Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Terrence Howard and Candace Owens: The Wildly Unhinged World of Celebrity Science

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

Is Terrence Howard onto something, or is he completely off the rails with his wild theories? In this episode, I was privileged to appear on Piers Morgan Uncensored, alongside Eric Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu to dissect the viral phenomenon of Terrence Howard's unconventional theories on Joe Rogan's podcast and their impact on public perception of science. The conversation touches on the impact of social media in amplifying non-expert voices and the need for scientists to better communicate with the public. We also highlight the tension between established scientific methods and popular skepticism, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tune in now and join the conversation!  Key Takeaways:   00:00 Intro 00:24 Trust in science challenged post-COVID pandemic 00:54 Terrence Howard's unconventional scientific theories go viral 04:07 Eric Weinstein analyzes Howard's claims, finding some merit 08:07 Debate on peer review's role in scientific validation 11:35 Eric Weinstein's interaction with Terrence Howard  22:31 Impact of amplifying pseudoscience from official sources 25:30 Brian Keating defends traditional scientific processes 49:30 Future and integrity of science Additional resources:  ➡️ Piers Morgan Uncensored: https://www.youtube.com/@PiersMorganUncensored   ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms:   ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast    —   Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known.   Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's 10 times easier to produce something that's BS than it is to refute it. In some cases, it's akin to listening to your friend, peers, you know, Andrew Tate for marital advice. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Trust the science became a mantra during the COVID pandemic. But in the years since, and partly as a consequence, a rising tide of people are doing quite the opposite, challenging the scientific mainstream is in vogue. Nobody's this better illustrated than the recent viral phenomenon

of actor Terrence Howard on a Joe Rogan podcast, the biggest media platform in the world right now, arguing that one times one actually equals two, among other bizarre theories. They don't show that hydrogen has the same tone as carbon. What do you mean by tone? Same tone, same key of E. You keep dividing light by two,

and you'll ultimately get back to the audible sound of it, because there was a relationship between light and color, sound and tone, matter, and shape. At a given point, Mars was here in the Goldilocks zone. Everything has an equal and opposite. It has to mate. Mating is a big part of what we do. The boron mates with nitrogen, and that's how the carbon happens. 96% of physics is unknown matter.

that they've had to make up to account for it and we were able to build Saturn. Man, don't turn my phone off. Don't do that. Every time I get ready, well, because I know they're watching me right now and they're mad at me. Who's that? The politicians and the authorities that give the politicians their accreditation.

And our world economy is based off of one times one equaling one. And you think they fuck with your phone? Oh, I'm sure of it. Whoa. Well, there were four hours of that, but it's reached tens of millions of people. It's been a true viral phenomenon, like I said. Well, many in the scientific establishment expressed alarm at the apparently limitless reach of wild theories

at a time science has a reputation problem. Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the most famous scientists on the planet, had this to say. If you're a fan of a subject, let's say, a hobbyist, let's call it, it's possible to know enough about that subject to think you're right, but not enough about that subject to know that you're wrong.

The platform to be accepted for the ideas is not social media. It is not Joe Rogan. It is not my podcast. It is research journals where attention can be given on a level that at the end of the day

offers no higher respect for your energy and intellect than by declaring that what's in it is either right or wrong or worthy of publication or not. Well, others disagree. They argue the old system needs to be shaken up. The questioning and challenging mainstream institutions and theories is the only real way to actually get to the truth. Here's a debate.

This is a podcast and cosmologist at University of California, Professor Brian Keating, the host of Impact Theory, Tom Billier, but I'll start with Dr. Eric Weinstein, mathematician and OG of the intellectual dark web, and creator of the Portal podcast. Well, Eric, welcome back to Unsensored. Really fascinating to see how big this has all blown in the last few days.

For those who didn't watch the Terrence Howard four-hour, I don't know what you would call it, theory athon. Let's be kind. What were the sort of main premises he was coming out with that have captured everyone's attention? Well, I think that he made several outrageous claims that were more or less baseless as far as either the heterodox or the orthodox view of science, that one times one is equal to two, that the periodic table should be rearranged, around earlier work from the 1920s, that he had a theory of physics based on platonic solids

with curved linear sides. I don't think any of those hold up to any kind of scrutiny. That said, he definitely has some very interesting engineering claims, and he's got some very interesting geometric structures that could make beautiful lighting, fantastic art. And he is saying some things that people are deriding in, you know, from a scholarly perspective, that actually have some merit.

So it's a very bizarre and complicated situation, but it is not complicated at the root. There's nothing wrong with standard orthodox science. And I say that as a very strong critic of the system. So if you wanted to hear it from somebody with a PhD who's nevertheless not shy about savaging the institutions when that is what they deserve, I would say that the level of doubt that he has cast on simple things like arithmetic is completely unwarranted. But it's a very bizarre situation to watch an entire nation that depends on technologies and science for its advantage, suddenly question whether or not one times one equals one.

