know, there's still that I never look at it—but it said that I was the youngest of four children, and I happen to be the oldest of four children. So it's a tiny little fact. It doesn't matter to anybody other than it's wrong. So my oldest son, who's a journalist, corrected it, and then whoever it was who put the erroneous information up there corrected it back to the false one.
00:30:34
Piers Morgan: And this went on and on and on, and there was no end to it, where my eldest son kept saying I was the eldest. I remember this person kept saying I was the youngest, and all it was for me was that Wikipedia professes to be, you know, a great vehicle for information, accurate information about people and so on, and free speech and so on.
00:30:57
Piers Morgan: But there's not much they can do if someone is utterly determined to put disinformation out there.
00:31:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, it was briefly a great resource. The problem that we find is it had certain flaws. When you had rules about, you know, authoritative sources, and sources were in fact largely authoritative, it worked well. As you've seen the degradation of authoritative sources, and as people have become more sophisticated about what kinds of exploits work on Wikipedia, you have a very dangerous situation, which is that technical articles continue to be of fairly high quality because there's no one determined to graffiti over them.
00:31:35
Eric Weinstein: However, when you start including political people or people who are disliked by someone, the incentives change. And as a result, what you see is a sort of chimeric resource, which is very high quality if it was going to describe hydraulic presses, let's say, but very low quality when you have a controversial figure who's hated by a determined group.
00:32:02
Eric Weinstein: So I think that it has morphed over our lifetime from being something which is an astonishing achievement to something which is, in fact, very dangerous. The other thing I would say is that we have a very strange situation in that we expected that free speech was going to be the exchange of ideas with which we disagreed.
00:32:25
Eric Weinstein: And instead, it has morphed, I think, over my lifetime much more into a question of what can I get away with that might not be true. It might not be a different point of view but is simply a free speech exploit to destroy. If I don't have a good argument against somebody's position, I always have the ability to try to talk about that person's family or skin care or what have you.
00:32:50
Eric Weinstein: And I think that, for many of us, we're sort of waking up to the idea that a world saturated in speech without friction, which is what we now have—you don't have to print a pamphlet or get a book deal in order to say your piece—that in a cacophonous world, mostly what free speech produces is vitriol and personal attacks.
00:33:13
Eric Weinstein: And I think that we're all sort of scratching our heads. This isn't exactly the future that we had envisaged.
00:33:18
Piers Morgan: Yeah, under the Covid pandemic, which we touched on earlier, your brother Brett has become a very high-profile part of this debate. And we got a clip of him talking about it. Listen to this.
00:33:32
Chris Williamson: I believe we must zoom out if we are to understand the pattern that we are gathered here to explore. Because the pattern is larger than federal health agencies and the Covid cartel, if we do zoom out and ask, what are they hiding? The answer becomes as obvious as it is disturbing. They are hiding everything.
00:33:50
Piers Morgan: So that was a Senate committee this week. What did you make of your brother's appearance? What do you make of the general debate about Covid as it raged in real time?
00:34:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, I just want to be very clear that whatever Brett's positions are on Covid or his positions, they are not my positions. And I don't want to be referenced to his positions. Much of what he says is true. But the problem is that when you are so clearly lying about the origins of Covid, its treatment, the reasons for doing things, the science, you open up the question, what exactly is going on and why are we lying about everything?
00:34:35
Eric Weinstein: I think the stark difference is that Brett claims that he can figure out much more of that story than I think I can. And I dare say I don't think anyone can. If you're not going to really go after the EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak in terms of the information that that organization and that individual holds, and you're not going to discuss Ralph Baric's lab in North Carolina, you're not going to talk about the private communications inside of NIH with Francis Collins—
00:35:07
Eric Weinstein: If you're not going to talk about Anthony Fauci's duties in terms of bio-warfare after the Geneva and bio-warfare conventions of the 1970s, because presumably this is all about statecraft and extremely secret programs as to why we are in Wuhan talking about inserting that fear cliff insights and humanizing coronavirus, it's an absolutely terrifying vacuum of knowledge, and I don't think we know why.
