Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Why Professor Dave Thinks Our Scientific Integrity Is at Jeopardy (#340)

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Today's guest is no stranger to drama and controversy, and he may have helped you pass a test or two in school… Meet Dave Farina, better known as Professor Dave Explains! Dave is a popular science communicator, chemist, author, and proprietor of one of the largest science YouTube channels in the world. Dave and I first got in contact after I published an interview with someone who Dave claims is a charlatan, and of course, that sparked my interest, and I knew I had to get Dave on the show, too, so he could state his case properly. Join us as we discuss the heated drama between Dave and the Discovery Institute, science deniers, faith, and the concept of lying. Are you ready? Let’s dive in! Key Takeaways: On exposing misinformation and fraudulent claims (00:32) The notion of lying (12:34) Judging a book by its cover: Is This Wi-Fi Organic? (21:32) On questionable influencers and fear-mongering (24:10) The undermining of the public’s trust in science and COVID-19 (30:04) Uncertainty in the scientific community (39:34) The moral obligations of scientists (46:29) Science communication (51:27) The most impressive invention of the human brain (1:03:59) Check out Dave Farina: 📚 Get Dave’s book: https://amzn.to/3QAb7Rf 🔔 Subscribe to Dave on YouTube:   / @professordaveexplains   Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're talking about a resurgence in no virus or like the denial of the existence of viruses or no maskers, right? Masks don't do anything. Things that are so blatantly obviously false and yet they only have gotten more traction. It's profoundly alarming. It leaves most of us science communicators a little bit not knowing what to do. My approach has been to become extremely aggressive and target liars, target charlatans and berate them and re-reight them and re-react. expose them as aggressively as possible. Welcome today.

We are joined with a renowned communicator of science, a chemist, I believe, by training, and author and proprietor of one of the biggest science YouTube channels on the planet. And that's Professor Dave, aka Dave Farina, joining us all the way up north. We said we could have come up there and you could have come down here up in L.A. How are you doing today, Dave? Pretty good. How are you doing? I'm very good. We have a lot of interest in having you on the channel for a long time.

And I should suppose since I'm a cosmologist, I should explain the origin of story of how this particular big band came to be. And that was about a year ago. I published a pseudo-debunking video as I started to wade my toes into the field of debunking, not perhaps criminally or negligently produced content, as Dave is so expert at doing in his new book that will get. to, but in the realm of cosmologists, purported to be cosmologists, seeking to upend and completely revoke our understanding of the origin of the universe. And that's my area of expertise. That's what I do. And I build experiments to study the cosmicry background with my team. And this was a man by the name, Mr. Eric Lerner, who also is a proprietor some fusion company or something like that. And he had posted a video or he had gotten a ton of attention. And this is something I want

to get into with Dave. He got a ton of attention by writing an article, which was a a rehash of a book he wrote 35 years ago called The Big Bang Never Happed. And it made the rounds. And it got tremendous amount of attention. I was even asked to go on, you know, various newspapers and TV shows or whatever. But I made a debunking video. And then Dave commented on it or he referenced that video. And I'll put a link to it here or there. I don't know where these things go. Dave can help me. About seven months later, after that event, I posted an interview with a gentleman, a professor at Rice University named James Tour. after that video aired, I received an email from Dick, and it was respectful. And it said, I don't know if you're aware of it, but you should know that James Tour is every bit as fraudulent or pseudoscientific or perhaps a charlatan, I think, one of the words they used, as Eric Lerner. And so that really caught my eye and caught my ear. And I don't like to talk, as you probably can imagine. I don't like talk negatively about past guests. I mean, for one thing, it's like questioning your wife's judgment. You know, it's like, look who she married, right? But, but, but, but, this is kind of consistent with, you know, I try to have comedy, a little bit of comedy, but we're not doing a debate today.

But the first thing I want to ask you about, before we get into your wonderful book, is what animates you when you see, you know, content produced by people who otherwise, in any other circumstance, are perfectly normal. I would trust them to babysit my kid, you know, they're even scientifically educated. They might even have a higher H index than I do. What animates you when you see that type of behavior that you deem egregious, perhaps fraudulent, perhaps charlatan, or at the very minimum, talking their own game? What animates you? How does it drive you to do the work that you do on your YouTube channel?

I mean, I'm motivated to expose misinformation and disinformation in the science space. So to me, I mean, there are different gradations. There are very clear charlatans. And then there are people who maybe have fallen prey to their own faith or something like that. But, you know, the fact remains that false information is false information. So regardless of the motivation, I seek to expose it. And then certainly there are cases such as with James Torre where in the process of exposing that misinformation, it has caused a heated exchange because he continued to double down, triple down,

quadruple down on his script of lies. So it turned into a very contentious interaction. But, you know, would I trust him to babysit my kids? I mean, at this point, certainly not. but whether it's an individual or it's somebody who's representing an institution. And so, you know, James Tour isn't like formally employed by Discovery Institute, but he certainly has a very strong affiliation with them. And they are undoubtedly a, you know, a nefarious propaganda organization. So, I mean, it's not as simple as just, oh, somebody is lying a little bit about chemistry or biology or something

like that. This is a concerted effort to erode the separation of church and state. I mean, there's no, I can't think of a greater threat. other than climate change or something, you know, to our society and the way we operate. So, you know, I think I feel a sense of duty to push back against that as I am uniquely capable of doing it. When you wrote me, you know, I immediately looked at your past history with James Tour. I hadn't followed it. You know, it's hard enough to make your own channel let alone.

Yeah, there's a lot going on on the Internet. But I did find a video and I screenshot it. I remember screenshoting it. And I put it in a folder. And it was actually perhaps even before I interviewed James. and in person, but I knew I was going to. And it was a video where you say, look, he's very religious and he is persuaded. He's actually a Jew for Jesus, a Messianic Jew. I'm an ordinary, a Jew for Moses. But, and we had rigorous debates about that, and it was very interesting. However,

when I looked at your videos, the early videos, at least, before it got heated and very, very contentious, you mentioned there's nothing wrong with a scientist practicing his or her faith, some of the best scientist in history you mentioned in a video. And you say, like, he's a highly cited scientist. He's actually, you said he's an esteemed scientist and whatever. And this was, you know, this is before. I was being pretty kind in that first one. You know, so here's the deal. So I've interacted with the Discovery Institute a lot. And let me, let me talk to you about how that has gone. So when I interact with them, I am not, I am what I call a practicing agnostic, which I think is a decent format for a scientist to be. And I take after my first guest on the podcast, Freeman Dyson, who also felt similarly,

and we discussed that a great link. Meaning that, I do go to a temple, but the practice of saying definitively there is a God or isn't a God I think is beyond what I'm capable of doing. However, there are lifestyle choices. There are ways to raise kids. There are lessons ethically and morally, which we may disagree about. When I confront the, when I was interviewed by the Discovery Institute about cosmology, they interviewed me originally thinking that I might give a rebuttal, or I might support, say, the Big Bang narrative as an instantiation of Genesis 1-1. And in fact, I did something very different. And I was interviewed by Stephen Meyer. And what I did is I presented all the ways that the Big Bang may not have been a singularity. And it may not have been. And that they

were in my mind, and I say this on camera, you know, that you can manipulate the, you know, the words of the Torah, the Genesis, to set a narrative as you like. I would never use that to teach a chemistry class or cosmology class. On the other hand, there's ample evidence and there are ample models that suggest that Big Bang maybe didn't even happen once. And I think that that surprised them, but to give them credit, they didn't censor it. They didn't like, you know, exclude me to the contrary. Just last week, we're taping this in late July. But Stephen Meyer was on Joe Rogan show. And Joe was asking him about, you know, these controversies over the web telescope that that Eric Lerner had brought up, you know, 30 years ago plus three weeks, three months ago.

