Acclaimed actor Terrence Howard has a new role playing a heroic Galileo-like character on the YouTube and podcast stage, where he fearlessly points out the flaws in mainstream math and science.
Howard's recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience gave him three hours to explain how his dreams and spiritual visions, along with his own research and deep study of maverick experts, have revealed unique answers to the deepest unsolved mysteries of physics. Turns out that none of this is new, the actor actually unveiled his discoveries in a surprising lecture at the Oxford Union in 2017.
Today we'll break down these two cosmic events in space-time and discuss what it all means, and whether it's just a bit of fun or something more dangerous.
Show Notes
5 Craziest Moments from Terrence Howard on Rogan
Prophetic Charisma By Len Oakes: A Brief Overview
Terrence Howard's Dangerous Mind
Terrence Howard Patents Debunked
Howard Virtual reality Patent Claim
John Keeley and The Etheric Force Machine
Walter Russell Society, now named The University of Science and Philosophy
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just things to counteract the metals that we have in our bodies that wear us out.
And you just take these periodically throughout the day on a timer?
Yeah, I gotta do it now.
I gotta do it now.
Okay.
I take a dropper, part of that dropper, and then four sprays, and it removes the parasites from your system.
like oil of oregano, like using oil of oregano instead of using antibiotics.
Thank you.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or you can just access our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We are also posting a bit more on YouTube these days, so for some exclusive video footage
you can go over there and search for Conspiratuality.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Two quick housekeeping notes before we start today.
First off, last week there was a Logic update and so some of the file for the main feed episode was a little corrupted.
I apologize.
It was re-uploaded, but if you had that experience on Thursday with Mallory, the first few thousand downloads, I had fixed the audio.
I will be more careful, but that update kind of screwed me.
So I apologize about that.
And then, bigger picture, before we start today, I want to flag an important story that we'll be covering on next week's podcast on Thursday.
Last Friday, Reuters published a bombshell article about the U.S.
military intentionally spreading anti-vax propaganda throughout Asia Now, the 101 is that according to military sources, the Chinese government was trying to pin the spread of COVID-19 on Americans.
And so our military countered that by paying a group $493 million in taxpayer money to create social media accounts to spread the idea that the Chinese vaccines were ineffective And that they contained pork ingredients, which would render them unsuitable for consumptions by Muslims, even though Islamic leaders said that it is okay because the vaccines were more important than any particular ingredients.
Now both of these statements by this company that the US government paid were inaccurate, But the program did help to boost anti-vaccine sentiment around the planet.
It is really a disastrous and tragic story that we're going to cover in depth next week as it runs counter to the important work that public health officials have been trying to do for the last four years and this move further eroded trust in experts, in doctors, in scientists, and in institutions.
So, just want to flag that because Yeah, well said Derek.
really, really primary to our podcast.
There's so many intersections with this story and so much of the work that we've done
over the last few years.
Yeah, well said, Derek.
I mean, we have to stare directly at this story, even though it'll probably give us vertigo
because we've got these four years of analysis behind us that really hinge on pushing back
against this core conspirituality paranoia of total institutional corruption.
So then we have the U.S.
military throwing a half billion dollars in propaganda back in our faces.
I'm thinking of all of those segments you did, Julian, called the jab.
And, you know, they're just sort of, you know, just overwhelmed by the power involved through these old colonial patterns.
And the scope of the trust crisis gets that much sharper.
Yeah, well, at least anti-vaxxers can be proud of their government again.
again.
Terrence Howard solves science.
Acclaimed actor Terrence Howard has a new role This time, though, he's not debuting a movie or a streaming TV series.
He's playing a heroic Galileo-like character on the YouTube and podcast stage who fearlessly points out the flaws in mainstream math and science.
Howard's recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience gave him three hours to explain how his dreams and spiritual visions, along with doing his own research and deeply studying maverick experts, have revealed unique answers to the deepest unsolved mysteries of physics.
It turns out that none of this is new.
The actor actually unveiled his discoveries in a surprising lecture at the Oxford Union in 2017.
Today, We'll break down these two cosmic events in spacetime and discuss what it all means and whether it's just a bit of fun or something more dangerous.
All right, guys, so off the top here, I think it's really helpful to define one word that for me sits at the center of our wheelhouse and is likely very much at play in what we're talking about today.
That word is apophenia.
It's defined as a tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
In New Age circles, there's a perhaps more familiar word inherited and then repurposed from Carl Jung that puts a positive spin on a kind of apophenia with regard to events and coincidences, and that familiar word is synchronicity.
The term apophenia, though, was coined by a psychiatrist named Klaus Conrad in 1958, specifically to describe the early symptoms of schizophrenia.
In that disease process, says Conrad, people who are not yet subject to full-blown hallucinations first become preoccupied with self-referential over-interpretations of their sensory experience as carrying abnormal meaningfulness.
It's important to add That like most mental and psychological phenomena, apophenia exists on a kind of spectrum.
It's something most people experience more mildly in a variety of ways.
So it's been used to describe the pattern-seeking psychological states that gamblers can get into, for example.
We're enjoying apophenia when we gaze up at the clouds during a pleasant picnic and see faces or animal shapes.
Even more so if you happen to smoke a joint or chew on some psilocybin mushrooms before looking at the sky.
It's also related to the types of superstitions that many professional athletes use to manage the anxiety of high-pressure competition.
Apophenia is part of what makes conspiracy theories appealing as well.
People enamored with things like astrology and numerology are captivated by apophenia.
So, of course, all of these are not descriptions of people on the verge of psychosis.
It's just that A, certain psychiatric conditions amplify apophenia even further, and B, apophenic perceptions often feel both pleasurable and revelatory.
But they're actually not reliable insights about reality.
Yeah, the question I have about it is, there seems to be this paradox.
I mean, maybe apophenic perceptions are not reliable in themselves, but isn't the revelatory part the thing that leads to scientific or aesthetic insight or perhaps even artistic mastery?
That seems to be the real crux of the matter.
Like, your brain does look like a large walnut if you can see it exposed,
but that doesn't cash out into Dave Asprey or Christiane Northrup saying that eating walnuts
are going to build your brain.