What is fascinating to me is the last time I had him to do with Terrence Howard, I interviewed him at CNN about 10 years ago when he did a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. And the next thing, he's doing a four-hour podcast with Joe Rogan, in which he's airing the most sort of intensely complex theories, many of which, as you say, might be completely for the birds. Were you aware that Terence Howard was thinking this way, was moving to a place where he could even conduct an interview like that? Well, to be honest, I didn't know who Terence Howard was, so I didn't have an image for him. But had you asked me, I would have thought back to Werner Herzog doing the entire film Fitzcaraldo to test his engineering theories about how less tech.

technologically advanced people could move heavy objects many miles up up hills. He created an entire film to test his engineering theories. Hedy Lamar famously developed spread spectrum technology despite being a screen siren back in the 30s and 40s. So just as I don't think it's very strange to find out that Steve Martin is an incredible banjo player, I don't find it at all odd that a polymath like Terrence Howard would have such theories. I don't think that the theories about math and physics and chemistry are incredibly deep,

so I'm going to push back on that. But I do think that he knows quite a lot about many things and he doesn't know what he doesn't know. I mean, Neil DeKrasse Tyson said that people can know enough to sort of ask questions and stuff, but maybe not enough to know when they're wrong. In other words, when they're presented with, you know, quite complex science that has been peer reviewed and is deemed to be established scientific fact, that he doesn't know enough about the detail to understand why he's wrong to question him. You mean the Dunning Kruger effect, as Neil said. Yeah.

It's kind of ironic, actually, because it feels to me like Neil deGrasse Tyson is himself a victim of the Dunning Kruger effect when it comes to peer review as his comments about Sir Arthur Eddington using the 1919 total solar eclipse to prove that Einstein's theory about a star-warping space, in particular our sun, appear to be borne out. Neil claims that that was sent to a peer-reviewed journal, whereas peer review doesn't really begin in physics and in the sciences, really until the 60s and much more the 70s. So it's very interesting because Neil himself doesn't appear conversant in the history of science and reviewing. Isn't the reality of all science a bit like with medicine that a lot of

very smart people take a look at a lot of available data, but maybe not enough to reach absolute definitive conclusions? And they espouse theories which their peer group then look at and discuss and analyze and argue about. And that's how we progress with science over decades, centuries, and so on. I mean, isn't this part of the evolution of science? Is that people like you and Neil de Krauss-Tycin might vehemently disagree about stuff? But actually, it's only through the disagreements you develop. Well, but I doubt that he would agree to a program where we were going to have a discussion about this. My guess is that you reached out to him and that he was too busy. to appear. My claim is, is that in general, we avoid dust-ups for fear of looking foolish. And I think

it's fine to avoid dust-ups when you feel that there's an ethical problem with the other person. But in general, science progresses by a large variety of different channels. Benjamin Jesty famously observed that his milkmaids weren't dying from smallpox, but they did get cowpox. So he injected his entire family with cow pus to give them cowpox to prevent against smallpox. It's one of the beginnings of vaccines. People would dig up bodies from graveyards to do anatomical studies. Famously, the ulcer, which was thought to be correlated with stress, was tested by the dissenting heterodox biomedical researcher

and shown to have a completely different etiology by using himself as a guinea pig. I think that you have to understand that just as Benjamin Franklin took a kite and key into an electrical storm to prove that lightning was electricity, people have done all sorts of things that have nothing to do with learned societies and the genteel sort of feel afforded by peer review in order to advance science. I really think that in part what we've done is we've sanitized our own history and we've forgotten what works. interesting to me was Neil deGrasse Tyson didn't go on Joe Rogan to respond, which is what Terrence Howard wanted him to do. But you did, and here's a clip from that. This is the other side of it. Yeah. This is what's very interesting. Like these, they'll come together and meet. You can see where they meet up. Yeah. Their natural meeting up. Yeah. Now, this one looks exactly like this one, but they don't have the same mixture.

So what this is creating, this is actually showing this is the equal and opposite. This is matter. This becomes the anti-matter of it. I can't stop you doing that. You can't stop me. I'm so sorry. I'm my own worst enemy and my own best friend. You know what?

That was a beautiful statement. But what I'm trying to say is the fact that they keep and these four will keep, this is just the magnetic field. You see, you stopped yourself. I consider this to be the magnetic field. because they're expanding at the center and magnetism to, in my language, magnetism expands out and becomes greater.

