Decoding the Gurus - The Rise of the Science Populists with Sam Gregson and Tim Henke

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

In this interview episode, we are joined by physicists Sam Gregson (Bad Boy of Science YouTube channel) and Tim Henke to examine the rise of science populism: a style of science communication that borrows the tactics of political populism, including grievance narratives, institutional distrust, and conspiratorial framing, while presenting its advocates as lone truth-tellers battling a corrupt academic elite.We discuss how DTG favourites like Sabine Hossenfelder and Eric Weinstein, as well as fresh new faces Brian Keating and Avi Loeb, deploy selective truths about physics to fuel self-aggrandising, anti-expert narratives.Along the way, we also cover stuff like why “physics hasn’t progressed in 50 years”, cranks are useful props for populist arguments, and the strange obsession with Nobel Prizes.If you are interested in guru dynamics, science communication, and physics crankery, this might be an episode for you.LinksBad Boy of Science (Sam Gregson)Tim's Profile WebsiteBad Boy of Science – The Rise of Physics PopulisersTheories of Everything (Kurt Jaimungal)Losing the Nobel Prize – Brian KeatingInto the Impossible (Brian Keating)Sabine Hossenfelder’s YouTube ChannelThe Portal (Eric Weinstein)The Galileo Project (Avi Loeb)Sean Carroll – Mindscape / Preposterous UniverseNot Even Wrong (Peter Woit)

The Guru's Nylode Decoding Nor Supplementary Material Edition, a interview episode, Matt. We occasionally do this. We have been known to do it. And it's your job now. We have to introduce the people that we have with us today. Who have you got for us, Professor Brian? Wow, that's a brilliant introduction, Chris.

Absolutely no information content. No funny little scripts. They know what it is. They heard the introduction news. Don't worry. Look, let me take care of things. Well, look, people know that the guru's fear, it's a rich tapestry. There are different categories.

There are different genres. And a recurring type that we've come across are physics gurus, physics influences. And, you know, we've dealt with them. We've dealt with them before. Eric Weinstein, of course. And here he is, Eric, the speak point. No, yeah. We couldn't book him.

Couldn't book him. But we got the next best thing, maybe even better. Who knows? A couple of physics, P.S. PhDs. One of them is Sam Gregson, chap we've known for quite some time, friend of the pod, I think it's fair to say. Yeah. And he's brought along a good mate. Tim Henke. Did I pronounce you the last name right, Tim? Pretty close, yeah. Henkin. Right. And as I said, both of you got PhDs in physics. Sam did his at Cambridge and also at the CERN large particle collider. And Tim,

I know that you're currently a postdoc at the University of Porto in Portugal. And And you're working in and I do not understand any of these things. But I'm going to read them out. Quantum moduli spaces. There's a whole bunch of acronyms there. QFT and so on. Algebraic geometry. That sounds like something Eric would like.

And yeah, mass and physics. So yeah, welcome, welcome to both of you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. And Sam also has a YouTube channel worth mentioning. Bad boy of science. We've shodied him out before.

We're not going to shout you out again. So, you know, if people want to go over it, you know, I've been shouting you guys out. I shouted you out on the, you know, the Professor Dave show. That's right. I heard that. Eric has joined us together. You know, he's tagged all of us together.

You guys, me, bad stats. Apparently we are the hegemony that keeps quantum gravity in place in the academy. I don't know how we do it. I don't know when we did it. But, you know, congratulations to us. I feel like you guys do it more than us. Like, you're more responsible for that. I think you might have been higher up on the list, though.

I don't know how he's how he's done it. Maybe best for us, who knows? Well, yeah, he's less qualified, but Chris is more annoying. So I think that's what lead billing there. So, you know, Sam, you've been paying attention to the same physics influences that we have because you work in this space. You know, you're a popularizer of science. You do comedy and stuff like that, basically doing outreach between the physics world

and the rest of us who are trying to understand it. And like I know that, you know, there's. there are other popularizers out there. I presume that there are many good ones as well as your good self. But there are also ones that, yeah, you don't have quite such a high opinion. We could say that. I think that's fair. And Tim, in your case, how did you get dragged into noticing these people?

So that's Sam's fools, mostly. I'm worried about this. It all gets pushed onto me. Eventually, someone's going to start to take notice, right? Who is this guy who's a, you know, the centre of the spotlight. All these arms spreading out into this debunking sphere. We're going to have to deal with it.

So I had been following Zabina Hossenfeller for a long time. Initially somebody who more or less thought that they were criticisms worth listening to, but wrong criticisms, slowly devolving into sort of really, well, let's say guru rhetoric. Yeah. So I've been documenting that. quite regularly. And then Sam picked that up when I've been writing those comments and at some

point he reached out. Hey, it's one at me. Let's let's get him on board. Let's have a chat. And so we at some point formulated a project on a specific subcategory of gurus, which we call the science populists, people who use tactics and the politics of populism in their science communication for their own purposes and we're currently developing a video series on the main culprits in that movement. I think I saw the first video in that series. That is our... I find the features convincing, but maybe you can summarize what is a physics populist?

So we kind of realized there's a new kind of science communicator abroad. So previous science influencers, if you want to think about people like Carl Sagan, you want to talk about people like Brian Cox, maybe Katie Mac. They were kind of marked by their enthusiasm. They wanted to get across the wonder of science. They wanted to educate the audience. But what we've noticed recently is that there seems to be a kind of explosion of physics influences and science influences who are more defined by their cynicism.

Their biggest content, their most popular content is all just dumping on institutions, pushing conspiratorial narratives, propping up cranks. And they all seem to operate in a kind of similar way. They mislead the audience with half-truths about. problems in science. Sometimes they raise good points, sometimes not so good points. And then they use these kind of half-truths, often which they've almost brought into existence themselves, to cast conspiratorial narratives about scientists and suggest that they are the only ones who are looking at these problems that they've identified seriously. And then further off those conspiratorial

narratives, they then use those as justifications for either openly demanding or kind of laying the groundwork for radical policy reforms in science. So we felt there was quite a few of these people abroad. We feel that Sabina Hosenfeld is the archetype of this type of science populist. And we notice that a lot of these people, they seem to become popular very, very recently with the rise of populism in the political sphere. And I think it's interesting to consider whether they're a reaction to what's going on in the political space, whether they rely on the same influences and the same sort of incentives.

But I saw a lot of mirroring between the populist politician and how they behave, dumping on institutions, installing themselves as a solution, and suggesting policy prescriptions that would usually just make everything worse. So we see this with Sabine, for example, she will tell you things about particle colliders, about the state of string theory, which we can get into later down the line, which are not exactly true. But she will then use that to say, scientists are up to no good, they're defrauding the public, they're stealing your money, they're doing all these bad things, and then she will make the next leap from there to, well, if they're doing all of these bad things, this all needs to be defunded, we shouldn't be paying for this, taxpayers are weary about this,

defund, do this instead. So that kind of three-step. Half-truths leads to conspiratorial narratives about science and science institutions, leads to terrible policy prescriptions that just so happened to align with everything that they believe, but would make everything worse. So we thought that aligned quite well with what we see in the world. the political sphere and hence science populace. It also aligns very closely with our concept of gurus more generally, which is anti-institutionalism, burn it all down, they're all corrupt, and presenting themselves as being the real source. And in the case of science populace, the real science is happening on their podcasts. If you go to your tick list on the Gorometer,

I think you can probably tick off every single one for the science populace. It's There's a very strong overlap. I think what's also important is that the science populists, they don't just exist separately, but they fit very well into the political populism movement as well, in the sense that they complement the attacks on institutions and the discrediting of experts extremely well. And this is a sort of symbiotic relationship

where they feed of the distrust sewn by the populist politicians, and in turn they help discredit experts by presenting themselves as, oh, I'm a former expert taking down the corrupt institutions from the outside. I mean, it's not a new thing in a way, is it? Because if you've had issues like climate change or vaccines, of course, which are issues that sort of intrinsically, I guess, have a political aspect to it, right? Or become political.

And that, I suppose, is part of the reason it kind of incites this anti-science populism. But physics is a different case, right? especially theoretical physics and so on, because it doesn't intrinsically have those social or political ramifications, right? So that's what makes it kind of weird. I mean, that's a very interesting thing, because climate change, there were several, well, there were quite a few sort of scientists who were specifically designated as the climate science debunker, right? And they're Christopher Monkton, etc. There were all these guys who had, as their job, to present to the public narratives about how climate change was all wrong. And we can all sort of understand how that came to be, right?

Who funded that? Most people can understand. And here it's quite a different story because none of this sort of obviously relates in any specific way to political movements. It's just more the general vibe, the general idea of how experts are not to be trusted and all that stuff. and it's this very common narrative that you'll hear, which will push back against latest. Fundamental physics hasn't done anything in 80 years or 70 years, which is a very silly line, an extremely silly line, that you'll hear all over. And if you go to any comment section, any reply section on Twitter, any comment section on YouTube, you'll see people repeating that claim over and over again.

