Podcast Bros and Brain Rot

The only thing worse than an expert is a non-expert

On April 17, researchers led by Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge announced that they had detected dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K2-18b, an exoplanet 120 light-years from Earth. On our planet, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by living organisms. It is emitted in large quantities by certain species of algae, and gives the ocean its special smell. The presence of this chemical on K2-18b might be the strongest evidence ever recorded for alien life.

Candace Owens is one of the most popular podcasters in America. On April 17, she also had an announcement to make. She did her own research on astronomy and concluded that the moon landing was “fake and gay.” She told her millions of followers: “You need to learn the history of NASA, of the Apollo programs, which were a cult and satanic....They just wanted people to believe in scientific advancement.” Owens has come to similarly unorthodox conclusions on many topics including WWII, the history of communism, and, of course, Jews and Israel.

Obviously, Candace Owens should have free speech to express her opinions. At the same time, a healthy society needs mechanisms to ensure that people like her don’t have an outsize cultural influence. When it comes to astronomy, for example, the voice of Madhusudhan, not Owens, is the one that should be amplified. In some ways it is. Madhusudhan is a professor at Cambridge, publishes his views in peer-reviewed astronomy journals, and gets covered in the New York Times. Twenty years ago, that’s all that would have mattered. But now, Owens, Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, or Russell Brand can go on Spotify, YouTube, or Twitter and reach a larger audience than the New York Times. They might even swing elections. Rogan & Co.’s support for Trump may have tipped the balance in his favor.

People who don’t trust “experts” now look to podcasters and other alt-media figures—many of whom (including Rogan and Brand) are comedians—to decide what to believe about everything from WWII to vaccines to Ukraine to tariffs. The result has been a proliferation of ignorance with disastrous consequences for our culture and public policy.

Uneducated podcast bros have not found a magic shortcut to knowledge. Even on Covid, they have not outperformed actual experts. However, it’s true that many so-called experts are fake and/or corrupt. Blind obedience to credentialed authority (associated with the left) or trust in a “marketplace of ideas” that rewards brain-rotting infotainment (associated with the right) are both failed strategies.

The Flame War

Last month, Sam Harris criticized the king of alt-media, Joe Rogan. According to Harris:

When [Joe] brings someone on to just shoot the shit about how the Holocaust is not what you think it was, or maybe Churchill’s the bad guy in WWII, or he’s got Dave Smith being treated as an expert on Israel and Palestine, and the history of that conflict....[Smith is] a pure misinformation artist on top of many others....Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe has interacted with information....It’s...avoidable. He could actually take the responsibility that really is his to take at this point to get his facts straight.

The week after that, Rogan hosted a debate between Douglas Murray and the aforementioned Dave Smith. Murray is the British face of Conservatism, Inc. He went to Oxford, writes books with footnotes, and hangs out with academics. Smith is an American comedian who recently started a second career as an Israel critic and opponent of the West’s support for Ukraine.

Before the debate even started, Murray (channeling Harris) complained that Rogan is platforming people who are “not experts.” Murray attempted to list the non-experts but mixed up their names. He became histrionically shocked when Smith admitted that he had never been to Israel. “You’ve never been?!...I have a journalistic rule of trying never to talk about a country even in passing unless I’ve at least been there.” (Critics pointed out that Murray has talked about countries he hasn’t been to.)

Harris then invited Murray onto his own podcast to celebrate his performance in the debate with Smith. Both Harris and Murray agreed with each other that expertise is real, and even Joe Rogan understands that expertise is real when it comes to topics that he knows about. Besides being a comedian, Rogan is a mixed martial artist. He would never invite a self-taught amateur onto his show to talk about the fine points of grappling. He would want to hear from someone who has real experience as a fighter or a coach, i.e., an expert. (This point was also made by Triggernometry host Konstantin Kisin.)

Harris and Murray are technically correct, but they’re missing the point. There’s a reason why people became tired of so-called experts. The “expert” class face planted about five times in a row. The podcast bros argue they have a better track record of sussing out the truth on controversial topics. Smith said this explicitly during the Rogan debate. Murray said that “[the solution is] to have more experts around.” Smith retorted: “The expert class hasn’t done a great job....This is ‘follow the science.’” With regard to vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the lab-leak theory, Smith said: “I will put my track record against any of the expert class on Covid.” DarkHorse Podcast host Bret Weinstein said that, on Covid, Joe Rogan’s record was “Pretty great.” Weinstein continued:

whether we’re talking about Covid origins, whether we’re talking about vaccine safety and effectiveness, whether we’re talking about repurposed drugs, whether we’re talking about how to understand the evidence of harm in the aftermath of these things—Joe Rogan figured it out. How? Through exactly the mechanism that Douglas Murray is arguing against right here. Douglas Murray is arguing, you’ve got to have standards, you can’t just put on people who are reporting things that, you know, they’re not even experts. Well, the non-experts actually did figure out how to follow the evidence and reach the correct conclusions. And a bunch of us figured out how to dodge the freaking shots, and I don’t know a single person who’s sorry they did.

