Brief: Math Class with Terrence Howard & Eric Weinstein
Terrence Howard recently made waves (again) when appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss “Terryology,” a language of logic which he claims proves one times one equals two. Since he announced his theory in 2015 (and published it on Twitter in 2017), he’s been repeatedly criticized. In this latest round, that criticism is coming from Eric Weinstein, who appeared on physicist Brian Keating’s podcast to discuss Howard’s math. As usual with Weinstein, the conversation went in a million directions. Derek and Julian discuss.
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So, about three weeks ago, the actor Terrence Howard appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast to present his elaborate alternative model of math and physics to the largest audience on Earth.
We're not going to get into breaking his entire model down today, as we do have a full-length episode planned on this for next Thursday.
What we will do today is look at how Eric Weinstein reacted to Howard's appearance.
He did this on YouTube on the channel of a physicist named Brian Keating, who it seemed had invited Weinstein on to discuss the problem with Rogan and others, giving enormous platforms to people who would get confused about or who would end up confusing the public about science.
Now that's already a whole set of names that may require some background, but not to worry, we've got you covered.
It's safe to assume that everyone knows who Joe Rogan is.
Eric Weinstein is the older brother of the perhaps more familiar Brett Weinstein of Dark Horse podcast fame.
Now, one thing the Weinstein brothers have in common is a perpetual sense of grievance.
Eric's been known to claim that actually both brothers deserve to have won Nobel Prizes.
Eric for mathematical physics and Brett for evolutionary biology for their unrecognized breakthrough ideas.
But they've somehow been snubbed as part of a kind of conspiracy against them.
Eric has also said that his wife, as it turns out, deserved a Nobel Prize as well for her work in economics.
So it's a kind of academic royalty in exile that we have here with the Weinsteins.
They have been forced to make their case and find their loyal subjects instead on social media.
You know, Julian, I've always said that you should have had a noble for now for podcasting.
So this all tracks.
Yeah, yeah.
If the world was fair, then that would have happened, but it hasn't.
And so, you know, we've got to make a lot of content about this.
Eric is also involved in something called the Galileo Project, which is a sort of breakaway initiative that's trying to get to the bottom of the UAP phenomenon and to find the possible signs of nearby extraterrestrial activity.
The Galileo Project has been criticized by astronomers and astrobiologists alike for mingling serious scientists with fringe UFO enthusiasts and for making poorly substantiated scientific claims.
So, that's those guys.
Derek, tell us more about Terence Howard.
Well, like many people, I first became aware of Terrence when he played DJ in the movie Hustle and Flow, which is just an excellent movie.
I'm sure it holds up, at least in my mind.
Who knows now if I go back 20 years, but I loved it.
He's been in a ton of movies before and after that.
He's most famous now for playing the lead role in Empire.
He also released an album after Hustle and Flow fame in 2008 called Shine Through It.
It was Nah, but you know, at least he tries, which is cool.
But beyond acting, Terrence fancies himself as a philosopher.
But as we're going to discuss today and on Thursday's episode, his claims don't really hold up.
He calls his philosophy teriology, and he calls this a language of logic, which is a formal language that's used in computer science and logic and linguistics and in math.
This was initially launched in 2015, and he said he wasn't going to publish Terryology until it was patented.
But he ended up publishing it in 2017 on Twitter, that very academic space.
The top comment on that tweet says, stick to acting, bro.
Now, Howard claims his logic proves that 1x1 equals 2.
Which is how we've arrived here today.
My intention was to rebuild the periodic table, you know, build a new periodic table, because the stuff I had learned in college, you know, I went to school for chemical engineering the first year over at Pratt, and they, at the time, I think it was like 108 elements, and I'd asked, I told the teacher, the professor, about the relationship between hydrogen on the spectrometer And carbon and silicone and cobalt.
And it was like it's the same exact color, same tone, just doubled in each octave.
And he was like, no, each element is the same element and it will always be that element.
And I was like, you don't see the relationship.
So I left school.
Okay, so amongst several other things, Howard essentially claimed that he had solved the greatest riddles of math and physics inside his own mind, actually in the womb, and then unpacked it all through the course of his life using a somewhat famous geometric pattern created by Pythagoras called the Flower of Life as his template.