And Stephen said, look, I'm not an expert in this. You should talk to Brian Keating. And, you know, he deferred in that sense. So all I'm saying is when I've interacted with them, they have a, let me completely obliterate the case that the Big Bang is a Genesis 1-1-like event, potentially. We're still studying that. It may be. Or that the Big Bang only happened once. and also that the reason I brought up that James Ture is Jewish is because oftentimes what I find with the Discovery Institute, and I've told this to all of the people I've interacted with, is that you get a syllogism. The universe had a beginning, which I disagree that we know that for a fact, a singular origin, et cetera. We can talk about that later.

Then the universe evolved to create life, that life has a purpose, and therefore Jesus. And as a Jew, that's very, you know, something that is very uncomfortable for me to sort of accept that this, by necessity, there's an unbroken logical chain from the origin of the university, origin of matter, to the origin of consciousness to a personal savior named Jesus. And I say all this in camera. And I'm only telling you this because, you know, at the risk of, you know, maybe upsetting you or something like that, I have found with me that they have been very intellectually open and honest. Now, I know that you don't agree with that. So I'd like to ask, how should I react? So knowing nothing, except that when I disagree with them forcefully, that they don't censor me and they don't, you know, they in fact celebrate it and they published, you know, the video I did about the Big Bang never happened. So how would you advise me

to interact with them? Should I cut off? I mean, if you're saying they're completely nefarious, then obviously your advice must be never associate with them. What would you say to a sign that wants to engage with religious people, perhaps, to bring them along, along the lesson that I always say, if you want to understand God, if you clearly think you God exists, then the quickest, easiest, best way to get to know him is to study science and study properly. So anyway, I've been blathering on. Please take it. There's like 18 different questions in there. I mean, in terms of you personally, if you want to get a better understanding of why they're a nefarious propaganda organization, I have a large amount of content demonstrating their fraudulence and their complete lack of academic

integrity. They need to put on the guise of academic integrity. That's their whole shtick. Look at us, right? We're like, we're academics, right? We're scientists. It's all a facade. So I have a number of pieces where I go through, I go down the roster, Casey Luskin, Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, and highlight very clearly how they directly and deliberately contradict all of the primary scientific literature that they try to discuss in glaring ways. I mean, they will quote mine. There will be omissions where there's an ellipsis and what's in the ellipsis directly contradicts what they're trying to present in that piece, things like that. But then the second thing, you said, I mean, in terms of interacting with, not a propaganda organization, a well, a well-funded propaganda organization

that has a dishonest mission statement, just your run-of-the-mill religious people who are likely to get roped in by this propaganda. I mean, these are completely different things, right? If you're going after frauds, which I do, I'm going to highlight their fraudulence. I'm going to compare their claims to the primary literature show you exactly how they're lying and why. And then for these other people, I mean, this is what I want to show them, right? I want to show these people that yes, and that's why I make all of these, you know, I will make these concessions like I did in that first James tour video. It's not about being religious, right? It's totally fine to be religious, and you can be a scientist, and you can be religious. But a good scientist who's religious will not allow their religion to

cloud their judgment on the scientific validity of a concept like intelligent design, which is not science. It is pseudoscience, objectively, by any measure of what science or pseudoscience is, definitively. That's why there have been plenty of religious scientists. So it has nothing to do with being religion. And of course, their MO is to paint me as the angry atheist, and I hate religion, and I love atheism. I don't care about atheism. It's not a big part of my identity. I've never made any content on atheism at all. It's about people who lie. about science. And that's creationists or intelligent design proponents. That's Eric Lerner in the electric universe and the wall, thornhills, and all those people. That's anti-vaxxers. It's anybody, right?

I don't just go after creationists, although that is a big chunk of my debunking, just because of how strongly they've tried to character-sassinate me as a result. But it's just science lies. That's it. And I did confront James in that videos. You know, I did talk to him about the kind of undermining of any position when an hominem attacks are brought in. So, and I'll refer and I'll put links to the video of debate where you did finally debate with him in person. I believe you went to Houston to debate him. You showed up.

You did your, you know, due diligence. 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 oceanfront 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. I guess the question that I might want to just click on before we move on to your book and other subjects is the notion of lying. So is it a lie in the sense that you may believe that there's a creator and you may want everybody to share the gospel and the good news and so forth? And you may be a promoter of something that's wrong, factually wrong. But is there the same kind of level of derisive or undermining perniciousness associated with somebody who's actively lying saying this thing definitely causes autism, this vaccine, or because perhaps they have political aspirations or they have governmental aspirations. So what does it take to qualify at the level of a pernicious lie, mendacity, whatever you want to call it, versus someone who has a worldview that's in contrast to what you believe is truth? Yeah, I mean, it's very, very easy to expose deliberate lies. I mean, to talk about what you said first, to quantify the urgency of these things, it's number one, yes, somebody that says, hey, this vaccine causes autism, that has a very direct ramification in terms of death count. But in terms of people who are prone to science denial, it's all one big thing. So when James goes up there and he goes, origin of life research is a scam. It's all a fraud. And he puts a quote from Lee Cronin, which was a

objectively facetious. If anyone goes to the podcast, they'll see in five seconds that it was a facetious thing. But he keeps flashing it. He admits it. It's a scam. I mean, this is a lie. This is dishonesty. But what people do is they go, see the origin of life researchers. It's a scam, and they're lying, and then they're lying about climate, and they're lying about vaccines. All the scientists are lying about all the science stuff. That's how the regular public operates. That's how they conceive of science. But in terms of James in particular, has nothing to do with the worldview, right? And that's why I made it, I made a particular point in the debate to highlight a number of objective lies that he told that do not require any understanding

of science to acknowledge. So yes, he lies about, oh, no one has ever created a self-replicating ribosime. That's just a bald-faced lie that he tells repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, but if you don't know anything about systems chemistry, you wouldn't know that. That's why I included some lies about, you know, the textbooks say that the lightning and then the goo and then the snake crawls out. No, the textbooks don't say that. I show that. There's only a dozen origin of life researchers. No, there aren't. There are thousands. Like really, very clear and blatant lies. Like, these are lies with the intent to misinform the public. That's all that you can say about it. I mean, to the extent that you can comment on the motivation, and I've had Lee Cronin and Sarah, I've had on

I had Carl Zimmer on. I had Jamie Green on. I've had on a good host of people in origin of life. So yes, I've had on harshly more than 12 people. On the other hand, you'll hear things said by him, you know, that is just quoting a statistic and I can vouch for it in cosmology, at least in cosmology. So they're like 25% of Americans think that the sun orbits the Earth. And I gave that talk where I'd mention that statistic from the NSF in Italy. And they all scoffed at me. And I said, well, guess what? You shouldn't laugh too loud because Europe, it's 33%. I don't think I believe that. That's where the heliocentric universe was proven.