As I mentioned, Harris and Murray say that Joe Rogan wouldn’t platform a rando with no serious training in martial arts to talk about MMA. If someone passed himself off as an MMA commentator, and his only credential was that he watched some old kung fu movies, Rogan would have no interest in hearing his opinion. But suppose the guy who learned kung fu from movies started fighting in the UFC, and beat the top Brazilian jiu-jitsu experts to win the Championship Belt? Rogan would definitely invite him onto his podcast! The podcast bros believe that they are in the position of that kung fu master outsider. You couldn’t persuade Rogan not to interview the self-taught UFC champion by insisting that we need to honor the expertise of jiu-jitsu black belts.

A Two-Sided Problem

At the height of our society’s “expert” worship, credentialed technocrats told a bunch of self-serving lies, imprisoned people in their apartments for two years, and then said that anyone who questioned them was a racist conspiracy theorist. Almost the entire academic and media establishment covered for them. On top of that, we are told that people with PhDs in how smells are racist are also “experts” before whom we must genuflect.

But the fact that some people with fancy credentials are corrupt, fallible, and/or frauds doesn’t mean that expertise isn’t real. Some people have knowledge and training that make their opinion more credible and worthy of attention than the opinion of a rando comedian with a microphone. Responding to Sam Harris et al., Glenn Greenwald attacks a straw man when he says that “you can become an expert in a particular field without necessarily having degrees from top universities.” No one is denying that. Almost all knowledge is available on the Internet for free. In theory, you can become an expert on almost anything without stepping foot onto a university. Scott Horton is a radio host who, based on public information, may not have gone to college at all. He knows the history of the Russia–Ukraine conflict backwards and forwards, and he wrote a well-sourced book arguing that Putin was “provoked” into war. Whether his conclusion is right or wrong, it’s rooted in deep knowledge of the subject, not some factoids he picked up from Twitter or Wikipedia.

But consumers of alt-media have largely given up on the notion of expertise, at least when it comes to politicized topics. When every credible economist on earth says that Trump’s tariffs are going to be a disaster, they say, “Nate Silver failed to predict the 2016 election, so maybe Oren Cass (a lawyer), Batya Ungar-Sargon (a Marxist English major), and Catturd are just as likely to be right about tariffs as people who know how to draw supply and demand curves (whatever those are).”

Defenders of the alt-media point to Covid as the great event that discredited the experts. But the lessons of Covid are not what people think they are.

Six Bowls of Bat Soup

A Racist Conspiracy Theory

In 2018, the US-based EcoHealth Alliance in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the University of North Carolina came up with a plan to genetically engineer a furin cleavage site into the spike protein of a bat coronavirus. In a draft of their proposal, they bragged that their work would be “highly cost-effective” because it would be conducted in a Biosafety Level 2 laboratory. (BSL-2 requires safety measures equivalent to those taken in a typical dentist’s office, such as wearing latex gloves.) EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal was rejected for funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Nevertheless, in November 2019, several researchers at the WIV became ill with a mysterious flu. By December 2019, bodies were piling up on the street because the morgues were out of space. The “Wuhan flu,” later given the more politically sensitive name of Covid-19, turned out to be a novel bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in its spike protein.

In the US, the public face of the government’s pandemic response was National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Anthony Fauci. Under Fauci’s leadership, the NIH had given millions of dollars to EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research. In a paper published in 2012, Fauci acknowledged that gain-of-function research, which involves making naturally occurring viruses more virulent, might cause a pandemic due to a lab accident, but he said it was worth the risk. In his words:

Scientists working in this field might say—as indeed I have said—that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.

A group of scientists—several of whom would have been directly or indirectly implicated in a lab leak, including Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance director Peter Daszak—announced that there was scientific proof that the virus had a natural origin. A letter published in the Lancet, which was signed by 27 scientists including Daszak, stated: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin....Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice.” Another letter signed by five scientists and published in Nature declared that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” According to “science,” the only explanation for Covid that wasn’t a racist conspiracy theory was that Chinese people got infected from bats that were being sold for food in a wet market in Wuhan.

Some of the scientists were outright lying. Regarding the Nature letter, an article in the New York Times recently reported: “we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the [lab-leak] scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely.” One of the authors of the letter, Kristian Andersen, wrote a Slack message saying: “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Establishment apparatchiks rallied behind the party line. A Washington Post headline in February 2020 referred to the “coronavirus [lab-leak] conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” In May 2020, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact ran a headline referring to the “debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab.” PolitiFact asserted: “The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” There were many similar examples. Under pressure from the Biden administration, Facebook deemed discussion of the lab leak to be a violation of its Terms of Service and not allowed on its platform.

