Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2171 - Eric Weinstein & Terrence Howard
Uploaded: 2024-07-01T17:00:27.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2171 - Eric Weinstein & Terrence Howard' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-07-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2171 - Eric Weinstein & Terrence Howard' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-07-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2171 - Eric Weinstein & Terrence Howard

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Gentlemen, here we go.
Terrence, thank you for coming back.
It was a lot of fun having you on the first time.
Obviously, a lot of people wanted to talk to you after they heard all these
ideas of yours.
And then my friend Eric reached out and he said he would love to do it.
Eric, one of my most brilliant friends, tell everybody your background, like
your academic background so people understand what you...
Sure.
So I'm a Ph.D. in mathematics, specifically in mathematical physics.
I've had positions in economics, mathematics, and physics departments at places
like MIT, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard, after my doctorate, Oxford.
And I'm a podcaster in part...
Very good podcaster.
Boosted.
Bring it back to Portal.
You have a lot to do with all of these things, Joe.
Listen, one of my favorite episodes of any podcast was your interview with Werner
Herzog.
Oh, man.
That was a great episode.
Have you had him in here?
I have not, but I would love to.
Because it seems to me like that's the conversation I want to listen to.
I would like to corner him because I believe that Grizzly Man was a secret
comedy.
I really do.
There's something about the way he edited Grizzly Man.
I'm like, this motherfucker is being funny on purpose.
I know he is.
I know he's like editing these like short clips.
So it's the guy's so ridiculous that you start laughing.
I didn't see it because I...
You haven't seen Grizzly Man?
We have different tastes.
How dare you?
By the way...
It's a work of art.
I need to also just say that I was not...
Terrence, I think, you know, I heard him on TMZ.
I was not looking for a debate.
I wanted to make sure that Terrence had his position steel-manned so that
anything that he didn't know how to do within mathematics that was legit gave a
chance to put his best foot forward before he got, like, reviewed.
And I didn't ask to come on.
You asked to have me on.
I'm happy to do it because I'm a friend of the show.
Well, you reached out about the episode specifically.
Yeah, sure.
And I felt like if anybody could talk to Terrence and actually understand what
they're talking about.
Yeah, and after I watched the interview with you and Brian Keating, I realized
that you weren't trying to eviscerate me or anything like that.
You actually wanted to hear a well-put-together argument concerning these
things.
So I appreciated you taking the time to come and examine these things and love
to hear your stuff.
But I wanted to say thank you to you, Joe, and for putting me on the show
initially and for your audience for how they responded and, you know, the
support and the people that were against it because it raises the idea of
critical thinking because that's what we're supposed to be doing at this
crucial time is the critical thinking.
So I thank all the haters and I thank all the supporters and I thank the people
that's on the fence.
And I'm hoping that today we can move people over to one side or the other.
Well, at least we can better inform people.
And Terrence, it's been really cool to meet you because I've heard about you
and you're an exceptional human being.
You really are.
You're very, very unusual.
For a guy to be that good of an actor, I almost always dismiss them as being a
moron or at least crazy or at least crazy, you know, like, but in a different
kind of crazy, like, like, you're super friendly and you're, it's, your recall
is insane.
But I wanted you to talk to someone who's had a deep education in it and let's
see, like, what, what he believes about these ideas and maybe you guys can
collaborate or just, like, let's start from Eric.
Like, what at, what out of the podcast that I did with Terrence really stood
out with you or something that you wanted to.
Well, what I thought is, I got to, I have to be honest, I've been listening.
I was not so happy with certain things that happened in the podcast.
And then I started hearing the response to it.
And I was much more infuriated by the response than anything I heard in the
podcast because I thought that a lot of people just use their position of
greater formal education in some of these areas to be jerks.
And to be really dismissive and pretend that they couldn't understand things
that you were saying.
And I didn't.
No, I'm not kidding.
I heard.
Because I think this thing goes out to millions of people and whatever, let me
just say something else positive about Terrence.
What he just did was very big.
He said, thank you to the haters.
I haven't gotten to that plane of existence yet.
You've got to stay offline.
I keep telling you.
No, no, no, no.
Some people just shouldn't be reading the comments.
It's not the online stuff.
It's the academic stuff.
The academic stuff is really vicious stuff.
And it's always with like a pretend smile on the face.
So it's the worst.
And what I thought I would do is I can't critique a man if I haven't built a
model of what he's actually saying in my own mind that he agrees with.
Like, in other words, if I start coming after Terrence and saying, I think this
stuff here is bullshit, and he's like, I didn't say that.
That's what you inferred from what I wrote.
Then I've just basically insulted a person incorrectly.
And so, and if I praise something, I don't know whether I built that in my mind
or he built it.
So the first thing I thought we would do is I would try to recapitulate what I
understand of Terrence's sort of grand arc and see whether or not I can steel
man it.
And then Terrence can say yes, and then I can evaluate it.
But until we do that, I don't know whether I'm actually reacting to the real
man.
I think that's really important.
