Breaking down the Eric Weinstein Terrance Howard Joe Rogan | Tom Reacts

Why should the world care about a 4-hour mathematical conversation between Joe Rogan, Terrence Howard, and Eric Weinstein? Because we live in the age of conspiracy. COVID ripped the mask off the fact that we are all being lied to. And the fact that lying is a very effective weapon, and that people really can be controlled. And I'm not conspiratorial minded. So, this is me really looking at this with an entrepreneur's eye to things that perpetuate through culture do so because they have utility. Which is one of my obsessions, to get people to understand that things that stick around, whether it's fame, whether it's money, people are always going to pursue them because they have utility. Lies have utility. Trying to control the masses has utility. And the reason that I am going to perk up anytime Eric Weinstein is involved is because I really think he understands without becoming bombastic or uh being so open-minded that your brain falls out, which is a great way to talk about it. He He doesn't fall prey to that, but he is very aware of the way that ideas are suppressed. Now, I don't think they're suppressed because people have evil agendas. I think they're suppressed because the incentives align. And so, watching Eric and Terrence collide, it was um and Eric talked about this in the episode, it is this collision of the establishment versus the non-establishment. And what Eric was saying is the reason that you've been shut down by somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson who pointed you to peer review is because that is uh an equation where it is simply the establishment not going, "Oh, maybe this is a heterodox thinker who's not right on everything, obviously, but who may even just have an idea that doesn't work, but sparks somebody else to have an idea that does work." And that's my question. Do you think Terrence Howard that he brings something to the table? I I cannot speak to that with any degree of authority. I will only give you my takeaway knowing Eric as well as I do? Almost certainly not. Now, Eric seemed fascinated about um one of the things that he had, the lynchpin, that may have implications for drone movement. But, I come at this from a writer's perspective, having been in so many writers' rooms where writers just understand you throw out the bad ideas. Now, you can litigate whether Terrence understands that his ideas are bad. I don't think that he does, and so that was a really important part of this moment, to get back to the initial question of I think it is critically important that Eric and other people like Eric who really do understand this stuff well enough to go point by point, show what's to use his words from the interview, what's baby and what's bathwater. And there was a ton of pushback against this when Terrence was first on Rogan that I thought was wildly unwarranted and is everything that's wrong with culture right now, which is he's a lunatic, don't listen to him, he's like a madman, he's narcissistic, he thinks he's right, but he's really just crazy. And my thing was, it doesn't matter. And the reason it doesn't matter is because it hit like that moment hit a level of cultural awareness that I think thinkers like Eric Weinstein should be using as the bar to what warrants a careful deconstruction. Now, of course, all of these guys, A, they're incredibly smart, so I'm sure that talking to mortals can be very frustrating at times. Uh they could also be thinking about other things that are far more important to them, and I'm sure sometimes they get very irritated at having to address this stuff. So, there does need to be a barometer by which we judge who do we engage with and who do we reject. And for my money, in the age of conspiracy, where the public, which should be the people that you're trying to win over, the public are telling you, I don't believe anything you say, you guys are a bunch of liars, and and truth has become this hyper-fragmented, individualized, deeply personal thing, which again, my North Star on that is utility. Because what is objectively true can be very hard to determine. So, I will just say what has utility. Okay, so to use the barometer of this reaches a level of cultural awareness where whether you want them to or not, there are going to be a ton of people that become devotees of Terrence Howard and terryology or what I I forget terryology ology forget the exact word that he used. Uh they're going to become adherents of that because he has this lyrical way of explaining things. And so, I literally I listened to that interview. I got on the phone with Eric right away and I was like, "Eric, you have got to go in and even if it's a pure debunking, you've got to go line by line on this one." And made the whole pitch about um why. Now, I have a feeling everybody in Eric's life gave the same pitch. So, I was but one voice. Uh and shout out to Rogan for being the one that can pull all of this together so amazingly. It's just I am constantly in awe. I think I think there's something to jump in there cuz something that I took away from the interview was how Eric was telling him you have to do it this way. And you as a non-establishment person, you're kind of building your own theory you're building your own studio. You're not waiting for that blessing. And it's weird that in the scientific community, you have to kind of wait to be grandfathered in. Somebody has to apprentice you. Somebody has to