Flattening the Curve

On March 16, 2020, the US government announced that we had “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” Fauci promised that, if everyone fell into line, we could “flatten the curve” and get the virus under control. 15 days turned into two plus years of lockdowns and social distancing.

During the lockdowns, people were forbidden from seeing their dying relatives or going to their funerals. Children and young adults spent some of their most formative years in social isolation. When they were allowed to interact with other human beings, they were forced to wear masks and/or stay six feet away from each other despite the fact that the virus posed almost no serious risk to otherwise healthy young people. Anyone who questioned this was written off as a dangerous science denier.

In June 2020, more than 1,200 medical professionals signed an open letter declaring that, in the name of public health, social-distancing restrictions shouldn’t apply to Black Lives Matter protests. They explained: “the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters’ demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.” It became obvious that many medical professionals were using the moral and legal authority they had been granted to advance a leftist political agenda. The mainstream media, which came down hard on lockdown skeptics, took the side of the BLM protesters.

Students at a high school in Washington State in 2021 demonstrate how “science” says you should live when you aren’t participating in a left-wing protest

Noble Lie: Vaccines

On May 16, 2021, after the Covid vaccine became available, Fauci went on television and said that it would provide “well over 90% [protection] against the disease,” “it is very unlikely that a vaccinated person...would transmit [Covid] to someone else,” and vaccinated people are “a dead end to the virus.” Around the same time, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky said: “Our data from the CDC today suggests...that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.”

The government’s internal documents showed that there was no scientific basis for these claims. A report by the Food and Drug Administration published in December 2020 stated: “Data are limited to assess the effect of the vaccine against transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from individuals who are infected despite vaccination.” This was still the state of our knowledge in May 2021. Apparently, Fauci and Walensky exaggerated the known benefits of the vaccine in order to encourage people to get the shot. As it turned out, the vaccine lowered the risk of serious illness but had only a modest effect on transmission rates.

Noble Lie: Masks

In March 2020, Fauci ordered Americans not to wear masks because (a) masks don’t work and (b) we needed to save masks for healthcare workers. This is what he said in an interview on 60 Minutes:

Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks....When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences—people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face....It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it.

Just a few weeks later, on April 3, he reversed his position and became a fanatical proponent of masks. Soon he was telling people that they should wear two masks.

During a Congressional Hearing in July 2020, Fauci was asked if he regretted not telling people to wear masks sooner. He indignantly explained that, when he told people masks don’t work, he was lying because he didn’t want regular citizens buying up Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that was in short supply:

At that time there was a paucity of equipment that our healthcare providers needed, who put themselves daily in harm’s way taking care of people who are ill. We did not want to divert masks and PPE away from them to be used by the people. Now that we have enough, we recommend [that people wear them]....

I’m not saying mask mandates were a good idea. The point is that Fauci admitted to lying, and he was not held accountable in any way.

Philosopher King

In 2021, Fauci said that “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” He added that critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” The mainstream press largely accepted the idea that there was no legitimate criticism of Fauci. Leftists showed their commitment to science by buying Fauci action figures and wearing T-shirts with his face printed on them.

Plato said that people should be ruled by philosopher kings. (“Philosopher” literally means “lover of wisdom.” In ancient Greek it referred to something like “scholar/scientist.”) According to Plato, philosopher kings should tell “noble lies” to maintain the social order. One could argue that a political figure should be forgiven for lying in the service of a noble cause when the result is unambiguously positive. But Fauci lied mainly to protect himself and his friends, and to manipulate people in ways that would obviously backfire and cause them to lose trust in medical authorities.

“I represent science”

Russian Disinformation

Although it wasn’t directly related to Covid, the Hunter Biden laptop incident was a big part of the story of how the establishment discredited itself. In October 2020, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was running against the incumbent Donald Trump. A few weeks before voting day, the New York Post published an article, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,” which potentially implicated Joe Biden in corruption. The Post’s source was a tranche of emails obtained from a laptop that Joe’s drug-addict son (and close advisor) Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. Five days later, the fact-checking news site Politico published a headline, “Hunter Biden Story Is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.” 51 former intelligence officials wrote an open letter stating that the New York Post’s story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The Post’s article was blocked on Twitter, and distribution was limited on Facebook under its policy against sharing false information. After the election, the mainstream press admitted that the Hunter Biden laptop story was 100% correct.

The True Lessons of Covid

According to the podcast bros, the lesson of Covid is that the experts were wrong, but Joe Rogan was right, therefore expertise is fake and you should get your information from Rogan and his “interesting conversations.” Here are three actual lessons.