But on the other hand, you know, there are things like the golden ratio,
which has been known about and wondered at for centuries by visual artists.
You know, that kind of sublime, I think it's like 1.68 something,
this sublime geometry that describes the, you know, the ratio between your upper arm
and your forearm and your forearm and your, from your wrist to your fingertips,
that seems to show up in a lot of natural contexts, you know, like corn stalks and, you know,
fiddleheads and shells and stuff like that.
And that sort of thing, it would seem to me, could only be discovered through pattern recognition.
You said revelatory.
I default to thinking about what Julian said about taking some psilocybin and looking up at the sky and being in those situations with friends where you're like, it all makes sense, but I can't explain any of it in this moment.
Because pattern recognition is what our brains do anyway.
It's economical in terms of energy consumption.
All animals do it to some degree.
I think of my cats because every morning I wake up and I prepare their food in one specific place and they can hear the sounds.
If I go to a different part of the kitchen and prepare their food, they will not know that I'm making their breakfast because I'm not in the right spot, which is what they're accustomed to.
But when I move to that spot, even if I'm not preparing the food, they go nuts the entire time because they think that's what I'm doing.
And so all animals experience patterns.
It's part of chunking, which is how our brains create heuristics.
Because if we had to define a tree every time we saw it by its sort of name that was given to it, there's just too much energy.
So we just have a heuristic.
It's called a tree.
The term tree chunks the general form so that it takes less effort.
And unless you're an arborist or you just love trees, you don't really need that information.
So pattern recognition, you're right, it could lead to important insights.
That's definitely part of the scientific process.
But I find it equally dangerous because we often chunk information in incorrect ways, like your brain looks like a walnut.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, it's precisely because there's a range of cognitive tendencies amongst them, pattern recognition, that have significant adaptive value, and so therefore they persist in humans.
But along with several unintended side effects, and these in evolutionary terms are called spandrels.
So pattern recognition gives us access to intuitions and inspirations that can turn out to be true when tested.
But it also produces these side effects that we often grow out of, like thinking there's a monster under the bed.
Others that are a little bit more banal, like adults being convinced that they can't date someone if they have the wrong rising sign.
But in its extreme form, it coincides with other symptoms of madness.
There are many train stations, of course, along the way.
But at the very least, to come back to our main topic, I think it's clear that Terrence Howard is no stranger to the subway line called Apophenia.
Terrence, let's just give a brief 101 for those of you who might not be familiar with him.
I've been a fan for decades of his acting, at least.
We'll get into some of his ideas, though.
But Terrence Howard was born on March 11th, 1969 in Chicago.
He grew up in Cleveland.
And he had a rough childhood.
His father, Tyrone, was physically abusive.
And when Terrence was two, he reportedly saw his dad stab and kill Jack Fitzpatrick while waiting in line for Santa Claus.
This became known as the Santa Line Slaying.
Tyrone served 11 months in prison for manslaughter.
Now, Terrence did have a strong relationship with his great-grandmother, whose name was Minnie Gentry.
She was a New York stage and soap opera actress.
She was also in The Cosby Show, along with many Broadway plays, and he credits his love of acting to her.
And so Terrence started acting in small roles in the 90s and NYPD Blue, but it was his breakthrough in Hustle and Flow, which is from 2005, where I first found out about him and absolutely love that role.
He played the aspiring rapper named DJ, and he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Now, no matter what we say about Terrence in this episode or what you feel about him, I highly recommend that movie.
Now Terrence has gone on to play a number of famous roles, including War Machine in the Iron Man film series.
He is best known for Lucius Lyon in Empire, for which he earned a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Now his personal life is a little more complicated.
He's been married four times to three women.
He has five children.
He married and remarried his first wife Lori, for which he was accused of and admitted to physically abusing her.
His second wife, Michelle Ghent, also accused him of abuse.
Then he married his third wife, Mira Pack, in 2013, and they divorced in 2015.
This is actually the same year that he developed his theory that we're going to be getting to today about math.
But in 2023, he re-proposed to Mira as they've continued their personal and business relationships.
They're also raising children together, even after their divorce, so they're often seen together in business situations.
Now, as I said, it was in 2015 that he debuted his language of logic, which he calls Terryology.
And this posits the idea that one times one equals two, and that is the main focus of today's episode.
He published a paper on the theory in 2017 and promoted it on Twitter.
And even though it's been debunked by basically every mathematician and scientist who's read it, including, as we're going to get to later in the show, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Howard's recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast has put him back into the spotlight.
And the point of this podcast, I want to say now, is not to debate his math or physics.
I take him at his word that he cares passionately about these topics.
You can hear it when he's talking about it.
In fact, before we get to Rogan, we're going to hear him, as Julian flagged, addressing Oxford Union in 2017, which is when he published the paper, and he's going to present his findings.
And I'm not going to play a ton of clips where he speaks about math or physics.
There's a few.
That's about half of his 52-minute speech because none of us are mathematicians.
But near the end of that address, some Oxford students did know what they were talking about
in terms of math and science and physics.
And Howard, while he never gets really angry, he certainly gets louder when debating them.
And that's what interests me about this man.
He's extremely charismatic.
I don't get the feeling that he's trying to start a cult, but I feel like he could if
He has that sort of presence.
He speaks very elegantly, and some of what he says is quite compelling.
During the Q&A, most students wanted to know about acting, not math, and he actually gave some really interesting and insightful answers and metaphors about the acting process that I actually enjoyed when I was preparing for this podcast.
But I found this moment, where he's talking about his origin story growing up poor in Ohio, a bit telling, as it serves as sort of a framework for the rest of the address.
I grew up in the real bad part of Cleveland, Ohio.
Wore little girls' dresses for the first two years of my life, because we didn't have any money for clothes for me.
I managed to climb my way out of there by doing a fancy little thing called lying.
You know?
You guys do any of that?
Back in 1986, when I started working in this business, there was no thing called the Internet.
So when I put my first resume together, since I was trying to go and get jobs, I'd go knock at doors and go and do castings, and nobody would take me seriously because I didn't have an agent and I didn't have a resume.
So I put together A three-page resume of all the projects that I wanted to do.
