“WILDLY Unhinged” Eric On Terrence Howard's Science (YouTube Content)
| "WILDLY Unhinged" Eric On Terrence Howard's Science | |
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| Information | |
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| Host(s) | Piers Morgan |
| Guest(s) | Eric Weinstein Brian Keating Tom Bilyeu |
| Length | 01:36:08 |
| Release Date | 11 July 2024 |
| Links | |
| YouTube | Watch |
| Portal Blog | Read |
| All Appearances | |
"WILDLY Unhinged" Eric On Terrence Howard's Science was a discussion with Eric Weinstein hosted by Piers Morgan on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show.
Description
"Trust the science" became the mantra during the pandemic - but now it seems we're living in an age where the likes of Terrence Howard and Candace Owens are trying to debunk it.
Actor Howard recently raised eyebrows when he appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast, claiming he can kill gravity and doesn't believe in the number zero among other outlandish theories.
Piers Morgan speaks to mathematician and physicist Eric Weinstein - who was invited by Rogan to challenge Terrence's theories - before the pair are joined by cosmologist Professor Brian Keating and YouTuber Tom Bilyeu.
Transcript
00:00:00
Terrence Howard: Everything has an equal and opposite. It has to, mate.
00:00:03
Brian Keating: Whoa!
00:00:04
Eric Weinstein: I'm trying to get you to stop pissing my community.
00:00:07
Piers Morgan: You're kind of adding the intimacy, too. You unhinged science fiction.
00:00:11
Eric Weinstein: I wouldn't have been able to appear with Terrence if I didn't think there was something in what he was doing.
00:00:16
Niel De Grasse Tyson: The platform to be accepted for the ideas is not social media.
00:00:22
Eric Weinstein: Neil himself doesn't appear conversant in the history of science and revealing.
00:00:29
Brian Keating: There's ten times easier to produce something that's BS and so than it is to refute it. Science has a branding problem. If you're arguing at the level of the specifics of the science, you have already lost.
00:00:40
Candace Owens: Science has become a pagan faith.
00:00:43
Eric Weinstein: Effectively, there are no professors who are standing up in good standing as experts doing the job that now Candace Owens is going to fill.
00:00:53
Piers Morgan: Trust the science became a mantra during the Covid pandemic, but in the years since, and partly as a consequence, a rising tide of people are doing quite the opposite. Challenging the scientific mainstream is in vogue. No resist better illustrated than the recent viral phenomenon of actor Terrence Howard on The Joe Rogan Podcast, the biggest media platform in the world right now, arguing that one times one actually equals two.
00:01:19
Piers Morgan: Among other bizarre theories.
00:01:22
Terrence Howard: They don't show that hydrogen has the same telling us as carbon. What do you mean by tone? Same tone, same q.b. You keep dividing light by two, and you'll ultimately get back to the audible sound of it. Because there was a relationship between light and color, sound and tone, matter and shape. At a given point, Mars was here in the Goldilocks zone.
00:01:45
Terrence Howard: Everything has an equal and opposite. It has to meet. Mating is a big part of what we do. The Karp, the, Then boron mates with nitrogen. And that's how the carbon happened. 96% of physics is unknown. Matter that they've had to make up to account for it. And we were able to build Saturn. When I don't turn my phone off, don't do that.
00:02:09
Terrence Howard: Every time I get ready. Well, because I know they're watching me right now and they're mad at me. Who's they? The politicians and the authorities that give their politicians their aggregation. And our world economy is based off of one times one equaling.
00:02:27
Brian Keating: So you think they fuck with your phone?
00:02:28
Terrence Howard: Oh, I'm sure of it.
00:02:30
Brian Keating: Whoa!
00:02:34
Piers Morgan: Well, there were four hours of that. But it has reached tens of millions of people. It's been a true viral phenomenon, like I said. Well, many in the scientific establishment expressed alarm at the apparently limitless reach of wild theories at a time. Science has a reputation problem. Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the most famous scientists on the planet, have this to say.
00:02:56
Niel De Grasse Tyson: If you're a fan of a subject, let's say a hobbyist, let's call it. It's possible to know enough about that subject to think you're right, but not enough about that subject to know that you're wrong. The platform to be accepted for the ideas is not social media. It is not Joe Rogan. It is not my podcast. It is research journals where attention can be given on a level that, at the end of the day, offers no higher respect for your energy and intellect than by declaring that what's in it is either right or wrong, or worthy of publication or not.
00:03:44
Piers Morgan: Well, others disagree. They argue the old system needs to be shaken up. The questioning and challenging mainstream institutions and theories is the only real way to actually get to the truth. Here's a debate. This is a podcast and cosmologist at University of California professor Brian Keating, the host of impact Theory Tom billiard. But I'll start with Doctor Eric Weinstein, mathematician and OG of the intellectual dark web and creator of the powerful podcast.
00:04:10
Piers Morgan: Eric, welcome back to uncensored. Really fascinating to see how big this has all blown in in the last few days. For those who didn't watch the Terrence Howard four hour. I don't know what you would call it. Theory of some kind. What was the sort of main premises he was coming out with that have captured everyone's attention?
00:04:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think that the, he made several outrageous claims that were more or less baseless as far as, either the heterodox or the orthodox view of science that, one times one is equal to two, that the periodic table, should be rearrange around, earlier work from the 1920s, that he had a theory of physics based on platonic solids with curved linear sides.
00:05:11
Eric Weinstein: I don't think any of those hold up to any kind of scrutiny. That said, he, definitely has some very interesting engineering claims, and he's got some very interesting geometric structures that could make beautiful lighting, fantastic art. And he is saying some things that people are deriding. And, you know, from a, from a scholarly perspective that actually have some merit.