00:35:39
Eric Weinstein: I think that this, you know, very likely we are trying to play 12-dimensional chess, and we're barely able to play checkers. And this goes back to the original point about, I think it was April of '53 when we figured out DNA, and then ten years later, we had the genetic code with the work of Marshall Nirenberg.
00:35:56
Eric Weinstein: It's so much power. And the treaties that we've signed are possibly nonsensical. I mean, we have a problem. We don't develop offensive weapons, but defensive measures can be easily converted to offensive measures. We have put restrictions on ourselves that we then attempt to get out of. Almost certainly, this has to do with questions that we don't want resolved in public.
00:36:26
Eric Weinstein: And I came from—you know, I'm an old man now at 58—I remember the Church hearings, the Pike hearings, the Watergate hearings, the Iran-Contra hearings. We have given up on a taste for actually figuring out who we are, what we've done, what our responsibilities are. And I think that we don't know. Brett, I don't think he does.
00:36:50
Eric Weinstein: I know that I don't know. And the hearings were the way that we were going to figure this out. And I don't think that we did that in a smart and aggressive fashion.
00:36:59
Piers Morgan: How do you think the pandemic began?
00:37:04
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. It could be a wet market. It's very unlikely, I think, that the diffuse proposal that came out of the EcoHealth Alliance clearly suggests that there's a whole lot of coincidence that was going on in Wuhan, China. But I have to say that, you know, as somebody with a STEM Ph.D., I'd like to restrict myself first to what I can say.
00:37:31
Eric Weinstein: And what I can say is we're not trying to figure it out. I can also say with absolute certainty that the claim coming out of places like The Lancet that any attempt to figure out the origin of Covid that considered the Wuhan Institute of Virology was necessarily racist was an abomination. The attempt to sign up Nobel laureates in order to make this seem like a respectable position—I'm, what was it, like 60-plus Nobel laureates?
00:38:04
Eric Weinstein: This is a great danger to science. We cannot spend our credibility covering up for failures of statecraft and 12 DHS at a geopolitical level. I think we have to go back to a world in which we actually get answers. And if we killed a bunch of people by helping the Chinese in their biological laboratories, we're going to have to take responsibility that potentially tens of millions of people are dead.
00:38:31
Eric Weinstein: Through our stupidity.
00:38:33
Piers Morgan: During the pandemic, the science regularly changed as facts changed. That struck me back on as, what does that mean? A normal sequence of events that with a novel virus that would happen? I mean, were you—are you sympathetic to the issues that scientists had and the fact that they did keep changing their mind about things from the efficacy of masks, for example, to whether, if you had a vaccine, you could transmit the virus and so on?
00:39:04
Piers Morgan: Are you sympathetic to that? That's the fog of war when you're dealing with something like that. No, really? You think it was willful, deliberate disinformation knowing the facts?
00:39:18
Eric Weinstein: Look, I'm not a biologist. But, you know, again, that above-40 IQ keeps causing me problems. This was obviously two separate things: a small amount of revision in terms of our knowledge as we learned more and a massive amount of revisions as our policy changed. If you expended too much PPE, personal protective equipment, in a previous administration, and then you failed to follow the admonitions of the literature, which said that you had to be prepared for surges, very sudden needs for a very large amount of PPE, for example—
00:40:01
Eric Weinstein: It was very clear that we were being told that masks didn't work at the beginning, in part because we were trying to reserve them for people who were working in emergency rooms, and then we decided that we needed these masks despite questions about the size of the virus and the width of the mesh of the mask.
00:40:21
Eric Weinstein: And then we go back and forth. This is a transparent situation in which we're pretending that our reasons for doing something are given by some proxy. I think that what we had was we didn't want to admit that we'd failed to replenish our stock under Obama. I think we didn't want to admit that the masks weren't necessarily very efficacious.
00:40:47
Eric Weinstein: We didn't really have great tools. And as such, we just look like idiots. And we couldn't ask questions. Right? When you look at that, for example, the Ph.D.s who are outside of the control of the university system, weren't dependent on NIH grants, who were free, effectively, to ask questions—we were supposed to be the representatives of ordinary Americans who wanted answers to these questions, and we were all denigrated.