And I was going to, and I put my name on them, starring in all these things, and that was my first resume.
And it got me into the door, and as time went on over the last 35 years, I filled up that thing, so it's no more lies on my resume.
It's all truth.
But it wasn't lies then, it was what I was going to make happen.
So on one level, we hear someone admitting to having a survival instinct.
He grew up very poor in an abusive household and he was trying to make something of himself.
He wanted to break into the industry and stick a pin in that term because it's going to come back later.
But on another level, someone that recommends lying as a tactic to get what you want in life should raise caution.
Well, it's such a wonderful place to start, and I don't know if it's lying so much as, like, hewing to the QAnon phrase, future proves past, or however they propose it, or this idea that you fake it till you make it, or that you're going to predict the life that you're going to have, that you're going to make your life through the power of intention.
I mean, yes.
He's lying as he hands over that paper, but he sees it on a different level.
You can also hear the kind of silence that follows in Oxford, because they probably weren't expecting that.
And he has that effect on people, because he comes from left field very often.
But he goes into a monologue about the need to embody roles, how acting demands that you become the person you're portraying, which is an old method acting technique.
Some actors famously won't even break character when they're not on set.
This was really well shown in the recent HBO series, The Sympathizer, which is also an exceptional book.
I read and watched it concurrently, and it's excellent.
In the series, David Duchovny plays a Marlon Brando-type army surgeon.
sergeant who won't break character during months of filming, and it's really good.
And so, for Howard, this means that 90% of his day involves carrying Lucius's torment around,
like physically embodying torment while he's playing that character in Empire.
Now, from there, he drops this on the Oxford crowd.
You may think you've been here for 20 years on this planet, but we know that energy, it is forever.
It doesn't die.
It continually recycles itself.
So you know that you've been a trilobite 350 million years ago, or some part of it.
Some parts of you were part of a pterodactyl.
Every one of us have been a part of everything in this universe.
So if we tap into those things in ourselves and remember those things in ourselves, we have that power.
Now, my vocation has been an actor.
And I've loved that.
I've been able to take care of my family as an actor.
But that's never been my passion.
I was an actor because it was like Jesus walking on water for tips.
Because he could do it.
That's what he did.
It was a natural thing for him.
I've always been an empath.
I've always been emotionally connected to everything.
But the thing that I was most spiritually connected to, that was my driving force, with physics.
He's so compelling.
Holy crap. I mean, and I'm okay with so much of that.
I mean, except the tapping into that power, but...
I mean, he's downplaying acting.
There's something so amazing here and tragic.
He's downplaying acting, and he's also saying that this is where his sort of like transformative ideas
come from with regard to his own sort of self and personality.
Like, I've been in plenty of acting classes where the director is asking us to connect with the ancient, you know, lizard self or the presence of a mountain.
And it works!
You know, you can do that.
Something about it works.
Like, I don't know how we test it, but you can feel it.
When it clicks, it clicks.
But he's saying that that's not what was important to him.
Like, he's saying he has this magical power that is fantastic, it's given him this wonderful career, but that's just like Jesus' party tricks.
I mean, that's a bit of a red flag.
I mean, he could have chosen anyone, to make his point, that there's a difference between having a lucky talent and having a deep desire, right?
Well, Jesus did make his initial fortune by walking on water for tips, right?
For tips, yeah.
And also at the wedding in Cana, I think they paid him to dance.
He created a lot of wine for very little initial outlay of expense, right?
Yeah, yeah.
All right, next up, we get into the drive behind Terrence Howard's love of math and
physics, which is the flower of life.
Now, this is an overlapping circles grid that's common in New Age numerology.
This geometric shape has been frequently found in Roman Empire art, though Howard attributes it to Da Vinci and the Temple of Osiris, ancient caves in China and elsewhere.
This is during the Oxford talk.
It does look a lot like a yantra as well, right?
It's like one of these kinds of geometric images that you could really trip out on if you just gazed at it, you know, with soft eyes for long enough.
Absolutely, and I think it goes back to pattern recognition.
I mean, it makes sense that disparate cultures around the world would be, when they had the tools to start drawing and creating shapes, that they would look for patterns and start to create similar shapes around the world.
Especially if you get the compass, right?
I mean, you give a kid any compass, they're gonna just make circles.
What's the, um, what's the, the, the, and the spirograph?
I mean, anybody with a spirograph, they're just gonna make this stuff.
You know, they didn't have that in the Iron Age, but I mean, you get my point.
Yeah, absolutely.
Then Howard starts getting very Theory of Everything once he invokes the Flower of Life, and he'll return to the idea again and again.
Now, the term Flower of Life is attributed to Gianvalo Melchizedek's 1999 book, The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, which is about sacred geometry.
Melchizedek was born Bernard Perrona in Alameda, California in 1941.
He also goes by the names Akbar and Hummingbird.
Derek, I know for sure it's Melchizedek because, yeah, it would be a taken name.
I think it's a Hebrew name, but that comes straight out of like...
The Old Testament somewhere.
Okay, thank you for that correction.
Mel Kizidek considers himself an esoteric researcher, so it's not surprising that Howard would probably find him and use the term.
In fact, Howard tells the Oxford crowd that despite the best efforts of people like Aristotle and Da Vinci, it is he, Terence Howard, that has found the true secrets inside of the flower of life, which he calls the void here.
Well, I found that there is something in the void.
The elementary fundamental particles that they've been searching for at the CERN Collider, the Hadron Collider in CERN.
I found that their energy signatures matched perfectly to some of the pieces that I was able to pull out of here.
So I'm gonna bring some of those now.
Do I have them in it?
Am I good?
Okay.
Now all of this was supposed to be on a projector for you guys.
I don't have that.
So what I do have is a bit of a Chanel bag.
Or an old Chanel bag.
A box, as it were.
And we're going to talk about a couple of items in here that are so hard to even express here.
Afterwards, you're going to have to just take a look at these.
My God, I won't have the time to do it.
I couldn't show you, but I am going to show you.
I didn't come here not to show you.
Now whether you guys are able to express, understand some of these things.
Lord help me, get confused.
Can we just pause here and confirm that this was not the advertised subject of the talk
and nobody knew he was bringing out this tickle trunk bag, Derek?