00:05:42
Eric Weinstein: So it's a very it's a very bizarre and complicated situation, but it is not complicated at the root. There's nothing wrong with standard orthodox science. And I say that as a very strong critic of the system. So if you if you wanted to hear it from somebody, you know, with a PhD who is nevertheless not shy about savaging the institutions when that is what they deserve.
00:06:07
Eric Weinstein: I would say that the level of doubt that he has cast on simple things like arithmetic, is completely unwarranted. But it's a very bizarre situation to watch an entire nation that depends on technologies and science for its advantage. Suddenly question whether or not one times one equals one.
00:06:28
Piers Morgan: What is fascinating to me is, is the last time I had to do a Terrence Howard. I interviewed him at CNN about ten years ago when he did a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. And the next thing he's doing a four hour podcast with Joe Rogan in which he's airing the most sort of intensely complex theories, many of which, as you say, might be completely for the birds.
00:06:52
Piers Morgan: Were you aware that Terrence Howard was was thinking this way, was moving to a place where he could even conduct an interview like that?
00:07:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, to be honest, I didn't know who Terrence Howard was. So I didn't have an image for him. But had you asked me, I would have thought back to, Werner Herzog, doing the entire film Fitzcarraldo, to test his engineering theories about how less technologically advanced people could move heavy objects, many miles, up uphill to create an entire film to test his engineering theories.
00:07:31
Eric Weinstein: Hedy Lamarr, famously developed spread spectrum technology. Despite being a screen siren back in the 30s and 40s. So just as I don't think it's very strange to find out that Steve Martin is an incredible banjo player, I don't find it at all odd that a polymath like, Terrence Howard would have such theories. I don't think that the theories about math and physics and chemistry are incredibly deep.
00:08:00
Eric Weinstein: So I'm going to push back on that. But I do think that, he knows quite a lot about many things. And he doesn't know what he doesn't know.
00:08:09
Piers Morgan: I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson said that he, you know, people can know enough to sort of ask questions and stuff, but maybe not enough to know when they're wrong. In other words, when they're presented with, you know, quite complex science that has been peer reviewed and is deemed to be established scientific fact that he doesn't know enough about the detail to understand why he's wrong, to question it.
00:08:35
Eric Weinstein: You mean the Dunning-Kruger effect is, he said. Yeah, it's kind of ironic, actually, because it feels to me like Neil deGrasse Tyson is himself a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to peer review, as his comments about Sir Arthur Eddington, using the 1919 total solar eclipse, to prove that Einstein's theory about, star warping space in the in particular our sun, appear to be born out.
00:09:11
Eric Weinstein: Neil claims that that was sent to a peer reviewed journal, whereas peer review doesn't really begin in physics, in, in the sciences really until the 60s and much more the 70s. So it's very interesting because Neil himself doesn't appear conversant in the history of science.
00:09:31
Piers Morgan: And reviewing isn't the reality of all science a bit like with medicine that a lot of very smart people take a look at a lot of available data, but maybe not enough to reach absolute definitive conclusions. And they espouse theories which they're peer group. Then look at and discuss and analyze and argue about. And that's how we progress with science over decades, centuries and so on.
00:09:59
Piers Morgan: I mean, this is this part of the evolution of science is that people like you and Neil deGrasse Tyson might vehemently disagree about stuff, but actually it's only through the disagreements. You, you you develop.
00:10:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I doubt that he would agree to a program, where we were going to have a discussion about this. My guess is that you reached out to him that he, was too busy to appear. My claim is, is that in general, we avoid dust ups, for fear of looking foolish. And I think it's fine to avoid dust ups when you feel that there's an ethical problem with the other person.
00:10:37
Eric Weinstein: But in general, science progresses by a large variety of different channels. Benjamin, Jesse famously observed that his milkmaids weren't dying from, smallpox, but they did get cowpox. So he injected his entire family with cow pus to give them cowpox to prevent against smallpox. That's one of the beginnings of vaccines. People would dig up bodies from graveyards to do anatomical studies.
00:11:05
Eric Weinstein: Famously, the, the ulcer, which was thought to be correlated with stress, was tested by the, dissenting heterodox biomedical researcher, and shown to have a completely different etiology by using himself as a guinea pig. I think that you have to understand that just as, Benjamin Franklin took a kite, and key into an electrical storm to prove that lightning was electricity.
00:11:32
Eric Weinstein: People have done all sorts of things that have nothing to do with learned societies and the genteel, sort of feel afforded by peer review, in order to advance science. I really think that in part, what we've done is we've sanitized our own history and we've forgotten what works.
00:11:50
Piers Morgan: What was interesting to me was Neil deGrasse Tyson didn't go on Joe Rogan to respond, which is what Terrence Howard wanted him to do. But but you did. And here's a clip from that.
00:12:03
Terrence Howard: This is the other side of it. Yeah. This is this is what what is what's very interesting. Like these. They'll come together and meet you can see where they meet up. Yeah. Their natural meeting up. Yeah. Now this one looks exactly like this one. But they don't have the same mixture. So what this is create this is actually showing this is the equal and opposite.
00:12:27
Terrence Howard: This is this is matter. This becomes the anti-matter. Stop. You do. You can't stop me. I'm so sorry. I'm. I'm a my own worst enemy and my own best friend.
00:12:37
Eric Weinstein: You know what that that was a beautiful statement.
00:12:40
Terrence Howard: But that's what I'm trying to say is the fact that they keep and these four will keep. This is just the magnetic what I consider the magnetic field.
00:12:48
Eric Weinstein: You see you stop.
00:12:49
Terrence Howard: Just I consider.
00:12:50
Brian Keating: Really.
00:12:50
Terrence Howard: Consider this to be the magnetic field because they're expanding at the center. And magnetism to in my language magnetism expands out and becomes great.