And they always get it from these science populists. And they sell this narrative, like, science has stalled, and therefore civilized. is stalling and therefore, et cetera. And that gets very much into the populist narrative, of course. And it really gets into Eric with his, oh, we'll never reach the stars if we keep on believing that the speed of light is the speed limit, blah, blah, blah, kind of thing. It seems like there's a confluence of sympathetic motivations because, like, on the one hand, you have the fact that the people involved by and large are people of very healthy ego.

those, right, and who seem to enjoy attention and hold themselves and their position in high regard. Let's put it like that, right, to be kind of them. And then you have the fact that the algorithmic ecosystem currently rewards this kind of engagement, right? Like Angela Collier talked about her videos where it sounds like she's, you know, being critical physics, much more attention. So I'm not saying that this is like YouTube foisting an anti-science agenda. I'm I think it's purely just sensationalism is something that grabs people attention. And then you also have the fact that there is an agenda from various people, including Peter Thiel, who employed Eric, right, to attack institutions and undermine academia

or mainstream institutional pillars, right, for whatever reason, whether they be political or like just libertarian-style ideological opposition. So I feel like it kind of results that sometimes it's hard to disentangle what is causing what, right? Because like it's enough, I think, that Eric, by his personality, would be doing what he's doing in any case. But he was employed for like over a decade by Peter Thiel as well, right? And like Sabina definitely seems to have lent into the algorithm. them, but I imagine that is a lucrative path to go down as well. So this is one of the things where sometimes people say to us that we should focus more on the underlying network effects,

but it's, to use a term that is often abused, like, overdetermined. I got to jump in here too, because I agree that there's a confluence of different causes, right, coming together. And I think at this point, maybe it's the internet or the way the infosphere is moving. But it's kind of enough, those conspiratorial narratives, the anti-institutional narratives, those self-aggrandizing people who are kind of entertaining to a certain kind of person. That's enough. You don't need the stuff we have with climate change or vaccines to get people on board with this. But there's another aspect, too, we haven't covered, which is that when Chris and I started the decoding the gurus thing, we talked about the idea that the gurus provide Ersatz wisdom, right? They give the feeling,

the feeling of truthiness, the feeling of great insights, right? And this is one of the appeals of conspiracy theories, right? They give you that feeling that you figured it all out. Now, as someone who watches physics podcast myself or your YouTube videos, whatever, and I watch some very dry and very serious ones, they're very hard to understand, right, for the rest of us. And, you know, they're just naturally unsatisfying in a way because there isn't an easy, palatable, you know, penny drop kind of,

oh, I see it all clearly now like Neo seeing through the Matrix. Neo seen through the Matrix, for the Matrix. Matrix. Sorry. I'm sorry to correct you there, Chris, but we'll let that go. But, you know, I think Kurtzomungle's channel is a good example of this. I mean, you know, he does get some decent names on sometimes, but he's got a lot of cranks on there as well.

And, you know, a crank is offering that. They're offering that. I've figured out how God and quantum mechanics and, and spiritual consciousness are all connected. People can go, wow, and you get the Joe Rogan kind of reaction. So I think just simple entertainment has got to be a big ingredient. I've been discussing with Tim. I call it physics as WWE wrestling, right?

It has to be made more exciting. If I'm doing a two-hour video on the Higgs potential and why it might be important, people are, I don't really understand this. It makes my head hurt. It makes my head hurt. I'm going to go watch something by Kurt where he's just waffling along with Chris Langen. Like, I totally understand that. One of the things we have to be a little bit careful of, and Tim, I'm sure we'll jump in on this as well,

is we have to be a little bit careful when we're making this video series and making these kind of accusations going to motives because it's very, as you said, overdetermined. You know, what is going on here? Is this people trying to go direct to the public because they couldn't win the argument in academia? Is this that they're pissed off because, you know, they got kicked out of the field where you might think with kind of Sabine or Eric, where he feels like he's not being listened to, is this audience capture, is this horribly naive political views? I mean, you see Sabine post things about the Nazis, he's been left wing and this kind of thing. All of these things

are an influence. So we can't possibly know exactly why they're doing it. So we're quite careful that we don't go too much into the motivations because the results are the results. As you say, would these people be saying anything different if they were. being paid directly by Peter Thiel? Like, probably not. What they do, undermining institutions, dumping on scientists. These are things that Peter Thiel would enjoy, whether he's paying for it or not. So I don't think we necessarily need that hypothesis in there.

And there's a little bit of a danger with it. If you say things that you can't necessarily back up, and we had a little issue with Professor Dave saying this, that Sabine is being paid, he's a fascist, he's been paid by Peter Teal. If you say things that you can't necessarily back up, that's obviously going to detract from what you're saying and make it look like this is a hit piece. We're just going after these people. They're saying nonsense. You're saying nonsense. It all comes out in the wash. So we have to be very, very careful with the motivations. And I think it's better to focus on the political projects

and the outcomes that these things feed into because they're always going to be the same, whether the people are doing this because they're getting a big bag of money or they're doing it because they really truly believe that they're saving physics. The outcomes end up being the same. Let me be Professor Dave's devil here. I've argued against this with Blint Debo, but I am curious to hear what you or Tim think about it. So the counter argument that is made by Dave and others is like, people like Eric and Sabina are winning in terms of like audience engagement and attention.

They have millions of subscribers. They are like frequently sought out for big podcasts or whatever. And Professor Dave, as an example, is somebody with a very large audience, right? So he made a video about Lab Lake with Philip recently. And the first three quarters of it are him going through the evidence in his style, right, which is very aggressive and so on. But part of his argument when I've seen him discuss this is we need people that are going to do that. And maybe not everyone needs to do that. but some people need to be just directly accusing people of things and highlighting that because

they're doing that. So what about the kind of argument that like it's effective? So if we don't do it, that you kind of hamstring your reach. I see what you're saying. And I do think his style is good and I think that is very useful. And by the way, I don't feel like I have to kind of police everything he says before, before I go on and support it. But I think what he does is very good.

I think it's very important. I think it's fantastic to be able to almost. shortcut that problem that we have where we don't have a big platform. Sabine can dump on stuff and scientists don't have that platform to push back and Dave is providing that. So I'm not in any way denigrating it. But I do think if you say things that you can't back up, then you're going into an awkward area. You're going to lose people then because it feels like it's just an attack. So I think you can do what he does, be very cutting, do the WWF thing back. But I think when you're making accusations or claims that you can't necessarily ground, then that's where you're jumping over.

You can still do the jokes. You can still be very cutting. You can still be very barbed. But I think just when you go a little bit over to making specific accusations, these people are being funded, that's where you're doing exactly the same as they're doing and you're maybe falling off the cliff a little bit and losing me. Very quickly becomes a mud slinging contest where sort of you're saying, oh, you're just corrupt and you've been bought by these people. And they're saying, oh, you're corrupt and you've been bought by these people and it becomes a very unproductive conversation and certainly you'll never convince anyone to switch sides.

I understand why Dave is doing what he's doing and I'm happy that he takes his platform to do these important things. But I don't think he's going to be convincing a lot of people who were on the fence about Zabina to viewer in a different light. We have raised this point with like the Kurt Jarmengal he kind of insiduated that Kurt had been paid off by Eric

but my image is that Kurt is sincere in his credulity, right? Because I don't think that Chris Langham paid off him to promote his particular theory. So, yeah, I'm just playing devil's advocate. No, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. And yeah, Dave does fantastic stuff. But the memes and the jokes and the cutting stuff is absolutely brilliant. It's just that one specific claim where I think we don't necessarily have the evidence to specifically back that up. And we don't need it that what they're doing is exactly what Peter Thiel would want anyway, regardless of whether he's paying or not.

All right. Enough about Dave. I might ask you, Tim, to give us a little bit of a tour of some of these, you know, main names, characters that we're talking about. I mean, people listen to our show will be familiar with Sabina, with Eric Weinstein. Kurt Jamungle, maybe less so. Maybe less so. But, you know, I think it's helpful. So maybe you could just tell us how, I mean, what's some examples?

and how each of those, each of these people have been attacking, maligning scientists and science in general and how they have a preference for these heterodox ways of looking at things. So, yeah, we've mentioned Zabina already a couple of times. And the main thing that we are interested in with Zabina is there is like this half-truth narratives that she presents. So when I was living in Denmark, I was living in a college dorm and there was somebody who was considered himself of science and things.

enthusiast and he liked to watch these kind of things. At some point we had a conversation about string theory. It was like, oh, string theory is all bullocks and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I like to push back against these things a little bit. I'm not a string theorist myself. I think it's interesting and I benefit from some of the mathematical trickle down stuff. But I'm not especially invested into it being true or not. But there are a lot of sort of reasons why string theory is interesting.

And it's very funny when somebody comes to me. me and says, oh, it's all pollocks and none of it's reasonable. So I mentioned some of the positive aspects about string theory, but some of the stuff that we can learn about it, we're trying to understand what should quantum gravity look like. It would be silly to have the one example that we have of a functional quantum gravity theory, just throw it away and never look at it again, because we don't necessarily have the experimental confirmation. It can teach us a lot about how quantum gravity is supposed to work. That's just one example, and then there's the ADS-C-F-T duality, blah, blah, blah.