Yeah. So what do you think the motivation is? I mean, you could say like if, let's say you can make a ribosome. I mean, there's an old joke. You probably've heard this joke. Like a scientist says, Dave, or, you know, you go up and you say, God, you know, we can make a man out of dirt, just like you. And God says, oh, yeah, let's show me. And then you go, you pick up some dirt and start working.

And God says, oh, wait, wait, make your own dirt. The notion of where does the first primitive thing have to come in? We can admit that we actually don't know if the universe came up with a singularity or if it began from a cyclic universe or if it's perhaps a classical bouncing cosmological we can't say that yet. So let's say from the perspective of James Tour, like we can make ribosomes. Why would that invalidate his beliefs? Steel man that for me in a god.

I mean, you could say like, well, God made, you know, the elaborate. Right. So what do you think the motivations are? I mean, is it financially? he has companies, he has, and, you know, I'm not, I'm not casting that particular accusation. I'm just like, why would somebody, I could see people getting upset with people like Lee Krona, who I like very much personally, and he's been on multiple times. But, you know, in 2010, we'd make life in the lab and in a few years, and my friend down

the street here, James Vettner, Craig Vettner, you know, there are a lot of bold promises. So they have financial interest, it's clear. I mean, Vettner is working on making artificial life as we speak about a mile from here. And I'm all power to him. But what are the motivations of the of the, of the, of the people like Torah, as far as you can determine? So earlier said, it doesn't invalidate God, but that's not it, right? His faith is not simply that a God exists, right? It's much deeper and much more archaic than that.

He's a creationist. So he specifically believes that the creation of life was a divine act. So it will not suffice for there to be a God that simply initiated the universe and then everything unfolded according to natural principles, he needs that he needs for his God to have tinkered with matter and created life because that's what his scripture tells him and scripture beats empiricism in his worldview. So anything that invalidates his faith has to be stamped out and he uses his ability to use chemical terminology to weave a web of lies that is convincing to his constituents, right, his followers. But then also there's a financial interest as well, right? The DI funds a good

chunk of his research, and this is their agenda, right? This is their agenda to invalidate the biological sciences so that religion in the form of intelligent design can be inserted into public school science curricula. This is their MO, and this is the first step towards the erosion of church and state. It's right there in that wedge document that was leaked. They've got the 20-year plan for design theory to permeate all aspects of public social life. Right. This is the goal. I mean, the debate I had with Stephen on this channel and in person revolved around, you know, at what level does a divine being have to interject himself? And in the conversation, I said, well, you know, if it's not biology, is it in the level of, you know, the strong nuclear force? In other words, where is the last creative act that would still substantiate creation? It would be more than just the unmoved mover of Aristotle that just created the universe left it spinning and going on its way? Clearly so, but when I debated, and I didn't think he gave a satisfactory answer. I mean, all the while, he points to, he always points to this information doesn't come from non-entities and non-conscious entities.

So the strong nuclear force, he would say, yes, that's part. That had to be cast to the laws of nature by an omniscient being. But then the question is, why is that not necessary and sufficient? So we don't have to keep talking about them. I guess the thing I would say is a push to doing this. I always feel it undermines. I debated a creationist once, and they mentioned that the flood of NOAA, that that invalidated the carbon dating process because the thermodynamics of uranium somehow changed during the heat produced by the flood. Okay, don't respond.

What does uranium have to do with carbon dating in the first place? Or what carbon, you know, just a new strong nuclear force, right? So this was all, you know, because carbon 14, the half-life is too short to measure the age of the universe, to measure the age of the earth. Anyway, I said to him, well, first of all, the half-life, do you know the half-life of carbon-14, Dave? This is pretty fun to know. 5,700 years. Yeah. Do you know how all the Earth is believed to be by creation?

By why? Well, by young Earth creation. It's, yeah, about 6,000. Right. Exactly. Only one half-life could have elapsed. Yeah. Right.

7.83, right. So anyway, but I said to him, look, forget about that. I can prove that your supposition is wrong in every single scientific level that I'm capable of from, you know, electricality and thermodynamics. But you're using science. You're using this notion that heat and entropy and nuclei. You're using science to invalidate science. And simply, so when you construct biological, you know, arguments that, you're using science, that the ribosome or, you know, Jim's argument that he used with me is that, you know, most people believe that scientists have created a frog in the lab, but we haven't even created, you know, DNA in the lab.

So, but of course we have created DNA. But it doesn't matter. I mean, it doesn't matter like the uneducated status of a populace has nothing to do with the status of a scientific discipline, which is completely unrelated. So how do you handle, let's go off of them and talk about, well, let's get to your book because, you know, like I said, I normally start off a conversation. with not the origin story of why we're having this conversation, but with the origin of your book. So I listened to this book called Is This Wi-Fi Organic? And I want you to describe in a segment that we call Judging Books by Its Cover, how did you call title?

How did you come up with the cover art? And the subtitle is always the most interesting thing to me. And you can't say my publisher made me do it. Well, you're going to be disappointed then. But let me start with the title. So Mango Publishing approached me. and asked if I wanted to write a book. I said, that sounds pretty interesting.

I actually have an idea. And so I sort of pitched to them this idea of combining the two things I do in my channel, one of which being just sort of academic tutorials on an array of scientific disciplines and then sort of the debunking aspect. I wanted to combine those and just offer very, very basic information in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, physics, and then apply that to sort of broader cultural trends and confusion that people have about basic scientific concepts that that makes them vulnerable to to misinformation and so they said great let's we got we need a title so i just did this big brain dump of all the keywords and ideas of titles that's there

probably put like a hundred potential titles and i picked like maybe 10 that i liked and i sent them to that and one of them was this is this is this Wi-Fi organic and they were like oh that's a great one and i was like yeah that is good what is that wait a minute i didn't come up with that and then i realized that I stole it from Bobby Moynihan on S&L. He had this great character called Drunk Uncle, and he would just, I mean, well, you can go see the sketch if you want, but he had that one line. Is this Wi-Fi organic?

He was, you know, making fun of young people, I guess. And I was like, ah, I kind of stole that from Bob Moynihan, and they're like, it's fine. It'll be fine. I'm like, okay, please send him a copy of the book as a thank you. I don't know if they did it or not. So that's how we got to that. And then the subtitle, I forget exactly what I want.

It was pretty much like that. And then they tweaked a couple words, a guide to spotting misleading science online. It's close to what I wanted. I don't remember what it was. Then the cover though, it was actually a point of contention. We were arguing back and forth. I just really hated all the covers that they were sending me. And finally, they were like, look, this is dragging on like, this is the cover or the deal is off.