If you watch the video, he kind of plays that lovable, crazy professor who comes in and
papers are flying out of the bag.
There's actually no advertised subject off the top of this address, at least not in the
video that's on YouTube.
It's more like, here's a famous actor that we're going to let speak.
And even the presenter talks about their pre-talk dialogues that they had leading up to this.
And you could just tell that he's in over his head.
Yeah.
I mean, given the types of celebrity talks they have, they have a range of different guests.
But the types of talks that generally come from celebrities makes me think that the audience is probably not expecting what they end up getting.
And actually, in that clip, you can really hear Howard going through a process, right?
And there's a moment there early on in the clip where he says, am I good?
And he's basically saying, is it okay if I like pull out these diagrams and show them?
Because what he tells Joe Rogan later is that he says, Oxford Union broke my heart because when I arrived, they refused to let me have access to their overhead projectors and, you know, anything that I might need to give the presentation I wanted to give, which sounds like they kind of didn't know.
And then he asked for it and then they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And so then he's like, am I good?
Can I show this stuff?
Well, I'm not going to show it.
Okay.
I will show it.
I didn't come here not to show it, he says.
Yeah, and you can hear him enter into the character of the person who has to overcome the difficulty of not having the correct technology.
And I have to point out, I've listened to this clip a couple of times, but if we could isolate the way in which he says void, I think we hear something quite incredible about his acting technique, actually.
Like, he has one of the most resonant voices I've heard.
You know, I'm wearing good headphones and stuff like that, but he's really...
And there's something also about his exhales of sort of, I don't know, it's gravitas.
It's gravitas, yeah.
And at the same time, so he's rooting through this stuff, there's something gentle and childlike.
It's show and tell.
It's a magic bag.
Here in Canada, we had this guy named Mr. Dress Up who had a bag like that, but also like LeVar Burton doing Reading Rainbow.
And so I can kind of get on board with this as a kind of performance art that's going to disrupt the Oxford Union.
He's walking in and saying, oh, you know, you think you're, you know, you're so smart, you know, don't think you're so rational.
Look at, look at this kind of magical reality that I've got coming out of my bag.
He's also doing the other thing that spiritual pseudoscientists do all the time, which is to make reference to science.
So he talks about CERN and they're looking for these elementary particles at CERN.
Well, what I found by looking into the void. So he conflates his kind of
mystical revelatory process with what they're doing at CERN as a way to kind of validate it but
also set himself apart.
And it's a really easy name check too, right? Like you could just say CERN, everybody knows.
Yep.
Who knows, right?
By looking into the void.
So next up, Howard says that he's found seven elementary particles and wants Oxford students
to examine them and test them.
I wonder, Julian, if some of his being disgruntled on Rogan besides the projector wasn't the fact that he literally went to Oxford to have them verify His theory and that didn't happen.
So I wonder if that's part of it, because he wants them to audit the square root of two.
He asked numerous times, and then they will find what he's found.
Yeah, but doesn't that mean that he doesn't understand that Oxford Union is not part of the Oxford Physics Department?
He thinks he's lecturing at Oxford.
Oh, okay.
Right.
All right.
So he just got that wrong.
He thinks he's giving a lecture where they're going to review and validate his findings.
Oh man, that's so tragic.
And to me, this all really leads to this question.
Why does this matter?
I've been around esoteric researchers my entire life, at least since college.
In freshman year, I met a few of them.
And they come up with these complex ideas using terminology from all sorts of scientific disciplines.
And if you don't know what that term means, or those terms mean, or the connective tissue between those terms, and a charismatic person says them with such confidence, You might believe they're onto something.
It's a form of what's called scientific gishgallop, that they just overload you with this terminology.
And then he talks about what's in the void.
Our planet is moving away from our sun at six inches a year.
You guys know that.
15 centimeters a year, our planet is pushing away from the sun.
So in less than half a billion years, our planet will be out of the Goldilocks zone, We'll be somewhere near where Mars is, somewhere halfway between there.
So life will not be able to be sustained on this planet anymore.
So if we're going to be able to sustain ourselves as a species, we have to become interstellar.
Not just interplanetary, we have to become interstellar.
But with approximations, you cannot become interstellar.
Okay, so is that true about the Earth-Sun distance?
It's actually 1.5 centimeters per year, so his math is a little wrong, surprisingly.
Well, you can't get there with approximations, though.
So, there it is.
He's trying to save existence in the next half billion years, and that means jumping on Elon Musk's Mars rocket, right?
Interestingly, he then goes on to refute the concept that nuclear fission powers the sun because we can't detect neutrinos.
And then he quickly pivots to saying math is at the root problem of our banking system.
So he's all over the fucking map at this point.
So his basic idea is if one times one is actually one, then the bank can give us one dollar instead of two while the people in the know get two dollars for every one.
And that's what he presents to them, and it's all patterns.
And this is all a prelude to the Q&A section of the address.
Now most students want Terrence the actor, not Terrence the guy telling them that their math is all wrong.
And when someone asks him about acting, as I said earlier, he offers a very eloquent description about how acting relates to physics because all life is chemistry, and he reacts to chemical changes in his counterpart's body movements and their tone.
It reminds me of why I like the dude.
Again, he's revealing some interesting insights.
And you knew there had to be a but.
Someone asks him how to break into the music business, and his reply really reveals something else.
And I flagged this earlier about breaking into, and here we are.
My thing is, I have no toleration for rivalry whatsoever.
It's not black eyes and bloody noses for me, it's life or death when I'm in that ring.
And that ring is the set and the stage for me.
So I'm coming in there to dismantle you.
I'm coming in there to take away any falsehood that you have, that you were carrying yourself with.
I want to shake that up with truth and to where you don't even know your lines afterwards, that you're just sitting there.
So if you can't come in ready for life or death, Wow.
You think it's a black eye or a bloody nose, you will lose your life in that game.
You go in and you destroy them, and you break into the business however you have to.
Wow, it's almost like he's telling people they're not just in line to see Santa Claus, right?
You know, I recognize this from acting, pump yourself up, shit talk,
and maybe he's transferring it over to this question about music.