There's a lot of interesting spin-offs, even if you don't believe it's veracity of string theory. That's what they're worth studying on their own. And he was really shocked to hear about these things. He was shocked that there were things to say in defense of string theory. He just never heard of this. He watched a lot of science, communication content, just never heard any positive case for string theory. And I think that's very illustrative of the content that these people produce, where they only present sort of these criticisms of this,

what they consider it sort of mainstream, because they want to present a narrative. And that's very much, Zabina is in all situations. It's the string theory thing. It's in her quantum foundations content. It's in her Collider content, which Sam will happily talk to you about for as long as she wants. where she presents her argument, and that's it.

And the opposite case, why other people believe something else, never enters the communication. And that's where you stop being a science communicator. Because as a science communicator, you're welcome to share your opinions, and you're welcome to say, here's what I believe. But you should explain why the consensus is what the consensus is. Otherwise, you're not doing science communication. You're proselytizing.

So Kurt has very much this same tendency where he'll invite people on to just shit on whatever part of the mainstream they don't like. And then he gets them talking about, oh, string theory is bollocks, oh, standard quantum mechanics is bollocks, general relativity is bollocks. They all contradict each other. He doesn't care at all that they all say different things. And he never connects any interview to the next interview. He just wants people railing against the mainstream. Very occasionally, he actually gets like a big star from the mainstream. He gets Leonard Suskin's Sean Carroll.

And Sean Carroll. And he does the sneakiest things. It's really, really slimy, where he plays fairly nicely in the interview itself. And then he cuts away to an intermezzo where he just calls them full of shiz. And then he continues the interview like normal. he asked a very reasonable question to Suskind about the states of string theory. And then Suskin replies, a very reasonable reply, and says, oh, you know, like string theory is a pretty broad subject.

It's not one specific theory. It's a class of theories. And we can learn from blah, blah, blah, et cetera. And then he cuts away and says, this is bullshit. You can't just call everything string theory. Like that's just claiming victory after the fact. And he's very much more interested into, like, who is on the winning team than actually what is true. And he doesn't even put this to Suskind.

He just adds it to call him full of shit where he can't defend himself. It's really nasty. It's very slimy. So I think the big thing here is that they're all pushing narratives that potentially the audience don't even realize are happening because they're not qualified to be able to understand the grounding that's going on behind these in very, very, very. niche complicated subjects. And that's not the fault of the audience at all. These are very, very difficult subjects. People spend their entire lives trying to understand them. But I kind of liken it to lawyering, right? When I hear a Sabine video, it's like a lawyer speaking. Here is the prosecution saying

what's going wrong in science, but there is no defense. This is not, this is why they're doing it. This is why it's important. This is why they think that they should do this and get the money for it. that part is missing, completely missing. And because it's completely missing, she's almost forced to say that they're up to no good. Because if they have no good reason for doing what they're doing, but they're taking this public money, then they must be up to no good, right?

And if they're up to no good, then that means something has to be done. Somebody has to step in. Somebody has to say something. Why is nobody saying anything? And that is their role. And this is what we see with all of them. because they don't present the two sides of the argument correctly and explain why the consensus is the consensus, because they don't like it and their audience can't judge that they haven't done that, they're almost forced into these conspiratorial narratives. And when you are in the field and you know both sides of it, you can see this clearly in action. However, if you're not in the field and you don't have those both sides, then the prosecution sounds damning, right? There is no defense. There's nothing there. They can't answer.

notice in interactions with Sabina online that like whenever pressed on that point that like you are presenting your opponents as like not just wrong but like as fundamentally ill motivated and not caring about truth right that she would very much retreat to it's a systemic criticism about you know like things like publication bias or about people being predictive over theories which are all genuine things but absolutely when you look at her rhetoric uh you know it is a that. It's saying somebody is lying to you and the system, there's no incentive and it's all about getting funding. And then, so it's kind of like this slipping between two things that you're saying. And I've noticed like not being someone with a physics background or particularly

well versed in physics in general that oftentimes the physicist that has put in as a stand in when there is like a rare confrontation, right, like Sean Carroll and Eric. Weinstein on Pierce Morgan's show. It's always the worst case or a terrible argument that they've made. But in that case, Sean Carroll was presented as like the defender of string theory. And he very clearly was saying, well, I'm not a string theorist. And actually most of my colleagues aren't string theorists. But, you know, I think to defend them since they're not here, like they are doing this

kind of thing. And I don't think it's that much of a problem. But it's this simplified narrative where there's a couple of people. Ed Witten. Yeah. I don't know what Ed Whitten's contribution is, but I know he's a villain. Eric Wynne. He's,

Eric calls him the Voldemort of particle physics, I think. Right. Yeah. In the Pantheon, right? And it's just interesting to me, like, what you say, that, like, it very much is personality driven. And it fits with the same way that the Lomblick or the pandemic or climate science, it very much focuses on individual science, right?

Like Fauci, he is the man. that made the coronavirus and the whole artifice of researchers in that field, it kind of boils down to Christian Anderson and Fauci and Eddie Holmes, maybe, and like one Chinese researcher, right? So, yeah, this W.W.E style personification is accurate. And you saw it in your reaction, on your interaction with Sabine recently, right? Is that it wasn't just that you have a disagreement as two intelligent people having a disagreement. it's that you, Chris, do not care about scientific advancement.

You don't care. You don't give a shit because you are disagreeing with her prescriptions. Now, that is not how scientists talk. Scientists say, look, I disagree. I think we should do this. And here are my reasons. I understand your reasons, but I disagree with them because ABC, right? And now we have a discussion and we work out what the solution is.

You don't say, here are my prescriptions and yours are bollocks and you don't care. And that's what she does all the time. That's what they all do. And this is the big problem. Because the audience don't have the other side. It's totally not on the audience because they're not particle physicists. And this is a very complicated field to have the other side. But these people feel empowered.

They feel like they have a good grasp on what's going on in a very difficult field. As Matt kind of said, you feel empowered. You feel like, wow, I know everything about particle physics. I don't need to know much because it's all bollocks and they're all stealing my money. But you feel like you have a good grasp on things because you haven't been given the other side. And that's how these people operate, unfortunately. Let's just complete our survey because just for the benefit of the audience. Because I think there's a couple of names there that people might not be familiar with that you guys could tell them about.

So we've got Brian Keating and Avi Loeb. And as well as those two, we've got people that we've talked about before, but I think it's worth mention them again. More on the in the crank, full on crank category. that is Terrence Howard. And I always forget his name. Chris said his name before. Chris Langan. Chris Langen, thank you very much.

So Chris Langen and Terrence Howard. So yeah, four people. Maybe you again, Tim. Maybe just give us a quick summary of who they are. I'm going to give Keating and Lerb to Sam because he knows their content better than I do. Terence Howard is an actor who has convinced himself that all of mathematics is wrong

and that one times one is two instead of one. and for reasons that are, I mean, I wish I could say they are beyond me. Sadly, I understand it. But for reasons that I wish were beyond me, he gets invited to all kinds of podcasts to talk about how he believes that one times one should be two. And therefore, he has all kinds of physics predictions, quote, unquote, resulting from his belief that one times one is two. And he gets to talk to people and Eric Weinstein pretend. sense that he's very profound in his criticisms.

He's very much on the crank side, though, isn't he? Yeah. Yeah, but he has the same views as these more respectable figures in the sense that he would also say that they're trying to shut me down. You know, the institutions aren't open to genuinely groundbreaking ideas. So it fits. I wouldn't say that he has the same views, but he has the same rhetoric. He definitely has the same rhetoric and the same defences.

And you'll have seen that Eric uses him as a springboard, right? So I think you guys covered the Rogan discussion where they dragged on Terrence Howard for a second time. And then Eric turns up as the elder statesman to oversee this young pop who's now come into this environment. But basically all it was was an excuse for Eric to use Terence Howard as a crowbar to say, look, the institutions are not listening to this guy. Look how he's just like me. Look how the problems are real. There was no real discussion of Terence Howard isn't saying it. anything sensible. It was just Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Brian Keating, some other podcasts,

used him as a crowbar to say, look, this is what's going on. Institutions are not listening. This is the big problem. That's all it really was. They were just using him as a wedge. And how about Brian Keating since he came up? What's his deal? Keating is an interesting one, right? So basically, my first thought with him is that he's kind of just an empty vessel for Eric and his right wing friends. So he will bring on Eric and he will stand for him to what is an absolutely absurd degree. It's basically like an oil massage live on YouTube. It's concerning, right? So to some extent, you can just say, what is he really saying? He's basically just a channel for Eric. It's almost as bad as Kurt Joe Mungle. Yeah. And also, he has his

kind of bug bear. So he seems to have a really big bug bear. He seems to be a very religious, which is absolutely fine. My partner is religious, no problem with that at all. But he will suggest that the kind of academy is sidelining religion. They're not taking it seriously. He's had videos recently saying scientists are running away from atheism. He goes on Prager You all the time and says that, you know, people thinking about the multiverse is exactly the same as people thinking about God. So he has these various bug bears, which are just nonsense. And then he will also appear on Prager-U saying things like, follow the science is bad. Now, of course, in a kind of banal way, we shouldn't trust scientists. They should always be, they should always be open to criticism,

there should be public debate. But I think we all know in the recent political milieu that follow the science was attack Fauci. He is the science. You know, these right-wing narratives of, well, we shouldn't follow the science. So he tends to appear on these very kind of culture war, right-wing things consistently, bashing that religion is being pushed down in the United States, peering on Prager-U, going at these statements of support for science, appearing with Eric and saying, you know, oh, it's so bad that you're being shut out by the institutions, and defending him in ways which are just so ridiculously absurd that it makes him look ridiculous. So these are my concerns with Brian, really. When you're doing science content,

which he can do very good science content. There's no doubt about that. But then when it's interspersed with dragging on exactly the same figures, Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, consistently to talk about how they're great thinkers and the edifice of the academy and human knowledge and human civilization is falling apart, I think you really are then pushing a narrative, which needs to be looked at.

