"WILDLY Unhinged" Eric Weinstein On Terrence Howard's Science

everything has an equal and opposite it has to mate whoa I'm trying to get you to stop pissing my community off you kind of adding legitimacy to sightly unhinged science fiction I I wouldn't have been able to appear with Terren if I didn't think there was something in what he was doing the platform to be accepted for the ideas is not social media Neil himself doesn't appear conversent in the history of Science and reviewing there's 10 times easier to produce something that's BS and so then it is to refute it science has a branding problem

if you're arguing at the level of the specifics of the science you have already lost science has become a pagan Faith 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 trust the science became a mantra during the co pandemic but in the years since and partly as a consequence ARIS tired of people are doing quite the opposite challenging the scientific mainstream is inv Vogue nobody is this better Illustrated than the recent viral phenomenon of actor Terrence Howard on the Joe

Rogan podcast the biggest media platform in the world right now arguing that one time 1 actually equals two among other bizarre theories they don't show that hydrogen has the same tone as as carbon what do you mean by Tone same tone same KY of 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 goldilock zone everything has an equal and opposite it has to mate mating

is a big part of what we do the car the um 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 cuz I know they're watching me right now and they're mad at me who's day um the politicians and the authorities that give the politicians their agregation and our world economy is based off of 1 Time 1 equaling

one you think they [ __ ] with your phone oh I'm sure the [Music] whoa well there were four hours of that uh but has reached tens of millions of people it's been a true viral phenomenon like I said well many in the scientific establishment expressed alarm at the Apparently Limitless reach of wild theories at a time science has a reputation problem Professor Neil degrass Tyson perhaps the most famous scientists on the planet have 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 to debate this the podcaster and cosmologist at University of California Professor Brian keting the host of impact Theory Tom billia 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 uncensored uh really fascinating to see how big this has all blown in in the last few days for those who didn't watch the Terrence Howard 4H hour um I don't know what you

would call it Theory ofon let's just's be kind um what would the sort of main premises he was coming out with that have captured everyone's attention well I think that the um he made several outrageous claims that were more or less baseless as far as uh either the heterodox or the Orthodox view of science that 1 Time 1 is equal to two that the periodic table uh should be rearranged around uh earlier work from the 1920s um that he had a Theory of physics based on platonic solids with curved linear sides uh I don't think

any of those hold up to any kind of scrutiny that said he uh 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 um in you know from a from a scholarly perspective that actually have some Merit so it's a very it's a very bizarre and complicated situation but it is not complicated at the root there's nothing wrong with standard Orthodox science and I say that as a very strong critic of the system so

if you if you wanted to hear it from somebody um you know 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 um is completely unwarranted but it's a very bizarre situation to watch an entire nation that depends on technology and science for its Advantage uh suddenly question whether or not 1 Time 1 equals one what is f fting to me is is the last time I had to do with Terrence Howard

I interviewed him at CNN about 10 years ago when he did a movie about the tus Airman and the next thing he's doing a 4our 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 um were you aware that Terren Howard was was thinking this way was moving to a place where he could even conduct an interview like that well to be honest uh I didn't know who Terrence Howard was uh so I didn't have an image for him

but had you asked me I would have thought back to uh verer Herzog uh doing the entire film Fitz coraldo to test his engineering theories about how less technologically advanced people could move heavy objects many miles um up up hills he created an entire film to test his engineering theories Hy Lamar uh famously developed spread Spectrum technology um 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 um but I do think that uh he knows quite a lot about many things and he doesn't know what he doesn't know I mean Neil de Tyson said that he you know people can know enough to sort of ask questions and stuff but maybe not enough to know when they're wrong in other words when they're presented with you know quite complex science that has been

peer-reviewed and is deemed to be established scientific fact that he doesn't know enough about the detail to understand why he's wrong to question him you mean the Dunning Krueger effect is yeah Neil said yeah it's kind of ironic actually because it feels to me like Neil degrass Tyson is himself a victim of the dun and Krueger effect when it comes to peer review as his comments about Sir Arthur Edington uh using the 1919 total solar eclipse um to prove that Einstein's theor about a star warping space in in particular our son uh appear to be