(1) Experts have the same human nature as non-experts

People need to let go of the fantasy that “experts” or “scientists” are angels who act only for the greater good and aren’t corrupted by power. Experts can lie and make risk/reward calculations that heavily weigh their own selfish interests at the expense of everyone else.

Making a dangerous virus via gain-of-function experiments may seem rational from the perspective of an individual researcher. In the best case scenario, he gets funding for his project and publishes a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. (Theoretically, information from GoF research can help scientists predict future viral evolution. In practice, it is unclear whether this has any actual benefits for public health.) In the worst case scenario, a virologist accidentally rubs his eye, gets infected, and a genetically engineered supervirus escapes from the lab and kills a chunk of the world’s population. (A lab leak isn’t such a fanciful possibility. A paper in the Lancet documented 309 “laboratory-acquired infections” and 16 pathogen escapes across the world between 2000 to 2021.) In most cases, the scientist is probably thinking about the glory of publishing a paper and writing another line on his CV. The rest of us, who don’t benefit from that, would probably prefer that the dangerous pathogen was never made in the first place.

Experts lie to avoid personal accountability and get people to do what they want. Trusting science doesn’t mean trusting scientists. People with PhDs have the same human nature—with both its angels and demons—as everyone else.

(2) The experts largely got it right—they just lied

Scientists, not Joe Rogan, sequenced Covid’s genome, developed a way to test for the disease, created an effective vaccine, derived the antiparasitic medication ivermectin from avermectin (a substance produced by a soil bacterium), and figured out that ivermectin doesn’t cure viruses. So why are we supposed to be impressed with Rogan but not scientists? Scientists told some noble and not-so-noble lies. That might be morally bad, but it doesn’t mean the scientists were wrong.

After prominent figures including Rogan touted ivermectin as a Covid treatment, some health authorities branded it as “horse dewormer.” This was misleading if not technically a lie. (Ivermectin is used as a dewormer in animals including horses and humans.) In this case, their motivation was noble—to scare people away from following Joe Rogan’s dumb and dangerous advice. You can argue that they shouldn’t have misled people. But nothing about this shows that Rogan was smarter than the experts.

From day one, many scientists knew—or at least strongly suspected—that Covid came from a lab. In the end, real evidence for the lab leak wasn’t discovered by Joe Rogan, who knows nothing about viral phylogenetics or furin cleavage sites. The first high-profile figure to publicly make the case for a lab leak was Nicholas Wade. Wade has a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge, worked as an editor at Nature and Science, and was a science editor and reporter at the New York Times for many years. He got his information about Covid’s origins from professional virologists. Now the torchbearers of the lab-leak theory are Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. Chan has a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from UBC and is a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Ridley is a science writer with a DPhil in zoology from Oxford.

(3) Podcast bros largely got it wrong—except when they had the relevant expertise

On June 18, 2021, Bret Weinstein appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said that “ivermectin alone, if properly utilized, is capable of driving this pathogen to extinction.” (Ivermectin has no meaningful effect on Covid unless you’re infected with parasites.) When Rogan got Covid, he treated it with ivermectin. He was widely criticized for this by experts, and the experts were right.

While interviewing the comedian Tim Dillon, Rogan said that he wouldn’t get vaccinated because he already has antibodies from the time he got Covid and treated it with ivermectin. “It doesn’t make any sense” to get the vaccine, he said. He was wrong. “Hybrid immunity” (infection + vaccine) would have made him less likely to contract Covid again, or to get seriously sick if he got reinfected.

In December 2021, Rogan interviewed Robert Malone, a biochemist who played a role in developing mRNA vaccines before he become an anti-vaxxer. During the interview, Malone falsely claimed that there had been an “explosion of vaccine-associated deaths.” They both suggested that when Joe Biden got the Covid vaccine on television, he was given a fake shot. Their evidence was that the person administering the shot to Biden didn’t aspirate the syringe. (Aspiration is when you pull back the plunger to make sure the needle didn’t penetrate a blood vessel.) In reality, this wasn’t evidence of anything. CDC guidelines say that you should not aspirate a syringe when administering vaccinations. Rogan said that one-out-of-a-thousand people who are vaccinated against Covid get “significant injuries like myocarditis.” He was citing a study that had been retracted for being wrong. In reality, the Covid vaccine is less likely to cause myocarditis than Covid itself.

Regarding lockdowns, Rogan made the evidence-free claim that “It makes things worse, you know why—because people go inside, they are trapped inside, and that’s where it spreads.” This was incorrect. Lockdowns did lower transmission. The reason to be against lockdowns is that the harm they caused was probably greater than the benefit, not that people are more likely to spread the disease when they are alone watching porn and Netflix in their apartment. Many health authorities favored lockdowns because they saw things from a narrow medical perspective. But whether or not lockdowns were justified was a moral/political question, not a medical one. Theoretically, anyone was entitled to have an opinion on lockdowns as long as they (unlike Rogan) had their facts straight.