And you know when you just said, in my language? In my language. That's what I just did with the Terrence product. In other words, I'm trying to get you to stop pissing my community. I don't want to piss them up. I want friends. I need friends. Now, the interesting thing to me is, as we would say in the UK,

it sounded to me like he was talking a load of old cobblers. And yet you were there, and you were being very generous and sort of reasonable and decent with him and allowing him to continue with his theories. That's attracted for you a lot of criticism that by engaging in that manner with him, you're kind of adding legitimacy to slightly unhinged science fiction rather than promoting the cause of science. How do you respond to that? Well, first of all, you know, this is always a scuttlebutt and, you know, people say. So I'm not very impressed with that. I would say that you have, I wouldn't say it's

mildly unhinged. I would say it's wildly unhinged. A lot of this stuff is just nonsense, right? On the other hand, I was very quick to spot something that I wouldn't have been able to appear with Terrence if I didn't think there was something in what he was doing. And because I have a lot of background and experience in this area, it was possible for, me to go through what he said at a speed that I think very few people would be able to go through his work. But what percentage, Eric, what percentage of what he was saying was true, or at least vaguely sensible?

And what was completely- Very little. Right. So my question, if it was genuinely very little, him getting tens of millions of views for espousing complete nonsense in the main, and then someone with your pedigree and your knowledge this subject matter going on and kind of going along with engaging him as a serious person in these things. Is that not in his own way diminishing science when you do that?

First of all, I wouldn't have had Terrence on the first time because it didn't do him a service to what he actually is doing that's interesting to give him this amount of error. That was a good friend of mine's choice. So partially what you're seeing is a relationship between a comedian Joe Rogan and a mathematician Eric Weinstein. Joe's a buddy of mine and he matters to me. And he's the one who asked me to come on. Some people tried to frame it as if I wanted to go on. I had no interest in going on.

But if we were going to watch a mass delusion take shape, certainly I don't want any more mass delusions. And I also don't want the idea that once these ideas are out there, that science is afraid somehow to confront, you know, Terence Howard's new theory of arithmetic. He doesn't have a new theory of arithmetic. And somebody needs to be the adult and say, this is not right. On the other hand, you have to appreciate that all it takes is one great idea

to move the world, and a lot of BS is going to be forgiven. And if he has a great idea, I would suggest to you, it's likely his concept of a six-roter drone that he calls the lynch pin that's based on a mathematical error where he's fit six-six-row. pentagons through the edges of a regular tetrahedron, giving him six degrees of freedom, which span what we would call the lee algebra of the affine group, giving him the ability to rotate around a center and move to any point in three-dimensional space. It's an incredibly cool idea. Now, I don't know that it's his.

I believe that it's his, but I don't know that. I haven't done that work. I'm not a drone operator, so I don't realize what the state of the art is. But imagine that that was the only thing that he did and that he figured out that these things could fit together as per the Intel drone shows to form capsids in the shape of dodecahedrons, much the way we see viruses doing that with capsomeres and protein coats to protect the genetic material. That would be an incredible contribution of Terrence Howard. And the thing that really disgusts me is watching my colleagues make fun of Terrence as easily where he is right as where he is wrong. It doesn't require that. He's clearly a self-taught guy.

He pronounces words like canonically, canonically, which indicates that he's teaching himself. And for all of this talk of the Neil deGrasse Tyson's where they say, I'm so pleased to see active minds engaging with the world of ideas. They're really not. And, you know, my feeling about this is pretending that Terrence Howard is a fool or an idiot is repugnant to me. I mean, if you just take what he said about tones in the periodic table, because of some good fortune in my life, I was able to go out to none other than one of the greatest musicians now living,

Stanley Jordan. And say, Stanley, you know, let's share your work on playing the periodic table by using the ionization energies as frequency information, much the way Terence was discussing. So my feeling is that a lot of my colleagues just don't have enough knowledge. And even though they're supposedly the academics sitting in professorial seats, they're not behaving like professors. They're not behaving like academicians. They're making fun of somebody because it allows them to work. work out their own personal insecurities, and that's not going to happen on my watch. It's actually really fascinating because unless I'm mistaken, what you're saying is,

look, you might be wrong about 99% of this stuff, but the 1% might be really significant, which is staggering to me that Terrence Howard has gone through life as a movie actor, is suddenly doing stuff which is to you quite groundbreaking in the very complex world of science and mathematics and so on. It's not in science and it's not in mathematics. If he's doing something that I recognize, it's in engineering, art, and it's possible that he's doing something. I was able to recognize where his shapes come from, where Neil does not appear to understand, which is fine. So, you know, there's some very beautiful geometry, but it doesn't appear to me to be at a research level.

And I don't want to conflate, again, I'm not being, I'm hardly a pushover. I'm saying he's wrong in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. In fact, it doesn't rise to the level of a theory that needs to be actively considered. That said, to dismiss everything he's saying because we can find, you know, sometimes a fly lens in your dish. and you insist that it be taken back at a restaurant. Other times you just say, you know, five-second rule, you're hungry, and it's not the fault of the restaurant, and you just let it go.