00:13:00
Eric Weinstein: And you know when you just said in my language.
00:13:02
Terrence Howard: In my.
00:13:03
Eric Weinstein: Lane, that's what I just did with the Terence product. In other words, in.
00:13:05
Terrence Howard: In your.
00:13:06
Eric Weinstein: Language, I'm trying to get you to stop pissing my community.
00:13:08
Terrence Howard: Off. I don't want to piss of mine, I want friends, I need friend.
00:13:12
Piers Morgan: Now, the interesting thing to me is, as we would say in the UK, it sounded to me like he was talking a load of old cobblers. And yet you were there and you were being very generous and sort of reasonable and, and decent with him and allowing him to continue with his theories. That's attractive for you.
00:13:33
Piers Morgan: A lot of criticism that by by engaging in that manner with him, you're kind of adding the intimacy to slightly unhinged science fiction rather than promoting the cause of science. How do you respond to that?
00:13:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, you know, this is always the scuttlebutt. And, you know, people say so I'm not very impressed with that. I would say that, you know, you have, I wouldn't say it's mildly unhinged. I would say it's wildly unhinged. A lot of this stuff is just nonsense, right? On the other hand, I was very quick to spot something that I wouldn't have been able to appear with Terence if I didn't think there was something in what he was doing.
00:14:17
Eric Weinstein: And because I have a lot of, background and experience in this era area, it was possible for me to go through what he said at a speed that I think very few people would be able to go through his work.
00:14:29
Piers Morgan: But what percentage.
00:14:30
Eric Weinstein: For example.
00:14:30
Piers Morgan: What percentage of what he was saying was true, or at least vaguely sensible? And what was very little. Right. So so my question if it was genuinely very little, him getting tens of millions of views for espousing complete nonsense in the main and then someone yeah, with your pedigree and your knowledge of this subject matter going on and kind of going along with engaging him as a serious person in these, in these things, well, is that not in some way diminishing science when you do that?
00:15:06
Eric Weinstein: First of all, I wouldn't have had Terence on the first time because it didn't do him a service to what he actually is doing. That's interesting to give him this amount of air that that was a good friend of mine's choice. So partially, what you're seeing is a relationship between a comedian, Joe Rogan, and a mathematician, Eric Weinstein.
00:15:29
Eric Weinstein: Joe's a buddy of mine, and, he matters to me. And he he's the one who asked me to. Come on. It's, you know, if some people tried to frame it as if I wanted to go on, I had no interest in going on. But if we were going to watch a mass delusion take, take shape.
00:15:50
Eric Weinstein: Certainly. I don't want to. I don't want any more mass delusions. And I also don't want the idea that, once these ideas are out there, that science is afraid somehow to confront, you know, Terrence Howard, new theory of arithmetic. He doesn't have a new theory of arithmetic. And somebody needs to be the adult and say, this is not right.
00:16:16
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, you have to appreciate that all it takes is one great idea, to move the world. And a lot of B.S. is going to be forgiven. And then if he has a great idea, I would suggest to you it's likely his concept of a six rotor, drone call that he calls the linchpin. That's based on a mathematical error where he's fit.
00:16:42
Eric Weinstein: Six, pentagons, through the edges of a regular tetrahedron, giving him six degrees of freedom, which span, what we would call the lie algebra of the affine group, giving him the ability to rotate around a center and move to any point in three dimensional space. It's an incredibly cool idea. Now, I don't know that it's his.
00:17:04
Eric Weinstein: I believe that it is. But I don't know that I haven't done that work. I'm not a drone operator, so I don't realize, you know, what the state of the art is, but imagine that that was the only thing that he did, and that he figured out that these things could fit together. As per the Intel drone shows, to form, capsids.
00:17:22
Eric Weinstein: In the shape of dodecahedron, much the way we see viruses, doing that with capsid mirrors and, protein coats to, to protect the genetic material, that would be an increase contribution of Terrence Howard. And the thing that really disgusts me is watching my colleagues make fun of Terrence as easily where he is right is where he is wrong.
00:17:50
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't require that. He's clearly a self-taught guy. He pronounces words like canonically, canonically, which indicates that he's teaching himself. And for all of this talk of the Neil deGrasse Tyson where they say, I'm so pleased to see active minds engaging with the world of ideas that they're really not. And, you know, my feeling about this is pretending that Terrence Howard is a fool or an idiot.
00:18:18
Eric Weinstein: Is is repugnant to me. I mean, if you just take what he said about tongues and the periodic table, because of, some good fortune in my life, I was able to go out to none other than one of the greatest musicians now living Stanley Jordan and say, Stanley, you know, let's share your work on playing the periodic table by using the ionization energies as frequency information, much the way Terence was discussing.
00:18:47
Eric Weinstein: So my feeling is, is that a lot of my colleagues just don't have enough knowledge. And even though they're supposedly the academics sitting in professorial seats, they're not behaving like professors. They're not behaving like, academicians. They're making fun of somebody because it allows them to work out their own personal insecurities. And that's not going to happen on my watch.
00:19:07
Piers Morgan: It's actually really fascinating because unless I'm mistaken, what you're saying is, look, you might be wrong about 99% of this stuff, but the 1% might be really significant, which is staggering to me that Terrence Howard has gone through life as a movie actor is suddenly doing stuff which is, to you, quite groundbreaking in the very complex world of science and mathematics and so on.
00:19:33
Eric Weinstein: It's not in science and it's not in mathematics, right. If he's doing something that I recognize, it's an engineering art, and it's possible that he's doing something, you know, I was able to recognize where his shapes come from, where Neil does not appear to understand, which is fine. So, you know, there's some very beautiful geometry, but it doesn't appear to me to be at a research level.