born out um Neil claims that that was sent to a peer-reviewed journal whereas peerreview doesn't really begin in physics uh and in The Sciences really until the 60s and much more the 70s so it's very interesting because Neil himself doesn't appear convers 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 little 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 isn't this isn't this part of the evolution of science is that people like you and Neil de Tyson might vly disagree about stuff but actually it's only through the disagreements you you you develop well but I doubt that he would agree to a program um where we were going to have a discussion about this uh my guess is that you reached out to him that he uh was too busy to appear my claim is is that in

general we avoid dust UPS um 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 uh Benjamin JY famously observed that his milk Maids weren't dying from uh small pox but they did get cowpox so he in injected his entire family with cow pus to give them cowpox to prevent against small pox it's one of the beginnings of vaccines people would dig up bodies from graveyards to do anatomical

studies famously the uh the ulcer which was thought to be correlated with stress uh was tested by the uh dissenting heterodox uh biomedical researcher uh and shown to have a completely different ideology by using himself as a guinea pig I think that you have to understand that just as Benjamin Franklin took a kite uh and key into an electrical storm to prove that lightning was electricity um people have done all sorts of things that have nothing to do with learned societies and the Gentile um sort of feel afforded by peer review uh 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 what was interesting to me was Neil degrass Tyson didn't go on Joe Rogan to respond which is what Terrence Howard wanted him to do but but you did and here's a clip from that this is the other side of it yeah this is this is what what is what's very interesting like these they'll come together and meet you can see where they meet up yeah their natural meeting up 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 a this is m this becomes the antimatter of can't stop you doing you can't stop me I'm so sorry I'm I'm I'm My Own Worst Enemy and my own best friend you know what that that was a beautiful statement but the TR what I'm trying to say is the fact that they keep and these four will keep this is just the magnetic what I consider the magnetic field you see you

stopped yourself I consider 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 langu that's what I just did with the Terren product in other words said in your language I'm trying to get you to stop pissing my community off I don't want to piss them off 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 um and yet you were there and you were being very generous and sort of reasonable and um you know decent with him and allowing him to continue with his theories that's attracted for you a lot of criticism that by by engaging in that manner with him um 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 uh you know this is always a Scuttle butt and you know people say so I'm

not very impressed with that I would say that you know you have um 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 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 uh background and experience in this era area it 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 what percentage of what he was saying was true or at least vaguely sensible and what was completely very little right so so my question if it was genuinely very little him getting tens of millions of views for espousing complete nonsense in the main and then someone with your pedigree and your knowledge of this subject matter going on and kind of going along with engaging him as a serious person in these in these things is that not in its own way

diminishing science when you do that first of all I wouldn't have had Terren on the first time because it didn't do him a service to what he actually is doing that's interesting to give him this amount of air that that was a good friend of mine's choice so partially what you're seeing is a relationship between a comedian Joe Rogan and a mathematician Eric Weinstein um Joe's a buddy of mine and uh he matters to me and he he's the one who asked me to come on it's uh you know some people have tried to frame

it as if I wanted to go on I had no interest in going on but if we were going to watch a mass delusion take take shape um certainly I don't want to I don't want any more mass delusions and I also don't want the idea that um once these ideas are out there that science is afraid somehow to confront you know uh Terrence Howard new theory of arithmetic he doesn't have a new theory of arithmetic and somebody needs to be the adult and say uh this is not right on the other hand you have

to appreciate that all it takes is one great idea uh 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 rotor uh drone called that he calls the Lynch pin that's based on a mathematical error where he's fit uh six um pentagons uh through the edges of a regular tetrahedron giving him six degrees of freedom which span uh what we would call the Le algebra of the apine group giving him the ability to

rotate around a center and move 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 you know what the state-ofthe-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 uh capsids in the shape of do decahedrons much the way we see viruses uh

doing that with capsomer and protein coats to 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 Terren 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 degrass Tyson where they say I'm so pleased to see active Minds engaging with the world of ideas they're they're really not

and you know my feeling about this is pretending that Terence Howard is a fool or an idiot um is is repugnant to me I mean if you just take what he said about tones in the periodic table uh because of uh 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 um you you know let's share your work on playing the periodic table by using the ionization energies as frequency information much the way Terren was discussing so my