And my feeling about this is what Neil did is really troubling. What he did is that he advertised a fake openness, which is just a bit what your work is to a peer-reviewed journal. Neil either doesn't know the history of peer review, doesn't know why it's called peer review, has no concept of what peer review actually is, which is bizarre, or he does know, and he's deliberately going to waste Terrence Howard's time because Terrence isn't a peer. And the whole concept of peer review, the word peer isn't like a jury of your peers, your fellow citizens. It's like peers in terms of the House of Lords.

The whole idea of peer review is to keep the laity, the people who don't do science for a living or medicine for a living, out of the review process. And that's where it was born. That's why it grew up in the 60s and 70s as peer review. It was as part of a struggle where scientists wanted to wall off their kingdom and say, look, we are taking. taking public money, but we don't want public review.

You're not qualified to be here. Shut up, get out of our lab and let us work. And that's why it's so fiercely defended is because it's the last ditch effort to keep the laity from interfering in matters that they can't understand. The science itself has been under probably a bigger public assault in terms of its validity

as a result of the COVID pandemic than I can ever remember in my lifetime, certainly. Is it damaging when everybody on social media suddenly becomes an epidemologist, whatever it may be, you know, any different types of science you like, or medical expert, whatever? When their views get amplified, like Terrence Howard,

if they're completely wrong, they get amplified and shared gazillions of times as has happened here with all of the things that he said. Is it damaging to the integrity of science when that happens? And is that a unique problem with social media, amplifying amateur scientific and medical views? It's a very interesting question. I would think that we would begin somewhere else.

The greatest damage is when we amplify pseudoscientists who happen to be official pseudoscientists. So when you take a director of NAI National Institute for allergies and infectious disease. And you take that person's contradictory pronouncements and you amplify those, then suddenly everybody has to learn what MRNA is because they're trying to make a decision for their child.

And suddenly you've thrust them into advanced biology because you've amplified pseudoscience coming out of the National Institute of Health or the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DITRA. The failure and the pseudoscience is coming from inside the house. The problem is when a Francis Collins and an Anthony Fauci in private emails can turn their dissenting colleagues, fully competent expert dissident colleagues like Jay Batacharya and his colleagues at Harvard and Oxford, and overnight they become fringe epidemiologists.

So more or less what you're seeing is not a failure of science. what you're seeing is a failure of science to disavow public health. Public health is not science. Public health is an incredibly bizarre field that tries to straddle two worlds of actual truth and the noble lie. And, you know, as I've said before, the problem is the failure to cancel an ex-spouse's credit card privileges. when the person takes the credit card on a spree, science did not cancel its credit card

that it had given to public health. And so what we had was an incredible destruction of trust in science, which is completely unwarranted because people who are not acting as scientists who may have at one time been scientists, but have gone over to public policy, were allowed to lie on science's behalf. That's a failure.

I understand why the credit rating got beaten up, but for God's sakes, just cut off the credit card and learn where scientists lie and where they do not. They don't lie generically. There's nothing wrong with Hook's law. There's nothing long with the adapter hypothesis in biology. There's nothing wrong with most of what we consider to be science. We lie in very special places out of necessity.

Let me bring in the other two guests now to debate, actually what you've been saying. Professor Brian Keating, cosmologist, from San Diego University, and Tom Billio, who's the Impact Theory podcast task. Professor Keating, your response to what you've just been hearing from Merrick. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive was buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't see. States. Explore GoogleFi wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Well, I think scientists, we have a responsibility. You know, Eric's unknown for coining the term the intellectual dark web. And I feel like as scientists, we have an responsibility to keep, you know,

the environmental, intellectual environment clear of pollution. And I feel like there is a tendency because of this anti-authoritarian moment that we seem to be in, to view science as authoritarian, and then to rebel against it, we look to heroes and people like Terrence or Candace Owens or or people like Tucker Carlson. And they get enormous platforms because of their social media statute. But to me, you know, to listen to people who have no domain expertise and no proven track record is an affront to actual practicing scientists. And it's fine to have a hobby.

It's fine to do things out of an avocation, a love for it. But it's a bit, to me, an example of the Halo Effect, which is a cognitive bias. And you have people you're listening to, in some cases, it's akin to listening to your friend, peers, you know, Andrew Tate for marital advice. He may be a great MMA star and Terrence may be a great actor. But that gives them no and it confers no benefit to their scientific practices. And it would be like me going on to the set of Iron Man and, you know, trying to be like Terrence. You would laugh me off the stage and rightfully so. So we have to look at and examine these claims that amateurs can do good science.