00:20:01
Eric Weinstein: And I don't want to conflate again, I'm not being I'm hardly a pushover. I'm saying he's wrong in chemistry, physics and mathematics. In fact, it doesn't rise to the level of a theory that needs to be actively considered. That said, to dismiss everything he's saying because we can find, you know, sometimes a fly lands in your dish and you insist that it be taken back at a restaurant.
00:20:33
Eric Weinstein: At other times, you just say, you know, five second rule. You're hungry. And it's not the fault of the restaurant, and you just let it go. And my feeling about this is, what Neil did is really troubling. What he did is, is that he advertised a fake openness, which is just submit what your work is to a peer reviewed journal.
00:20:56
Eric Weinstein: Neil doesn't either. Doesn't know the history of peer review, doesn't know why it's called peer review. Has no concept of what peer review actually is, which is bizarre. Or he does know and he's deliberately going to waste Terrence Howard's time, because Terence isn't a peer. And the whole concept of peer review, the word peer isn't like a jury of your peers, your fellow citizens.
00:21:23
Eric Weinstein: It's like peers, as in terms of the House of Lords, the whole idea of peer review is to keep the laity, the people who don't do science for a living or medicine for a living out of the review process. And that's where it was born. That's why it that's why it grew up in the 60s and 70s as peer review.
00:21:44
Eric Weinstein: It was a it was as part of a struggle where scientists wanted to wall off their kingdom and say, look, we are taking public money, but we don't want public review. You're not qualified to be here. Shut up, get out of our lab and let us work. And that's why it's so fiercely defended, is because it's the last ditch effort to keep the laity from interfering in matters that they can't understand.
00:22:11
Piers Morgan: The science itself has been under probably a bigger public assault in terms of its validity as a result of the Covid pandemic. Then I can never remember in my lifetime, certainly. Is it damaging when everybody on social media suddenly becomes an epithet? It etymologies whatever it may be, you know, a different time besides your light, or medical expert, whatever.
00:22:37
Piers Morgan: When the when their views get amplified, like Terrence Howard, if they're completely wrong, they get amplified and shared gazillions of times. This has happened here with all of the things that he said. Is it damaging to the integrity of science when that happens? And is that a unique problem with social media? Amplify amateur scientific and medical views?
00:22:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, it's a very interesting question. I would think that we would begin somewhere else. The greatest damage is when we amplify pseudo scientists who happen to be official pseudo scientists. So when you take a director, of, an AI, National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease, and you take that person's, contradictory pronouncements and you amplify those, then suddenly everybody has to learn what mRNA is because they're trying to make a decision for their child, and suddenly you've thrust them into advanced biology because you've amplified pseudoscience.
00:23:43
Eric Weinstein: Coming out of the National Institute of Health, or the defense, Threat Reduction Agency, Detroit. The failure and the pseudoscience is coming from inside the house. The problem is when a Francis Collins and an Anthony Fauci in private emails can turn their dissenting colleagues fully competent, expert, dissident colleagues like Jay Bhattacharya and his colleagues at Harvard and Oxford.
00:24:11
Eric Weinstein: And overnight, they become fringe epidemiologists. Right. So, more or less, what you're seeing is not a failure of science. What you're seeing is a failure of science to disavow public health. Public health is not science. Public health is an incredibly bizarre field that tries to straddle two worlds of actual truth and the noble lie. And, you know, as I've said before, the problem is the failure to cancel, and ex-spouses, credit card privileges when the person takes the credit card on a spree.
00:24:50
Eric Weinstein: Science did not cancel its credit card. That it had given to public health. And so what we had was an incredible destruction of trust in science, which is completely unwarranted because people who are not acting as scientists, who may have one at one time been scientists but have gone over to public policy, were allowed to lie on science's behalf.
00:25:13
Eric Weinstein: That's a failure. Yeah, I understand why the credit rating got beaten up, but for God's sakes, just cut off the credit card. And learn where scientists lie and where they do not. They don't lie generically. There's nothing wrong with Hooke's law. There's nothing wrong with the adapter hypothesis in biology. There's nothing wrong with most of what we consider to be science.
00:25:37
Eric Weinstein: We lie in very special places out of necessity.
00:25:40
Piers Morgan: Let me bring in, the other two guests now, to debate actually, what you've been saying. Professor Brian Keating, cosmologist from San Diego University and sommelier, has the impact theory podcast. Professor Keating, you your response to what you've just been hearing?
00:25:57
Brian Keating: Very well. I think scientists, we have a responsibility. You know, Eric's, known for coining the term the intellectual dark web, and I feel like a scientist. We have a responsibility to keep, you know, the environmental, intellectual environment clear of pollution. And I feel like there is a tendency because of this anti-authority moment, that we seem to be in, to view science as authoritarian and then to rebel against it.
00:26:24
Brian Keating: We look to heroes and people like Terence or Candace Owens or or people like, Tucker Carlson, and they get enormous platforms because of their social media stature. But to me, you know, to listen to people, who have no domain expertise and no proven track record is an affront to actual practicing scientists. And it's fine to have a hobby.
00:26:47
Brian Keating: It's fine to do things, you know, out of an avocation, a love for it. But it's a bit to me, an example, the halo effect, which is a cognitive bias. And you have people you're listening to, and in some cases it's it's akin to listening to your friend peers. You know, Andrew Tate, for marital advice. It's it's he may be a great MMA star and Terrence may be a great actor, but that gives him no and confers no benefit to their scientific practices.
00:27:14
Brian Keating: And it would be like me going on to the set of of Iron Man and, you know, trying to be like Terrence, you would laugh me off off the stage and rightfully so. So we have to look at and examine these claims that amateurs can do good science. You know, Eric pointed out in the interview that there's some babies in with the with the bathwater.