In September 2020, Rogan said that Covid probably came from a lab, but “obviously I don’t know whether or not it came from a lab or whether it came from people eating bats.” In March 2021, he interviewed commentator Jamie Metzl, who called for an investigation into a possible lab leak.

I publicly stated that “It seems highly likely that the coronavirus leaked from a lab studying bat viruses” on April 17, 2020—five months before Rogan. But you didn’t need to be an expert in virology to make this call. You just needed to look at publicly available evidence, and have the social intelligence to see the hallmarks of a coverup. It took journalists a long time to catch on because most of them lack basic critical thinking skills, and their heuristic is to trust people in positions of authority (especially scientists) even when they have obvious conflicts of interest. Rogan may lack critical thinking skills, too, but at least he has a reasonable degree of social intelligence and skepticism—i.e., he has the qualifications needed to spot an obvious lie. Ultimately, neither Rogan nor I made a scientifically informed case for the lab leak. As I said before, that was done by people with expertise in virology.

Who Deserves to Have an Opinion?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist turned YouTuber. She argues that CERN’s plan to build an expensive new particle accelerator is a mistake, and physicists should focus on resolving inconsistencies in their current theories and data. Many of her peers strongly disagree. Critics on Internet message boards have hurled obscenities at her. A group of physicists working at CERN tried to get her fired from her then position at the Perimeter Institute.

What am I, a non-physicist, supposed to make of this squabble? What Hossenfelder says sounds persuasive to me. As a philosopher of biology, I have views about how science ought to work, which seem to line up with hers. But it would be grossly irresponsible for me to adopt a strong position on particle accelerators. It would be doubly irresponsible for someone with a large platform to invite me onto their show to pontificate about how physicists need to change their ways.

That doesn’t mean I can’t have a tentative opinion, or ever talk about the issue publicly. I might mention that there’s a debate about whether to build a new particle accelerator, and Hossenfelder expressed a position that seems reasonable to me. But I would be clear about the fact that I’m not an authority on the subject myself, and I don’t think the decision about whether to build the Future Circular Collider should be made by me. Just as I wouldn’t pass myself off as a physics expert, I wouldn’t invite someone with my level of physics knowledge onto the Cofnas Podcast to shoot the shit about particle accelerators.

Darryl Cooper calls himself a “storyteller.” He likes to tell stories about how the standard account of World War II is wrong. For example, in an interview with Tucker Carlson that has thirty-five million views on Twitter, he says: “maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, maybe, [but] Churchill was the chief villain of the second world war.” According to his story, Hitler actually wanted peace, and Churchill was bribed into going to war by “Zionists.” Also, millions of Soviet POWs under Nazi control perished due to poor logistics rather than ill intent. Tucker Carlson introduced Cooper as maybe “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” A couple months ago, Rogan also interviewed Cooper, allowing him to spread his message to an even larger audience.

Many of Cooper’s claims can be easily refuted in ways that people who are not experts on WWII can understand. He refused to debate the eminent historian Andrew Roberts because he knew he would lose. As Cooper wrote to Roberts: “As much as it would be an honor to meet one of my favorite historians,...I’ve read enough of Mr. Roberts’ books to know how that would go for me.” He prefers to talk to people like Carlson or Rogan who are unwilling and/or unable to challenge him. Roberts published a devastating response to Cooper documenting some of his errors.

Douglas Murray told Rogan that a non-expert like Cooper shouldn’t go around challenging the expert consensus on history. Rogan replied that “Darryl Cooper does not think he’s an expert,” and Dave Smith said “it’s everybody else who’s always calling him an expert, and he’s like, I’m just a history nerd.” Murray was quite right to push back on this. It’s not that a (near) expert consensus can never be wrong. But, if it is, this will be discovered by someone who knows at least as much as the experts, not someone who is ignorant of basic facts. Cooper should not be talking publicly about history. (Obviously, I mean “should” in a moral, not a legal, sense.)

Dave Smith gets basic facts wrong in ways that reveal deep ignorance and intellectual irresponsibility. For example, he tells his audience that Churchill described WWII as the “unnecessary war” because “he was looking back at it and going, man, okay, yeah, we really shouldn’t have done that. That turned out to be a huge mistake.” According to Smith, Churchill admitted that it would have been better if the West hadn’t stood up to Hitler after the invasion of Poland. In Andrew Roberts’s words, “the ignorance is just astonishing.” Churchill said that WWII was an “unnecessary war” because it could have been prevented if the West had taken his advice in 1934 to rearm and adopt a more aggressive stance against Hitler from the beginning. The idea that Churchill admitted it was a mistake to go to war after Hitler started his rampage is ludicrous, and contradicted by the text of his book, which Smith presumably didn’t read.