You know, Eric pointed out in the interview that there's some babies in with the bathwater. And I'd love to ask my dear friend Eric to expound upon those particular babies. Because to me, to say that there might be some angle or something like that or some drone or it sounds to me a little bit like damning. with faint praise as well. Because if you go through and there's 97 patents that he claims he has, we go through them, we find out that very few of them have been granted. There may be a couple that have been granted. You go through one times one equals two. Eric demonstrated clearly that's not the case. You go through the periodic table. His ideas are completely wrong there. His claims about gravity and building planets that he's built the planet Saturn or comes out of a biological digestive

process of the sun. These things are completely fallacious. So I think there's a danger and it's a symptom of the halo effect. I mean, just as a point about Andrew Tate, he's not a friend of mine. He's someone I've interviewed three times. But the point I make about him, I've this debate with someone the other day, is he has a huge following on social media, regardless of whether people like me interview him. At least when I interview him, I get a chance to challenge him. And I've really noticed when young men in particular come up to me in the street, which they do with alarming regularity about Andrew Tate, that actually the conversation I have with them has moved from, God, you know, Andrew Tate, isn't he amazing, blah, blah, blah, to I really liked it when

you challenge him about this, this and this. In other words, shining a light on people like Andrew Tate, actually challenging them on a big platform, can, I see tangible impact on the street of those challenges kicking through into people's consciousness in a way they wouldn't if he was just able to do his thing slightly below radar on social media without ever being challenged. So that's my kind of theory about why I interview people like him, which is in itself open to debate, obviously. Eric, just in that response to the baby and bathwater,

what would you say to Brian Keating's point there? Well, I tried to say it already, that if you take the vertices of a tetrahedron as measured from the center, you're looking at an angle of the arc cosine of minus one-third, which is about 109.47 in degrees. And if you take the interior angles of a regular pentagon, it's 108. So 108.8 is not 109.47. But it is close enough so that within engineering tolerances,

you can put six of these motors into a regular tetrahed. and then you can potentially, therefore, traverse all of the dimensions needed to orient the object around its center of mass and to move it to any point three-dimensional space. I've stated that clearly to any technical person who wants to hear it. It may be that there's prior art,

and it may be that it doesn't end up being that interesting because of the tolerances or it's too difficult to work. That's fine. But I've already stated what the baby is. And further, you know, Brian, I was very surprised, that you just corrected me on social media. Now, of course, we're friends, and so I don't mind having this back and forth. But you've stated that in my field, that peer review is much older than Gilane Maxwell,

who was born in 1961. And you cited a bunch of journals in physics. And in fact, that's simply not true. In part, Eric? Well, you know, I have Melinda Baldwin. I have Melinda Baldwin's article here, which says, however, most papers accepted for physical review never went out to referees at all. The editor accepted most papers on its own authority, consulting referees only when he thought he might want to reject a paper. It was not until the 1960s that all physical review papers were sent out for external referee opinion.

More or less, peer review comes out of Utah in 1972 through Senator Wallace Bennett's amendment. that forces the issue into the NIH framework because the Medicare Act was established in 1965 making the US taxpayer responsible for medical payments that they suddenly wanted access to knowing why are we paying all of this money to doctors without the ability to question them. So in part, what I'm astounded by is that we're not even aware

of our own history. If George Green, the Miller, with no formal education, mailed off a solution to an inversion problem for differential operators, which is what gives us Green's functions, which Feynman made famous, he didn't have any training whatsoever. It's in part very dangerous to be offended when people listen to what we say and they then say, I keep hearing that science is for everyone and that mathematics is a great place to play. There are no bad questions.

And then when they appear to take an interest, we cut their heads off. And my feeling is that I'm not going to do that. I'm going to state what this is. This is an elite activity. It's elite the way a violinist is elite. It's elite the way a surgeon is an elite brain surgeon. You're not going to have somebody say, hey, I've been doing brain surgery in my backyard on my family members and I'm ready for prime time. We are not honest about the extent that this is an elite community.

And the last thing that I would add to what you said is part of the problem is where are the dissident scientists who don't go along inside of the university system, inside of the research institutions? If you had them, they would have been tared and feathered during DEI because they would have said, who are these foreign intruders into the academic arena? We must fire them and get them out. Claudine Gay could never have become president of Harvard. What we've done is we've gotten rid of all of the dissenting experts. And the dissenting experts who are going to get up and at the top of their lungs say, hey, we've got a disaster in theoretical physics at the moment.

We have an abomination in the way in which we are pretending that random mutation is decidedly the main engine of Darwinian selection. We're going to pretend that neoclassical economics is on solid ground. All of these things are just absolutely silly, and effectively, there are no professors who are standing up in good standing as experts doing the job that now Candace Owens is going to fill. And I promise you that it's more expensive to get rid of your dissenters who actually know what they're talking about than it is to open it up to a public that wonders whether they've just ended, you know, shorten the life of their child by giving them an unnecessary experimental

pseudo-vexing. All right. Let me bring in Tom. He'd be waiting very patiently. Tom, what's your perspective on this? So I think the key thing to understand is if you're arguing at the level of the specifics of the science, you have already lost. So the goal here has to be to understand that we are living in the age of conspiracy, and that is the problem. When I saw the interview with Terrence Howard and Joe Rogan the first time, I just about dislocated my finger dialing Eric to call him up to be like, hey, you have to refute this stuff. And the reason that I was very excited to see that he went on and did that and did that so well, Eric, you are a national treasure, is that it does not matter to me what the elites think in isolation. All that happens is if people have an idea that hits a critical mass, they begin to bifurcate. I mean, this is like the multiverse where we no longer have a shared vision of what is true.