He also realized, as you said, Derek, that 1 times 1 actually really equals 2, so there's a whole dimension missing from the mainstream view of reality.
What we hear here from Howard is how his first year chemistry class failed to validate his intuitions about the correlations between color and sound and the elements of the periodic table.
So he had to get out of there.
There's also some contention about his educational background because Pratt closed its chemical engineering program in 1993 and it's never been confirmed that he even took those courses.
He also says he's gotten advanced degrees, which have never been confirmed.
So there's a lot going on in his mind.
Yeah, there's a lot there.
We'll save that for next time.
For now, let's move along to the main topic for today, which is Eric Weinstein on the Brian Keating podcast.
I really felt for Brian Keating throughout this entire video because Weinstein, as he does, just kept taking tangents that would avoid what Keating really wanted to talk about.
And then anytime Keating could get a word in, sadly, he didn't really cover himself in glory.
So, first clip, here they are having an exchange about what may have led to the problem of someone like Terence Howard being given such a huge platform to talk about his pseudoscience.
And I think that the experts would do very well to take that very seriously, not to reflexively say, ha ha ha, people believe now in a number system where 1 times 1 equals 2.
Instead, what they should be doing is say, What is it that we've done that has lost so much credibility so quickly?
And I would say it has a lot to do with COVID origins.
It has a lot to do with not acknowledging national security issues and pretending that they aren't national security issues.
This goes under the heading of covert operations, which are deniable operations.
That's not a conspiracy theory.
In fact, it is what, let's say the CIA is taxed with not just intelligence, but also doing things that can be denied.
A small number of topics, particularly COVID origins, the COVID vaccine, lying about inflation.
Deceptive about Ukraine and Russia and the risks that are being run, not covering the Jeffrey Epstein story, not covering the firebombing of the federal courthouse, where you could see a daily battle, but then it didn't appear to be a big deal to our major news organs.
This is the thing that's destroying I have to say, remember during the pandemic there was that phone app where everyone, like 100 people, 300 people could go in and talk.
Can you talk about one times one equals two and zero doesn't exist?
I have to say, remember during the pandemic there was that phone app where everyone,
like 100 people, 300 people could go in and talk.
I can't remember the name of the app right now, but the week after we criticized Brett Weinstein
on our podcast when he was on the Bill Maher show about vaccines, Eric somehow found my channel
and came on to defend his brother.
Now, what was interesting is it was about COVID vaccines, but he ended up talking about Jeffrey Epstein, which made no sense.
And this is just indicative of that.
Like he starts off talking even before this clip about why people lose trust in experts.
He does not identify the experts.
It just becomes that nefarious they in the background.
And so he can jump from national security to inflation to COVID origins to the vaccine.
And it just creates this aura of this deep state idea behind everything.
And what he rarely acknowledges, he does sometimes when he drills down on specific points, but in times like this, when he goes galaxy brain, He doesn't acknowledge that each of these disciplines has its own set of experts and that you have to look at that field and then judge those experts against the sort of data that they are releasing to the public or the field that they're playing in.
And instead, he just muddles everything together.
And at the end of it, you're just kind of left exhausted.
Is that the feeling that you get?
Yeah, totally.
I mean, what he does here, his take, On the problem is really that people have been lied to on this little laundry list of essentially conspiracy theory talking points.
And that's what he blames everything on.
And that's why people are open to Terrence Howard's outsider science.
But he's like, oh, but the outsider science is silly.
I mean, give me a break, right?
What comes next is Brian Keating chimes in with his culture war take on why this problematic thing has happened, why people are getting platformed on Joe Rogan, who are spouting pseudoscience.
And I just have to say here, I can feel his nerves and I can feel his attempt, I think, To match Weinstein's ostentatious verbosity, to coin a phrase, as evidenced here by Keating's first oddly pronounced big word.
We're seeing a concomitant destruction of the respect for universities, which used to be the paragon of civilization, being completely eroded at my campus, at your alma mater, Harvard.
Many other institutions.
How do you think the universities play into this and what culpability they have when you hear, you know, the kind of things, chants that are going on on campus, and then you also see the intellectual pushback to such individuals as myself?
Well, roughly speaking, the universities have been on a slide since the late 60s.