00:41:15
Eric Weinstein: We were told that we were, I don't know, crazy people, conspiracy theorists, etc. You look at the trajectory of Jeffrey Sachs, who was put on this commission to investigate these things. He appointed all of these people from inside the system, and he realized that he'd hired wolves and foxes to guard henhouses. This is a crazy situation.
00:41:41
Eric Weinstein: We need to give our scientists a few money, and we need them to tell us the truth. And I don't think it was that the science was changing. I think that the idea is something terrible happened, and we weren't honest about it.
00:41:55
Piers Morgan: You have been called the new Einstein because you love math and physics, but also because you have the theory of relativity. You have the theory of everything. It's complex, the theory of everything. But what's the simple layman version of it?
00:42:12
Eric Weinstein: That Einstein was—well, first of all, I mean, it's a very kind introduction. I'm happy to just be myself, effectively, that you're looking at something that's extraordinarily simple, that Einstein's theory, if you will, began with four degrees of freedom, which you can think of as any four degrees of freedom, like treble, mid, bass, and reverb on an amp.
00:42:34
Eric Weinstein: And then what he did was he took the four degrees of freedom and he said, let's put three rulers and one watch as measuring devices and six protractors to measure the angles between all of those four objects. And he called that space-time. That space-time object is not where I believe we live. We actually live on top of all of those extra rulers, watches, and protractors, and we are played back in this four-dimensional space.
00:43:07
Eric Weinstein: So imagine you have a record on a phonograph. Imagine that record was, in some sense, 14-dimensional data. The stylus was Einstein's space-time metric, and the gramophone is the four-dimensional world that you perceive. That is, in essence, where I believe we are. I believe that we are looking at a 14-dimensional world, effectively. You think you're living in four dimensions, but you're playing back a 14-dimensional world via Einstein's metric, and you're getting confused.
00:43:39
Eric Weinstein: How is it that, you know, you have Schrödinger's cat, both dead and alive? Well, how is it that on The Doors' first album, you have both "Break on Through to the Other Side" and "Light My Fire," but you don't hear them both at once? You don't think of that as a paradox. And I think that, in part, we have all of these crazy logjams because we think we're living in a four-dimensional manifold.
00:44:03
Piers Morgan: So for people who are scientifically illiterate like me, what is your plan to resolve this?
00:44:13
Eric Weinstein: Sooner or later, the string theorists will retire and die, and my desire is to outlive them, effectively. What you have is one group of very brilliant, very smart people who refuse to follow scientific ethics. They won't consider other people's work. They name everything after themselves. They absorb everything into their worldview, and they've made science impossible, much the way biology was made possible under Covid.
00:44:45
Eric Weinstein: And what I thought I would do is I'd start a podcast, I'd grow an enormous channel. I think I'm the mathematician with the largest following in the world.
00:44:53
Piers Morgan: Yeah.
00:44:54
Eric Weinstein: And the entire point of that is to make sure that they can't do to me what they did to me before, which is to drown me out and use the official channels. So I'll use the unofficial channels. In fact, that intellectual dark web came about because I spotted that podcasts were far more powerful than anyone in traditional media had thought.
00:45:15
Eric Weinstein: And so what I did was I tried to aggregate a few people with mega channels and a lot of voices that needed amplification and wrap a kind of concept or a brand around it. Right now, the legacy media doesn't know why it's dying. And what I intend to do is to use a large channel to become even larger.
00:45:36
Eric Weinstein: And apparently, I jumped the gun a little bit. I think that, unfortunately, this university system that holds back new ideas—and I mean scientific ideas—and is still too powerful. This thing that we just saw with Claudine Gay, however, is a huge—I don't know—it's a huge window of hope that's opening because if I had told you before that the president of Harvard was completely unqualified for that office and that person might be a plagiarist, that might have sounded completely fanciful.
00:46:09
Eric Weinstein: You might have thought I was crazy.