that has second and third order consequences that I think are going to be terrifying for the nation and when you have a thinker like Eric who can actually go through and say, hey, let me steal man

what I have heard you say which Joe and Terrence would not let him do which I was mortified by because he should have just laid it out. Here are the base assumptions and then we're going to build up from that. Now the reason that I want that to happen

is when an idea, whether it is terrible, whether it is obviously terrible, whether every elite person in the world who does science is like this is the worst idea ever you have to understand because of a whole host of things but certainly COVID being a nice mile marker for us it broke people's trust in elites to lead us properly it broke our trust in science and so now you must if in fact I will say scientists I love you all you have no obligation to do what I'm saying I beseech you as somebody who wants society to move forward

well that if an idea hits a certain level of critical mass in the public's awareness, even if you hate it, you are going to have to address it. If you want to lead us well forward, but you have to do it based on base assumptions so that anybody following along at home that's trying to build their thinking up can go, oh, I actually understand Terrence's base assumptions. One times one equals two. All things are in motion. There's no straight lines.

Like things that, okay, have I understood your position perfectly, Terrence? Yes, Eric, you have. Okay, amazing. Now I'm going to walk through each of those base assumptions and show you which ones are broken and how that is going to make the rest of your sequencing fall apart. If people would just stay focused on utility, these beliefs work in the real world. We would be in a much better position. That's what I want to see more of. Okay. We bring Brian in. Before I come to you, Brian, though, I want to play a clip from Candice Owens. This was several days after the debate that Rogan and Terrence said. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton, for the stay. Why I am now rejecting the cult of science. So many things that they've lied to us about. Vaccines, birth control, people that are being injured, and we just accept everything. What I said was that science has become a pagan faith. Yes, that's what I actually believe. Do you want to say that NASA has satanic origins and so on?

Now, I interviewed Candice myself recently, and she's a bona fidey anti-vaxxas and believe in vaccines. at all. And she has a big following. And there are lots of people like her out there now saying that because there have been legitimate areas of concern around the COVID vaccines, that everything about them is flawed and wrong. And therefore, all the scientists who promoted them are the devil. And this stuff gathers momentum. I see it. It's spreading like wildfire. She also says that Emmanuel Macron's wife is a man. It's by having had three kids and so on.

And these things gather their own momentum. And whilst on one level it's sort of humorous, on another level, it's actually, I think, very damaging because it means that scientists can never be wrong again. Because if they're wrong about any one aspect of a big thing like a COVID pandemic, which is fast moving and evolving and changing, if they're wrong about any aspect of it, the whole thing gets trashed by this community. Here's this, this is why we have to understand that this is about the age of conspiracy. The very thing that Eric I think is trying to combat, yeah, is to say science is about figuring out where we are wrong. And if scientists stake their reputation as they have done over the last four or five years entirely on always being right, then if I can pull one thread and it falls apart, everything

is dead. But if science just gets behind Feynman's statement that this is about distrusting experts and figuring out where they're wrong, now it can become a, far more fruitful pursuit of what actually works. Okay. Brian, Brian, your thoughts on that. Yeah, Tom, just because someone's an expert doesn't necessarily mean that you have to distrust them. When you look at something, there's a concept called Brandelini's Law, which my kids are nearby, so I'm not going to say in full, and it's full terms. But it's basically that there's 10 times easier to produce something that's BS, and so then it is to refute it. Therefore, the world is

full of unrefuted BS. And to put that on scientists, to make us sort of the intellectual SEAL Team 6, where we can never be wrong. The terrorists only have to be right once, and everyone else is relying on us, SEAL Team 6, that we're never wrong. To put that in perspective, you know, when you listen to people like this, Candice tweeting from her laptop and enabled by technology that was invented at Bell Labs, that was the byproduct of the space race, which she also denies, moon landings and so forth, we're not in New age. We're in a pre-scientific age where people can, unfortunately, spread not scientific truth via

scientific proof, which, Eric, I'm sorry to say, my academic genealogy goes back 17 generations. Every single one of those people, including my students, I'm now in my third generation. I have graduate students that have their own graduate students. They've all been through peer review. We didn't have Pergammon Press and Robert Maxwell. That is true. Einstein published almost all of his famous papers. They were done by peer review. In fact, the discovery of gravitational waves, one of the most revolutionary discoveries in all of science. That prediction, he first tried to get submitted in the early 1930s, and he didn't want to get it peer reviewed. And there was an error in it.