And I was like, well, I guess that's the cover. It's the best of the ones you've showed me. I honestly don't like the cover. But it's fine, I guess. Yeah, I always say, you know, why do we need these dust jackets anyway? You know, it's just like how much dust is raining down on top of your bookshelf as we speak? But it turns out if you have a book on old first edition, say, of Galileo, as my late great friend, Jay Pasachov showed me one. And it doesn't have the frontest piece or whatever.

It's worth 10% of the value of a book with frontispiece. Keep your cover. So is this Wi-Fi organic? It may pay for the book. I want to talk about your YouTube channel, and I want to phrase it in a different way than maybe I was originally thinking. And that came about listening to a bunch of influencers, which are very popular, maybe even have more subscribers than Professor Dave. And those are people that like Andrew Huberman and other people that are in the medical space. It seems like Peter Attia is another one.

They have huge audiences. They have the credibility of PhDs and stuff like that. And then I find that they have great advice, basic advice, free advice. You know, look at the sun every morning. But, you know, I always say, I'm in the astronomer here. So don't look at it with your bare eyes, you know, naked eyes. And don't look directly at it. But anyways, free.

It might, you know, enhance your cortisone or de-keats. I don't know what it does, Dave. And then we find that they have supplements. And you can get these supplements at their company. And you can get their apps. And you can get their co-branded affiliate links for their cool pod, cool, plunge pools or whatever. What do you make of these folks that are educated, highly educated, scientific, and then we'll pivot specifically to some comments that Andrew Huberman and Tim Ferriss have

talked about on their show. Anyway, what do you make of these and how should we assess those as a lay person in least in that field? I find them to be predominantly scammers and grifters. I don't know those people that you listed in particular. It's not necessarily the case that they're scammers. And I suppose it is possible for someone to be selling supplements that are not a scam. But in virtually any instance of such figures that I have found, it's just a bunch of lies that the public likes to hear to gain an audience to make money. I find it more prevalent. You know, there are a few things I'd like to do more than, you know, grift and make a lot of money.

But unfortunately, there aren't many telescope companies that I can co-brand and share my links with. But if I were to, I would like to think it would be for a good purpose. And I have in all series that's on videos saying that essentially it's child abuse if you don't get your kid a telescope because it's basically possible to see every single thing that Galileo saw 400 years ago from northern Italy. You can see that from Los Angeles right now. But when you think about, you know, kind of the levels of possibility here where, you know, a scientist like me who's working in the physical sciences, hard sciences, versus those. that are working in the soft sciences, I find there is some danger because there are crossovers,

right? And the most, the one I want to think about now is not, is this Wi-Fi organic, but is this Wi-Fi harmful? And there have been many conversations, Tim Ferriss and Andrew Heberman talked about this at a great length, that, you know, the possible negative effects of cell phones. And I wonder, you know, if that, if you've encountered such skepticism or outright fear, I know people that don't use cell phones because of the electromagnetic radiation, what about those types of fears? Are they the type of fear that is justified only because of the ignorance of the average person about how Wi-Fi works, etc, which I wouldn't expect Andrew Heberman would have because he's an educated, you know, brilliant scientist? But what do you make of these kinds of fears

that general public has? And, you know, ranging from don't stand in front of the microwave, as my wife will say to my kids, to, you know, don't use a cell phone because you're going to get, you're going to get cancer. I mean, it seems like fearmongering to me. I mean, uh, it's, relies on buzzwords, right? Electromagnetic radiation sounds pretty harmful, right? Well, how about all of it, all of the visible light around you at all times? Look at that concentrated radiation. Look out. It's colorful evil. Yeah, coming to get you. I mean, this is the problem, right, of painting with a broad brush. Electromagnetic radiation is bad. Obviously, that's an insane statement to make. Of course, that doesn't mean none of it is harmful. Gamma rays are pretty damn harmful.

UV can be harmful, microwaves can be harmful, even though they're of a lower energy than visible light. So how does that work? Well, then we have to go into how it induces molecular vibrations. So the problem with this kind of charlatanry is that it takes a concept that exists, right? Electromagnetic radiation is a real thing that exists that we utilize in technology, and it just goes, oh, it's bad. It's kind of like saying, oh, chemicals are bad. Well, what chemicals? What are you talking about? I mean, without chemicals you die, water, oxygen, what are you even saying? Of course, there are harmful chemicals. No one would say that there aren't.

It's just the problem is that all of the pseudoscience, it paints with a broad brush, it says, this is bad, this is good. And if it has even a morsel of truth to it, it's never the full story, right? Unfortunately, in order to be immune to these kinds of tactics, you have to actually understand fairly basic chemistry and physics and biology. Otherwise, you're going to fall for this stuff. That's why in the book, that's what I do. You know, here's 20 pages trying my best to summarize high school chemistry. And then we'll move on from there. You know what I mean? Things like that. When we look at those types of scientific conflations, I call them when you have something that, you know,

legitimately could cause problems, you know, and in X, you know, it's like water, as you say, the book is deadly, you know, especially if you're drowning in it, although it's the staff. drink too much of it. You can drink enough water that you die. I mean, you know, yeah. Right. So that's why I only drink vodka, which means little water in Russian. When I was listening to the book, just reviewing it, again, for preparation for the podcast, I came across, you know, the realization that you wrote it during COVID-19, that you must have written it in 2020-ish, you know, given the sclerotic nature of publishing industry, I don't know why it takes, you know, two years to publish a paper in three days. That's, you know, took 10, you know, 10 minutes to write.

But at the same token, you know, you were writing it during this time. And you mentioned vaccines and you say, I believe this is a very quote. You said that anti-vax sentiments are the most pernicious form of anti-science. So it's clear, you know, that where you stand on that. I find that there has been a degradation in trust for science. And it's not only because of, you know, what you would call charlatans, grifters, and pseudoscientists. It's actually, I think that this case study will be written for decades to come on the role of so-called experts, including people that are here in San Diego, like Eric Tall Paul and others, and how that might have led to the undermining of scientific credibility. And let me give you one example. So Eric, as I mentioned, Eric Tall Paul, I don't know if you're

familiar with him. He's renowned. He's a cardiologist, but he wrote a book called The Patient, We'll See You Now, and it's all about, you know, patients rights. And then he wrote a book about AI doctors and or reforming medicine. But he was one of the foremost proponents that we do not release the vaccine created during Operation Warp Speed because it might redound to the effect of Donald Trump. And that would be worse on the long run than had it been released afterwards or something like that. You saw a similar statement.