feeling is is that a lot of my colleagues just don't have enough knowledge and even though they're supposedly the academics sitting in professorial seats they're not behaving like professors they're not behaving like uh academicians they're making fun of somebody because it allows them to work out their own personal insecurities and that's not going to happen on my wife it's actually really fascinating Because unless I'm mistaken what you're saying is look you might be wrong about 99% of his 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 right if he's doing something that I recognize it's in engineering art and it's possible that he's doing something you know I I was able to recognize where his shapes come from where Neil does not appear to understand which is fine um 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 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 uh you know sometimes a fly lands in your dish and you insist that it be taken back at a restaurant other times you just say you know 5-sec 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 um what Neil did is really troubling what he did is is that he advertised a fake openness which is just submit what your work is to a peer-review journal Neil doesn't either doesn't know the history of PE peer review doesn't know why it's called peer review uh 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 um because teren 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 as in in terms of the House of Lords the whole idea of peer review is to keep the Le the the the people who don't do science for a living or medicine for a living out of the review process and that's where it was born that's why it that's why it it grew up in the 60s and 70s as peer rreview it was a it was as part of a struggle where scientists wanted to wall off their Kingdom and say look we are taking public money but we don't

want public review you're not qualified to be here shut up get out of our lab and let us work and that's why it's so fiercely defended is because it's the last ditch effort to keep the Le from interfering in 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 is it damaging when everybody on social media here suddenly becomes an Epi edist whatever it may be you know

any different type of science you like um or medical expert whatever when they 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 it's a very interesting question I I would think that we would begin somewhere else the greatest damage is when we amplify pseudo scientists who happen to be official

pseudo scientists so when you take a director uh of uh ni National Institute for allergies and infectious disease and you take that person's uh contradictory pronouncement 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 pseudo science coming out of the National Institute of Health uh or the defense threat reduction agency ditra um the failure and the pseudo science is coming from inside the house the problem is when a Francis Collins and

an Anthony fouchy in private emails can turn their dissenting colleagues fully competent expert dissident colleagues like Jay bachara and his colleagues at Harvard and Oxford and overnight they become Fringe epidemiologists right so more or less what you're seeing is not a failure of science what you're seeing is a failure of science to disavow Public Health public health is not science Public Health is an incredibly bizarre field that tries to straddle Two Worlds of actual truth and the noble liw um and you know as I've said before the problem is the failure to cancel uh an

ex spouse's uh credit card privileges when the person takes the credit card on a spree science did not cancel its credit card uh 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 won at one time been scientists but have gone over to public policy uh were allowed to lie on science's behalf that's a failure yeah I understand why the credit rating got beaten up but for God's sakes just cut off

the credit card um and learn where scientists lie and where they do not they don't lie generically there's nothing wrong with hooks law there's nothing WR with the adapter hypothesis in biology there's nothing wrong with most of what we considered to be science we lie in very special places out of necessity let me bring in uh the other two guests now uh to debate actually what you've been saying uh Professor Brian keting cosmologist from San Diego university and Tombo who the impact Theory poco's task professor keting your your response to what you've just been hearing

from Eric well I think as scientists we have a responsibility you know Eric's known for coining the term the intellectual dark web and I feel like a scientist we have an responsibility to keep uh 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 um Tucker Carlson and they get enormous platforms because of

their social media stature but to me you know to listen to people uh 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 you know out of an advocation of 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 it's akin to listening to your friend peers you know Andrew Tate for marital advice uh it's it's he

may be a great MMA star and Terren may be a great actor but that gives them no and confers no benefit to their scientific practices and it would be like me going on to the set of of Iron Man and you know trying to be like Terren you would laugh me off off the stage and rightfully so so we have to look at and examine these claims that amateurs can do good science you know Eric pointed out in the interview that there's some babies in with the with the bathat 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 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 uh there may be a couple that have been granted uh you go through 1 * 1 equals 2 ER demonstrated clearly that's not the case you go

through the periodic table uh his 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 complete completely fallacious so I think there's a danger and it's it's a symptom of the halo effect the pro mean just in 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 have this debate somethingone the other day is he has a huge following uh 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 the conversation I have with them has moved from God you know Andrew Tate isn't he amazing blah blah blah too I really liked it when you challenge him about this this and this in other words shining a light on people like Andrew T actually challenging them on