Because the film actors I've been around, like, a lot of them have this sense that they have to internally simmer all the time.
And it's different from being on stage where your movements are broader.
You have to be expansive so that they read to the back wall.
But on film, movements and expressions are really tiny, so the camera peers into John Malkovich's eyes and it seems like he's ruminating on deep mysteries.
But if you saw the film set from a short distance away, it would look like he was just standing there looking bored.
And I think a lot of them, to generate that aura that only this close-up can catch, really have to psych themselves up.
They have to believe in some kind of internal superpower.
And this thing about, like, I'm gonna make you forget your lines by blowing you out of the water, is also, it's not just aggressive, it's also saying, I'm going to help create a kind of peak transformational onstage moment in which we are not actors anymore, we're actually in real life.
Yeah, I have pulled back the curtain to reveal the actual mystery here through my truthfulness.
I mean, it's one reason why acting coaches sometimes create cult-like adherence.
Absolutely.
And why Scientology has thrived in Hollywood.
100%.
It's a different Scientology than the peasants get.
And so I think it's, you're right.
It's this domain of altered states, suspension of reality, heightened empathic imagination, being possessed by creative actions and impulses that feel authentic to the character, but it's like come through you like you're channeling.
And it's all mysterious enough and disorienting enough and it's worth so much money and so much fame that it's fertile ground for a range of magical beliefs and exploitive dynamics because no one actually knows what works and why.
Right.
I also find it interesting because in terms of acting, from my limited experiences on stage but also just from reading I've been reading books about it and being very into theater for a while.
Usually, you're cheering for the other actors.
You want that magic to happen.
I know not a ton of actors, maybe there are, maybe it's just my own ignorance, but that go on stage or in front of a camera to destroy someone that they're actually working with.
In improv, it's like you want to help people along, even as you challenge them.
Challenge them, yes.
But destroy them?
And that kind of bleeds over into his whole idea.
Like, Da Vinci was onto something, but I figured it out.
And, you know, how hardcore he is to any of his critics.
Like, in his very charismatic way.
Again, he's not an explosive type dude, except when he's in front of a camera sometimes.
And in the blue corner, playing Willy Loman.
He is an undefeated fighter who's destroyed every actor who's played opposite him.
Like, what the hell?
So, last clip from Oxford.
Finally, someone asks how he lives with the fact that everyone else but him hasn't figured this out yet, that he's figured it out, that he's living correctly while everyone else is living under this illusion that is allowing the banking system to do this to us.
And Terrence says that he's been told that he's been wrong about his physics for 40 years before he came to a revelation.
I edited this down from about two and a half minutes, but the pertinent points remain.
This may be crazier than the fiction.
The truth is, I woke up inside my mother's womb at about six months of age.
I woke up inside of there.
Like, boom.
I don't know what had happened, maybe my mother went through some trauma or whatever, but I woke up and I was like, oh god, I'm here!
Don't forget, and you know what I didn't want to forget?
This flower of life.
Because apparently I had been interested in it at a given time.
What I'm saying, and what I tried to tell you guys earlier, this is not your first time, it's not your first rodeo, and it won't be your last rodeo.
Don't panic in this life.
You can actually, there's no sense of death.
Everything goes to sleep and it wakes back up again.
Okay, so, wow.
Well, that's a perfect place actually for us to segue into Terrence Howard's appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience some seven years later.
He's on the biggest platform in the world, bar none.
He's talking about alternative pseudoscience models of math and physics that have been covered up by a conspiracy to perpetuate the mainstream narrative and cheat you out of like half of the money that you're owed apparently by the banking system.
And this clip, true to form, so he's consistent, it's literally his first answer.
After Joe has started, the music fades and Joe says, so how'd you get into all of this?
I didn't come into this world the way everybody else does, I don't think.
I used to think that everybody had the similar experience, but like if I asked you what was your first memory in life, what would it be?
I don't think I know.
My first memory was almost like when you're dreaming and you're falling.
and you hit the bottom and you wake up. That was my first memory, but I didn't wake up here.
I was inside my mother's womb and I was about maybe six months inside the womb. And I'm like,
Don't forget. He's really not like other people is the theme, right?
And we should mention he's wearing what looks like a silk hoodie with a hood up over his head
under his headphones, like it's half B-boy, but also half Jedi. And he takes a lot of time here
to lock the whole opening of the episode in.
This monologue that you just clipped from, Julian, is six minutes.
And, you know, honestly, it reminds me, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but the opening of the Mahabharata directed by Peter Brooks, there's this little boy who represents the audience and all of humanity.
And he walks into the warehouse stage set, and the scribe Vyasa is sitting there, and he's about to narrate the great poem of life.
But Vyasa begins with his own mythological birth and how unlikely it was, how unique, how it gave him insight into all of creation.
Now, of course, Brooks' play, when he filmed it, was three hours long, which is about the length of a, you know, a Rogan episode.
But the main vibe is this Simplicity in meeting the scribe of all life.
No special effects are needed.
There's just this ancient storytelling scenario with Joe as the credulous boy who has stumbled into the midst of, you know, a spiritual giant.
Yeah, and so as he continues here, he starts talking about he's got that moment of waking up in the womb, and then there's this really important dream when he's around five years old.
In The Dream, a mysterious figure asks him if there's just one thing you want more than anything else.
And despite being really poor and having a dad recently released from prison for manslaughter, as we've covered, He answers that he really wants to know how everything works.
Yeah, because the mundane sort of, I don't know, like pragmatic response would be, you know, a house for my family, no worries about food, you know, stable, you know, domestic life.
But at five, he knows already that these things would only provide a kind of temporary ephemeral relief in relation to the real mysteries of life.
I think it's important to note that this beneficent figure leading him through the mysteries, it really does seem to be a kind of foil for his dad.
Yeah. And so this figure now takes him into a kind of mansion of knowledge in which he's
presented with crystalline flower shapes, quite beautiful, that represent the core structures
of reality.
But after that moment, anytime something strange would happen in a dream, I had the powers
of inception. Anytime something, I would be naked at school, I would say, I'm not naked.
I must be dreaming. And immediately I would run out of the school or run out of wherever
I was and I would find that mansion again. And I had access to all the knowledge. The
proof of it is the 97 patents that I have now.