bless you. It's almost like if Tesla if Elon had to wait for Ford to give him the thumbs up before he made Tesla. All right. This is this is where we really have to start teasing ideas apart. So, first of all, Eric was right at the beginning of the episode and Rogan wouldn't let him do it. Terrence wouldn't let him do it, which was I have to steel man Terrence's argument to make sure that I understand it. Literally, if you take nothing away from that episode except one thing, take that that that would have been the right way to do this because this is you has utility in real life. If you take nothing but one thing away from this episode, make sure that you take that away. You first want to make sure that you understand somebody's view in a way that they will recognize. Okay, that's my definition of a steel man. I'm going to say Terrence, you your beliefs back to you. I want to make sure that you say, yes, those are my beliefs. Now, the reason I want to do that is if I'm going to debunk it, you have to do it in a systematic way. And I'm telling you when two smart, well-intentioned people disagree, it is either a collision of values, how the world ought to be, or it is a collision of base assumptions, their assumption about how the world actually is. Now, if you keep arguing at the level of like is this super symmetry, is this not super symmetry, you are never going to make progress. You have to go, hey Terrence, here's how I think your world view is built up. These are the exact foundational assumptions that I see you making. And if those assumptions were correct, then your stance would be correct. But let me tell you which base assumptions you've gotten wrong. And therefore, since your your literal foundations are wrong, the rest cannot be accurate. So, one of the foundations that Terrence Howard puts forth is that everything is in motion. Now, Eric does eventually in the interview he says point blank, that isn't true because you have to understand that the vast majority of physics hinges upon a weight on a spring. So, it's potential energy. And so, that now unravels the whole theory. But they because they didn't structure the interview, and I get it, it's not as entertaining. But when my North Star is utility, it's like you have to go with those base assumptions, figure out what they are, get Terrence to say, yes, those are the base assumptions upon which I'm building. And then Eric just goes one by one. This one's true, this one's not, it's not for this reason. If Terrence has a rebuttal that he thinks Eric doesn't understand, whatever, then they can debate over it. And when you get to something like uh an Einstein coming in and saying, hey, all the physics is built on these whatever 72 fundamental base assumptions that I know nothing about. So, I've no idea what it actually was. But they they the physicists would all have agreed. And what he said was, this base assumption is incorrect because of what we end up understanding is general relativity and special relativity. So, it's like, okay, cool. We can point to the exact thing that you're challenging. You show me a thing that then can be debated at the level of philosophy. If we can't come to an agreement at the level of philosophy by running thought experiments, then we know that we have to wait for experimentation. Which happened small handful of you I think less than a decade later. Was in uh 1919 I believe that they were able to measure the way that gravity warped space-time during a solar eclipse. And so, once you see like, oh snap. Like, okay, we actually have data that shows that your hypothesis, which challenged a fundamental um building block upon which all of the theories of physics are built, and we've tested experimentally, we see that it's probably true. Now, this is where I'll channel Bret Weinstein and say Bret uh believes that all problems in society go away, tongue in cheek obviously, uh if you understand the difference between a hypothesis and a thesis. A hypothesis you can take as just a best guess. Hopefully, it's a well-informed best guess, but it may be one of 30 best guesses that you alone have, let alone all the best guesses that are out there in the world. And only when you start running experiments do other things other hypotheses begin to fall away. And when you have a hypothesis, it's when all other Sorry, when you have a thesis, it's when all other hypotheses have been proven incorrect. And you were left with one hypothesis, and that now becomes a thesis. That's the one thing that has not yet been invalidated. And so, if you understand, this is why it drove me crazy during COVID when people were like, follow the science. And I'm like, [ __ ] the science is literally questioning what's true. And you're just looking for predictive validity. If I believe this, then I can predict the outcome and I can test the outcome and yes, I get that outcome. They talk about repeatability a lot. It's repeatable because you actually understand the foundational building blocks. I want to jump in right here cuz I think you said something really good. Can you kind of break down how somebody would test those hypotheses? So, is it From I know Terrence Howard you'll have to get a bunch of springs and balls and do it in a very scientific way. But like practically speaking, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm something like that. Would it just be kind of going into life and trying things out and seeing what works? Cuz how do you get through how do you establish