Yes, we're going to go back to the late 60s and what's coming next is that Weinstein will now rattle off five different pieces of legislation that most people haven't heard of or can't remember from like the late 60s through the 80s and give that as an explanation for what, for why kids are chanting like from the river to the sea on campuses and this somehow is related Through conspiracy logic, seven degrees of separation back to Terrence Howard appearing on Rogan.
It's really nutty.
And I'm also really tired of people putting all of this on universities as if, again, there is one university board that's deciding everything that's happening inside of American universities.
It's just not true.
And even on campuses, it's well known that there is a small percentage of teachers who engage in the quote-unquote culture war issues that people like Weinstein are always attacking when most of the faculty is just trying to do their job.
When I was at university in the 90s, there was such a wide range of disciplines and teachers that you could Partake in their classes you can learn from and I don't think that the structure of the university has changed that much I would say that yes, there are There's more taken into consideration now which is healthy in terms of things like DEI and critical race and bringing new ideas into the fold which is a
What a university should do is evolve as you gain more knowledge and understand how systems work better.
But everything gets compressed and flattened in discussions like this as if the American university is in peril.
And if it's in peril for any reason, it's because of the exorbitant costs of attending those universities, which is a problem of the capitalist structure and not having enough social support for everyone to get an educational opportunity.
That's not what Weinstein or most of these culture warriors are discussing, though, because that would move into social determinants, which they can't monetize, they can't fearmonger around.
So anytime that conversation comes up, my eyes glaze over, or my ears glaze over in this sense, and it's just so dishonest about what actually happens on most campuses.
Yeah, and this is the culture war strategy for the last, I don't know, 10 years, if not more, where essentially you take the minority of, you know, questionable or extreme or perhaps not well thought out or like bad examples of certain aspects of things on the left, and then generalize it as if it's this whole thing that's taking over all the universities, it's taking over all of the institutions, it's taking over the whole of the Democratic Party, and if we don't stop them, We're going to go to hell in a handbasket.
And it's just, it's nonsense.
And yeah, there you go with your facts and analysis getting a little bit deeper.
And this entire conversation between Keating and Weinstein, again, is framed as a talk about Terrence Howard.
And we've both listened to the entire podcast, and it's maybe five minutes on Howard, but I think we're covering it because we both found it fascinating how far afield from the topic they go to try to make sense of it.
And it really just shows how, as you said, expansive they attempt to make their vocabulary to describe it, when it could probably be done in a lot simpler terms, but that just doesn't create good content in this space.
Yeah, you have to relate everything back to the culture war talking points.
So what comes next actually is about Terrence Howard and it's actually Eric Weinstein, I think, doing a fairly good job, we must give him some credit here, for speculating about what goes on inside the mind of someone who's captivated by a certain type of romantic, metaphorical, magical thinking around pseudoscience or how they interpret science in pseudoscientific ways.
And he's really describing what we've covered on the podcast for a long time, which is apophenia.
Apophenia is this tendency to perceive meaningful patterns and connections or causal relationships that simply aren't there.
It pays not to rush off Terrence Howard's appearance with the back of our hands.
And let me say where I was headed with this.
The circle of fifths in music is not a circle.
It's a spiral.
And the reason for that is that you can't have both a perfect octave and a perfect Pythagorean fifth as part of an even-tempered scale.
And as a result, if you're, if you choose special numbers of notes, namely 12, 29 and 53, you can get a great, you can get a perfect octave and a nearly perfect third, sorry, nearly perfect fifth.
Those special numbers have that property.
Most people don't know that that's true.
If they sit down at a piano, they see 12 notes on it.
So what happens when Terrence, for example, figures out.
That lots of things are true that aren't well known.
There is no periodic table, there's a spiral one, there is no circle of fifths, there's a spiral one, and you can associate tones with vibrations and molecules with vibrations and frequencies.
You take all of that and you push it together and you create this delicious amalgam Where everything is connecting to everything.
And this is part of the pleasures of the overly associative mind.
Yeah, he's right on it there.
And let me tell you something else.
Let me just tell you.
He's right.
He's right about music.
That is a really fascinating thing about music and what happened when they created, I think it's called, equal temperament harmony.
Like, there's a whole thing there that's fascinating.