On Rogan’s show, Smith falsely asserted that the Soviets agreed to give up communism in 1991 in exchange for a “promise” and “deal” that was both verbal and “put in writing” that “NATO would not expand one inch to the east.” In fact, a verbal proposal to not expand NATO eastwards had been made to Gorbachev by US Secretary of State James Baker in 1990 during the negotiations over German reunification. (This was a year before anyone was seriously anticipating the collapse of communism.) The White House didn’t approve of Baker’s idea. The Soviet government signed an agreement that allowed NATO to expand (with some restrictions) into East Germany and said nothing about NATO expansion into other countries.

The problem isn’t that Dave Smith makes mistakes—everyone makes mistakes. The problem is that, if you think Churchill regretted going to war with Hitler, you don’t know the first thing about Churchill. If you think the West made a solemn promise in writing that, if the Soviets gave up communism, NATO would not expand one inch to the east, you will have a profoundly distorted view of the present conflict. (I used these two mistakes for the purposes of illustration. There are other examples.) Smith is like one of the French teachers in Scottish primary schools who doesn’t speak French and tries to stay one chapter ahead of his students. Suppose the French teacher says the same thing that Smith said to Harris: “What did I get wrong? Point to something I got wrong!” Sure, I can give you a list of things you got wrong—you conjugated savoir incorrectly, you got the gender of livre wrong—but this misses the bigger picture. The problem is that you don’t speak French and therefore you shouldn’t be teaching it.

What about anti-vaxxer Robert Malone? Is it a good idea to give him a huge platform to tell people not to get vaccinated? It’s true he has a good claim to be an expert in vaccines. And, if experts disagree with each other, the non-expert shouldn’t automatically side with the majority. But Malone makes many claims that intelligent non-experts can evaluate, and he’s often wildly inaccurate. Since there is clearly something wrong with his reasoning ability, it’s rational to defer to the consensus of the experts whose minds are not obviously impaired. (I would make similar comments about the revisionist historian David Irving, who appears to be the source of many of Darryl Cooper’s ideas.) An epistemically healthy society would ignore Robert Malone.

Last year, Rogan interviewed the writer Coleman Hughes. Rogan asserted that Israel killed “30,000 innocent civilians” in Gaza, and was therefore committing genocide. First, Hughes corrected his statistic. According to Hamas, 32,000 people had been killed, not “innocent civilians.” Israel claimed to have killed 13,000 soldiers. Taking those numbers at face value, it would imply a civilian to combatant death ratio that’s pretty normal for urban warfare. Rogan replied, “I see what you’re saying if you wanted to look at it cold and objectively” (as opposed to emotionally and inaccurately?). Then Hughes made the obvious point that you can’t live in a world where terrorists get a free pass to commit atrocities as long as they run and hide behind their civilians. Rogan said: “I appreciate your perspective. I see what you’re saying. You clearly know more about it than I do.” It was clear from the exchange that, besides having a tenuous grasp of the facts, Rogan hadn’t considered basic questions about the ethics of war. This is not the kind of person who should be broadcasting his opinions on serious topics to millions of people.

Who should pontificate about Israel if not Joe Rogan and his comedian friends? Douglas Murray and Sam Harris say we need to hear from “experts.” But what does it mean to be an expert on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? In order to have an opinion, do you need expertise in all relevant subjects: history, archaeology, political science, religion, military science, genetics, Middle Eastern languages, and just war theory? Should no one comment unless he has eight Ph.D.s and follows hourly updates on the war in Gaza (and, of course, has been there)?

There are different aspects of the conflict (or any complicated situation), and no mortal can grasp everything there is to know about it. But for someone’s opinion to be worth sharing with millions of people, they should meet at least two conditions. First, they should achieve some level of intellectual seriousness. They should, for example, grasp the difference between killing combatants vs. innocent civilians without this needing to be explained to them. Second, they should have least some claim to expertise—to knowledge that goes beyond what you pick up from scrolling through Twitter and watching TV—that justifies handing a megaphone to them.

How to Follow the Science

I get it, people are sick of hearing that there’s a “scientific consensus” and “experts agree” that leftists are correct about whatever they wish to be true. Journalists attribute every claim they make to an expert, where “expert” is defined as anyone vaguely connected to the subject who agrees with the journalist’s narrative, while anyone who disagrees is ipso facto a “non-expert.”