a solid fundamental way of thinking by going through those hypotheses to get to ultimate thesis? Okay, so this a lot of this comes down to what are you trying to achieve and where do you want to fit in on the spectrum? So, one of the things that I found really fascinating about Terrence Howard is I'm watching him with Eric Weinstein. Now, look, it's possible that there is somebody else out there that is a better combination of loving, articulate, and just astonishingly brilliant more than Eric. I haven't encountered them and I seek these people out. There's a lot of bright people, but Eric just has something special about him. And watching him collide with Terrence was utterly fascinating because what I liked about what Eric was saying is, "Look, the quality of your thinking is on a spectrum from absolute trash to like, "Hey, this could be a brilliant insight." Yeah. And I'm not going to throw out everything simply because I can detect that there is some flaw in your thinking, which I think he's right that people that fall into the establishment camp of science using peer review, they just the second they detect one thing is off, they want to throw you away. Again, I'll come at this as a writer and I'll say in a writer's room if you did that, you're the biggest dick in the world and you're going to kill the screenplay because, bro, if we have to like if every idea has to be perfect and you can't just let me put one on the table as like, "Hey, this is probably a terrible idea, but it might spark a good idea, but you first have to engage with that terrible idea as if it wasn't a terrible idea to see if it leads somewhere." Again, what's the baseline for that so you don't waste all of your time? Cultural awareness. When enough normal people are like, "Yo, that speaks to me." then that's going to be the one that you go in and you say, "Okay, hey, I'm going to engage with this." So, I start thinking, "Okay, wait a second. Terrence is smart. Like, even if all you're going to say is that he's able to memorize all these facts and then find um free word association uh connections, right? Eric talked about this that you find things that remind you of other things, I think is the exact way he referred to it. Yeah, but he it reminded me of John Nash as represented in the movie A Beautiful Mind where you're following him, everything seems to make sense, and then you realize, "Oh, actually he's a paranoid schizophrenic and he sees patterns in everything." And so, the warning that Eric was putting forward is, "Hey, if you stare long at this stare long enough at the stuff, you're going to see Jesus, right?" And so, there are all these beautiful amazing things, and if your brain is wired in such a way that you will find patterns in anything, which is probably partly what makes him a great actor, which is probably partly what makes him a great musician, it's like, "Hey, that has value in a society." Because I come back to evolutionist searching for utility. So, why why aren't we all Eric Weinstein? Yeah, nature. Why aren't we? I would very much like to be on that spectrum. Uh why do some of us have far more metaphorical minds? And I think even if they're like a terrible artifact and if we could just get rid of them, we would, we have them, and so now it becomes a question of is there a way to extract value? And I would say especially from somebody as smart though from I'm team Eric on this one, so I will just assume the vast majority of this is bathwater and it is completely nonsensical. Uh but again, I can't prove that. I can just tell you what side I have chosen to go on. But even if we're just like, "Hey, this is all nonsensical." Is it putting forth ideas that other people can riff on? Now, why does that matter? Because minor star is utility. And I'm looking at physics going, "The last breakthrough we had was from a guy who we only have black and white photos of." So, it has been a very long time since we've had a breakthrough. We should be traveling the cosmos, and we're not traveling the cosmos. So, you have to understand, since traveling the cosmos does not violate the laws of physics, we don't understand something about physics. And so, approaching this with a level of humility is critical. Now, you were sort of giving me a softball earlier saying, you know, how do you dissect this? And I'm saying, if I'm looking at this as a business guy, it's like I always want to understand what I have to do is I have to look at all the dots of my business. Uh what does the audience want from me? What's working on podcasting? Hey, this thing called YouTube is popping up. How do you make that work? Uh what works well there? We have a university. How do I make that work? And I have all these sense of how I'm going to tie it all together, right? And then, I go in and I connect the dots. Now, you have to then go intoxicate your team with certainty. So, you have to tell them, "Here are the dots, and they connect like this." But hold on, to go to a step back, it's easy kind of for you in a straight line cuz you're owning the business, you're the man in the big chair. For somebody like Terrence Howard, he doesn't own science. He's doing the same thing. So, what I'm trying to get you to understand is that uh nature creates minds in a certain way blindly. It's the blind watchmaker. There there's no ghost in the machine. But the blind watchmaker is realizing, "Oh, if I only make one type of brain, then we have a problem." I I have a whole diatribe about why there's