But what Eric is not doing, what Eric is never, ever fucking doing, Is sitting down and explaining something in a thoughtful way so that people understand what he's saying and then breaking it down.
Like this whole episode could have been really about where is Terrence Howard talking about some stuff that has some basis in actual facts and where is he, you know, fudging and making leaps that are unwarranted.
They could have done that, but he doesn't.
Anytime he takes this kind of Tangent into explaining something like this.
He's actually not explaining.
He's posturing.
He's peacocking.
He's saying, hey, look at this thing that I know that most other people don't know.
And I'm actually not going to explain it to you.
I'm just going to use it to cry and create a false sense of authoritative insight.
And you are a musician, so you would better understand that.
I'm a former music journalist, and as I appreciate music, I can't read it.
I've heard all sorts of theories about music that don't make sense to me.
What I find interesting about this particular moment is that he's criticizing Howard for apophenia.
And yet, as we've already highlighted, he's partaking in it in other situations.
And I wonder if he ever recognizes he's being disingenuous in that sense, or if he just thinks that his apophenia is really describing these structures that complete the whole instead of just grabbing for parts and trying to jam them together all the time.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Eric is going to get triggered on the clip after this one.
So we'll get to revisit that.
And I think you're really onto something there, Derek.
So in response to this last moment, Brian Keating jumps in to say, yeah, yeah, you know, that's fine and everything.
But what about Joe Rogan?
And what about Tucker Carlson having massive audiences and platforming dangerous and potentially destructive conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists?
Keating here references conspiracy documentary filmmaker Bart Sibrel, who also recently appeared on Rogan, and then got mentioned by Tucker, and also got mentioned by Patrick Bet-David, who hosts that Valuetainment kind of right-wing podcast.
And this is a guy who has, you know, made a career out of injecting moon landing hoax ideas into the discourse.
So Keating keeps struggling to get his point across, which is that when you platform certain conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, it can have destructive downstream effects.
And Weinstein gets snippy and superior.
He keeps doing what he does.
He'll make reference to four obscure pieces of political legislation from the 70s, or he'll string together two or three historical facts, so as to sound authoritative.
But all the while, he's taking a complete detour away from the point at hand.
And then Keating asks, is there a way forward?
Oh, sage and seer of the future, Eric Weinstein, how shall we solve our crisis of trust in the scientific institutions?
We are reestablishing the relationship that everyone wants, where the adjudication of ground truths will be done by scientists.
We're going to stop lying to you about gender.
We're going to stop lying to you about COVID origins and we're going to stop lying about
vaccine safety.
We're going to trust you with more information and if you can't handle that
then this will go horribly south and we'll all suffer.
But the right thing to do is to trust the people who we are ultimately trying to serve and who fund the
projects.
Why can't we have one podcast where gender doesn't come up?
And this isn't the only instance in this hour and seven minute conversation.
They don't drill down on it, but they almost put it as an aside, as a given that there's two genders and these are the same people who are fucking up everything else.
It's so tiresome hearing that just be shoehorned into these conversations all the time.
For no apparent reason other than to signal to their crowd that what side they're on here.
Yeah, it's good for the algorithm.
I mean, we know it's good for the algorithm, so I can only imagine they know that as well.
They're smart guys.
Yeah, it's annoying.
And there he gave his list of culture war talking points that if we're really going to save the institutions, we need to stop lying about this set of things.
Did you catch what they are?
It's the lab leak hypothesis.
It's the it's vaccine injuries, right?
It's, of course, gender.
The Lapu League thing, and you and I have actually said this for years on the podcast, that that to me is not a far-off conspiracy theory.
I'm totally open.
The idea that China would lie about something, of course, it's an authoritarian government.
Of course they would.
But right now, most of the proof leans not in that direction.
So personally, I go where most of the proof lies because I don't have the sort of background to understand how zoonotic diseases might jump across species.
So I'm going to go with that.
But again, it's just framed within this, they lied to you about this, they lied to you about vaccines.
And it's, again, really disingenuous.
That word always comes up when I'm listening to these conversations.
Because these are people, Eric is a very intelligent human being.
He is a scientist, so he knows how science actually works.
And the fact is that as new evidence comes out, public health officials will then say, We made a mistake.
This seems to be the best evidence.