For example, in 2019 I published a paper in Philosophical Psychology defending research into all possible causes of race differences in intelligence, including genes. There was a petition to retract the paper and fire the journal’s editors. This is how the controversy was described in Inside Higher Ed: “Scholar makes argument in favor of race-based research into intelligence, but experts in that subfield say it’s an unnecessary plea that doesn’t square with scientific realities.” At the time, I was a doctoral student at Oxford working in the philosophy of biology, had published extensively on evolutionary theory and related topics, and had just published specifically on the topic of race differences in a respected peer-reviewed psychology/philosophy journal. The “experts” the journalist cited to oppose me were Mark Alfano (a philosopher who started the anti-Cofnas petition, does work on “epistemic humility,” and wants Trump supporters to be killed), Quayshawn Spencer (a philosopher of biology who acknowledged to me that he never read my paper), and Joseph L. Graves (a biologist who works with fruit flies). Apparently, anyone who agrees with the journalist and is willing to provide a quote can be an expert!

However, the fact that the leftist establishment plays games like this doesn’t mean that we should just give up and listen to Candace Owens or Russell Brand. Sometimes we should listen to people who know what they are talking about—namely, experts.

Thomas Young was a British physicist who played an important role in decoding the Rosetta Stone. He has been described as “the last man who knew everything”—in other words, who mastered all the knowledge of his time. He died in 1829. Since then, there has been an exponential growth in knowledge. No matter how smart you are, it is impossible to be a true Renaissance man. You have to take most of your information on faith. A big part of being a critical thinker is having good heuristics about whom to trust, not trying to understand everything for yourself.

Many areas of “scholarship” are fake, existing only to promote left-wing activism. Sometimes it’s easy to figure out where a field falls on the fake-to-real spectrum. Experts in aeronautics have tangible accomplishments like airplanes that can fly, so you can be confident that aeronautics isn’t totally made up. On the other hand, critical theorists produce zero evidence that they have special insight into anything, and they make obviously wrong claims about observable reality (for example, about sex differences). Critical theory falls on the fake end of the spectrum. Most fields will occupy some intermediate position, perhaps closer to one end or the other.

Suppose a field is (largely) real and there is a (near) consensus among people who are trained in the field that, in regard to some topic that they study, X is correct. That is strong evidence in favor of X. Of course, many experts might be biased in favor of X. Universities might create incentives to espouse X. But it’s very unlikely that everyone with expertise relevant to X will have the same prejudices, or be so corrupt that they are willing to lie if they think X is wrong. If the whole community agrees, the best explanation is that arguments for X really have the strongest pull.

That doesn’t mean you should accept claims about “consensus” uncritically. You should ask: Is the consensus actually real? Is it being enforced via external pressure? And so on. Unless you find a really good reason to think that all the experts got it wrong, it would be absurd for you as a non-expert to disagree with them.

In a large community, it’s inevitable that there will be an occasional crackpot who acquires some credential and then veers off into la-la land. For example, there are perhaps several thousand Americans with serious economics bona fides. They include individuals from across the political spectrum. They disagree on many issues large and small. They vote Republican, Democrat, and libertarian. They have different views on gun control, tax policy, and immigration. However, virtually all of them say with one voice that Trump’s tariffs are moronic and will fail to achieve their aims. The two apparent exceptions are Peter Navarro and Stephen Miran, both of whom have Ph.D.s in economics from Harvard and support the tariffs. Navarro is notorious for being incoherent and angry during interviews. In six of his books, he cites a fictional economist named “Ron Vara” (an anagram of “Navarro”) for support because he struggles to find actual authorities who agree with him. Miran has a single, coauthored publication in a second-tier economics journal, and is not a genuine expert at all. In such cases, it is appropriate to dismiss the cranks.

A more difficult case is when an alleged consensus is opposed by someone who isn’t a crank. Richard Lindzen—a chair professor emeritus of meteorology at MIT—is one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world. Against the majority, he thinks that climate change is not something to freak out about. (If you examine Lindzen’s position carefully, it might not be as far outside the mainstream as it first appears. But I’m not going to get into the weeds of this debate.) If the expert (near) consensus is wrong, someone has to point it out, and that person will start off in a small minority. That’s how scientific progress happens. You can’t dismiss minority views as a matter of principle. However, as a non-expert, you’re generally not in a position to adjudicate these debates. All things being equal, the non-expert should assign a higher probability to the dominant view, because that has a stronger pull on the majority of people who know what they’re talking about. (Climate change is a highly politicized issue and all things might not be equal in this case. But the conceptual point still stands.)

Suppose the experts disagree: Do minimum wage laws increase average earnings for low-skilled workers? Are there race differences in intelligence? Should we spend thirty billion dollars building the Future Circular Collider? First, you can look for clues about whether advocates of one position or the other have biases or conflicts of interest. When it comes to the question of race differences in intelligence, for example, many “experts” on one side have stated openly that they take their position for moral rather than scientific reasons. That’s something to consider. Second, note that you don’t have to take a stand on every issue. If experts are split and you have no way to know whom to trust, you should probably treat both positions as equally likely to be right.