left brains, right brains, meaning politically left, politically right. There's a reason you want dynamic tension. Okay, there's a reason there are Eric Weinsteins, in my opinion, and there are reasons that there are Terence Howards. A very metaphorical thinking. it it's a split. Yes. And there's a reason that we're spread across the spectrum. Now, going back to what I was saying, it's like this is how you get Remember, the the thing that makes humans great, and this goes back to I'm going to show you my base assumptions. The thing that makes humans great is that we are able to cooperate in extremely large groups, but flexibly. So, ants can cooperate in extremely large groups, but not flexibly. They do one thing one way, that's it. You're going to get ant hills, period, end of story. Humans can cooperate flexibly in gigantic groups. Religion is one of the more profound ways that we do this, but one of the mechanisms by which a religion, for instance, would be born is by noticing dots. Oh, sometimes there are storms and people get zapped by lightning and things burn and we all die. Uh I bet there's this all-powerful being that's throwing lightning down at us. And if I sacrifice a goat, cuz I did that one time, and then the lightning stopped, and I bet if I sacrifice a goat, it will make the lightning go away. Whatever, right? And so, they start seeing the dots, which are real. They connect the dots, but they connect the dots with narrative. The narrative is made up. Now, what I see when I look at Terence is somebody who has a lot of dots and a narrative about how they connect. And when you hear him talk about it, it's compelling. You call him a shaman, which I thought was brilliant. Terence is shamanistic to me. something to It's like you want him to be right because it feels so good. But as an entrepreneur, I will just tell you right now, the thing you have to worry about is feelings make dots feel like they connect when they don't actually connect. So, going back to I, as the entrepreneur, I have to look at all the dots, I have to come up with a narrative that connects the dots. I need that to get a large group of people to cooperate flexibly. So, I'm going to come to them with a narrative, and I'm going to say it like it is the gospel [ __ ] truth as if there is nothing else beyond this. Now, the thing for me is I have to be the one person that doesn't actually believe it. I have to hope it's true, but I have to know the only thing I can guarantee is my thinking is wrong in some way. And this is what I love about Eric. Eric understands you have dots, you connect them with narrative, the narrative is a story, and Eric is saying step outside the [ __ ] narrative, look back at it and say I have to find the problems. To do that, you have to seek disconfirming evidence. And this is his whole idea of the DISC, distributed information suppression complex. That over time industries have calcified because the money is being pulled out of academics. I don't know the story well like he does about how that happened, but just grant me that money gets pulled out of the educational system. And so, you have professors now that really have to fight and scrap for their tenure. And so, now you can use peer review as a way to keep other people out, especially younger people with different ideas. Exactly. And so, there's a quote if I can find it fast, but basically I'll paraphrase that the um the establishment will glom onto a set of ideas, this dots connecting narrative, and they'll stay stuck for 40 years because they don't Now, that that is a paraphrase of Eric. The Now, what I'm going to say is me. Um they don't seek disconfirming evidence. And so, they actually want to keep people out of it. And that as an entrepreneur, I will tell you is the problem. So, what I do is I will paint this picture, I will intoxicate people with certainty so that I get my large group of people cooperating flexibly cuz they have a a simple narrative that they can hold in their head that they can repeat to each other about why we're here and what we're trying to do. Cuz I have to give them that very simple, easy-to-articulate meme that can replicate through the organization when I turn my back that everybody's spreading the same meme over and over and over. Okay. Once the meme is off spreading, I then go in my room and I'm like, "I know that meme is a lie. I just don't know which part because I am giving you my best take right now with my current thinking. Some part of it is flawed. How do I know that? Because I know I'm not where I want to be. So, if I know I want to be traveling the cosmos and I'm not, then I know something is flawed in my physics. So, while I may believe string theory connects all the dots in the right way, clearly not because we're stuck. And so, you have to seek that disconfirming evidence. And you might say, "Hey, this is as close as we can get." And by the way, I I want you to give me disconfirming evidence, but I'm not going to be like, "Oh, gee, thanks." And like, I'm going to attack your ideas. And I'm going to say, "No, no, no, come on. Give me a better idea. That one doesn't make any sense for these reasons." But I'm actually going to engage. I'm going to fight with those ideas. And in a company, and I I understand most companies are run by somebody who just wants to tell you what to do and they expect you to do it. Dude, I'm not smart enough for that. So, I surround myself with people that are smart and I say, as I hope you will attest, I want