I think we would really be remiss if we covered Brian without covering his origin story. Please. So Brian used to be like a very respectable sign. I mean, he wasn't sort of like a giant in the field, but he did sort of normal good science as part of an experiment. And he did an experiment that was supposed to, I think, give us some very interesting insights into cosmic microwave background radiation stuff, if I'm correct about that. Then he wrote a book, which to me is incredibly funny, about losing the Nobel or missing the Nobel or something like that. He wrote a book about missing the Nobel Prize. And I just want to contextualize this.

He was doing serious scientific work, but he wasn't the architect of this experiment, right? He was some, in a non-denegraising way, he was a worker bee. Like people who are needed to make experiments running. He wasn't the boss of the experiment. He would never have been considered for the Nobel, right? The people who come up with the experiment are the people who get to know. Also, the experiment didn't pan out. He didn't lose the Nobel Prize.

The experiment didn't work. Like, what are you talking about? Anyway, he wrote that whole book, and he got saltier and solterier. And then I think he did his podcast. He started doing this podcast thing and this science communication thing, and he sort of slowly spiraled further and further into a crank series into the form that we can see now. And it all started with this hilarious book about losing a novel that he was never going to guess.

Yeah. Thanks for reminding me about that, because that delusional belief that you were, you know, deserving of one, if not multiple mobile prizes. I mean, it appears a lot. It appears a lot in the people we're talking about. I saw on Reddit, he has an IMA from eight years ago, right? And it's from him, Dr. Brian Keating. And it's, I am Brian Keating and an astronomer who lost a Nobel Prize,

it asked me anything. But in that little blur of he's got it says, he's talking about the experiment and so on. It says, suddenly on March 17th, 2014, we saw what we and the whole scientific community wanted to see. The world went crazy. We were on the front pages of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, and soon a well-produced viral video appeared on YouTube. Made by Stanford University, it explained our discovery's significance and quickly garnered two million hits. In between creating the telescope and the announcement of the Nobel-worthy discovery, I'd been

edged out of the leadership of this experiment and blah, blah, blah. But the thing that strikes me there is you see that influencer thing. How many views the video got? I was on the front cover. And then the notion is that you're entitled to a Nobel Prize. And the funny thing for me is it does feel a little bit childish, the amount of focus that is placed on Nobel prizes. You know, I've heard almost all of these people talk about Nobel prizes.

And it's like, aren't there other? Aren't there just internal physics prizes that people get for some nice presentation at a conference? but it's like they either get the most famous prize in the popular imagination for science or what's the point? And I've never heard normal scientists talk about, you know, well, I was really aiming for the Nobel Prize. There's always this really interesting dichotomy as well, isn't there, that the institutions are broken, you can't trust anyone in it, how could they possibly judge my ideas? but I really, really, really want them to tell me that I'm in the most amazing. So it's like, come on, guys. Which one is it?

Pick a lane. You might put that me for invoking Schrodinger in this podcast. See if you do it right first. Because it feels a little bit like Schrodinger's cat. You might have heard of this. Because they can at once say the institutions are decrepit line. If they endorse you, it's almost a sign that you're. definitely grew up.

But like with Avai Loeb, who we haven't talked about yet, or any of them or Hooperman, the fact that they have credentials from a elite institution, be it Stanford or Cambridge or whatever, that is taken as, well,

they wouldn't give them those credentials if they're not legitimate. So in our comment section today, Matt, we released a video. And someone was like, do you think Stanford would let Hooperman promote things that aren't true and it's like it's so funny they

simultaneously really really bank on the credentials of institutions at the same time as saying everybody else in them is a dirty liar The epitome of this is Eric of course who goes on all podcasts I was going to say as with so many things who goes on every podcast you've ever heard of

to complain about how nobody wants to listen to his theory and if they just took one day to hear him out, then they would all be convinced that he has the theory of everything and we could finally reach the stars, et cetera. And then he turns around and he brags about all the highly reputable institutions where he gets to give talks and all the physics departments where he gets to give seminars. And he doesn't appear to see the irony there.

And he doesn't appear to see the blatant inconsistency. No, no. The other smaller example, it doesn't really compare to Eric, but then nobody can. I was just reminded of Sabina's recent thing where she, I think she had an adjunct appointment somewhere. It might not have even been an adjunct. She had an affiliation. So she was not paid by the institute, but she was allowed to use their name. And she was on her website as sort of an external faculty member, something like that.

How do you not remember Chris and Matt that this is apparently the one that we got canceled by. Oh, you. It was Yuri. I don't know when I did this or like, you know, fine. Yeah. So in Australia we call that an adjunct, I think. I think that's what they call it. But yeah, it's basically you get to have the affiliation.

You put on your email and you might have library access, right? You get free printing at the office or something. Yeah, it's literally, literally it. So it's like virtually nothing. And then Sabina, who didn't seem to have any active goings-on with the university for quite some time. It kind of, you know. I mean, she wrote some papers and that were nominally in there. So she now writes about her passion of quantum foundation stuff.

So she quit academia because she couldn't get a job working on quantum foundations. And then she started doing this YouTube thing. And now she's doing the quantum foundation stuff on the side. And she was doing that at that institution. And then the institution said, well, you are now sort of no longer benefit to our reputation. so why are we having this affiliation structure so they decided to stop creation. Please stop calling other researchers

bullshitters and assholes and this kind of thing. It doesn't look good for us. My point there is it's not a big deal. Like in Australia you might have one of those things. Unless you renew it or unless there's some reason for it to keep going, it'll just naturally disappear after a couple of years or something. That's deathless free speech. Yes, but in any case, but to Sabina it meant an awful

lot. So those credentials, those academic credentials of the actual institutions that she is claiming are all lying to you, communists and are wasting your money and going nowhere. Having this tangential affiliation is like a big deal. And I'm also reminded like of Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson, yeah. Yeah, like who had done, you know, no, you know, he was famous, he was rich, he was, had six different business ventures going on and was certainly not doing any teaching of research and when you know he was very upset to lose his affiliation with and this is with the woke horrible university that he absolutely despised is that because of the the value that the audience puts in that oh he must be like chris was saying before oh he must be good because he's you know stamped

by the ontario psychological association or oh she must be good because the munich center of mathematical philosophy wouldn't support her if she wasn't like maybe it's just they use it as a stamp to to, you know, play to the audience, I guess is why they feel so bad about it. I think they do use it as like a stamp of legitimacy, but it's also... There's an ego there. I think with Sabina and other people, like earlier in her career, she was less grievance-oriented, right? But the longer and the more that you swim in those words, you know, you saw what Jordan

Peter said. I mean, he started out fairly grievance-oriented, but later he was reading, like, articles, pausing after each sentence and saying, yeah, right? Let's go. It's like that level of greed is hard to even fath him. But in that case, he was granted by his university at Toronto. They kept him in his position, you know, on paper or something around five or six years after he'd stopped teaching any classes. Then they gave him an emeritus position, right? So not even removing the affiliation. Like he's never going to go back to teaching anyway because he's a millionaire punded for the Daily Wire.

And he, in response to that, released an article completely shitting on them in, you know, the media. And then with the Ontario College debacle, it's the same thing, right? Like he refused to accept any disciplinary procedures and went on a tirade saying he's going to, I mean, he took several court cases, right? And he lost all of them. But in the same respect, so was not willing to change whenever they're defeated by those systems. So you could view it that is it that they want that legitimacy. But I think that can't explain, like, because Jordan Peterson is presenting it that this is an evil institution that is out to destroy him.

So even if he manages to get out of it, it's not like his audience is unaware that he's been accused of being in this repute, right? And we found this weird thing where there was a figure called Dr. K, like an online psychiatrist. slash influencer. And he was reprimanded by his official medical licensing board or whatever, the psychiatrist board for unethical behavior that brought the field into this repute. He had to announce these employers that that happened. And online, he managed to present that as them giving him a golden stamp. So like, I don't know.