00:27:31
Brian Keating: And I'd love to ask my dear friend Eric to expound upon those particular babies, because to me, to say that there might be some angle or something like that or some drone or it sounds to me a little bit like damning with faint praise as well, because if you go through any and there's 97 patents that he claims he has, we go through them.
00:27:50
Brian Keating: We find out that very few of them have been granted. There may be a couple that have been granted. You go through one times, one equals two or demonstrated clearly that's not the case. You go through the periodic table, his his ideas are completely wrong. They're his claims about gravity and building planets that he's built the planet Saturn, or it comes out of, biological digestive process of the sun.
00:28:13
Brian Keating: These things are complete, completely, solid, fallacious. So I think there's a danger. And it's a symptom of the halo effect.
00:28:21
Piers Morgan: The interesting point about Andrew Tate, he's a friend of mine. He's the one I've interviewed three times. But the point I make about him, this debate with someone the other day is he has a huge following, on social media, regardless of whether people like me interview him. At least when I interview him, I get a chance to challenge him.
00:28:40
Piers Morgan: And I've really noticed when young men in particular come up to me in the street, which they do with alarming regularity about Andrew Tate, that actually the the conversation I have with him has moved from God. You know, Andrew Tate, isn't he amazing, blah blah blah too. I really liked it when you challenged him about this, this and this.
00:28:57
Piers Morgan: In other words, shining a light on people. Andrew Tate actually challenging them on a big platform. Can I see tangible impact on the street of those challenges kicking through into people's consciousness in a way they wouldn't if he was just able to do his thing slightly below radar on social media without ever being challenged. So that's my kind of theory about why I interview people like him, which is in itself open to to debate.
00:29:25
Piers Morgan: Obviously, Eric, just in that response to the the baby, bathwater, what would you say to, to Brian Keating's point that.
00:29:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, I tried to say it already that if you take, the vertices of a tetrahedron, as measured from the center, you're looking at an angle of the arc cosine of minus one third, which is about 1 or 9.47 in degrees. And if you take the interior angles of a regular pentagon, it's 108. So 108 is not 109.47, but it is close enough so that within engineering tolerances, you can put six of these motors into a regular tetrahedron.
00:30:05
Eric Weinstein: And then you can potentially therefore, traverse all of the dimensions needed to orient the object around its center of mass and to move it to any point in three dimensional space. I've stated that clearly, to any technical person who wants to hear it, it may be that there's prior art, and it may be that it doesn't end up being that interesting because of the tolerances, or it's too difficult to work.
00:30:27
Eric Weinstein: That's fine. But I've already stated what the what the baby is. And further, you know, Brian, I was I was very surprised that you just correct me on social media. Now, of course we're friends and so I don't mind having this back and forth, but you stated that in my field, that, peer review is much older than, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was born in 1961.
00:30:53
Eric Weinstein: And it's you cited a bunch of journals in physics, and in fact, that's simply not true.
00:31:02
Brian Keating: In partner.
00:31:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, I have Melinda Baldwin's article here, which says, however, most papers accepted for Physical Review never went out to referees at all. The editor accepted most papers on its own authority, consulting referees only when he thought he might want to reject the paper. It was not until the 1960s that all peer review that all physical review papers were sent out for external referee opinion, more or less peer review comes out of Utah in 1972 through Senator Wallace Bennett's amendment.
00:31:37
Eric Weinstein: That forces the issue into the NIH framework because the Medicare act was established in 1965, making the US taxpayer responsible for medical payments that they suddenly wanted access to, knowing why are we paying all of this money to doctors without the ability to question them? So, you know, in part what I'm astounded by is that we're not even aware of our own history.
00:32:05
Eric Weinstein: If George Green, the miller with no formal education, mailed off a solution to an inversion problem for differential operators, which is what gives us Green's functions, which Feynman made famous. He didn't have any training whatsoever. It's in part very dangerous to be offended when people listen to what we say and they then say, I keep hearing that science is for everyone and that mathematics is a great place to play.
00:32:39
Eric Weinstein: There are no bad questions. And then when they appear to take an interest, we cut their heads off and I my feeling is, is that, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to state what this is. This is an elite activity. It's the elite. The way a violinist is elite, it's a it's elite. The way a surgeon is an elite brain surgeon.
00:33:01
Eric Weinstein: You're not going to have somebody say, hey, I've been doing brain surgery in my backyard on my family members, and I'm ready for prime time. We are not honest about the extent that this that this is an elite community. And the last thing that I would, I would add to what you said is, part of the problem is where are the dissident scientists who don't go along inside of the university system, inside of the research institutions?
00:33:29
Eric Weinstein: If you had them, they would have been, tarred and feathered during die because they would have said, who are these foreign intruders into the academic arena? We must fire them and get them out. Claudine Gaye could never have become president of Harvard. What we've done is we've gotten rid of all of the dissenting experts and the dissenting experts who are going to get up and at the top of their lungs, say, hey, we've got a disaster in theoretical physics at the moment.
00:34:00
Eric Weinstein: We have an abomination in the way in which we are pretending that, random mutation is decidedly the, the main engine of Darwinian selection. We're going to pretend that neoclassical economic base is on solid ground. All of these things are just absolutely silly. And effectively, there are no professors who are standing up in good standing as experts doing the job that now Candace Owens is going to fill.
00:34:33
Eric Weinstein: And I promise you that it's it's more expensive to get rid of your dissenters who actually know what they're talking about, than it is to open it up to a public that wonders whether they've just, and, you know, shorten the life of their child by giving them a not necessary experimental pseudo vaccine.
00:34:49
Piers Morgan: All right. Let me bring in Tom. You've been waiting very patiently. Tom, what's your perspective on this?