Biden would say he wouldn't take a Trump, you know, created vaccine, whatever that. Like Trump was in the laboratory, you know, mixing reagents, right? But and then, you know, all the way up to the level of people like Anthony Fauci and others and Francis Collins, you know, deliberately calling for takedowns of epidemiologists, et cetera, proclaiming themselves to be the science, Jacinda Arden of New Zealand saying, we are your single source of truth. Do you think that scientists, so-called experts, not Charleston, that they are partially responsible for some of the undermining of the public's belief or trust? in science. I mean, that's hard to say. I mean, there could be individual instances of that, but not in a broad sense. I think scientists are just, the scientific community is just the one with the targets on their back from the people who have some kind of financial interest in discrediting science, right? Whether that's the guy making a buck lying on the internet or some larger institution, yeah. But how do you react to now that we have had some distance from COVID-19,

the claims that were made about masks, the social distancing. Let's say there's, you know, God forbid, or I don't know what I should say to you. Zeus forbid. No, I'm just kidding. Science forbid. There's another pandemic, which is guaranteed to happen, right? It's just guaranteed. We live on an biological active planet, right?

A planet. Yeah. So what would you say are the lessons learned about communicating science to the public, at least, that you men have gleaned from the COVID-19 lockdowns, etc? ambition comes in all shapes and sizes at first citizens bank we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building fit for your ambition for citizens bank i think a lesson that has been learned over the decades but has become glaringly obvious now is that calmly presenting facts does precisely nothing you can take something like oh was the what did the virus uh leak from a lab right

you know, something that like, there's a lot of lies surrounding that, but it's at least something that could be discussed, kind of like the UFO stuff we were talking about earlier. Like, I don't know, like there's something to talk about here, but to trickle all the way down, not just to vaccine hesitancy, but we're talking about like a resurgence in no virus or like the denial of the existence of viruses, things like that, or no maskers, right? Masks didn't, don't do anything. Things like just set things that are so blatantly obvious. false, and yet they only have gotten more traction during and post-pandemic. It's profoundly alarming. It leaves most of us science communicators a little bit not knowing what to do. My approach

has been to become extremely aggressive and target liars, target charlatans, and berate them and really expose them as aggressively as possible. Other people may have other strategies, but I think as a result of being a little bit at a loss for seeing how incredibly ineffective it is to simply present facts. It just doesn't do anything. One of my thoughts as I was listening to the book had to do with the way that we perceive history and how we teach history. And I believe it's done into the detriment of physics by not teaching history properly in the context of which people form their worldviews. And I want to take us back to, you know, the two characters that figure very prominently, actually three in your book. One is Aristotle, one is Galileo, and one is Isaac Newton.

And you do talk about them and glowing terms and, you know, first Aristotle for empiricism and observing the physical universe around him and contributions to laws of form of logic and philosophy. And he was just a giant in many ways. It turns out factually, every single thing he said about physics, I believe, is wrong. More or less, yeah. But a step in the right direction. Yeah. And then Galileo, of course, my hero, I've, I have the distinction of being the first person to ever make an audiobook of Galileo with Frank Lilchek and Carla Rovelli and many others and Fabiola Giannati. And he's obviously my hero, but he had huge flaws. He believed, you know, in many things that that we know now to be to be false. And even when he was right, say, about heliocentrism, he claimed it based on incorrect reasoning pattern.

He believed that the tides on Earth, for example, which were his sine qua non-evidential. for the rotation of revolution of the earth to be the proof of that. And in fact, the tides are caused by the moon, which has nothing to do with the earth orbiting the sun. Nevertheless, he was right, but for the wrong reasons. And then finally, Isaac Newton, you know, hero but also villain, you know, he was a devout, first of all, he's a devout Christian. Do you know what, by the way, just parenthood.

Do you know what Isaac Newton claimed his biggest accomplishing it was, Dave? I don't know, alchemy stuff. The man who invented calculus, co-invented calculus, universal gravitation, et cetera. He claimed biggest accomplishment was that he died a virgin like his hero, Jesus Christ. That was the only way that he could emulate Jesus. Think about it. I think that might be harder than inventing calculus, actually. I will give him credit for that.

Okay, yeah, I agree. It's quite an accomplishment. But anyway, the reason I bring these up is I want to ask you, so Newton was an alchemist, you know, Aristotle was a deist or, you know, a polytheist in some level. and, you know, obviously Galileo had his peccadillos. Where do you come down? What are the things that scientists today might be gently mocked for 100, 200, 400 years from now? In other words, I think it's impossible to think that we have come upon the final laws of nature, right?

I mean, we know that we have these incompleteness blaring lacuna in our understanding. So at what level do you think we will be mocked, scientists of our age, or perhaps gently teased, for our beliefs. Hundreds of years hence. I mean, that, of course, I certainly cannot know. I am not even a practicing scientist. And certainly if I lived prior to Copernicus, there's no way that I could have figured out heliocentrism. I do like to mock flat earthers and say that I alone could have figured out that the earth is a sphere just with basic logic at any, you know, anytime. But heliocentrism, absolutely not. That took the skill of Kepler and Brahe and the painstaking accumulation. of data and mathematical analysis.

And no, I don't think we can, you know, yeah, in terms of where we are lacking now, obviously I cannot know. However, it is an important thing to understand because this is an argument that a lot of science scenarios will put forward to go, well, science is wrong all the time. So all the science we know right now is wrong. So it's just whatever science I want to be wrong is wrong because science was wrong in the past. And it's important to understand that when paradigm shifts occur, it's never that. the existing paradigm is discarded. It's always just relegated to a particular area of reality. So

the biggest paradigm shift, obviously, being going from Newtonian mechanics to quantum, you know, the quantum realm or relativity, you know, relativistic dynamics and things like that. And it didn't invalidate Newtonian mechanics. We still use it all the time. You can model earthly motion and even send probes through the solar system using these equations. It's just that our understanding of the cosmos became more refined and more specialized and better able to describe certain phenomena that had eluded us in the previous paradigm. So I don't know. I mean, I'm sure we'll figure out what dark matter is and I'm sure we'll figure out some of these things and it will revise our understanding of matter and the properties of matter. But it doesn't mean that molecules don't exist

or something absurd like that. Of course molecules exist. How could anything that we understand be the case otherwise. I think that's something that the history of science, hopefully at this point by the 21st century, should have taught us that we always retain that which has value, and then science becomes more and more streamlined and specific as we learn more. So Carl Sagan, I'm sure is a hero of yours. I have the honor of havoc, not only his wife, Andurion, on the podcast, but his daughter, Sasha Sagan on a mother-daughter team at one point. But he said that, you know, never has science been more important for, you know, society to flourish. and simultaneously so few people have been aware or knowledgeable about science.