It's like it's that thing where it's hard to model the psychology because I think you have to put yourself into the mode of someone who really thinks that everything is being done against them and they're treated unfairly or is willing to take that pose if it suits their things. So like, does Sabina really care that she lost that affiliation? It certainly seemed like she did, but, you know, most academics would know, but that's not, like Matt says, it's just an honorary thing. It doesn't really make any difference. So, yeah, I'm just expressing my befuddlement over what the What fuck is going on? I mean, this again, gets into their motivations and psychology, which we are unfortunately wildly

unqualified to speculate on. And in the end, I suppose, it doesn't matter, even though it's very interesting to think about it. It is interesting that they all have this in common, right? You guys on the Gorobiter talk about the grievance mungering. Talk about Brian Keating, losing the Nobel Prize. You talk about Sabine. She believes she was mistreated. And, you know, I believe her to some extent she was mistreated in particle physics when she had a job there.

you go to Eric who believes he's constantly being mistreated by and underappreciated by the scientific establishment. People have been stealing his stuff for years and presenting it as their own. They all have this in common. So whether that is the overall motivation for what they do, I don't know, can't speculate, but it does seem to be potentially in the mix as a reason. We have speculated before that it is, and I'm speaking about gurus generally now, that is narcissism is kind of the golden thread that binds a little. things together. Yeah, so, you know, the psychological research has shown that the people of a

conspiratorial mindset do tend to have more of a chip on their shoulder, be more narcissistic than most other people. And also fundamental to most conspiracy theories are narratives of grievance, you know, powerful groups or the Jews or whoever, conspiring against us and undermining us and holding us back and stealing from us and so on. So I think that the grievance stuff is interesting because we talked before about how they, you know, especially someone like Eric, they centred themselves, or Brian Keating, for instance,

they centered themselves as like a key player in all of this thing. They have a personal narrative of grievance, which they will bang on about forever. But they also, as you guys talked about before, are focused on inculcating a sense of general grievance amongst the audience against the institutions in general. This is what they took from us. they've been lying to us and so on.

So Avi Lohab, right, who we mentioned in passing, he seems to do what Matt was just talking about. And you documented in your video, the recent science popularist one, that it does seem like an intentional strategy to portray it that scientists aren't looking at this or they won't talk about it. But he presumably knows that he's not representing the truth there. At least in your video, you made a good case. But like, it's an intentional misrepresentation.

So I was just wondering in that kind of circumstance, is that a case where it is clear that the grievance bonkering is strategic? Or do you think it's the same kind of mixture of things that we're talking about? So Avi Loeb recently, he was reprimanded, right? He had to apologize because he went on with all the experts from SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and basically dumped on them, said you've not been doing enough over the last however many years. And then he's very specific that he thinks his area of expertise should get, I think he talks about billions of dollars to look for these ancient pieces of, you know, UFO trash that are going

around. So he is very explicit in saying the field is broken and therefore give me the money, give people like me the money. So he's very much a science populace. He wants to, he wants these changes to go on. In that case, like, you know, when he's talking about comments or whatever and saying, you know, that nobody's, nobody has an answer to what this is or whatever. But you made the case in the video that like, it's clear. Like if he can read the scientific literature, he knows that that's a misrepresentation. So is it intentional or is that what he actually thinks? I think Avi Lerbe is one of the most clear-cut cases of somebody who knows what he's doing.

So in the original paper that brought him in for me, it was a paper that was most, normal, like it was a perfectly normal paper, and then at the end it was, by the way, aliens, like maybe aliens a little bit. And then he immediately did a bunch of press conferences and interviews how he wrote a paper about aliens, right? Even though none of the paper was about aliens, it was just like the final paragraph. This should put in mind Andrew Wakefield, who, of course, did something very similar in his paper. He wrote his shoddy, fraudulent nonsense paper. And then all the way at the end started speculating a little bit and then immediately went to the press and of andrew wakefield of course like we have from the brian deer documentary we have extensive insights into his financial

motivations etc so i think like him we can call a grifter uh without much nuance but i think these people even when they're telling half truth to tie it back to what matt said before i think they actually think it's not really that important because what they're doing is so important and worthwhile anyway. So you look at Avi Lope. He believes that if we just look for these things, we will work out where we came from. The aliens are there. They want to communicate with us. It's so important for humanity. We have to do this. If it takes a few half troops, fine. Sabine believes that she truly is saving the heart of physics. The heart of science requires physics to advance. Physics advancing. Civilization requires that. She believes she is saving

civilization. She says it explicitly. gets on with Joe Rogan and says, look, we are all going to die on a planet which is heating up due to climate change unless we can leave. If you look at geometric unity, we'll build the spaceships, we'll leave, everything will be fantastic. So I think for these people, they think that the work that they are doing is so incredibly important that this kind of lawyering is fine. There is no real issue here because they're doing the important work. And I see this with Sabine's stuff. When a scientist, For example, Fabiola Gianotti, who is the former Director General of CERN, says, The Future Collider, maybe we'll get some insight into dark matter.

Sabine will jump up and say, this is lies, you know, it's very unlikely that we'll find this. They are lying to you. But then when Sabine is talking about something that she's passionate about in quantum foundations, you know, this will suddenly become the most important thing ever. And her telling sort of half-truths about how important it might be or what we might find with it, It's suddenly it's not really a problem that we're talking in generalities and what we might find. So I think these people don't really worry about the lawyering because they feel like the institutions have given such a one-sided story along the way that they're just redressing the balance and setting things to rights. So I don't think they worry about too much, at least in my opinion.

Yeah, well, you call it lawyering. I guess you could also call it like it's a mode of communication which is most similar to political rhetoric, regardless of what political agenda. you're attempting to further, if you're out there polemicizing about it, you're not attempting to educate, you're not attempting to give a history level or do boring economics things where it's, well, maybe this, maybe the other, and there's some evidence this way, and therefore, no, no, you know, you are doing a political thing, straight down the line, it's very black and white, it's a mode of communication. And so perhaps, that's just one way to think about what they're doing. They have their hobby horses. They usually revolve around them, their interests and their friends.

And that makes them very different from other science communicators. And the one thing that has made us that we were, Tim and I were discussing before, is it's not really a problem for them to have their opinions about what the policy might be for science. But the interesting thing with, let's take Sabina, for example, is that her backstory, her origin story is that she got out of physics because of the precarious job market. She couldn't get a job in the field. But now her policy prescriptions will be. get rid of the funding for everything, take it all away, there will be far less jobs.

So there's this weird dichotomy between her origin story is I couldn't get a job to now she's proposing remove all of the jobs. It's bizarre. Another part of the origin story was I was subject to sexism in the academy and I was mistreated, which is horrible. That should never happen. And now, fast forward, anti-DI, the war on science is really DEI that she's ripping everything apart. So our problem is not that they have these opinions. It's that they seem to go from these opinions to then making prescriptions which would make everything worse, which is, again, a really weird sort of dichotomy between how they behave. It's part of it like just a sour grape thing.

I mean, where to one degree or another, many of them have been disappointed in their endeavours along conventional scientific track. And, you know, it's hard, right? And it's boring a lot of the time. And it's often not very well paid. And there's a whole bunch of other that things. And I think that's particular. I worked with a bunch of sort of ex-physicists,

physicists, people who had a degree in physics. So I think it's worse in physics than most of the fields, just because it's such a rarefied area. So you will often see physicists shifting sideways. And I work with physicists at an AI lab and essentially working as engineers. And they were great, obviously, because they had the skills. But, you know, a lot of the names we've talked about

have been disappointed in their careers. And I think if you combine that with having a massive chip on your shoulder, Isn't that going to make you want to burn it all down? It's possible. I mean, we're speculating about motives. We're just speculating. No, no, it's fine to speculate. We just have to be a little bit careful

because of what we can back up, that's all. Speaking of backing things up, there is a question that you two seem better qualified than me and Matt to answer, which is like the narrative that is very popular, as you mentioned, Tim, is like physics is stuck, right? You hear it from Peter Thiel, you hear it from Sabina,

from Eric, from everyone, that basically a lot of discoveries, there was good stuff going on till the 70s or 80s, often the time that people finish graduate school, just as it happens, but nonetheless, then things kind of got stuck, right? And no progress has happened in the past 50 years. This is absolutely true. This is true, but mainly in terms of music, I think. All the best music was made at university. Big Ed Witten turned up around these times and put his hammer down, you know, this was... Matt Lofi didn't exist back then. But the thing is that whenever they talk about this in science in general,

which sometimes they do go that far, it's obviously like it's definitely lies. I know it's lies because I can see all the evidence against that around me, interacting with my life, helping six children doing various things. We just had a global pandemic with a vaccine with MRNA technology produced like in incredibly high speed with like great. scientific cooperation, you know, with limitations or whatnot. But at any case, I can see that that's bullshit. What about the case in physics or particle physics or are you guys just

spinning your wheels for 50 years? Tell the truth. Admit it. So in physics, in general, again, there's an extremely easy defense. You know, you can look at material science. Material science is making amazing stuff, just designing materials on the molecular level. And that's all extremely new, it's all from the past decade or something, and amazing things are happening. Again, it's a very easy defense, and then if you reply that, they'll go, no, no, I mean... It's engineering. That's engineering. Yes, that's engineering. They'll do this Mott and Bailey thing, right? All of science hasn't progressed, and then you say, obviously, false. No, I mean physics hasn't progressed.