00:34:55
Tom Bilyeu: So I think the key thing to understand is if you're arguing at the level of the specifics of the science, you have already lost. So the goal here has to be to understand that we are living in the age of conspiracy. And that is the problem. When I saw the interview with, Terrence Howard and Joe Rogan the first time, I just about dislocated my finger dialing Eric to call him up to be like, hey, you have to refute this stuff.
00:35:20
Tom Bilyeu: And the reason that I was very excited to see that he went on and did that and did that so well. Eric, you are a national treasure. Is that it does not matter to me what the elites think in isolation. All that happens is if people have an idea that hits a critical mass, they they begin to bifurcate.
00:35:42
Tom Bilyeu: I mean, this is like the multiverse where we no longer have a shared vision of what is true, that has second and third order consequences that I think are going to be terrifying for the nation. And when you have a thinker like Eric who can actually go through and say, hey, let me steel man what I have heard you say, which Joe and Terrence would not let him do, which I was mortified by because he should have just laid it out here.
00:36:09
Tom Bilyeu: Here are the basic assumptions, and then we're going to build up from that. Now, the reason that I want that to happen is when an idea, whether it is terrible, whether it is obviously terrible, whether every elite person in the world who does science, it's like, this is the worst idea ever. You have to understand because of a whole host of things.
00:36:27
Tom Bilyeu: But certainly Covid being a nice, mile marker for us, it broke people's trust in elites to lead us properly. It broke our trust in science. And so now you must if, in fact, I will say scientists, I love you all. You have no obligation to do what I'm saying. I beseech you, as somebody who wants society to move forward.
00:36:48
Tom Bilyeu: Well, that if an idea hits a certain level of critical mass in the public's awareness, even if you hate it, you are going to have to address it if you want to lead us well forward. But you have to do it based on base assumptions, so that anybody following along at home that's trying to build their thinking up can go, oh, I actually understand Terence's base assumptions.
00:37:08
Tom Bilyeu: One times one equals two. All things are in motion. There's no straight lines. Like things that. Okay. Have I understood your position? Perfectly, Terence? Yes, Eric. You have. Okay. Amazing. Now I'm going to walk through each of those base assumptions and show you which ones are broken and how that is going to make the rest of your sequencing fall apart.
00:37:28
Tom Bilyeu: If people would just stay focused on utility, these beliefs work in the real world. We would be in a much better position. Okay, that's what I want to see more of.
00:37:37
Piers Morgan: Okay, we bring Brian in before I come to you. Brian, I want to play a clip from Candace Owens. This was several days after the debate that, Rogan and Terence said.
00:37:47
Candace Owens: Why I am now rejecting the cult of science. So many things that they lied to us about vaccines, birth control, people that are being injured, and we just accept everything. What I said was that science has become a pagan faith. Yes, that's what I actually believe in.
00:38:04
Piers Morgan: Do you want to say that NASA has satanic origins and so on? Now, I interviewed Candace myself recently, and she's she's a bona fide anti-vaxxer, doesn't believe in vaccines at all. And she has a big following. And there lots of people like her out there now saying that because there have been legitimate areas of concern around the Covid vaccines, that everything about them is flawed and wrong and therefore all the scientists who promoted them, the devil.
00:38:38
Piers Morgan: And this stuff gathers momentum. I see it spreading like wildfire. And she also says that Emmanuel Macron's wife is a man spy, having had three kids and so on. And these things gathering momentum. And whilst on one level it's sort of humorous, another level, it's actually, I think, very damaging because it means that scientists can never be wrong again, because if they're wrong about any one aspect of a big thing like a Covid pandemic, she's fast moving and evolving and changing.
00:39:07
Piers Morgan: So wrong about any aspect of it. The whole thing gets trashed by this community.
00:39:13
Tom Bilyeu: Here's this. This is why we have to understand that this is about the age of conspiracy. The very thing that Eric, I think.
00:39:20
Piers Morgan: I agree with you that, yeah.
00:39:21
Tom Bilyeu: Is to say science is about figuring out where we are wrong. And if scientists stake their reputation as they have done over the last 4 or 5 years, entirely on always being right, then if I can pull one thread and it falls apart, everything is dead. But if science just gets behind Feynman statement that this is about distrusting experts and figuring out where they're wrong now, it can become a far more fruitful pursuit of what actually works.
00:39:46
Piers Morgan: Okay, Brian, your thoughts on that?
00:39:49
Brian Keating: Yeah, Tom, just because someone is an expert doesn't necessarily mean that you have to distrust them. When you look at something, there's a concept called friendliness law, which my kids are nearby. So I'm not going to say in full it's full terms, but it's basically that there's ten times easier to produce something that's BS, and so than it is to refute it.
00:40:07
Brian Keating: Therefore, the world is full of UN refuted BS and to put that on scientists to make us sort of the, you know, intellectual Seal team six, where we can never be wrong. The terrorists only have to be right once and everyone else is relying on us. Seal team six that we're never wrong to put that on in perspective.
00:40:28
Brian Keating: You know, when you listen to people like this, Candace tweeting from her laptop and enabled by technology that was invented at Bell Labs, that was, the byproduct of the space race, which she also denies, the moon landings and so forth. Yeah, we're not in New Age. We're in a we're in a pre scientific age where people can unfortunately spread not scientific truth via scientific proof, which.
00:40:52
Brian Keating: Eric I'm sorry to say I my academic generate genealogy goes back 17 generations. Every single one of those people, including my students. I'm now in my third generation. I have graduate students, have their own graduate students. They've all been through peer review. We didn't have Pergamon Press and Robert Maxwell. That is true. Einstein published almost all of his famous papers that were done by peer review.
00:41:12
Brian Keating: In fact, the discovery of gravitational waves, one of the most revolutionary discoveries in all of science. That prediction he first tried to get submitted in the early 1930s, and he didn't want to get it peer reviewed, and there was an error in it. He said it would never be detected. Imagine that Einstein made a mistake. But thanks to peer review, that paper was published in 1936, and it went on to win the Nobel Prize for some of my good friends.