I actually think that's wrong. I don't think people in the past were more scientifically literate, I think probably to the contrary. However, I do agree science is more important than ever. Certain things that educationally in the past were much, much better writing. If you read a Civil War soldier with no formal education, you read his letter to his wife, it's better than 98% of college students at Harvard could probably muster up. But beyond that, when you think about science and the perceptual, of science by the public as you obviously do. What do you think about things like retraction watches

and P hacking and replication crises, which are just replete in the biological sciences, pharmaceutical industry, et cetera? What is an average layperson to do? My audience has a lot of lay people in it. What do you say to somebody when they say to you, well, like 95% of 3-sigma so-called claim, you know, P values are later found to be invalid, fraudulent, retraction. attracted, look elsewhere effects, confirmation bias. What do you say to somebody who is justifiably uncertain about how to handle uncertainty within the scientific community? How do you assure them that that is a healthy part and not above? I mean, first, I think that's a mischaracterization. I think that's meant to imply, oh, 95% of science is wrong, right, which is just an oversimplification

of what is being discussed anyway. But at any rate, I think I would try to, for a lay person to fixate on some aspect of the peer-reviewed scientific literature in those terms without really being capable of reading the scientific literature, right? You need to have gone through a process of reading the literature and understanding how to read it and what it means and things like that. I'm just thinking of my experience reading chemistry literature, right? You know, organic chemistry, synthetic techniques right here, we did, we achieved this synthetic technique. We mixed these and we got that. We did our our NMR and that's what we got. It's like you can talk about P values and you talk about all these things and perhaps for

something like epidemiology, it has a greater impact. But it's still the case that scientists are doing things and then they publish this science and it's just expanding the realm of what it is that we know about matter and about the universe and things like that. And so I want there to be a greater appreciation for that process. And sure, let's keep an eye on a particular paper that needs to be redacted in some case, very urgently, such as Wakefield's fraudulent autism, MMR vaccine case, things like that. There are going to be instances where something happens, something bad happens right now.

We need to be vigilant about that. But it needs to be in the context of promoting science and scientific values. It can't be the case where it's somebody just arbitrarily monitoring science who wants to deny all of science and just goes, here's a thing, so we can safely reject any other science we want is this one thing happened, you know. Here's a proposal. I'd like your reaction to it. So I was part of a very, very well publicized retraction where the team I was a part of and founded an experiment called Bicep, which later became Bicep 2, announced the discovery of the earliest evidence for what's

called cosmological inflation that posits essentially a quantum origin of the universe, along with a multiverse and other things. And this was front page news literally around the world for every major newspaper in New York Times, above the fold, et cetera, et cetera. CNN, every single TV, you know, the international and national television broadcast. Six months later, we effectively retracted the claim that we had discovered inflation. And the signal that we had instead seen was an imprimatur of dust rather than of inflation, essentially micrometeorites caused by a dead star supernovae long ago depleted and deceased in our galaxy and not a cosmological signal.

So we actually never really retracted it. We never published Eratom because the measurement was actually very accurate. We measured exquisitely accurately how much dust there is in the Milky Way galaxy along the particular region that we were looking at. We did so with the help of many, many scientists working around the world. I always thought that we should have, and I advocate for others, ranging from cold fusion to recent claims about high temperature superconductivity, which may be errant, that for every dollar that you reserve or your institution pushes towards. towards publication of your work. You should retain 25 cents. And that should be a fund, a rainy day fund, which you are in charge.

And you must then make some amount of publicization of the error. If there is an error, and hopefully there's not, you can use that money to have a big blowout when the paper is confirmed later on. But there's such a rush to publication, to even through peer review. And most, as you know, most articles in, at least in the physical sciences, might have one postdoc in a nature paper that is the referee. I mean, it's not like there's this cabal of like every scientist who's, you know, prominent. They don't have time, right?

So what do you make of that? That we should have a retraction budget along with a publicity budget, which is needed and very useful. And that newspaper should not endeavor to print the retraction if and when it comes on page B-17 of the Saturday edition. What do you make of this proposal of mine? Well, yeah, I mean, the problem is that you're going to get the retraction in, the literature where where it belongs so that your colleagues can can read it and adjust their worldviews appropriately. The problem is that the media that the lay people have access to, they're going to publish whatever is going to get the eyeballs. And so the sensational claim

is going to get the eyeballs. And even if they publish the retraction, it's going to get glossed over. Nobody's going to care. And then whatever got in the newspaper, that turns into YouTube videos and that turns into, you know, obviously you shouldn't be stopped from trying. I think that's the ethical thing to do is to say, and it also educates people in terms of how the scientific process works. Here are some results that we got. Oh, we have to actually slightly modify our analysis because some new data has come to light. And I do want people to understand that science is an iterative process like that. But again, you know, this is the only thing that me and James Tour agreed about is that sometimes the popular media is responsible for sensationalizing things one way or the other.

So if a blog or a magazine says, hey, they figured out the origin of life, well, no, no, they didn't. And so that sucks that the public might get a false impression of something. But the scientific process itself, that's something completely different. And yeah, I would encourage people to become more familiar with it as it truly is rather than how it's reported in a magazine. I agree, except I think that the reservation of such funds would rid down to the benefit of science, right? Because like you said before, to get this impression that, oh, you guys don't know what 95% of the universe is made up of, which is objectively true in a certain sense, to then equate that to saying, well, I shouldn't trust the vaccination or I shouldn't trust, you know, a finding about the Higgs boson mass or G minus two of the muon. I think that that's really, that ultimately is the end of science as we know. Because once the public, and this is where I want to pivot to you next, what are the, I was talking about the rights that.

scientists a lot today and how revere they should be, rightfully so, if they're doing good science. But what are the responsibilities? In other words, there are very few people like you and me that are popularizers of science, you know, and I'm not even close to where your league is. It's not my main job, you know, but, but, you know, I have a day job as a public servant of the University of California. But my question is, what are the responsibilities of scientists? We're funded by the public. They pay every, even though my number one project is a privately funded project of about $200 million, all funded, you know, by institute, by private foundation, you know, largely funded by a private foundation.

Nevertheless, I was educated. I teach at a public university. I went to public. What are the obligations? Like, what would you say is the moral obligation, if any, for a scientist to communicate what he or she does to the public? It's hard to answer because I'm inclined to say that there is no obligation for a number of reasons.

Number one, why. I mean, if someone's interest is in research, it's in research. And more importantly, the skill set required to be a good scientist has very little overlap with the skill set required to effectively communicate said science. And I just want to put back on that, Dave, because, you know, with respect. But, you know, I wasn't born knowing how to, you know, make a lejeander polynomial series either. And I wasn't born, no, I was never taught how to teach. I was never, and maybe that's obvious to my students, but, but I was never taught that. I think I'm a competent teacher.

But just because something's hard or didn't comport with my personality. I don't think that's an excuse because science is incredibly hard. So we're basically saying, oh, well, benign. It's like the benign bigotry of lowered expectation. Like, oh, we shouldn't expect a scientist because she's brilliant and she knows how to do a spherical harmonic transform that we should then ask her, well, spend a couple minutes at Toastmasters. I actually pay for my foreign students to go to those masters to learn public speaking skills because I think they're essential to communicating science and to having a good career to boot. Anyway, sorry to interrupt. Yeah, no, no, no.

But what I'm saying is I think you may have found that you coincidentally have a talent for both, both research and communication. And there are certainly many scientists that do. And I would say that scientists should be encouraged to communicate their science, strongly encouraged. But you spoke in terms of an obligation. I don't think that there should be an obligation. But that's why I do a lot of outreach. You know, I go to universities and things. And I, you know, I give talks to lay people, but I also give talks to undergraduate and graduate students in the sciences and encourage them and say,

Listen, if you find, you know, you're a grad student, you're working in the lab right now, you find, as I did, that you don't particularly enjoy working in a lab, you don't really have too much interest in going into academia. Let me tell you about science communication, because it is still a pretty nascent field. And it doesn't even occur to some people that it is a career option. We need people. We need scientifically educated people. And it is starting to turn the corner.