The proof of it is the industries that I've innovated.
It's like waking up, having a dream that you have a diamond in your hand and out of nowhere you wake up and you're hoping you're holding it and you try and hold it and it's gone when you wake up.
But the proof is all the stuff that I've been able to do now.
So these, all these thoughts, these thoughts are from the time you were a baby.
These are not things that you've learned.
These are things that you had in your mind from the time you were born.
From before that time, because I remembered that I had been someplace else before.
Now what's interesting, that voice that I heard, that's my voice now.
So it was like my greater self.
I really wonder if he is trying to actually produce that voice in his vocal technique that is actually leading himself.
Wow, that's incredible.
Okay, I want to point out that there's this really beautiful book, very important to my own work.
It's from 1997.
It's called Prophetic Charisma, The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities.
It's by a psychologist named Len Oaks.
And it's one of the early studies of cult leaders that we have.
Derek, you already said we don't know if this guy's trying to run a cult, but I think there are some overlaps here.
Oakes claims that many charismatic leaders go through a period of what he calls early narcissism.
involving a certain amount of baby worship that comes from a female caregiver, especially
who's placing all kinds of hopes in the child, often in the absence of a father figure.
And the praise shields the child from the world's reality so that he becomes a believer
that the world exists to serve his needs and that he has a sacred purpose.
Maybe you remember how like Adi Da or Bubba Free John talked about his childhood that he was floating in this womb of light all the time that he knew the truth of all existence.
But then there comes a long period of disillusionment, of struggle, of being deceived by the world and let down by everybody around the person.
The world cannot understand the boy's divine nature.
So he has to find a way to get by, usually by hiding his sacred gifts, going undercover.
And what would the undercover person do?
well, they might go into acting, right?
♪ Okay, so we get even more poignant here now,
because next, Howard talks about realizing later that maybe he could have saved his mother
and perhaps helped resolve some of the painful family dynamics
if he'd stayed on the path that the dream guide was revealing
instead of getting derailed into becoming an actor.
Because he says that around seven or eight he had figured out what he calls the Grand Unified Field Equation.
Now we'll get into his claim a Of having 97 patents in a minute, because that's important.
But he talks about acting as being on the wrong path and going through hell.
And then he briefly mentions his history of domestic violence and how all of this felt like a curse.
But that, as you said, Derek, was when he started having the dreams again.
As I moved along, I got in touch with Michael Hudak.
He was the president of the University of Science and Philosophy, because I was studying a guy named John Keeley.
You know, who had worked with Frequency back in the 1870s, had built the first self-sustaining engine back in 1872, but he wouldn't tell people how he built it.
And I was watching a program with Dale Pons, and somebody in the audience said, doesn't John Keighley's work remind you a lot of Walter Russell?
And a bell went on.
And so I got in touch with the University of Science and Philosophy after watching some stuff about Walter Russell.
And Michael Hudak, you know, took me under his wing and started talking to me.
But he was more into the philosophy and the love that Walter was talking about.
But 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 and I was going to spend 40 years rebuilding a periodic
table and I found out that Walter Russell had already did that. All right. So here's actually where
we get to the heart of the matter in terms of the ideas. What I found here really changed my
analysis of what Howard is doing.
Because it's a little perplexing at first.
First, let's just get this out of the way, the 97 patents.
A lot of internet sleuths who know something about the patenting process, which I don't, have weighed in on this, along with fact-checking sites like Snopes.
One thing that is useful to know is that actually anyone can apply for a patent and describe what it is that they're trying to get patented and that'll be logged.
So they can claim anything they like about what it is they're trying to patent.
Applying for a patent is not the same as actually holding a patent.
Holding a patent means it's been approved, and the invention has actually been shown to do something.
Oh, okay, so this is like VAERS, but for inventions.
Actually, it's also like the FDA process.
When we covered it in our coffee enema episode, saying that something is, you know, FDA approval is different than, there's another term, but it's like these companies will use it to say, we've submitted it to the FDA, so therefore you know it must be legitimate.
Yeah, no, exactly right.
It does appear that actually Terence Howard was granted 11 design patents, and these are explicitly defined as having no functional purpose, i.e.
the description is they are purely ornamental.
In addition to those 11 design patents, it looks like he has 10 patents as a co-inventor on educational toys that all use magnets to do different things, to make shapes and to reconfigure in various ways.
There is one noteworthy patent he holds that looks like it's about using electricity to fire a bullet.
So that's kind of interesting.
He went into some detail on Rogan about inventing a virtual reality system and that that patent was somehow stolen from him and has supposedly gone on to make trillions.
But it turns out that patent was never actually granted and it was eventually abandoned due to him not completing paperwork.
There's no evidence that it is the basis for other people now getting rich off of his genius.
So, is he really a groundbreaking inventor who's had his patents stolen or suppressed?
Does he have 97 patents that he holds?
Did he really intuitively, spiritually wake up in the womb and then have dream guidance into understanding foundational math and science truths about the universe that are, as he says, backed up by his patents?
Well, as far as I can tell, none of that really pans out.
Yeah, so if I go back to the enlightened childhood claim, trying to back that up with bogus patents I think is a personality, maybe a developmental tell.
He's not satisfied with the notion that people will simply accept the evident results of his radiant childhood.
He has to back those results up.
It reminds me of how, like, certain kids will involve grown-ups in very rich fantasy play, in which there are monsters or superheroes all around, and then they'll check in every once in a while and say, you believe me, right?
Like, this is really happening.
There's a chance that if Terrence Howard hadn't gotten derailed into his very successful and talented acting career, he might have been someone like Joe Dispenza.
Well, you use a lot of pseudoscience to back up a lot of claims of spiritual revelation and quantum consciousness, etc., and the ability to cure cancer and Parkinson's disease.
Yeah, and I suppose the sort of qualification there, or the threshold there, was that he would just have had to...
Well, I suppose he wouldn't have to go to chiropractic school.
That's an additional sort of added value for Joe Dispenza.
He probably could have just floated by with the education he has.