Look at material science. No, no, I mean fundamental physics hasn't progressed. So let's get to fundamental physics, because also in fundamental physics, it is a transparent lie. And it's It's actually a very neat little trick that they do where they'll go, the Higgs boson was predicted 70 years ago, and we have not found anything beyond the standard model since the Higgs boson. And hold on a minute, you did a sneaky little trick there. You go from the prediction of the Higgs to the finding of something beyond the standard model. And you don't get to do that.

You don't get to compare a prediction to an experimental finding. You get to compare the prediction to the prediction or the finding to the finding. If you are honest about this, the Higgs boson was found in 2012. So the best you can say is fundamental physics has been stuck for 13 years. But it doesn't really quite pack the same much. 13 years is not that much. Also, in fairness, physical physics has been on an amazing winning streak, like a ridiculous winning streak.

We discovered quantum mechanics about a century ago, arguably 1905, maybe a little bit before that with Max Planck. You can argue about that. But we know about quantum mechanics for about a century now. And inside one century, we went from not even being aware of its existence to finding potentially the full list of constituents, fundamental constituents of the universe. Maybe. I mean, there might be others, but we might be done. That is an amazing feat in one century. You should expect a brief return to me.

It's very strange to be like, guys, it's been 13 years, where's the new revolution? It's a very strange narrative. And it's very funny that everybody's uncritically repeating this just because Zabina is saying it. How about the argument that the other popular one is like there's a lot of theoretical models, you know, string theory is the big bad here, but a lot of them are saying that basically particle physicists and theoretical physics are just inventing these like dream castle scenarios with multiple universes and quantum holograms and so on. But there's no way to test it. So it's just people waffling shit on the basis without like experimental evidence that you get for,

you know, the fundamental physics things. How about that charge? I think, and I think this is an important thing. It's something that's very easy to sell to the lay public because they often have a quite narrow conception of science. They think, okay, you come up with a theory, you test a theory, and then if it's falsified, you come up with a new theory, and you test a new theory. And in the general sort of naive Poparian-Poparian view of science,

this theory development is just free. You just come up with an idea under the shower, you're like, oh, of course, it's this thing. And then you do a prediction and you check. And Apple falls on your head. That's how it works, Tim. Exactly. And I think it's very important to push back on this where sort of theory development

absolutely is really hard. So that's a big part of the issue is that coming up with a consistent theory that can cover both quantum mechanics and gravity is really, really hard. And a lot of people seem to think that it just sort of comes for free and you can come up with a new prediction tested, come up with a new prediction tested, and that's extremely false. So the problem was open and considered even potentially unsolvable for decades before string theory came along. And then string theory was the first ever example, and so far the only ever example, of a theory of quantum gravity that is self-consistent. We don't have any other

theories that we know to be self-consistent that can do quantum gravity. And so this self-consistency itself is a huge check and it's a huge control on what potential theories of quantum gravity are even possible. So Eric's model in particular, he considers his model to be a competitor of string theory. But Eric's model is gravely inconsistent. All these magical consistency checks that string theory passes, Eric's model absolutely doesn't. And he gets a lot of, he gets into this in the debate on Pierce Morgan, which I think is quite funny, I think it's quite worth mentioning. One of the things that Sean Carroll mentions is that there's no quantum mechanics in this paper. This is, in my opinion, an extremely funny thing. Like, he writes a whole paper

claiming to explain quantum mechanics and gravity, and in the paper he addresses neither quantum mechanics nor gravity. On gravity, there is one extremely brief comment where he just, he derives his sort of fundamental equation and he says, by the way, this is the Einstein field equations with no explanation and he even messes that up. But quantum mechanics, there's nothing. There is no quantum mechanics in there. And in his response to Sean, he does this jargon-filled rant. He loves doing this. He loves sort of spitting out as many jargon words as he can, where he formulates as apakly as possible the idea of geometric quantization. And I won't get into the details, but quantization is when you take a classical theory and you make it into a quantum theory. So what we know is that

a quantum theory, quantum effects are quite small. And so if you sort of ignore the quantum effects, you eventually get a classical theory. So this direction always works. Quantization is trying to go the other way. So taking a classical theory and trying to guess what quantum theories could lead to this classical theory. And Eric, in his rant, pretends that this is completely for free. And he sneaks in one little word where he says locally, and he says locally, it's the curvature of a line bundle, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He sneaks in that word because that word is very important and makes his whole story silly because actually none of this is for free. Actually, quantization is a really hard thing. It's really hard to find a quantum theory that reproduces your classical theory. Eric seems to think

it's for free. So he thinks that just by formulating the classical theory, he can immediately get the quantum theory and he doesn't need to do that work. And all of the criticisms of Eric that point out his wildly inconsistent theory are saying, no, no, no, if you try to quantize this theory, it won't work. It will fail. It will lead to anomalies. You haven't shown that it's even topologically possible to quantize it. So there is these huge inconsistencies in what he believes to be a free step to quantum mechanics. And that means that his theory has failed completely. So there's this thing called anomalies. If you try to do, if you try to quantify, with gravity in it, you'll get a bunch of infinities that you basically can't get rid of.

A string theory used to, we used to think that string theory had this problem, and therefore nobody was interested. Like, that was the death of string theory. Until they figured out that if you do string theory in 11 dimensions, then you can get rid of these anomalies. That is why people say string theory predicts 11 dimensions. And if you don't get this, then the whole thing is broken. And this is why a theory like string theory is a real theory and a theory like Eric's is not.

Because they try to find these inconsistencies and try to resolve these inconsistencies. Eric doesn't care about this. Eric doesn't know about this. Somebody asked him about these anomalies. He didn't know what they were. And if quantization were as easy as he thinks it is, there would be no problem with quantizing gravity. If that were easy, we would just quantize gravity and we would be done with it. And the whole problem is that you get these anomalies. it's not easy. I want to ask you guys about this notion of the sort of slowing or stagnation in physics, right? Just one final thing, and not to take anything away from what you said about the very important advances that have happened over the last 50 or 100 years. And correct

me if I'm wrong, but my naive assumption is that there's another reason for this, which is that a discipline like physics has a natural asymptote. Yeah? I mean, there are fundamental limits. it turns into metaphysics at some point. Like, why is there anything rather than nothing, that kind of thing, right? And as you approach this asymptote, things get kind of infinitely harder as you go, right? So both in terms of theoretical development, but also in terms of the kinds of material requirements that are needed in order to go further. So that the kinds of materials you need to show that Eutonian mechanics was true is this big,

To prove like Einsteinian stuff, it gets bigger. And then going forward, it gets astronomically bigger again. So I guess this was my just sort of naive assumption that there is this natural sort of exponential increase in difficulty. And the public's assumption that, oh, science always progresses. There's a nice linear progress. And you're going to have, you know, big developments dropping in your lap every 20 or 30 years. I just feel that's a fundamental error.

But I mean, is that a correct way to frame it? Or for her to tell me I'm wrong. I think absolutely. And I think the giveaway is that kind of Sabina will recognize this. She will actually mention it in her videos. It's not my concern that it's slowing down because this is the fate of any mature field. And then just prescribe it anyway to people doing everything wrong, right? So she will mention it.

She knows that that's the answer. That's the alternate hypothesis. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. it's become more difficult. That's why it slowed down. However, no, I'm going to throw that to the side. It's all because you're doing it wrong. And if you did it like I say it, then it would start moving again. And you're absolutely right. I think it becomes more difficult. As Tim said, we might have found all of these building blocks of the universe. So obviously things slow down. The 60s, 70s were an incredible time of discovery of these new particles. And the last century has been. So of course, we get this slowing down. As you say, we need bigger and bigger machines to go up to higher. energies, we already have a 27 kilometer long tunnel to get the pieces that we've seen so far. The next one is going to be 100. The next one after that, God knows how big. I think it is very interesting from a sociological perspective to think, what if particle physicist just hadn't have been so successful in the 60s and 70s? They'd have come up with all these theories that

explain the universe at the smallest scales as we understand it to the energies we've gotten and just sort of drip fed them out over the next 60 or 70 years, rather than solving everything in 10 years and then having a gap, if they'd have just drip fed them out, let's hold them and just put out every 10 years, we'll put out a little bit. There would have been no complaints because, as Matt says, people expect this linear sort of path. This is how everyone thinks everything is going to happen.