You do have, you know, master's programs in SciCom cropping up in various institutions. So we are starting to recognize the need for it and push people, scientifically minded people, in this direction. But I push for the creation of a class of career Cycomers, right? You have a day job. This is my job. That's not to say that I have anywhere near your expertise in your particular field. Of course I don't. But I've become a generalist.

And so that makes it easier for me to approach these multidisciplinary problems in society and try to diagnose them in different ways. And so I think that we need a very large pool of career SciCommerce to interface very strongly with the experts in their field, right? Anytime we need, you know, niche information, we need to be interfacing with people like you. But in general, we need this group of people to be diagnosing what the problem is. Where is the public confused about science? Why are they confused about it?

Is it a cultural thing? Is there a specific bad faith actor that we need to, uh, uh, address and try to and try to expose how what is the best way to do that we need different people that are communicating on different platforms in different languages to different target demographics with different tones right my tone is going to work for some people someone else's tone is going to work better for other people because it really is I think the the greatest existential challenge facing mankind is how do we get people to understand what is true not just politically but scientifically we're not winning We're not winning right now. It's getting worse. I largely agree, although I do think that more or less anybody can modulate the skills that made them into a good scientist to at least engage with the public because it's the only field that I know about. Like if you're, you know, my brother's a lawyer. And, you know, if he said to his, you know, the partner in his firm, like, you can't understand what I'm doing. You know, it's really kind of beyond your ken. And furthermore, you know, like I have very specialized knowledge because of my special, you know, like he's paying your salary.

you'd be gone, you know, but my favorite thing about Richard Feynman is you can find an equal and opposite quote for almost everything he did. One thing he said, you know, is that if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't really understand it. And then a journalist asked him the day he won the Nobel Prize, what did he win it for? And he said, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So let's turn into science communication. So you run, the professor Dave explains YouTube channel. How is having a YouTube channel affected your life? I mean, it's completely changed my life. I mean, it is now. my the centerpiece of my career and in fact I never I mean I spent my 20s trying to become a successful

musician and got pretty far with it but then ultimately didn't pan out the way I wanted and so I had initiated this YouTube channel in an attempt to get some passive income stream going and I sort of pivoted to that and went full force into that and that is now you know I found a science communication career for myself and so obviously the channel is the is the centerpiece of it and and I spend the vast majority of my time making content for the channel. So the channel is more or less equivalent to my professional life at this point. Let's talk about a little bit. Let's do not on YouTube if you don't mind?

So do you have a team? You know, if so, how many people? How do you describe, you know, your content organization? You know, help me, my, this is my V&L self-interested, you know, portion of the podcast, Dave. How do you do it? So nuts and bolts, operating a huge 2 million plus subscriber YouTube. Pretty much just me sitting in this room.

I outsource a good chunk of the writing, depending on the subject, and a minuscule amount of the post-production for non-science topics. So I found an animator that I can use for, who is doing like my economics content, just because you don't need any scientific understanding or anything like that to animate those concepts. But otherwise, it's pretty much just me sitting in this room for an unbelievable amount of hours every day. or you don't outsource the editing even? No, because the thing is, well, I mean, the editing is really nothing. The editing is just trimming the audio together.

Then there's the animation, which is actually adding the visuals, which is obviously the most time-consuming part. The problem is that it's not really outsourceable because the success of the content is due to my ability to set up the aesthetic of the frame and the way I convey information, the way that I'm highlighting things. And so every time I've tried to outsource that, it has failed miserably immediately. And so I've just sort of stopped trying. Presumably, you know, uproying and making thumbnails.

And I think like you could outsource some of that. At content, obviously, you're the, you're the, you know, sui genera, but could you not, you know, enhance your bandwidth to make more content? You know, what is your, you know, kind of overall strategy? Because, I mean, very few people can sustain such a big channel just by themselves. I'm not trying to give you advice. It's no sense. Yeah, I mean, things, mundane things, the business end, you know, doing SEO or to what level do you think that you could not outsource stuff?

I mean, SEO, I utilize tags to the best of my ability. Thumbails, I don't do anything fancy. I tend to just put a, just use like the most interesting frame of the video. Because that's the thing. Most of my content is just academic tutorials meant for students. students, you know, look at like Khan Academy or, you know, the tablet style learning. The thumbnail is just a frame of what's being explained. A student says, you know, I need to understand some calculus concepts or some organic

chemistry concept. They want to see the thing they're trying to learn in the thumbnail. So that's what the thumbnail is. The title is just what I'm explaining in the video. It's remarkably straightforward. I mean, it's not quite the same as content that is meant to have broader appeal. My debunking content maybe has brought a appeal, at least flat earth debunks or things that are entertaining. People want to laugh at, you know, something like that.

But most of my content is quite niche. So there's really no SEO or thumbnail production that really factors into it. So it's just about how quickly I can pump out the content. And that's why I landed on sort of a level of production value that is just barely sophisticated enough to be more palatable visually than the tablet learning. I've never enjoyed that's, you know, scribbling on the black background. I don't like that. So I have the crisp white background and clean imagery and everything, but it is still very easy to make. It's easy enough that I can do it by myself.

This is not like Kyrskisat or Crash Course and these very elaborate animations. Of course, I will never be able to do that. So, yeah, just I've been doing this eight years now. This is the workflow that works for me and I support my family on it. So, you know. 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 Google Fi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when

the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google FiR Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Ask question about YouTube in kind of, you know, my own self-interest. How do you decide, so on this channel, I do combination of these kind of long-form deep dive interviews, you know, where the biggest lift for me is listening or reading every single book by every single author. And I've listened to over 600 books in the last three years and enjoyed it, read them

or had the authors on. I feel uncomfortable if I have an author and I didn't listen to is or a book or read it. So that's the heaviest thing for me. And that's the thing only I can do because of my personality, you know, coming through. And the interview hopefully has a good report. You could be the judge after this. But the other content I do are short explainer is usually about some interesting topic in experimental physics. Because I feel like there's enough, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson's, Michi Okapkus, Brian Greens and Lisa Randalls and Jan 11's out there.

But there aren't as many experimentalists. They're actually building the instruments, going to the launching a strategic place. So I do deep dive. And I always find that the deep dive, you know, kind of the explainer 20 minutes or less. I just did one on Oppenheimer, which I want to wrap up with you in a minute, talking about Oppenheimer. or an AI, because why not? But those get far fewer views. And I noticed, you know, in your views, recently at least, you get, you know, tons, millions

of views on the kind of take down, you know, big, big ticket debating, unraveling of Jim, tour, et cetera. But, you know, they're less maybe, less may be, you know, pletiful viewers for the deep dives, which I think you're, you know, just renowned and just the plethora and the breadth that you do is just mind-bogglingly impressive. How do you react to that? You put out this awesome video and it will get the square root of the number of views that some like take down of, you know, some famous young earth creationists will get. Do you, how do you react just psychologically and then like does it affect your notions of what the algorithm is?