00:41:36
Brian Keating: I've interviewed 20 Nobel laureates on my podcast, and three of them won the Nobel Peace Prize for the discovery of the thing that Einstein thought was impossible. We can go back many, many generations. And yes, they didn't have presses. Of course, the printing press was only a relatively recent invention, but go to the peer to the peer review process, not far from where peers is right now is the Royal Society, and also not too far away is the Royal Institution.
00:42:01
Brian Keating: I've been to both places, I've lectured there. And when you go to those places, yes, there wasn't a press, but you gather your peers around you and you do an experiment, and that experiment would either fail or pass in real time and you would get feedback from a jury. Okay, jury of peers.
00:42:17
Piers Morgan: Okay. All right. It's interesting watching Elon Musk goes with him actually the other day.
00:42:22
Eric Weinstein: Oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. I have to respond. Okay. What you just said is not true. You know, it's just the fact is, is that Einstein.
00:42:32
Brian Keating: Was not, for the.
00:42:32
Eric Weinstein: Most part.
00:42:33
Brian Keating: After peer review ever.
00:42:36
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. That was John Tate, who was the editor at Physical Review before Simon Pasternak, before, Sam good. Schmidt. Yes. It is true that most of Einstein's work was not peer reviewed. That's why he was incensed. He'd never sent another paper to Physical Review. If I'm not incorrect, please check me on it.
00:42:56
Brian Keating: Was that paper?
00:42:57
Eric Weinstein: The fact is, there was one paper with Rosen that was peer reviewed, which incensed Einstein because he was used to not being peer reviewed.
00:43:07
Brian Keating: And he was, in other words, until peer review pointed out by adding, Eddington helped out as well and said that you're never seeing another, you're not hearing.
00:43:15
Eric Weinstein: Peer review is not referee review. Right. We had external referees that were occasionally sought. But the what you cite about the Royal Society is, in fact an error introduced into the literature by Merton, the famous historian of science, who is the father of the Merton of Black Sholes Merton fame. And that was an erroneous, claim that peer review began, I think, in the 1700s.
00:43:47
Eric Weinstein: What we currently call peer review is far more recent. And it is fantastic to find out that our professor, it does not know the history of peer review in its own subjects. Because what we have is we have a chorus of people with the highest credentials repeating a fable, and we can't always tell when we've been, when malware has entered our minds.
00:44:17
Eric Weinstein: But I would submit to you, sir, that despite your pedigree, in general, your predecessors were not peer reviewed, in any modern sense of the term before the 1970s. Certainly before the 1960s. The beginning of forums for external referees, begins, I think, in the 1930s under John Tate. I just don't think, you know, the history.
00:44:45
Brian Keating: I know. And in fact, I invite you to go down to the Royal Institution next time you're in London and you'll see pictures of Michael Faraday, of JJ Thompson, of the of Eddington, you'll see them in front of audiences. Was there a peer review process before journals? When we did the and perfect in the face right now, as somebody that loves you too literally.
00:45:06
Tom Bilyeu: I know both these guys, Eric, I know very well. Both have been on my show. Brian, I love you guys. So I say this because I am begging you, the average person wants to chew through their TV set right now or their laptop as they're listening to this. And the reason is they don't care about this. You.
00:45:22
Brian Keating: It's already.
00:45:23
Eric Weinstein: Done. I'm sorry. Sorry.
00:45:25
Tom Bilyeu: Hold on, hold on. Let me finish. Let me finish. The world cares about people like they want to hear what Joe Rogan has to say. They want to hear who goes on his show. They are absolutely going to listen to Candace. I think, Brian, you brought that up. Candace is about to sweep the world. And if I could just get you guys on board with the reality that we are in a very difficult moment right now where, yes, you guys are being asked to do a public service, which is to collide with these people who do not have your scientific, bona fide days, but the average person does not care, but they will actually listen
00:45:57
Tom Bilyeu: to your collision of ideas for sure, because I took a lot away from you talking to Terrence. And the first time I heard Terrence, I was like, maybe this is genius. I don't know.
00:46:07
Piers Morgan: You know, it's so interesting. I was I was going to say, actually, Eric, earlier I saw Elon Musk, recently met for the first time, and he did a fascinating Q&A about everything from colonizing Mars to, humanoid robots and so on. But I also we talked about X and his purchase of Twitter and then to into one of the best things I've seen in terms of populist peer review is community notes.
00:46:32
Piers Morgan: Now on X, where I often see things which are spinning around, which is complete nonsense, and then you see a very well sourced community nodes killing it. And it does seem to have an effect because that in itself, because it's happening in the same medium, starts to also spread like wildfire and tends to kill them quite quickly. Are you a fan of of what Elon is doing with X?
00:46:56
Piers Morgan: Is this helping in terms of populist not peer reviewing? Right.
00:47:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Again, this is you know, this is one of these Wild West conversations where it's not peer review. The whole concept of peer review is peer and community nodes is community, right. And so in a certain sense, the point is it's an anti peer review. It's working pretty well right now. But keep in mind that Wikipedia worked pretty well until people figured out how to game it.
00:47:27
Piers Morgan: Right.
00:47:27
Eric Weinstein: So my concern is, is that what you're looking at with peer review and with, community notes, which is anti peer review, if you will, is technologies that are in the process of being probed and gamed and just to refute what Tom was saying before. Tom, I don't disagree at all. We are going to have to deal with the Candace phenomenon, but the reason the Candace phenomenon is happening is that you don't have any expert dissident opinion.