Yeah, Joe Dispenza's only benefit from going to chiropractic school is he gets to put doctor in front of his name, which does carry him a certain distance, but mostly it's about the fact that he had this terrible accident in which he supposedly cured his own terrible catastrophic spinal injury through the power of his mind.
What's interesting here is that Terence Howard talks about John Keighley as his first influence.
John Keighley claimed to have invented some kind of free energy perpetual motion machine in the 1870s.
I looked him up.
He's most widely known as having been a fraudulent inventor who's been shown to have performed deliberately misleading demonstrations of technological inventions in order to get investors to throw money at him.
It turns out he's a former carnival barker and circus performer.
Who's primary talent seems to have been fooling stockholders and investors into giving him money for machines that never actually worked in the ways that he claimed they did.
If you look at his Wikipedia page, it's kind of dominated by lengthy sections describing all the various lawsuits against him for fraud.
So that's Keighley.
Now we get to the main character in everything that we're discussing here, and that is Walter Russell.
Howard said he was going to spend 40 years inventing his own version of a periodic table of elements.
But then he saw Walter Russell had already done this.
And that's a funny thing, because the rest of his conversation with Rogan, and indeed most of what he presented at the Oxford Union seven years ago, is really all to be found in the work of Walter Russell.
But Howard, to me, makes it sound like Russell merely confirmed what he had already discovered So this is my first time hearing about Walter Russell's name, Julian.
So what's his 101?
Russell's fascinating.
He's actually a very accomplished painter, sculptor and builder who lived from 1871 to 1963.
Like he was already somewhat famous as a painter by his early thirties.
Then he published three successful children's books.
Then he was involved in some prominent building projects in New York City with top architects.
Turns out Russell was employed for 12 years by IBM as a motivational speaker.
So he's got some of these talents.
Then in his mid fifties, he turned his hand to sculpting and he was very successful as a sculptor as well with some very high profile commissions.
But it's in his 50s that Walter Russell claims to have had a life-changing spiritual awakening, which led to him then publishing a series of books over the next 30 years about the relationship between God and science, including this alternate way of thinking about the periodic table of elements.
Okay, so Russell adherents reject the standard model of physics.
He didn't believe in the existence of electrons, He believed that Einstein was wrong about electromagnetism, which Russell said is actually God's still light.
The magnetic force is God's still light.
The universe is electrical.
It's not made of four forces, but of just two, gravitation and radiation.
Those two, it turns out, are held in balance by God's still light.
Newton was wrong because he gave a one-sided account of gravity.
The mainstream periodic table is wrong because it failed to show us how all the elements are paired with one another in an eternal divine balance, and that they are resonant frequencies in symmetrical relationships that are similar to how musical tones resonate with each other.
Now, if some of that language is sounding familiar to those of you who've spent time in spiritual circles, It just so happens that Russell was also very influenced by and involved in what was called the New Thought Movement.
And that's one of the root sources of what became the familiar New Age ideology.
And a quick aside here, just in case we get some Walter Russell theologians commenting on this episode, I am no more immersed in Russell's entire body of work than I'm a scholar of astrology or homeopathy.
But as with those topics too, I can recognize pseudoscience when I see it.
So regarding Howard, with the exception, I think, of some of his interesting geometric computer-generated shape extrapolations, Everything he talks about essentially comes out of Walter Russell.
Yeah, which puts a different spin on the mysterious figure that leads him through dreams as a child, right?
And I'm also just totally speculating here, but I'm thinking that one possible interpretation of, you know, Howard's childhood fantasy life is that maybe it's sort of like a retrospective Yeah, it's plausible.
after having heard all about Walter Russell and wanting that kind of life.
Especially given that it was sort of mystical and somewhat pre-modern.
And a life that was much more or less fraught than his own.
Something that he could sort of reverse engineer into his own origin story.
Yeah, it's plausible.
During his Rogan appearance, Howard does mention, as you will have heard, being taken under
taken under the intellectual wing of a mentor.
His name is Michael Hudak.
Michael Hudak was for many years the president of, and is now listed as on the board of directors
of something impressively called the University of Science and Philosophy, which Howard also
mentioned.
He didn't mention that that was formerly named the Walter Russell Society.
So it's a little old school in what looks like a strip mall in Waynesboro, Virginia.
It's attached to the Walter Russell Museum and it offers courses, many of which you can
take online on the work of Russell and his much younger wife with this pitch on their
Maybe you feel like something is missing in your life.
You want a deeper understanding of how the universe works and your place in it.
At the University of Science and Philosophy, our purpose is to teach those who feel the cosmic urge within them to cultivate their inner knowing and to further unfold it.
In a strip mall in Waynesboro, Virginia, I can imagine like it's right beside a Chick-fil-A or something.
Yeah, I mean it's the best I could get from Google Maps looking at its location.
It does not actually give University of Science and Philosophy vibes when you see the building.
Okay, so last clip.
Terence actually got in touch with Neil deGrasse Tyson to talk about his work.
Let's listen to what happened and then you'll notice at the end they get interrupted in a quite interesting way.
I started it off with one times one equaling two.
And he went in on my treaties, wrote, redlined everything, attacked that I had immediate, that I talked about Walter
Russell and Victor Schauberger and John Keely as,
and Tesla as the people that I looked up to.
He attacked them, but then he started attacking, you know, the one times one equaling two.
How did he attack them?
Oh, he was, he was, because I asked him, I said, I said, under what conditions?
I said, it's illogical where the square root of a number added to itself would equal more than that number squared.
But that's what happens with the square root of two.
That's what happens with most of the numbers.
I was like, how is it that multiplication If it means to make more and increase in number.
Because all this started in third grade.
I was arguing with my teacher because we were talking about the square root of 100.
Oh my God.
Is that your phone?
Yeah, that's my detox thing.
I'm supposed to detox right now.
What's in this stuff?
Just things to counteract the metals that we have in our bodies that wear us out.
And you just take these periodically throughout the day on a timer?
Yeah, I gotta do it now.
I take a dropper, part of that dropper, and then four sprays, and it removes the parasites from your system.
Like oil of oregano, like using oil of oregano instead of using antibiotics.
And that is why we have him on Conspiratuality.
We should have had Mallory on this episode for the parasite cleanse.