It's a completely different style of content. So, like, there's definitely content that I am regularly getting not huge amounts of views, but consistently getting decent viewership because every year there are new students who need to learn calculus, organic chemistry. biochemistry, whatever it is, whatever the subject is. So that's the nature of the academic tutorials is the evergreen content. Like, yes, people enjoy the drama of me and James or me and the Discovery Institute or me in the Flat Earthers or something like that. They like that pugnacious aspect of it. And so I get, you know, some viewership there because people want to keep up to date with the, with the drama of it all. But that's very different from, you know, a calculus tutorial that's going to earn me, let's say, 200 views a day, right? But consistently over a decade, right? And now

I have a thousand plus tutorials like that. Obviously, people are like, oh, Dave is a shill. He's got fake subscribers because he has two and a half million subscribers, but he'll put out a tutorial on botany and it'll get 5,000 views. It's like, because people don't want it, they're not studying that, right. I get the views, right, I get the subscribers from people go, oh, this guy, help me get an A in organic chemistry, have a subscribe. They're not going to watch my geology tutorials or my philosophy tutorials, right? So it's just a completely different paradigm. And I just over the years have had to become comfortable with that and understand that I'm just accumulating small amounts of views for very many tutorials, which ends up actually being more stable. Right now there's a bit of a dip in AdSense revenue, which is stressful. I think across, the board for most creators. But I always have that solid base of tutorials that they can never really dip below a certain viewership just because if they are of a certain quality and people are consistently using them to pass their classes and they're telling their friends, this is how I was able to understand this topic so I could pass this class. They're just going to get a certain

baseline of viewership and it's taken a lot of work, but I do get to enjoy that little bit of extra stability because of that, yeah. And maybe I lied and said to be the last question. But if you had an infinite budget or you had the, if you had Discovery Institute money. Just kidding. What would you do? How would you, what,

if anything, would you modify? If I had a lot of money, I could do completely different styles of content. I could do because right now, like, I have to do things that don't cost any money. So I just,

I have a script, I record my audio, I do my little animations on Adobe After Effects and I put it out. But I have a lot of ideas for what would essentially be like TV, format content where I can be in the field and go and do all kinds of different things or more talk show style debunking. And I have a lot of ideas for format and for different styles of content. And then I have been trying to sort of pitch to network and being sort of unable to navigate that world, even though I'd live in Los Angeles. And you'd think I'd have some more contacts at this

point. And I've had some interest by email and it never really materializes. But if I had lots of money. I could just do it, make it myself, you know, make it exactly how I want it. You have your own studio with animators. I would say anime, probably a lot of animators out there that would like to work with you and they probably work for free at first and you could give them some portion. I don't know about for free. Everybody's got bills to pay. But I had someone just offered a and animate stuff for free for me as a physicist. Anyway, but if you're really interested, we can talk offline about. Cool. I'm around if anyone's listening. You want to work for me for free.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and some masterclass level stuff would be very interesting. You have so much content already. You could probably get higher a team of people to do with an infinite budget and have the, you know, Farina Academy. Last question is related to a question that I really ask four different questions, typically to my guess, but you've been generous with your time. I don't want to take too much more. And I actually have an interview with a climate change denier, well, that he's not your ordinary denier. It's Stephen Coonan, who is a provost of NYU, wrote a book called Unsettled. He's coming to the studio in a few minutes. So any questions for climate change? I actually hate the name as a Jew. I think it conjures the name of Holocaust denier and it kind of is a little bit emotionally manipulative.

And I've heard it used for like multiverse denier. Well, you should be a multiverse. I was zero evidence for it. What would you say to an edge? I mean, this person, you know, he was Obama's, you know, deputy science, White House science chief in the Obama administration, Caltech provost, the NYU Provost. What do you, what would you say if you have any questions for somebody who's scientifically rigorous but doesn't toe to the typical narrative of, you know, human-induced catastrophic climate? He believes climate's changing, but does, disagrees as catastrophic. I mean, there's nothing we can do about it except cut off carbon emission. I mean, I would want to hear some alternative justification for the objective empirical data. I mean, there's sea level rise and increased disasters and average temperatures, things like that. So what is the alternate explanation if it's not carbon emissions? I mean, we can rule out Malankovych cycles.

We can rule out, you know, all of these other alternative explanations don't fit. So I'm all ears. What do you got? Okay. Final question is related to the namesake of the center that I am affiliated with as associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Clark had many great quips, one of which is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. So I'm going to ask you that question first. What technology would you most want to put on an intergalactic billboard to say, look at the magical creation of the human mind?

You mean something that we've created? that is magical? Yeah. What's the most impressive technology, discovery, invention of the human brain? I mean, I think that the most, as an artist, the thing that impresses me most is the most incredible art that I've experienced. Music, film, things like that. That impresses me a lot and sort of eludes my ability to describe at times. I mean, that's kind of a cop-out.

No, it's actually what Carl Sagan's widow, Andurion told me. And she said, I've already had that billboard. My brainwaves are recorded on the Pioneer, are on the Voyager 2 plaque, Golden Disc, that Carl and others sent out into interstellar space. So she recorded her brainways listening to some like world music and thinking about her love for Carl Sagan. So it's not too dissimilar for you're in good company. All right. Last question is another quip of the great Arthur C. Clark, who also said that the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And that's why I use that little phrase as the name of my podcast. But the last one I want to ask you is when he said the following, well, an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible, he or she is very much likely to be correct. But when he or she says something is impossible, they are very much likely to be.

be wrong. I want to ask you, Dave, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about? I'm not calling you elderly, by the way. I guess in looking at Origin of Life research, I came across the RNA world hypothesis first and perhaps neglected to look at other competing hypotheses. So in talking to some other experts, I've been learning about metabolism first and some of these other hypotheses and sort of starting to initiate a synthesis in my mind, I guess, about how different elements of these competing hypotheses might all have some validity and all have a part in the answer. That's the only thing that comes to mind immediately.

The thing is that that doesn't necessarily apply to me so much just because I don't make claims. I don't make the, like, I'm not out there going like, I know what dark matter is. I don't know what it is. I'm keeping my mouth shut about that. I heard Seth Godin on the podcast last week, and he answered it. He answered by not realizing that I could have made a billion dollars from having some of the first web blogging software in history. Oh, sure.

Yeah. I could have had a million dollars in Bitcoin if I invested in Norway. Are you wrong? Good. Okay, Dave. I thank you for your generosity of your time. Sure. For this book, a reminder.

The book is called Is This Wi-Fi Organic? listen to it, buy it in formats around the internet and around bookstores. And also subscribe to Dave's great content on Professor Dave Explains YouTube channel, where he covers everything from astronomy to zoology, pretty much, everything in between. And I want to thank you very much for taking the time and joining me in my audience than I did. Thanks for having me. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th.

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