you to challenge my ideas. Now, I'm going to push back. I'm going to debate ferociously until you can convince me that your idea is right. But if your idea really has merit, meaning it has utility, then I'm going to adopt it because what I care about is the utility. Now, that's what I hear Eric putting forth in this interview, which is why I think this is so critical. And I'm like, "Dude, th- this moment was important for culture." Now, it's going to be up to us whether we do anything with it. And I am going to be watching Terrence like a hawk because here's what happens. From where I'm sitting, Eric just demolished his worldview. The the basic foundation that he built on, there were several, but one of them is 1 * 1 = 2. Killed it. And Eric went through and just explained why mathematically that you just don't understand these other things and hey, we can help you and you should apprentice and learn and grow and ah and then maybe you'll actually be able to make better contributions. Though it may be that he just needs to be a lyrical mind and throw out these ideas and then other people can run. Anyway, that that's a a different point. But Eric going into this and really trying to say, "Hey, I think that this is exactly where you're falling down." Mhm. Then allows Terrence to go, "Okay, I see how my worldview is broken. It doesn't have the predictive validity that I thought, which to me is the ultimate utility. It doesn't have the predictive validity that I thought. I'm going to have to rebuild my worldview." Now, the catch is my read of that interview is as of right now today Terrence doesn't understand what Eric is saying well enough to reconstitute a worldview. And so that worldview is a gravitational center for him. And he's going to keep devolving back to the mean. Yes. So, he he's just going to be like talk to him in a a month, right, and do another interview and he's going to be saying the same things he was saying before because he doesn't understand why his worldview doesn't work and maybe more troubling he's not like a understand Now, to cut you off, but as you're saying this, I I immediately thought about politics where it's I know that there might be a flaw in my thinking if I'm left, if I'm right, whatever, but I can't say that I can't give up that tribe. I can't announce that. So, I almost have to double down. So, Terrence, unfortunately, I can kind of see him doubling down and that's the same thing we kind of see in other industries and other parts of society. You've got your finger on an incredibly important thing that honestly is so much more common than what we're about to talk about. So, I fully acknowledge that that's like 85% of the reasons that somebody would shut down like a new worldview. They will never allow it into their world because they put so much of their personal credibility behind it. And money and time and all these things. 100%. I didn't get that vibe from Terrence in the only two interactions I have ever seen with him. Now, I've seen other people say, "Guys, come on. In other interviews, he's a full-blown narcissist, and he just says this stuff like it's fact, and he's pulling the stuff out of his ass." So, it's possible. I just don't know Terrence well enough, and that there really is a narcissist behind this. But, I thought he handled himself very well in the interview. He was receptive. He was open. He The only times he interrupted, he interrupted out of enthusiasm. Yeah. Like, "Hey, I really I just really want to show you this thing." Like, if if you look at Terrence through the lens of he he's wrong, but he really believes what he's saying. Now, if he really believes, "Guys, I have the great unifying theory, and new things will become possible if people will just start approaching these ideas and engaging with them sincerely." That's beautiful, right? So, he believes it. He's trying to put it out into the world. So, he gets excited when Eric is brings something up that he's like, "No, no, no. You don't understand. Let me show you this thing." Now, Eric responded something with the "You've got to stop teaching." Yeah. And I thought the brilliant analogy that Eric used was as a fighter. Mhm. And so, which obviously got Joe like uh perked up, which is Joe's made fun of so many times, people that talk about, you know, like death grip or, you know, one touch or whatever. And those people get their asses handed to them in a real fight. And if you're a real fighter, and you hear somebody talking about things that you know to be false, you're like, "Oh, this guy actually doesn't know what he's talking about." And that is almost certainly what's going on in that case. Mhm. But, again, I will give Terrence the benefit of the doubt. He seems to be coming at it very sincerely. And so, even though he's wrong, potentially, me, again, not being the one to pull that apart. But, if he can go learn this stuff, if he has the raw intellect to do it, uh and can update his worldview, dude, this will have been a master class on getting us out of the age of conspiracy, which I think a lot about how we get back out of this, where we can trust people again. And it certainly isn't going to be uh recrowning a bunch of elites. It's going to be people like Eric, who I'll call an intellectual gladiator, and he's not afraid to go in and fight ideas. But is it podcast? Are we the new, you know, Greek philosophers? Cuz you go back in time I think Think of podcast as a mechanism. So, you may have the new Greek philosophers, I