He said it would never be detected. Imagine that. Einstein made a mistake. But thanks to peer review, that paper was published in 1936, and it went on to win the Nobel Prize for some of my good friends. I've interviewed 20 Nobel laureates on my podcast, and three of them won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. of the thing that Einstein thought was impossible. We can go back many, many generations. And yes, they didn't have presses. Of course, the printing press was only a relatively recent invention, but you go to the peer review process. Not far from where peers is right now is the Royal Society

and also not too far away as the Royal Institution. I've been to both places. I've lectured there. And when you go to those places, yes, there wasn't a press, but you gather your peers around you and you do an experiment. And that experiment would either fail or pass. in real time and you would get feedback from a jury. Okay. Okay. Eric, it's interesting watching Elon Musk goes with him actually the other day. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I have to respond to that. Okay, respond to them. Brian, what you just said is not true. You know, it's just, the fact is, is that Einstein paper was not published in 1936 after peer review error. Sorry, that was John Tate, who was the editor at physical review before Simon Pasternak, before Sam Goodschmidt. Yes, it is true that most of Einstein's work was not peer-reviewed.

That's why he was incensed. He'd never sent another paper to physical review. If I'm not incorrect, please check me on it. Was that paper peer-reviewed? The fact is there was one paper with Rosen that was peer-reviewed, which incensed Einstein because he was used to not being peer-reviewed. And he was wrong about it. Until peer review pointed out by Eddington helped out as well and said that there was an error in a calculation.

Peer review is not referee review, right? We had external referees that were occasionally sought. But what you cite about the Royal Society is in fact an error introduced into the literature by Merton, the famous historian of science, who is the father of the Merton of Black Shoals Merton fame. And that was an erroneous claim that peer review began, I think, in the 1700s. What we currently call peer review is far more recent, and it is fantastic to find out that our professor does not know the history of peer review in its own subjects. because what we have is we have a chorus of people with the highest credentials repeating a fable. And we can't always tell when we've been, when malware has entered our minds.

But I would submit to you, sir, that despite your pedigree, in general, your predecessors were not peer-reviewed in any modern sense of the term before the 1970s. certainly before the 1960s. The beginning of forms for external referees begins, I think, in the 1930s under John Tate. I just don't think you know the history. I do know it, and in fact, invite you to go down to the Royal Institution next time you're in London,

and you'll see pictures of Michael Faraday, of J.J. Thompson, of Eddington. You'll see them in front of audiences. Was there a peer review process before journals? When did it journal Nature? That's the average person is perfect in the face right now. As somebody that loves you to, literally I know both these guys. Eric, I know very well.

Both have been on my show. Brian, I love you guys. So I say this because I am begging you. The average person wants to chew through their TV set right now or their laptop as they're listening to this. And the reason is they don't care about this. It's already done. Sorry.

Hold on. Hold on. Let me finish. Let me finish. The world cares about people like they want to hear what Joe Rogan has to say. They want to hear who goes on his show. They are absolutely going to listen to Candice. I think, Brian, you brought that up.

Candice is about to sweep the world. And if I could just get you guys on board with the reality that we are in a very difficult moment right now where, yes, you guys are being asked to do a public service, which is to collide with these people who do not have your scientific bona fides, but the average person does not care, but they will actually listen to your collision of ideas for sure, because I took a lot of way from you talking to Terrence. And the first time I heard Terrence, I was like, maybe this is genius, I don't know.

You know, it's so interesting. I was going to say, actually, Eric, earlier, I saw Elon Musk recently, but for the first time. And he did a fascinating Q&A about everything from colonizing Mars to humanoid robots and so on. But I also, we talked about X in his purchase of Twitter and then to take into X. One of the best things I've seen in terms of populist period,

review is community notes now on X, where I often see things which are spinning around, which are complete nonsense. And then you see a very well-sourced community note killing it. And it does seem to have an effect because that in itself, because it's happening in the same medium, starts to also spread like wildfire and tends to kill them quite quickly. Are you a fan of what Elon is doing with X? Is this helping it as a populist peer reviewing? Right. Yeah. Again, this is, you know, this is one of these Wild West conversations where it's not peer review. The whole concept of peer review is peer. And community notes is community. Right. And so in a certain sense, the point is it's an anti-peer review. It's working pretty well right now. But keep in mind that Wikipedia worked pretty well until people figured out how to game it. Right.

So my concern is that what you're looking at with peer review and with community notes, which is anti-peer review, if you will, is technologies that are in the process of being probed and gamed. And just to refute what Tom was saying before, Tom, I don't disagree at all. We are going to have to deal with the Candace phenomenon. But the reason the Candace phenomenon is happening is that you don't have any expert dissident opinion. If you have five professors shout me down that I don't know what I'm talking about with respect to peer review, and I happen to be completely right, I will be told that I'm not an academic despite the fact that we all speak the same language and have the same credentials.