And what you said about the viciousness of academics, I think that's just a
human thing that exists at the highest levels where people are doing something
very difficult.
And there's a lot of stress and anxiety involved.
And you attack even your peers because your biggest fear is your peers
attacking you.
And usually, generally, it happens with people that are getting more
recognition than someone who thinks they should be getting more think deserve.
Like, someone thinks they should be getting more recognition.
They see someone getting recognition, especially for something that perhaps
could be controversial.
And then they start attacking them viciously.
But it's generally people that wish they got more attention.
It's part of the thing.
Sure.
If you think about it, though, if you think about the number of people in
podcasting who sort of have tried to lift each other up, it's pretty good,
right?
Yes.
Like, you, Lex, Sam Harris, all sorts of people have been good to each other.
And one of the reasons that is is that there's enough money in it.
What happened in academics is that it went into a contractive state in which
you killed or you died, right?
And so, basically, the ethics of academics plummeted after the early 70s.
It was always, it was always very competitive.
But really what it is is it's the Hunger Games.
And, you know, in acting, for example, if there's money among the elite set,
people have trouble with each other.
Same thing in tech.
They kind of fight each other, but they all get rich together and then they
bury hatchets and things like that.
You don't see that as much in academics because it's kill or be killed.
And so we've had an implosion ethically.
And so one of the things that I wanted to do was to try to just begin by steel
manning because I've been really disappointed in a lot of the critique that Terrence
has experienced.
The funny thing is the scientists that attacked, most of them was upset that I
got into their lane and climbed into their lane talking about science.
But here, they're not inside a lab somewhere.
They're not in Cambridge or Oxford somewhere.
They're on social media.
They're on the entertainment world.
And I've never sat up and said, oh, you're full of this because you have no
business doing this.
But they got upset that I'm talking about the foundational problems associated
with mathematics that's held us back.
But I think people really care about these ideas, though.
What they should do is talk about the ideas.
It's the personal attacks that are attached to the ideas by people that want to
be taken seriously.
It fucks the whole thing up because, like, either you're correct or you're
incorrect.
Tell me what you think is right, and then you tell me what you think is right.
Let's work this out.
But this personal attack shit, if you're talking about something as complex as
the things that you discussed on this podcast, there's no room for bullshit.
There's no room for bullshit.
You're dealing with such highly complex ideas.
It says that, and to his credit, you know, I found that interview you were
doing with that woman where you're wearing a wig.
I was doing the movie.
I was in the middle of doing fight night, and they had a shooting.
I had to do the interview in between shots.
It's amazing.
It's an amazing interview with the wig on.
It's amazing.
Well, I remember that line from High Heels, you could put that wig head on your
head.
But, bro, you could pull that wig off.
You could just start to speak it at Oxford with that wig on.
Fuck it.
But anyway, so Terrence was there, wigged out, and he was saying this.
Wigged out, literally?
Literally wigged out.
And he was saying this thing.
He said, look, all I care about is the truth.
And that freed me up to come on, right?
Because the spectrum of Terrence, from the best to the worst, is a broad
spectrum.
And he seriously wants to improve what he's doing.
He cares about it.
And if I can play a part in that, I think he's...
I love you.
I want to offer to you, I want to be able to show you the things that I tried
to show Neil deGrasse Tyson
that he would not even really take a look at.
But no, he did take a look at it, right?
He responded in a long video recently.
Yeah, but his response was disingenuous.
Guys, may I make a recommendation?
Let's start with the ideas, because I think we all care about those.
Yes, for sure.
But hold, please, because this is an important thing that just came out.
He was so disingenuous, because I sent him a long email after he sent me back
the red line
thing, thanking him for reviewing it and saying, look forward to when we can
discuss these things,
because I sent the treaties to him so we could discuss that on the show.
His whole point was, I'm going to bring you on my show, and we're going to
talk.
So here's the stuff that we're going to talk about that I would like to talk
about.
He never followed up from that point forward, just sent one-line emails.
Any other thing you got, you got to go to somebody else.
So he's pretended like, oh, I was trying to be, you know, very helpful, but
that's not what
the email trails show.
So he did make this one very large response, though, right?
He did.
He did go over the treaties, very, like, all the red line stuff.
He only has so much time, you know?
He might be in a position to defend him, but he might be in a position where he's
like, look,
I just said what I said about all this stuff.
Good luck.
I don't have the time to, like, sit here and discuss these things in depth.
Maybe that's possible.
That's great.
But it's like you invited me to come and do your show.
I put this stuff together to come and talk to you on your show, and then there's
no follow-up
with the show.
Got it.
So where's the beer?
I understand it.
I mean, I understand your perspective for sure.
It's like, come on, man.
If you're going to do it, do it.
He got to a point where it's like a thing where he thinks it's ridiculous, and
he doesn't
want to engage it on the show.
Ridiculous.
Amen.
And I believe that, but if you've got 97, 98 patents and four supersymmetrical
systems
that you're claiming you have, and all you need is someone to review them.
I'm going to have to jump in.
I don't want to do it this way.
That'd be great.
Listen, we'