And that statement right there is one of the heuristics I have for sort of identifying red flags with so many of these figures.
Are you saying you know these things for certain?
Or do you say things like, the evidence right now points to this and we'll update it as we know more.
And the sad truth is that Credible scientists and researchers will say things like that, but because it doesn't have this strongman ethos behind it that we know for sure it's this thing, it just doesn't play as well as you said, Julian, to the algorithm.
Yeah.
So hedging and epistemic humility doesn't really drive clicks, right?
And what these folks have been doing, I'm talking about the Alternative podcasting, formerly intellectual dark web, whatever you want to call them, there's a whole cluster of them.
What they've been doing, who lean more conspiratorial, and what they've been doing over the last at least two years is just taking a victory lap as if everything they claimed during COVID has turned out to be true, when actually the scientific consensus does not say that at all.
But they just keep saying it enough that I think a lot of their audience believes this laundry list of like, oh, they lied about this.
They lied about that.
And that is the thing that's really corrosive.
That's the thing that's really corrosive.
Not like all of these other factors that Weinstein and even Keating are trying to point towards.
So here's our last clip.
Having heard Eric's sage analysis of how to solve the problem, Keating, he's still, you know, he has this thing he's been trying to get to the entire time.
He still wonders if the misinformation of conspiracy theories will have damaged public discourse, in fact, so much that even Weinstein's brilliant plan could fail.
And at this point, I think Eric has had it.
He finally lets Keating have it with both barrels and we'll see why he's been avoiding this question of conspiracies so far.
Will there be irreparable damage because of people with enormous megaphones like Tucker And, Terrence, will it possibly be past the tipping point that we cannot recover credibility with a public that's used to treating, you know, the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist or somebody like that on an equal par with... What are you doing?
You're saying conspiracy theorists.
I'm talking about Bart Sibrel in this case.
It's a conspiracy.
I mean, his Wikipedia page says conspiracy theorist.
If I look at Google Ngrams, conspiracy theorist appears to start in 1962-63, right?
Yeah.
1962-63, right?
Yeah, I think I know why.
Well, my claim is, if you use the word conspiracy theorist so much as once
to throw shade, to disparage and discredit somebody who is actually correct about something,
You'll lose that as a weapon.
We've lost that as a term.
We call people conspiracy theorists who were right.
What I'm trying to say is if there's going to be a new compact, We are not going to go around saying these people are conspiracy theorists.
We're going to be going around saying Tucker Carlson does not know partial differential equations.
He just doesn't.
Right?
It is the case that when you give everybody a virus in their lungs, suddenly everybody knows what messenger RNA is.
You know, mRNA we've heard of now, but do we know about transfer?
The adapter hypothesis.
In general, what the public is being forced to do is to learn science piecemeal.
And the problem with Terrence Howard or Tucker Carlson or any of these people, including us, is That we're not coming at it with the right concepts.
Conspiracy theorist is the wrong concept.
I claim there's some conspiracy around the EcoHealth Alliance.
Am I a conspiracy theorist?
Okay.
Sure.
And someone could be a scientist, call themselves a scientist, and they may or may not be an actual scientist, a cognitive scientist, a political scientist.
A conspiracy theorist is an It is also a description of somebody who has, if you're going to try to catch a conspirator, everybody who prosecutes RICO against organized crime is a conspiracy theorist, but you never.
Sure.
I, so that's why I don't even call them.
Do you, you don't say, do you believe in the five crime families of New York?
Do you believe in the Gambinos?
Is everyone who believes that the Gambino crime family exists a conspiracy theorist?
Oh, Brian, Brian, Brian, son, son, come here.
Sit down on my lap and let's talk this through.
Yeah, he has that attitude throughout.
And you said it earlier.
You feel bad for Brian, but he's very deferential, but he also seems very Very whimsical in his, he'll just kind of go with it, he'll shapeshift to kind of fit Eric's.
I think what I get, and this is pure speculation, but I feel like the level of fame that Brian is experiencing right now, he's still a little starstruck.
So he's on Rogan, you know, he has Brett on, he talks, Eric, he talks earlier about going to dinner with Eric.
It just seems like he's, I'm in the mix now, but I don't want to, I don't want to upset anyone.