a big platform can I I see tangible impact on the street of those challenges kicking through into people's Consciousness in a way they wouldn't if he was just able to do his thing slightly below radar on social media without ever being challenged so that's my kind of theory about why I interview people like him which is in itself open to to debate obviously Eric just in that response to the the baby and bath water what would you say to uh to Brian keating's point there well I tried to say it already that if you take

um the vertices of a tetrahedron uh as measured from the center you're looking at an angle of the arc cosine of minus 1/3 which is about 109.2 7 in degrees and if you take the interior angles of a regular pentagon it's 108 so 108 is not 109.2 7 but it is close enough so that within engineering tolerances you can put six of these motors into a regular tetrahedron and then you can potentially therefore uh Traverse all of the dimensions needed to orient the object around its Center of mass and to move it to any. threedimensional

space I've stated that clearly uh 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 what the baby is and further you know Brian I was 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 stated that in my field um that uh

peerreview is much older than uh gillain Maxwell who was born in 1961 and it's you cited a bunch of journals in physics and in fact that's simply not true um we we well you know I have Melinda Baldwin's article here uh which says uh 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 peer review that all physical review papers were sent out

for external referee opinion more or less peer review comes out of Utah in 1972 through Senator Wallace Bennett's Amendment um that forces the issue into the NIH framework because the Medicare um Act was established in 1965 making the US taxpayer responsible for medical payments that they suddenly wanted access to knowing why are we paying all of this money to Doctors Without the ability to question them so you know in part what I'm astounded by is that we're not even aware of our own history if George Green the Miller with no formal education U mailed off

a solution to an inversion problem for differential operators which is what gives us greens functions which Fineman made famous um he didn't have any training whatsoever it's in part very dangerous to be a 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 uh we cut their heads off and I my feeling is is that uh 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 a 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 um we are not honest about the extent that this that this is an elite community and the last thing that I would I would add to what you said is um 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 uh tarred 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

uh we have an abomination in the way in which we are pretending that uh random mutation is decidedly the uh the main engine of darwinian selection uh we're going to pretend that neoclassical economics Is On Solid Ground um all of these things are 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 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 un necessary experimental pseudo vaccine all right let me bring in Tom you'd be waiting very patiently tell 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 uh 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 treasure uh is that it does not matter to me what the elites think in isolation all that happens is if people have an idea that hits a critical mass they they begin to bifurcate 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 terms would not let him do which I was mortified by because he should have just laid it out here 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 win 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 Co being a nice uh 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 1 Time 1 equals 2 uh all things are in motion there's no straight lines like things that okay have I understood

your position perfectly Terren 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 me bring Brian before I come to you Brian though I want to play a clip from Candace Owens this was several days after the debate

that Rogan and Terrence had 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 they 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 she's a a Bonafide antiac doesn't believe in vaccines at all and she has a big following and there lots of people like her out

there now saying that because there have been legitimate areas of concern around the co vaccines um that everything about them is flawed and wrong and therefore all the scientists who promoted them uh are the devil and this stuff gathers momentum I see it spreading like wildfire you know she also says that Emanuel macron's wife is a man despite 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 with yeah is to say science is about figuring out where we are wrong and if scientists stake the 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 Fan'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 Bri 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 brandolini's law which my kids are nearby so I'm not going to say in full in it's full terms

but it's basically that there 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 uh uh you know intellectual SEAL Team Six where we can never be wrong the terrorists only have to be right once and everyone else is is relying on US Seal Team Six that we're never wrong to put that on in perspective you know when you listen to people like this Candace tweeting from her laptop and and

enabled by technology that was invented at Bell Labs that was uh the byproduct of the Space Race which she also denies moonlandings and and so forth yeah we're not in New Age we're we're in 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 gener 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

pergamin press and Robert Maxwell that that is true Einstein published all almost all of his famous papers they were done by peerreview 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 Ed 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 laurates on my uh 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 NE recent invention but you go to the peer uh to the peer review process not far from where peers is right now 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 jury of okay Eric it's interesting watching Elon Musk I was with him actually the other day down wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait I have to respond to that okay respond what you just said is not true you know it's just the fact is is that Einstein paper