We're just going to find something. We'll find something, find something, find something, find something, find something. And it doesn't work like that. So I think what's happening is part of it. physical physicists, particularly theorists, are being punished for making such brilliant models of the universe, which have held up for the last 70 years. And instead of saying, guys, this is amazing. Like, every time we test, like, your model still holds up. It's the greatest model ever. It's explaining everything down to these high energy levels. People go,

what have you done for me recently? Like, you're failing. Because you did so well to start with, you're almost a victim of your own success. And one kind of more comment I had on theory development is that a lot of this stuff is defined or given purpose in hindsight. So if you look at people at the start of the last century looking at set theory, something that Tim will be very familiar with in mathematics, people would have said, why are you messing with this? You know, it's a mathematical intricacy. Nobody cares. What's going on? And then 50 years later, 60 years later, it's the grounding for all modern particle physics. And now we look back and we say, oh, of course, like people looked at this and then

they went from set theory to modern particle physics. This is the folk indomitable march of progress, like moving forward. People look at string theory now. And in 50 years, we might look back and say, oh, of course, it was always the answer. You know, it took a little bit of messing with and it took longer than we might have expected, but this was the indomitable march forward of quantizing gravity and now we know how to do it. Some of these things turn out to be broken paths, wrong turns. But in the end, everything that's successful is defined in hindsight.

We have to keep looking at these things. We're looking at them because they show promise. Maybe they will work out. Maybe they will not. My thought about theory development at the moment is, if there is even a perception that one is becoming overly dominant and it does seem that people have managed to sell this idea that string theory, even though it's a tiny part of theory development, has become over dominant, well, what's the solution? Give a little bit more money, give some edge cases, let them have a look,

diversify your portfolio the ways that you're looking at these things, throw a bit more money at it. What's the prescription of people like Eric? Give it all over to me. What's the prescription of people like Sabina? Take all the money away. These are solutions which would make everything much, much, much worse. So I just do not understand their policy prescriptions on this. And I think they're, as Matt says, expecting a linear progress of science, which was never ever going to happen and punishing scientists for their success in the past. One of the amazing things that we can do in physics now, and I think this is really quite remarkable, so that they can do something called effective field theory, and they can figure out roughly at which energies your theory stop

working. Now, I think that's quite remarkable, right? It's very rare for a scientific theory to say all of this I predict, and I predict that here I will break down. It's very strange, very rare. It's quite amazing. It's a really amazing achievement. That's another great achievement from recent times in how we understand theories. And in particular, what we know is that if we were to find quantum gravity, we would know at which energies it should show up. Like, if you want to find evidence, like direct evidence, like we found of the Higgs boson, if you want to find direct evidence of quantum gravity, we know the energy levels that you need, and we know that they are completely beyond any technological capacity that we will develop in this century. And therefore,

if you are extremely cynical, what you can say is, okay, then the question of quantum gravity is not scientific. We can't test it. It's not scientific. Full stop, end of story. And if you chastised string theory for not making any testable predictions, What you are saying essentially is that quantum gravity as a question is inherently non-scientific. And I think that's a very tough cell. I think if you try to sell your audience on the idea that we have these two fundamental theories and they are inconsistent together and we try to resolve them. And if you tell them that is not scientific, I think they wouldn't believe you.

And instead they much prefer that you tell them, oh, string theory is wrong. String theory doesn't make any predictions. is here is my wild guess that I came up with under the shower, and I haven't thought about it for more than five minutes. The other thing is, of course, I mentioned earlier that consistency turns out to be an extremely stringent constraint in quantum gravity. And what that means is that if we understand the landscape of consistent theories, we can already learn a lot about what quantum gravity is supposed to look like,

even if we don't have experimental data to guide us, which we don't. So that's sort of this theory development where we are trying to look at a lot of different theories of physics that we know for a fact don't describe reality. And this is crazy to lay people. Like, why would you study a theory that definitely doesn't describe reality? It's to learn about what types of theories make sense in the first place and to try to understand. So one of the greatest developments in the last 50 years is what's called ADSCFT duality or holography. And it's this amazing result where they actually let me read you a quote from Zabina's book where she says the research on string theory has also brought about the biggest breakthrough in foundational physics in the last decades, the gauge gravity duality.

The implications of this duality are nothing but astonishing. is in her book from a couple years ago when she didn't used to be so hard on string theory, when she still called string theory, progressive scientific program, etc. She used to be very positive on this kind of stuff. And it's an amazing result that says the following. In a universe with a specific type of cosmological constants, we can understand gravity in purely quantum mechanical terms. That is a remarkable result.

And we got it thanks to string theory. We first found it in string theory, and then from knowing it in string theory, we managed to get it more general. But crucially, we don't live in ADS space time. We don't live in anti-discutter space time. It's the wrong type of cross-inadro constant. And then a lot of people are saying, well, why are you bothering with this? Like, what's the point of studying this thing in a universe that we don't live in? And it's a very strange question because we're trying to understand how gravity and quantum mechanics fit together.

and this is an amazing clue to how they might fit together. And we just need to figure out how to make it work in our universe, or we need to follow these leads. When you get a lead, you should follow it up, even if it doesn't quite work out in our universe, just like how studying a frictionless problem in Newtonian mechanics can be very insightful into studying the real solutions. And it would be very silly to us,

but we don't live in a universe without friction. why are you solving this, right? Yeah, I think that's pretty clear. It's coming across clearly. And it's also clear how something like string theory could still have a lot of incredibly useful machinery and results that can have applicability without it necessarily being the final answer.

And as Sam was saying, with 2020 hindsight, you look back at the stepping stones that got you here and it looks like you were following a clear path. But at any given point in time, the best you can do is, allocate your resources to what seem to be the best steps forward and probably nine out or 99 out of 100 of them will turn out to be false steps and that is just simply how science works dead ends never make it into the history books is the thing yeah when you read the history book

suddenly everything seems clear and there is an amazing thread by a particle physicist martin bower who reviews a book about the crisis in physics and like how fundamental physics is completely broken and everything is wrong. And then he reveals that the book is from the 70s. And it was written in the 70s. And the people writing about, oh, we're finding too many particles. Nobody knows what to do with all these particles, et cetera. And it's exactly the opposite of what's happening now, right? That we're not finding any particles. But the key point is that physics is always in crisis. Science is always in crisis. It's never going to feel like you've got it all figured out in the moment. That's almost

a defining feature of science. Well, I think this has been pretty interesting. Theoretical physics is definitely a bit of an abtruth subject for most of us. I'm more comfortable with the empirical stuff. Like, I could go, wow, you discovered gravity waves or you detected

oh God, I even figure what they're called. One of those particles that are almost impossible to detect, but the sun's emitting trillions of the neutrinos. Thank you. Yeah, Chris is on it. There's a lot of neutrino physics going on in Japan, Chris. That's right.

That's why I'm here. Are you involved with any of that, Chris? A lot of it. A lot of it passes through my Ballywick. I just add comments, really. You just do editorial stuff. You just do a bit of editing on the other. Yeah, you're right.

And I have a very stupid question. It's really stupid. We can edit it like, but I'm just going to ask it randomly. I had heard a long time ago, it might have. been from my brother, who may be a liar, that you can make a neutrino bomb. I think he was talked about a neutrino bomb. That theoretically, a bomb that would kill living matter, like, go out and think, but leave buildings intact. The thing that's supposed to be a neutron bomb. A neutron. You're right. You're right. So that is, that's something that you guys are working.

Because that would be a real, you know, that would be a game changer. The atomic bomb, that was pretty serious if that big impacts for the world. But a neutron bomb. So my brother isn't a liar. That's okay. You've got a very Japan-centric understanding of particle physics. It's having bombs dropped on you in neutrinos. This is, you clearly absorb the zeitgeist in the country. My brother was a physicist. He was a physicist. He's now a lawyer. So make of that, what you will. Thanks for your contribution, Chris. I have a less, no mention it. I have a less curious question for you guys. I mean, who do you he thinks doing good work in terms of science popularization apart from your good self of course sam who else do you rate who do you because you know we've got the moods we've got the problematic characters but um he's doing okay

i definitely prefer as much as it might not seem in the content i prefer the positive message so i think we all like pbs space time matt i think you like pbs space time as well i don't understand it i don't understand it but I like it. Okay. They put out pretty good stuff. You know, someone like Dr. Becky. I like Dave Kipping, Cool Worlds. He is a full disclosure. He's a friend of mine.

Yeah, I listen to him. Yeah, yeah. We used to sit on the back row in Cambridge. I agree. I think he's very good. But he does have the guru vibe though, doesn't he? He's got the voice. He's very handsome.

It's very soothing. It's good to fall asleep too, actually. But I agree. He's good. But he gets accurate stuff across. He's accurate in the stuff he says. I just meant in terms of his looks and how his voice sounds. John Carroll's also really, really good.

And he is amazing knowing exactly sort of what the right level is of explanation to the audience. So he's very satisfying to listen to for me, even though it's like often he explains things to lay people and stuff that I already know. But it's very nice to hear somebody explain something and go like, yes, that's exactly how you explain it. He's my level. I think that's why I like him. It's a great extinguisher from gurus like Eric and Kurt Jai Mangle, who love to explain, like put things as opaquely as difficult to understand as possible. There was this episode where Kurt interviewed Sean.