And that comes through without and Eric just steamrolls right over him.
And this talk about conspiracy theories, it is just amazing.
You know, I remember years ago, Abby Richards made that made that chart of like, you know, like JFK shooting.
There's still stuff we don't know.
It's not necessarily conspiracy theory.
But when you get down into a lot of the issues that they're conflating, Eric keeps doing this.
Oh, Rico, the Gambinos, you think that's conspiracy?
No, it's just as much of a conspiracy as the lab leak and COVID.
And that's the technique.
And that, again, is apophenia.
It's just like, here's this whole world of things that I'm going to compress and flatten.
I'm going to package up and put it into this space where I am the contrarian intellectual who is the true truth seeker, and I'm going to present to you the views that you really need to hear.
And last word from me, that's what the algorithm wants.
Yeah, absolutely.
And they're both doing it, right?
So Eric is doing it in that he insists on acting as if he doesn't understand the difference between a conspiracy that has been demonstrated to be true through police investigation, through intelligence gathering methods, through investigative journalism, through scientific discoveries, right?
There's all sorts of ways in which you can list out, and we've done it on the podcast before.
I mean, an easy one is Tuskegee.
Actual conspiracy, terrible things were done.
It was awful.
The government lied.
Yes.
You know, Vioxx.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
These things have been shown to be true.
The Gambino crime family.
I love that Keating's like, what?
Wait, what are we talking about now?
It's like, oh, you think if we're saying there's organized crime in New York City and there are these five crime families, then you're a conspiracy theorist.
It's It's disingenuous.
And I think he knows better.
That's just my speculation.
Now with Keating, he starts off the whole thing.
And you're right.
I think you're, I think you're onto something in terms of his being starstruck and not wanting to offend anyone.
But he's, he's trying to like poke at something here where he's like, is this a good thing?
Like, is it good for Joe Rogan to platform Terrence Howard and Bart Sibrel?
And he starts off the whole interview saying he has some people on like RFK Jr.
Who's not a conspiracy theorist.
Right, right, right.
That's right, because he does that comparison where, yeah, he talks about conspiracy theories and then says, but he has credible people, too.
And it's like, are you kidding me?
Yeah, yeah.
So that's this is a problem.
But look, clearly the term conspiracy theorist is a trigger for Eric.
And Brian has failed to maintain a safe space.
Like he probably should be spending more time on campuses so we can learn how to not trigger people insensitively.
But like his brother Brett, here's the thing.
Eric has a habit.
This is interesting.
He has this idiosyncratic habit of trying to coin What are usually awkward catchphrases and acronyms for the conspiratorial claims that, you know, he and Brett believe in.
So, for example, Eric uses the term DISC, D-I-S-C, which is the shorthand for Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.
You haven't heard about it.
I don't know why, because it's so incredibly catchy.
And he uses DISC to explain why he, his wife, and his younger brother haven't won Nobel Prizes.
He's got another non-catchy acronym that failed to go viral, it's called the GIN.
And Jin stands for the gated institutional narrative.
I mean, it sounds impressive.
But I have to say, to his credit, he has one that really stuck.
Eric actually is the person who came up with the phrase intellectual dark web back in 2017.
He meant it unironically.
I think it mostly gets used ironically, which is part of why it's stuck as a descriptor for these brave truth tellers who are speaking out against political correctness and cancel culture and they're, you know, champions of free speech.
Here's the thing that I find supremely ironic, though.
From 2013 to 2022, Eric Weinstein worked as the managing director for Peter Thiel's hedge fund.
Peter Thiel, who, let's remember, founded Palantir, which is named after the all-seeing magical stones in The Lord of the Rings.
Palantir makes data analytics platforms for U.S.
intelligence and defense agencies, as well as some of the biggest banks in the world, like Morgan Stanley.
And Peter Thiel has famously, or infamously, I should say, been quoted as saying he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.
He's an out-and-out right-wing, anti-democratic person.
So, look, we had Renée d'Aresta on last week.
Her academic work on disinformation and propaganda has led to her being smeared by conspiracy theorists as an anti-democratic operative.
But look, I think the folks who say that may have actually misspelled Peter Thiel, who is Eric Weinstein's boss for almost a decade.
Well, thanks for that, Julian, for putting it together.