What is going on is that the world is not crying out for Candace Owen. It's crying out for where is the physician with my daughter's interests at heart? Where is the biologist who's willing to stand up to a Tony Foucher? and say, I completely disagree. Why is it that we keep having these fake consensus? And these consensus are basically determined by getting rid of the people who won't shut up and who won't sit down and who won't sing from the hymnal. And what I'm trying to say is what you just saw was an interchange between two colleagues

with a great deal of love and respect for each other on an issue where I'm claiming that the good professor is simply an error. And if you had somebody saying that around the Wuhan lab and the origin of COVID or the potential danger of the vaccines or the liability regime in which they were negotiated, that this is an abomination that we can't sue the manufacturers, you would have a totally different world. Nobody would be listening to Candace Owens. They would be trying to track J. Batacharya. They would be trying to track all of the experts who were standing up with their interests. and hearts. The big problem in the United States is we used to have experts in the right chairs who dissented. And now what you have is a group of people who know to keep their head down. Brian, just want to end with just quick thoughts from you and Tom before we finish. Give me some hope about the future of science. Clearly, I think, it's indisputable. The science and the integrity of science and scientists has never been under a bigger attack than it is today.

A lot of it fueled by conspiracy theorists and social media. Give me some hope for the future of science and its integrity? I think the hope comes from my students, the people that I work with, the incredible breakthroughs that I've been witnessed to, both personally and part of a team of 300 scientists that are working to uncover. What happened during the first nanosecond in the cosmos's history? What kind of breakthroughs do we now unlock, knowing that the universe is suffused with dark energy?

What do we learn about the future, possibly with new technology, like high temperature, room temperature, superconductivity? perhaps fusion. That's never been a more exciting time to be a scientist. And to hear about science its best days are behind us, I think that's nonsense. On the other hand, we have to guard against conspiracy theories and flat earthers and all sorts of anti-vaxxers and things like that. Because there is always a grain of truth. As Isaac Asmov said, if you believe the earth is flat, you're wrong. But if you believe it's perfectly round two, you're also wrong, but you're less wrong. And I think what we want to do is scientists is not be held to this impossible secret service level of we can't make a single mistake.

Recognize that we do make mistakes. But science is self-correcting. And part of that self-correction mechanism has to do with being analyzed by your peers. Whatever Eric and I disagree with about in the past, today peer review is perhaps, as I like to say, it's the worst system for gauging scientific process except for all the rest. Tom? All right. So the thing that I really want to make sure that I'm being heard on, Brian, because you keep repeating, we shouldn't be held to this team seal team six level of perfection. What I'm saying is science has a branding problem.

You guys created a branding problem. I'll just say during COVID where it was, hey, everybody listened to us and everything is going to be fine. Masks don't work, by the way, but save them for the health workers because they need them. It's like so everyone's brain starts sketching out. Also, no one has talked about social media yet. social media, this is done. The horses are out of the stable. The toothpaste is all over the floor.

The genie has flown out of the bottle. We are living in a reality where everybody is a publisher. Everybody is going to say things. And people are screaming out for Candace Owens. I'm telling you right now, as somebody, I'm almost sure I'm going to disagree with every word out of her mouth. And yet, I am utterly fascinated by how she has already captured people in terms of their imagination, because this is what they want. As a marketer, I can tell you, you guys are terrible.

Like if I have to market you, oh, God, even though I look at Eric and I'm like, is this the smartest human I've ever encountered? For sure. Do I want him at my house just whispering in my ear all the things to do? Absolutely. My life will be way better. However, from a marketing perspective, oh, dear God. So it's like we have a much bigger challenge that we have to overcome.

And Candace doesn't have that problem. She's electrifying. She captures what people want to hear. And what I'm saying is the service that you guys can now play in the world that we live in is to say science isn't about being right. Science is about two things. Number one, the pursuit of utility. Einstein's breakthroughs matter because they give us GPS and nuclear energy. That's the only reason that they matter. And the second thing is we know we're wrong about a whole lot of stuff. And so our job is just go through what are all the things we're wrong about that are

stopping us. And I hope I'm not talking out of class, Eric. Oh, please God. But Eric has said to me many times, We ought to be traveling the cosmos. And we aren't because string theory has gotten stuck. Exactly. So you have to get new ideas. You have to break the old paradigms in order to get the utility that you want. And if we judge every idea by its utility and not by where it comes from, we'll be in a much better place.

You know that the best thing about this debate, Tom, is that it's actually by having this kind of conversation on a platform like this is watched globally in pretty big numbers now. that we can probably get to where you want to get science to. And the other thing I'll observe is I host a lot of debates between people who disagree and they normally end up screaming at each other. What I loved about you three was, the more abusive you became, in a very nice, polite manner,

the more you all laughed. That is the way to debate. So thank you all very much indeed. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel

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