And that just fits the crazy professor thing too, right?
Because here he is speaking in what is probably in front of 11 million people per download on the Rogan episode, and he just totally spaces that he has this alarm set that he has to detox.
It's just so perfect.
Yeah, and at least we can say he's thoroughly consistent in his confusion about evidence.
Here he is now like, oh yeah, this is going to detox the metals and remove all the parasites from my body if I take it multiple times a day on a timer.
During this appearance, we obviously can't like clip the whole thing.
He also said he had lost several acting jobs during COVID because of his refusal to get vaccinated.
He suggested that his geometric models could be a good explanation for how UFOs
are able to do all of that fancy maneuvering.
So he has solved UFOs as well.
He praised Rogan for taking a stand against governments trying to poison their citizens.
He said he refused the vaccine due to his knowledge about governments using chemical warfare
against their citizens.
Do the aliens grow oregano too?
Are we completing all the circles here?
Well, but at least we know you don't need to take antibiotics based on things that Terrence Howard discovered in the womb.
It turns out that Neil deGrasse Tyson, like 11 million people, saw the episode and he published a YouTube video response over this past weekend that detailed his actual exchange and what went down in terms of Terrence Howard's treaties and how Neil deGrasse Tyson interacted with it.
I actually spent time reading every line of all 36 pages.
And I commented.
My comments are in red here.
You see that?
I spent a lot of time on it.
And I thought, out of respect for him, what I should do is give him my most informed critical analysis that I can.
In my field, we call that a peer review.
You come up with an idea.
You present it either at a conference or you first write it up and you send it to your colleagues.
It is their duty to alert you of things about your ideas that are either misguided or wrong or the calculation doesn't work out or the logic doesn't comport.
That's their job.
What can happen?
Is 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.
Yeah.
So he spent a fairly thoughtful, like 25 minutes or so talking about this.
And later on he has this other great turn of phrase, geniuses are often misunderstood, but being misunderstood doesn't therefore make anyone a genius.
You know, guys, when we started with the Oxford Union presentation, I was kind of entertained because there's something about his intense focus that I recognize from my own yoga years, especially from when I studied astrology, which is a total apophenia machine.
Like when it shows you some kind of revelation or it seems to show you a revelation, even just one time, you can be filled with a real wonder and a sense of confirmation.
And I get that sense that that's what happened with Howard and whatever thought he had at some point about one times one equals two.
But I'm coming away from this a little bit unsettled because, you know, while there's a part of me that appreciates and also worries about this quiet spectacle unfolding on Rogan, I think it tells us something about how the stranger or mystical aspects of life are engaged with on this massive scale in a kind of confusing way.
Like, I'm imagining that listeners of this episode, and especially men, are gonna be moved by that whole opening of like, what was your first memory?
And I think that part of the Rogan cultural payoff in this case is that, you know, you've got 10, 11 million people are watching two alpha men discuss infantile memories.
And that gets spread out in an expanding circle in a vibe of sort of like vulnerability and tenderness.
And I don't think We can really address Rogan as a misinformation black hole without also getting that it provides a lot of a kind of homosocial and parasocial nourishment.
Like, even the resonance of the dude's voice, I think, is gonna send some people, some men especially, into, you know, another zone.
And I think that as the stats on the loneliness epidemic continue to rise, The length of these long-form podcasts is going to increase because it provides this kind of substance.
And it's also really painful to sit through Howard making, you know, what Neil deGrasse Tyson shows, and everybody should watch his review because I think it's very explanatory.
Howard is making elementary-level mistakes in math while painting them as breakthroughs.
And Howard dismisses his acting career as unimportant, but really that's all he's working with, as he pretends to be something that he's not.
And, you know, then there's this thing where we don't have any evidence that he hasn't changed his life.
since battering his partners, but we know that those patterns are hard to change, and so I'm also uncomfortable with this relaxed gentleness that is at the heart of the presentation.
It's hard for me to trust that he's not simmering with rage and insecurity.
And that's really ironic, because I do think that the appeal of his appearance is really locked into this feeling of intimate sharing that the episode presents.
Yeah, that's an important insight that I feel you've been bringing up from time to time, Matthew, the relational piece culturally of what this represents in terms of the need that it serves for men, you know, especially with the Joe Rogan experience.
Yeah.
I want to close by situating Terrence Howard's potential influence in the context of conspirituality.
I mentioned before that his biggest influence, Walter Russell, was also involved in what was at the time called the New Thought Movement.
And that's one of the root sources of what became what we now call the New Age set of beliefs.
And funnily enough, in terms of the history of ideas, that movement comes right after the period I just delved into last week for my bonus episode on spiritualism in what was called the burned-out district of New York State after the failed prophecies of the Second Great Awakening in the 1840s.
By the time we get to the 1890s, we have the Law of Attraction being coined by Prentice Mulford.
And then along with Mulford and Walter Russell and others, we have Christian science founder Mary Baker Eddy in the new thought mix as well.
So in addition to mind manifesting reality, we get this pernicious meme that sickness is the product of incorrect thoughts because in the mind of God, all of us are well.
So we can see the seeds of new age delusion that are part of what would later blossom into conspirituality.
But before that, they would feed cult leaders their daily caviar.
They would make Joe Dispenza wealthy and give a generation of traumatized seekers the confusing and immiserating message that the real cause of their suffering was their mistaken belief that they'd ever really been victimized.
And we've cataloged on this podcast some extreme examples of people who had terrible outcomes from COVID, from cancer, from HIV, and even from just going on a sweat lodge to become spiritual warriors.
Specifically due to believing that their metaphysics were more real than medical science.
There's also the whole pseudoscience industry that we cover which can lead people to risk their lives while wasting a lot of money on false hope.
Then there's our now looming crisis of increased rejection of vaccine science in which kids that should be fully protected are now going to inevitably die.
The next pandemic will go even more poorly due to the influence now of organized and networked resistance to quarantine and vaccines.
For me, Terrence Howard's appearance on Rogan feeds into all of that, too.
And it validates the magical thinking of naive people susceptible to pseudo-profound anti-signs, which, as it turns out, contain strains of both conspiracy theories and spiritual beliefs.