And Sean, like a responsible science communicator, asks, you know, what's the level of the audience? And Kurt just lies to him and says, oh yeah, all my viewers are professors, and researchers in mathematical physics. And that is such a strange thing to say. And it speaks to what he's selling to his audience, like what he's trying to give to his audience. Well, it's flattery, isn't it?

It's absolutely flattery. It's only flattery. I looked whenever we were mentioning him earlier about on Kurt's timeline. And his most recent post from 17 hours ago at the time recording is him talking with Professor Bass Van Frasson, arguing science doesn't deliver literal trance, about reality, meaning unobservable physics is merely

a model. He also contends the self isn't a thing and that logic permits free will, ultimately sharing how he maintains faith in God without relying on metaphysics, right? So that's very standard, Kurt, but it was this interaction that I liked underneath it. There's a response to this

that says, just a random Twitter person, right? It doesn't matter, but they said, love your stuff, man, really. I've watched your deep dive on Eric Weinstein's geometric unity like seven times. still don't have a clue what it means, but I'm fascinated deeply. Can't wait to dive into this one. So that's the approach, right?

That doesn't matter that you understand, I think. It's just it sounds good. His deep dive on geometric unity is the biggest crime against pedagogy I've ever. No, no, no. Tim, I don't think you've approached that properly because I understood, I mean, we looked at that video and Kurt said, you might get lost. And if that happens, that's what normally occurs. Like when you're doing science, you just get lost.

You've got to go back, rewatch it eight, nine, 12, 15 times. Boostage metrics. You'll uncover a new level. That's science, isn't it? That's how it works. It's like a mantra type thing. I think this is linked to my closing thought, which is actually the same as my opening thought,

which I think as a subdomain of our, topic or like as a type of guru, I think physics gurus are interesting because more than any other guru, they really rely on that, that false sense of insight, you know, that that that's wisdom and, you know, those were perfect examples of it. That flattery to your ego, that you are, you are kind of grocking it, you know, at some level. And that mixing together of consciousness and God and particles and quantum waves. You know what I mean? It's all mixed in together.

It's a melange. None of it actually means anything. But it kind of feels good. It makes you feel like you're having something. Like I understand the appeal. I think gurus do it across all different fields, not just physics. But I think what you guys are grappling with is a very special thing. Because in the public imagination, physics is one of these deep questions.

there with consciousness and the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And yeah, so I think that's the thing you have to contend with. There's a very famous meme clip. I don't know if you guys have seen it. It's Alexander Armstrong and he has a chap on. He's a physicist and he's trying to get him to explain his theory and he's like, oh, I can't explain it. It's too difficult.

It's too difficult. And Alexander Armstrong, who's the host of the news article, says to the guy, how can you be so certain that the audience will not understand your theory? and he says something like because Eric's on holiday and Chow Young's dead. Because these things are so neat, so incredibly difficult. If you can short circuit 20 years of studying, you know, school, undergrad, learning mass, learning physics, if you can shortcut 20 years and tell someone who's a painter and decorator that they fully understand string theory in 30 minutes, that's a very powerful message to be putting across to someone, right?

You don't have to do all of that work. No, that's right. It's either bullshit and you don't have to do it or you understand it. That's right. You get all of the wonderful rewards with none of the work. And, you know, all of us have worked in some kind of scientific endeavor in our careers. And anyone who has worked in that area knows that those dividends, like the psychological or even psychosocial dividends, that feeling that you've actually cracked something,

you know, even in a small way. It's amazing. I'm certainly not going to be so inventing any grand unified theories any time soon. That's not going to happen for me. But, you know, people like me, foot soldiers, cannon fodder in academia, you know, we have our little wins, right? And they're incredibly rare. And they're incredibly hard to come by. And so I understand the appeal of just skipping all the hard bits and getting the feeling of the winds.

This is, I think, a really important, like, mark of a lot of cranks, a lot of gurus, and also a lot of these communicators, especially Kurt here, is really bad at this. I'm going so far as to say, like, he kind of hates science. Yeah. He hates science as it actually is. So he has this, he has one of his guests, is a very serious mathematician, Eva Miranda. I've been to conferences with her. She's lovely. And she comes there to tell him about a subject that is interesting.

like genuinely interesting but incremental work and he hates that he is always trying to spin it in his big narrative like oh this is going to be a big unifying theory for for all of no no she talks about geometric quantization again of the thing that i was i was talking about earlier which is also you know not a hundred years old but close i think and she is doing interesting incremental work and he doesn't like that he has to sell it in his editorial line as if it's like this huge thing. Otherwise, he doesn't care because he doesn't actually like science. He just likes the idea of science. Yeah, yeah. I think the message that, you know, like one of the, just the issues in general is that it is a little bit of a less appealing message to tell people that you don't have the background to critically assess a relevant literature.

If you want to understand this properly, you will actually have to devote, you know, months, if not years, to study in a topic. And like, people don't like that. They don't like the feeling that somebody else is saying, you're not smart enough to know this, right? And in many occasions, that's not the message. Messages, you're not smart enough. It's just like the same way you cannot learn to build a computer, like having never done

it before, like, I mean, from the ground off or whatever. But there's this thing where it's kind of insulting if it comes from academics, that there's a, you know, a scale. You're looking down at average people, but nobody is like, I'm an electrician because I've watched a video about it, right? Like, you understand there's a skill gap there. Just today, I heard someone explain that they, they have been Googling about their sudden hearing loss, and they now, after consulting AIs, believe they're on par with other medical experts in the field. And you're like, that is a message that's a lot more appealing than, but you're not, though, right? You don't know how to assess medical.

literature, you haven't had the training in a medicas. And people get very angry when you're telling them you're not so curt and everybody that is feeding your audience, fantasy, that you're a high level physicist by listening to a random podcast. Unfortunately, like, it's just a much more appealing narrative, but it's a fantasy. I will say just some closing thoughts. I think particle physicists can do a better job in this area. I think, although you're right that a lot of the problem is that these people are just feeding into the egos of their audience. Particle physicists have historically probably not realized that they have to come into this arena.

They have to be on social media. They have to be on YouTube. We're now asking for 15 plus billion pounds for a massive collider. So we have to be in these spaces explaining as well as we can. Some of these things are complicated. Why these things are important, why we need to be doing these things, getting the trust up with the audience. Because I think when you explain these things,

even if you have to water them down a little bit, people understand why they're important, why they're exciting, why they're interesting. And I think particle physicists need to get better at doing that. We do need to not just say, look, we're really smart, give us the money, it's going somewhere important, you don't need to know about it. We do need to be open. We do need to do more outreach.

And we do need to challenge people like Sabina. Particle physics has a rich heritage of increasing the knowledge of human civilization, but also providing amazing returns on investments, amazing technologies. We have a brilliant science case and a brilliant economic case for continuing to build these machines and learning more about our universe. And we should be putting that exciting case forward rather than being on the back foot and saying we really don't want to get our hands dirty in these new arenas that have developed. I think we need to do better with that.

I think there's a fantastic closing statement. So, Tim, how about you? So another great science communicator who I'd love to endorse. is Bobby Broccoli, and he makes science documentary. He made the James Bond films. So actually, so he's very interested in sort of scientific scandals and scientific fraud as well. In that sense, you could imagine that he would be on the guru side, but in fact he's very interested in actually like how these things happen and what the conditions are.

And he doesn't sort of try to sell you, oh, it's all a scam and they're all, blah, blah. He is genuinely interested in the subjects that gurus only raise to score points about failures of academia, etc. And he has one video on, what is it, the FCC Collider in the US? Oh, the superconducting Super Collider, the SAC. Yeah. And he goes into detail about why science communicators, why particle physicists don't do enough outreach, etc. and why that is why the Connecting Super Collider

failed in the US. And he has a very good story on how you should do better science outreach and how you should do more to make the public enthusiastic for science. And I think it's a great antidote to the science populists and the gurus. Fantastic. All right. Well,

I'm loving ending on this positive note. We will add links to all of these good sources. But you know who's going to be the top of that list. Bad boy science. He's going to be the top of the list. He's our boy. Thank you very much. That's very kind. That's very cold. I will continue to carry the guru's pod standard to wherever I go and we'll see how that. That's the kickback. Yeah, exactly. Preach the good word. I'm being paid by Chris. So just, you know, full disclosure. Yeah, the payments are underway, I swear. Well, thank you both for coming on. And let's hope that

it doesn't become more relevant with time, but sadly every good will. But nonetheless, let's let's end optimistically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully in a year or two we'll meet again and we'll go, look, remember this. That was a funny old period. That was a funny. Remember those science populists? They're all gone now, but that was odd.

Me and Sabine have our podcast together. We all. Yeah, yeah. That's it. Yeah. Thank you both. And, yeah, keep on physics in right there. Thank you so much for your time.

Keep on the good fight. Thank you very much. It's been fantastic.