mean, Ryan Holiday, I'm looking at you. Uh you may have the new Greek philosophers literally doing podcast, but podcast is just a medium. It's standing up in the forum and addressing people. What I absolutely hate, do you want to know If you want to get me triggered and red flag, like, my wife's channel is all about red flags on men. Like, the the red flag for me, the second somebody is like, "This person's ideas shouldn't be heard. They're just beyond the pale and we shouldn't listen to them." Red flag, whatever that is, the depression the ideas depression complex, I'm not here for that. So, let peo- I'm not a free speech absolutist, but man, do I come close. And I think that the it is absolutely critical to have free speech just front and center is because and Jordan Peterson sums this up better than anybody else, you you have to be able to think bad ideas so that you don't have to live them out because some ideas are so bad, they're going to ruin your life. And so, you want to be able to put them out in an arena like a podcast, have the I won't even say humility cuz I I am uh I have a gigantic ego based on being the learner. And once you understand me through the lens of somebody who does have an ego, but it's based on being the learner, you're going to be able to predict my behaviors a lot more. So, I'll come on and say the things that I think are true. I'll say them aggressively. But, if somebody comes back at me with an idea that has more utility, because I'm obsessed with utility, and my entire life, all the success I've had is an echo of me collecting things that have utility. And I often talk about skill acquisition. What I mean is you can do things other people can't do. And so, I'm so I so believe that all of us can collect skills with so much utility that we can outperform other people, and that the ability to outperform other people will yield you immense results. That I'm hungry for those ideas. So, when people give them to me, I'll update my worldview, and then we're off to the races. I wanted to talk about Neil deGrasse Tyson a little bit and how he I don't know if it's gaslighting, I don't know if he kind of virtue signaling, but how he was how he approached it sincerely, and then how Eric Weinstein kind of broke it up and kind of showed him that that was really an insincere backhanded kind of like gesture. I I am I take it differently. So, I watched the video, and to me, that was somebody who recognizes that this is um it's just nice to be a polite person, and so he found a uh lie, I have to shampoo my cat, to get out of the conversation. Because he looked at like Terrence Howard, famous actor, meet him, seems like a lovely guy, gives me this prospectus. I wanted to have him on my show. This is uh literally from uh Neil deGrasse Tyson. His Neil deGrasse Tyson's mom had said, "Oh my god, did you know that Terrence is like into cosmology? Like, you really got to talk to this guy." So, he wanted to have him on the show, and because he had courted him, he was like, "I'm actually going to read the prospectus." He goes through it and is like, "Oh my god, from top to bottom, this is just somebody who does not know what they think they know." Dunning-Kruger, which remind me to go into Dunning-Kruger, because I think people have that wrong and are um getting themselves into an unnecessary dead end by going to that, but he sees somebody as sweet guy, but good lord does not know what he's talking about and therefore I don't want to spend any more time on this and I really don't want to have him on my show because he's going to sound like a lunatic. And the number of people that I've refused to have on the show over the years cuz I'm like a lot of the things you say just aren't true. There's a guy that people want me to have on the show again. So he's going to reveal something one out of the thousand and I refuse and he was a he was a big guest. And I won't have him back on cuz I think the that not all in fact 50% of what he says is [ __ ] and 50% is real. But it like a tumor they are so intertwined the good and the bad that I was I'm not going to do it. So I get it. Everybody has to have that thing where they're like I'm just not going down this path. So yes, I think Eric is right that the using peer review is idiotic. That [ __ ] is dead as disco and that is a red flag and when I hear people throw that out I'm like you're trying to shut people down. You're trying to keep people out, but I actually don't think that that's what Neil was doing there. I think he knew that it was an easy way to be like, "Hey, sorry can't like there's a process for this go enjoy it." But he was saying that only because he he is just so dismissive. But I actually think he was dismissive in a kind way. So I don't have a bad I I am not the biggest uh fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson. However, I thought he handled himself well if you don't understand that the ending is a brush off. Yeah. He brushed him off kindly. Yeah, it it's so in podcasting we say a lot cuz a lot of guests say no to us. By the way everybody this is Drew the producer Uh the show. So when things go uh well, you can clap for Drew. When they go poorly, you can still stare at me. Um but I We get the kind decline, right? There are people that we want to get on the show, but they say in a very nice way, I can't do it. I don't have time. Whatever. I'm traveling. Ah. I have to shampoo my cat. Uh and so that feels like a reasonable thing to have in your arsenal. The