00:46:11
Piers Morgan: Well, the fact that she lost her job for it actually would have sounded crazy because you would have thought that—no, no, no.
00:46:18
Eric Weinstein: She's still employed as a professor.
00:46:22
Piers Morgan: But she lost her job as the president of Harvard, right?
00:46:25
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely. But what I'm trying to say is, when you find out how corrupt our universities are and how much amazing work is still being done within them, you'll be ready to listen to geometric unity. But you're not there yet. Right now, you're in the process of figuring out that Harvard isn't Harvard, MIT isn't MIT, and I sure hope that Oxford and Cambridge are still themselves.
00:46:51
Eric Weinstein: They have a little bit more history under their belt. But right now, it's important to purge the universities of everything related to diversity, equity, inclusion, plagiarism. We need to get rid of a lot of these activist subjects that were maybe founded with the best of intentions in the late '60s.
00:47:10
Eric Weinstein: And we need to return to rigor, scholarship, and, above all, collegiality with enough money that professors do not fear. If they don't sign a loyalty oath, they don't need to worry about walking to campus that they're going to be, you know, attacked. Right now, what we need is something like a civil war in the universities, and the right side has to win.
00:47:31
Piers Morgan: You know, I realize we've reached an absolute nadir with this. When a professor at an American university—I can't remember which one—for 25 years had delivered a lecture about the use of offensive language in modern society, and as part of the lecture, he used examples of offensive language, and he was reported by students who couldn't handle this and were triggered by it for using offensive language, and he was fired, even though the whole point of his lecture for a quarter of a century had been how you navigate the use of offensive language in society.
00:48:04
Piers Morgan: And at that point, I realized we had literally lost our minds. I mean, the idea that a university professor will be hounded out of his job for giving a lecture about a subject where the students had just willfully, deliberately misused the use of the offensive language to get him out of his job seemed to me extraordinary.
00:48:30
Eric Weinstein: University is not kindergarten. It is important to become intolerant of people who are not tolerant themselves. That will sound like a paradox to some. We have no time for that. It is very important to restore collegiality, academic freedom, freedom of speech, and a lot of people don't belong in university, and we need to practice exclusion rather than inclusion in their case.
00:48:56
Eric Weinstein: I don't know how to say this: this idea, this vogue that we have for things that sound good but make no sense, has to be purged from the system by the adults. Otherwise, there will be no adults in the system.
00:49:08
Piers Morgan: I want to end very quickly. Eric, I've got ten things I want to give you the opportunity—give me a statistical probability of these things happening, so you can choose any percentage you like, okay? But you've got to answer quickly. It's rapid fire.
00:49:22
Eric Weinstein: No, no. Yeah, I decline. You can't—
00:49:24
Piers Morgan: Do that.
00:49:26
Eric Weinstein: No.
00:49:27
Piers Morgan: Really? Why?
00:49:27
Eric Weinstein: Because it's going to be—well, because it's going to be extremely low quality. I live on the internet, and as you know, I'm quite serious. There's a vogue for trying to get people to answer all questions. I didn't particularly want to answer a question about my brother's views on Covid because of why I completely supported him with respect to ivermectin and the idea it wasn't horse dewormer.
00:49:51
Eric Weinstein: But I completely disagreed with his ivermectin maximalism. And the internet can't maintain a distinction like that. You see, in other words, to the ivermectin army, Brett was a genius for realizing that ivermectin was a near-perfect prophylactic, which I didn't believe. On the other hand, to people who were buying the official line, I was killing people by suggesting that ivermectin was a replacement.
00:50:16
Eric Weinstein: So every time you ask a person to engage in such activities, what happens is that that person's life turns to crap because of the low-quality people on the internet, many of whom are bots, probably not even humans, that dog you with everything that you say. So the reason that I don't accept what you're saying is that I don't want three weeks of pain in my life.
00:50:38
Eric Weinstein: That I'm an idiot for giving those probabilities.
00:50:42
Piers Morgan: That's actually a brilliant answer. Eric, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much.
00:50:47
Eric Weinstein: Really enjoyed it, Piers. Thanks for having me again.