Finally, if experts advocate X, you have to ask is their expertise relevant to X? Many medical professionals said that both lockdowns and BLM protests were necessary for the sake of public health. In both cases, expertise in medicine was irrelevant to the moral/political question of how to balance the physical health of the population, freedom, the psychological development of children, the demands of activists, and so on. When people try to invoke their authority as “experts” when it isn’t appropriate, they should be treated like anyone else with an opinion.

Fixing Alt-Media

Twenty years ago, if you were (fairly or unfairly) blackballed by establishment media, your options included standing on the street with a sandwich board, printing fliers, mailing out a newsletter, or holding in-person conferences. Realistically, you couldn’t compete with CNN or the New York Times in terms of reach. Ubiquitous high-speed Internet in the 2010s created a marketplace of ideas that didn’t exist before. The floodgates really opened in 2022 when Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it a “free speech” platform with almost no attempt to enforce any standard of accuracy or ethics.

We now know who is rewarded in an unregulated marketplace of ideas—at least on the right. It’s people who appeal to the intuitions of the lowest common denominator in the most entertaining way. Winning ideas include anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, WWII revisionism, drinking unpasteurized milk, vaccine denial, moon landing conspiracy theories, fascism, the notion that Americans would be happier working in factories, and the theory that America is being “screwed” by Madagascar because we spend more on their vanilla beans than they spend on food and medicine from us. Some of these bad ideas are being implemented into policy by the Trump administration. Three-and-a-half months of what Alex Kaschuta calls “government by meme” has destroyed trillions of dollars in American wealth, irreparably harmed our global status and influence, and set the stage for a global left-wing backlash.

Dave Smith mocks Sam Harris for thinking that alt-media figures with large audiences should enforce intellectual standards. Smith says:

There does seem to be something so inherently anti-democratic in this [Harris’s] worldview that like...everybody’s just too stupid to figure it out except for you and a small cabal of people. The rest of us are all just too dumb that like, man, if Joe Rogan is allowing lies to be told on his podcast, then I’ll guess we’ll all be fooled into believing them. Then how can you trust people to have the right to vote?...Like, the common person just isn’t smart enough to figure all this shit out.

But that’s exactly right. If Dave Smith goes on Rogan’s podcast and says that Churchill admitted it was a mistake to fight Hitler, many people are not going to “figure it out.” Even if you have a live debate where one side spews lies while the other side has a chance to correct them, many people in the audience are just going to believe whoever they think is more charismatic, or whatever sounds truthier.

As for this observation being “anti-democratic,” there’s a reason the Founding Fathers explicitly created America as a republic rather than a democracy. A recent survey of US adults found that 9% have a favorable view of the Black Plague, and 17% “don’t know” how they feel about the plague. And that’s without Joe Rogan bringing a bunch of plague apologists onto his show. Garett Jones’s book 10% Less Democracy should arguably have been called At Least 26% Less Democracy. Flattering the intelligence of the “common person” is a good way to get a big audience. But huge numbers of people are going to latch onto disastrously wrong ideas unless elites exercise some paternalistic control over their informational environment.

Sam Harris’s solution to the misinformation problem is for Joe Rogan to “take the responsibility that really is his to take...to get his facts straight.” But a system that depends on one man acting responsibly is inherently unstable. In any case, Rogan appears to have no interest in taking Harris’s advice. His audience will continue to reward him for providing them with more Dave Smiths and Darryl Coopers.

Instead of begging Rogan, Bret Weinstein, et al. see the error of their ways, people like Harris and Murray should focus on creating alternative institutions that embody the values they want to see. (I don’t mean hosting their own podcasts, but building actual institutions.) That would mean enforcing standards among their friends as well as their political opponents—something they may be reluctant to do. Demands for rigor and expertise shouldn’t be used selectively as weapons against people we disagree with. We can’t criticize Darryl Cooper but say nothing when Jordan Peterson pontificates on philosophy and argues that dragons are real.

Social status on the right is determined mainly by how much attention you can generate, regardless of the quality of that attention. People who appeal to the lowest common denominator rise to the top. The right won’t be able to attract large numbers of cognitive elites—and therefore won’t be successful—if it doesn’t create alternative tracks for people and ideas to gain influence. Nietzsche says: “Far from the marketplace and from fame happens all that is great.” I think there are occasional exceptions to that principle. But, when it comes to ideas, the marketplace rewards “space is fake and gay” a lot more than “there’s dimethyl sulfide on the exoplanet K2-18b.”