00:47:58
Eric Weinstein: If you have five professors, shout me down that I don't know what I'm talking about. With respect to peer review, and I happen to be completely right. I will be told that I'm not an academic, despite the fact that we all speak the same language and have the same credentials. What is going on is, is that the world is not crying out for Candace Owen.
00:48:17
Eric Weinstein: It's crying out for where is the physician with my daughter's interests at heart? Where is the biologist who's willing to stand up to a Tony Fauci and say, I completely disagree? Why is it that we keep having these fake consensuses and these consensuses are basically determined by getting rid of the people who won't shut up and who won't sit down and who won't sing from the hymnal.
00:48:44
Eric Weinstein: And what I'm trying to say is what you just saw was an interchange between two colleagues with a great deal of love and respect for each other, on an issue where I'm claiming that the good professor is simply an error. And if you had somebody saying, that around the the Wuhan lab and the origin of Covid or the potential danger of the vaccines or the liability regime in which they were negotiated, that this is an abomination, that we can't sue the manufacturers, you would have a totally different world.
00:49:15
Eric Weinstein: Nobody would be listening to Candace Owens. They would be trying to track J by the chariot. They would be trying to track all of the experts who were standing up with their interests at heart. The big problem in the United States is we used to have experts in the right chairs who dissented. And now what you have is a group of people who know to keep their head.
00:49:36
Piers Morgan: Brian, just want to end with just quick thoughts from you and and Tom, before we finish, give me some hope about the future of science. It clearly, I think, is indisputable. The science and the integrity of science and scientists has never been under a bigger of time than it is today. A lot of it is fueled by conspiracy theorists and social media.
00:49:54
Piers Morgan: Give me some hope for the future of science and its integrity.
00:49:59
Brian Keating: I think the hope comes from you, my students, the people that I work with, the incredible breakthroughs that I've been witness to, both personally and part of a team of 300 scientists that are working to uncover what happened during the first nanosecond in the cosmos is history. What kind of breakthroughs do we now unlock, knowing that the universe is suffused with dark energy?
00:50:19
Brian Keating: What do we learn about the future? Possibly with new technology like high temperature, room temperature, superconductivity, or perhaps fusion? That's never been a more exciting time to be a scientist. And they hear about science. It's its best days are behind us. I think that's nonsense. On the other hand, we have to guard against conspiracy theories and flat earthers and all sorts of anti-vaxxers and things like that, because there is always a grain of truth.
00:50:43
Brian Keating: As Isaac Asimov said, if you believe the earth is flat, you're wrong. But if you believe it's perfectly round two, you're also wrong. But you're less wrong. And I think that what we want to do as scientists is not be held to this impossible Secret Service level of we can't make a single mistake, recognize that we do make mistakes, but science is self-correcting, and part of that self-correction mechanism has to do with being analyzed by your peers.
00:51:06
Brian Keating: Whatever Eric and I disagree about in the past, today, peer review is is perhaps, as I like to say, it's the worst system for gauging scientific process, except for all the rest. Tom.
00:51:20
Tom Bilyeu: All right. So the thing that I really want to make sure that I'm being heard on, Brian, because you keep repeating we shouldn't be held to this, team Seal team six level of perfection.
00:51:30
Tom Bilyeu: What I'm saying is silent. Science has a branding problem. You guys created a branding problem. I'll just say, during Covid, where it was, Hey, everybody, listen to us, and everything is going to be fine. Masks don't work, by the way, but save them for the health workers because they need them. It's like. So everyone's brain starts sketching out.
00:51:48
Tom Bilyeu: Also, no one has talked about social media yet. Social media that this is done. The horses are out of the stable. The toothpaste is all over the floor. The genie has flown out of the bottle. We are living in a reality where everybody is a publisher. Everybody is going to say things and people are screaming out for Candace Owens.
00:52:05
Tom Bilyeu: I'm telling you right now, as somebody, I'm almost sure I'm going to disagree with every word out of her mouth. And yet I am utterly fascinated by how she has already captured people in terms of their imagination, because this is what they want. As a marketer, I can tell you, you guys are terrible. Like, if I have to mark you, oh God, even though I look at Eric and I'm like, is this the smartest human I've ever encountered?
00:52:27
Tom Bilyeu: For sure. Do I want him at my house just whispering in my ear all the things to do? Absolutely. My life would be way better. However, from a marketing perspective. Oh dear God. So it's like we have a much bigger challenge that we have to overcome. And Candace doesn't have that problem. She's electrify. She captures what people want to hear.
00:52:46
Tom Bilyeu: And what I'm saying is the service you guys can now play in the world that we live in is to say science isn't about being right. Science is about two things. Number one, the pursuit of utility. Einstein's breakthroughs matter because they give us GPS and nuclear energy. That's the only reason that they matter. And the second thing is we know we're wrong about a whole lot of stuff.
00:53:11
Tom Bilyeu: And so our job is just go through what are all the things that we're wrong about that are stopping us. And I hope I'm not talking out of class. Eric, please, God. But Eric said to me many times, we ought to be traveling the cosmos, and we aren't, because string theory has gotten stuck. Exactly. So you have to get new ideas.
00:53:29
Tom Bilyeu: You have to break the old paradigms in order to get the utility that you want. And if we judge every idea by its utility and not by where it comes from, we'll be in a much better place.
00:53:38
Piers Morgan: You know the best thing about this debate, Tom, is that it actually, by having this kind of conversation on a platform like this, is watched globally in pretty big numbers. Now that we can probably get to where you want to get science to. And the other thing I've observed is I host a lot of debates between people who disagree, and they normally end up screaming at each other.
00:53:59
Piers Morgan: What I loved about you three was the more abusive you became in a very nice, polite manner, the more you all laughed. That is the way to debate. So thank you all very much indeed.
00:54:11
Eric Weinstein: Thank you Piers.
00:54:13
Brian Keating: Thank you.