was not 1936 after peer review error sorry that was John Tate who was the editor at physical review before Simon past neck before Sam uh Sam gmid uh yes it is true that most of Einstein's work was not peer-reviewed that's why he was incensed he never sent another paper to physical review if I'm not incorrect please check me on it um that paper 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 it until peer review pointed out

by eding Edington helped out as well and said that there was peer review is not referee review right we had external referees that were occasionally sought uh but the what you site about the royal Royal Society is in fact an error introduced into the literature by Merton the famous historian of science uh who is the father of the meron of black scholes meron fame um and that was an erroneous uh claim that peerreview began I think in the 1700s what we currently call peerreview is far more recent and it is fantastic to find out that

our professor does not know the history of peerreview and its own subjects um 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 um when malware has entered our minds but I would submit to you sir that despite your pedigree uh in general your predecessors were not peer-reviewed uh in any modern sense of the term before the 1970s uh certainly before the 1960s uh the the the beginning of fors for external referees uh 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 I can invite you to go down to the Royal Institution next time you're in London and you'll see pictures of Michael Faraday of JJ Thompson of the of Edington you'll see them in front of audiences was there a peer review process before journals when would journal the average personing themselves in the face right now as somebody that loves you to literally I know both these guys Eric I know very well uh both have been on my show Brian I

love you guys so I say this because I am begging you the average person wants to chew through their TV set right now or their laptop as they're listening to this and the reason is they don't care about this you it it's already done the world sorry 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 who goes on his show they they are absolutely going to listen to Candace I think Brian you brought

that up Candace is about to sweep the world and if I could just get you guys on board with the reality that we are in a very difficult moment right now where yes you guys are being asked to do a public service which is to collide with these people who do not have your scientific bonafides but the average person does not care but they will actually listen to your Collision of ideas for sure because I took a lot away from you talking to Terence and the first time I heard Terence I was like maybe this

is genius I don't know you know that's it's so interesting I was I was GNA say actually Eric um earlier that I saw Elon Musk uh recently met him for the first time and he did a fascinating Q&A about you everything from colonizing Mars to uh humanoid robots and so on but I also we talked about X in his purchase of Twitter and then to x one of the the best things I've seen in terms of populist peer 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 uh are you a fan of of what Elon is doing with with X is this help terms of 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 um but keep in mind that Wikipedia worked pretty well until people figured out how to game it right so my concern is is that what you're looking at with peer review and with uh Community notes which is anti- peerreview if you will um 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 peerreview uh and I happen to be completely right I will be told that I'm not an academic despite the fact that we all speak the same language and have the same credentials what is going on is is that the world is not crying out for Candace Owen 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 fouchy and say I completely disagree why is it that we keep having these fake consensuses and these consensuses are basically determined by getting rid of the people who won't shut up and who won't sit down and who won't sing from the Himel 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 uh that around the the Wuhan lab and the origin of covid or the potential danger of the vaccines or the liability regime in which they were negotiated that this is an Abomination that we can't sue the manufacturers uh you would have a totally different world nobody would be listening to Candace Owens they would be trying to track Jay bataria 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 um just want to end with just quick thoughts from you and and Tom before we finish give me some hope about the future of science clearly I think it's indisputable that 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 nanc 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 superc conductivity or perhaps Fusion it's never been a more exciting time to be a scientist and to hear about

science it's its best days are behind us I think that's nonsense on the other hand we have to guard against conspiracy theories and and flat earthers and all sorts of antivaxers and things like that because there is always a grain of Truth as Isaac asmo said if you believe the Earth is flat you're wrong but if you believe it's perfectly round too you're also wrong but you're less wrong and I think what we want to do as scientist 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 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 HT on uh Brian because you keep repeating we shouldn't be held to this uh Team SEAL Team Six level of perfection what I'm saying is

silence uh science has a branding problem you guys created a branding problem I'll just say during covid where it was uh Hey everybody listen to us and everything is going to be fine um 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 th this is done the 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 G 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 would be way better however from a marketing perspective oh dear God so it's like we have a much bigger challenge that we have to overcome and Candice 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 actually by having this kind of conversation on a platform like this that 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'd observed is I 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 than than you thank you