the not right now, but said in a nice way. And he took the time. It's like a 17-minute video where he goes point by point and it's like this is what I said. And so, anyway, I didn't have beef with that. I get it. It triggered Eric for what I'll call scar tissue on Eric. Um but I didn't have beef with it. And then let's jump into the Dunning-Kruger thing. Yeah, so Dunning-Kruger. All right. It It's a real thing, which is to know just enough about something uh to not know that you don't know. So, there there's a quote that sums up the Dunning-Kruger effect really well, which is as the island of my knowledge grows, so grows the shore of my ignorance. So, there's this moment where your island is so small, you know it so well, you think I know everything there is to know. And then one day you finally get to the shore and you're like, oh god, there is a vast expanse of things that I don't know. But you actually don't know how big it is until your island gets bigger and bigger and you realize you're just extending into this infinite ocean. And no matter how big your island of things that you know gets, it's just unrelentingly dwarfed by the things you don't know. Now, since that will always be true and everybody, even Eric, even the hardest core, smartest people ever, again, because we're not traveling the cosmos, there is something that we don't know until you accept, ah, uh the things the outcome that I desire is not coming true yet because there is something I don't know. Therefore, if you approach the world like I do, you're like, I just need to find out the things I don't know. I'm going to keep using the things I know. Okay, I'm not going to discard them if somebody can't convince me that they're holding me back, but I'm hungering for the thing that I don't have. So, something I say in business all the time is the skills you have have already taken you as far as they're going to take you. If you want to go farther, you must get new skills. And so, I'm like, "Hey, everybody in theoretical physics, the ideas that you have have already taken you as far as they're going to take you. If you want to get farther, you need new ideas." And so, I'm just saying, "Don't dismiss somebody because they fall into Dunning-Kruger." At a wide enough aperture, we all fall into Dunning-Kruger, no matter how much we know. And so, again, you do have to have a bar because you're not There really are crackpots, what Eric was calling the axe murderer. There really are like whack jobs that are going to be an absolute total waste of your time, and they are just as convinced that they're right. And so, I say, "Let them fight in the the world of public opinion." I've no idea for how long Terrence was trying to get people's attention, but he went to Oxford, he was on red carpets talking about this stuff, and then finally, God knows how many years later, ends up on Joe Rogan. Cool. He had to earn his shot. And then, he took a shot, and the world was like, "Yeah, I want to know more about that." And cool. So, now he got his day in the new court of public opinion cuz it got all the way to somebody like Eric who can actually tell you what's wrong with this. And he said it. And so, for anybody that wants that breakdown, it's there. So, I think people ought to have to fight their way up. So, if you've got nine followers on Instagram, then you go live with somebody that has 12 followers, right? And you're good for each other, and you keep climbing up that ladder until you get enough people to listen to you where real people go, "Okay, there's enough public interest." I still think it's wrong, crazy, stupid, whatever. Fine. There's enough public interest in this thing that now it warrants a debate. All right. So, I'm rapid-fire questions. You ready? Keep your answers as short as possible. Uh yes. Uh best sound bite of the interview? I'm I'm to have to go to my quotes here. All right, best sound bite for me came from Eric. He said, "Right now we're in a crisis where no one knows what is true. Nobody knows who's full of [ __ ] Nobody knows what they can trust." Love that. Did this legitimize Terrence Howard as the scientist inventor? Uh definitely not. What I think this did was legitimize him as a musical thinker. That's not quite the right word, but that he's uh able to bring really interesting patterns together, the vast majority of which should be thrown away, but every now and then he's going to hit on something that could spark creativity in an engineer or something like that. So, it would be interesting to see where he goes. Have you ever been humbled by an elite before? Yeah, all the time. Literally. Daily. Do we get to Mars in 10 years? No. God. Oh, wow. Define do we get to. Do we drop humans off? Boots on ground. In 10 years? Yes. Wow, you just excited me. I've never thought about that before. And then follow up, if there's like a recolonization thing, would you live on Mars? Um if I live to like 250 or something, I cannot fathom in the next 40 years uh being done on Earth, but if there's something so extraordinary being built up there, that would be amazing. But, I'm not going to go to like some hostel in the middle of space uh you know, to be with nine people. That's not interesting. No space hostel No, thanks. Uh all right, that's all we got. There we go. All right, everybody, we're going to be doing more of these. If there's something that you want to see us approach, make sure you drop it into the comments. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.