Bret and Eric Weinstein: Brothers in Fraudulence

01:24:19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGcpUxl_9Vg

Résumé

TLDRThe video scrutinizes the Weinstein brothers, Bret and Eric, for their roles in the 'intellectual dark web.' Bret gained notoriety after opposing a protest at Evergreen State College and was involved in controversies related to COVID-19, promoting Ivermectin without scientific backing. Eric is noted for his claims about a 'theory of everything' called Geometric Unity, which lacks scientific credibility. Both brothers are accused of exaggerating their intellectual contributions, claiming they have been suppressed by academia. Their narratives contain elements of conspiracy against established science and institutions, portraying themselves as victims of suppression. This video dismantles their assertions, highlighting how they promote falsehoods under the guise of free-thinking intellectualism.

A retenir

  • 👥 Debunk the Weinstein brothers' influence as leading figures in the 'intellectual dark web'.
  • 🎓 Examine Bret Weinstein's controversial rise due to the Evergreen State College incident.
  • 🚫 Critically analyze their propagation of falsehoods regarding COVID-19 treatments.
  • 🔍 Investigate Eric Weinstein's 'Geometric Unity' theory and its scientific criticisms.
  • 🔬 Highlight the absence of credible scientific contributions by both brothers.
  • 🎙️ Expose their use of podcasts to amplify misleading narratives.
  • 😱 Discuss the misuse of scientific jargon to portray legitimacy.
  • 📉 Evaluate the harmful effects of their anti-science rhetoric.
  • 📢 Reveal the fictitious persecution narrative used by the Weinsteins.
  • 🗝️ Emphasize the need for skepticism towards demagogue-like figures.

Chronologie

  • 00:00:00 - 00:05:00

    The narrator introduces a critique of Bret and Eric Weinstein, highlighting their self-appointment as leaders of the Intellectual Dark Web. He sarcastically critiques the name's connotation, likening it to the less flattering aspects of the internet. The narrator plans to debunk Bret's rise to fame through the Day of Absence controversy at Evergreen State College and Eric's disputed Geometric Unity theory.

  • 00:05:00 - 00:10:00

    Bret's rise to fame is attributed to a campus incident involving racial representation. The narrator argues that Bret exaggerated events and distorted reality to frame himself as a victim of reverse racism. This manipulation attracted the right-wing media and led to Bret's resignation and a new career as a right-wing commentator.

  • 00:10:00 - 00:15:00

    Bret claimed laboratory mice's elongated telomeres invalidate drug testing due to flawed safety systems. The narrator debunks this by explaining human trials follow rodent ones, and telomeres aren't a magic solution to toxicity. Bret's fraudulent telomere discovery and subsequent claims of suppression by esteemed scientist Carol Greider are dismantled.

  • 00:15:00 - 00:20:00

    The narrator criticizes Bret's misguided telomere conspiracy against Greider, pointing out earlier research and Nobel acknowledgment. Eric's hyperbole about Bret's martyrdom at Evergreen and academic prowess plays into their narrative of suppression. Bret's work is described as fraudulent, serving to mislead his audience.

  • 00:20:00 - 00:25:00

    The focus shifts to Bret's COVID-19 conspiracies: lab leak origin, Ivermectin promotion, and inflated vaccine harm claims. The narrator emphasizes the lack of evidence, counterproductive anti-pharma stances, and the spread of misinformation endangering public health, highlighting specific COVID-19 related pseudoscience Bret endorsed.

  • 00:25:00 - 00:30:00

    Bret amplified unproven remedies like Ivermectin against COVID-19 with manipulated studies, despite legitimate research invalidating its efficacy. He wrongly linked natural substances to safety over synthetic formulas, ignoring scientific data. Bret's anti-vaccine rhetoric, misinformation, and resulting public health threat are heavily criticized.

  • 00:30:00 - 00:35:00

    Bret's baseless claims about COVID-19 vaccines causing mass deaths are elaborated. His opposition exaggerated natural infection immunity, disregarded scientific consensus, and perpetuated vaccine hesitancy. This irresponsibility has caused avoidable deaths, and Bret's misinformation is depicted as harmful and self-serving.

  • 00:35:00 - 00:40:00

    The narrator attacks Bret's support for disproven HIV/AIDS theories, exhibiting disrespect towards established science. Bret's references to pseudoscientific figures and offensive implications about the disease's origins are condemned. The irrationality of Bret's claims and his unserious approach to critical health issues are highlighted.

  • 00:40:00 - 00:45:00

    Eric Weinstein's 'Geometric Unity' theory, claiming to be a revolutionary physics breakthrough, is under scrutiny. Lacking formal publication and substantial scientific backing, his theory is dissected as incomplete and inconsistent. His endeavor is portrayed as pretension rather than genuine academic pursuit, exploiting public platforms for recognition.

  • 00:45:00 - 00:50:00

    Eric's resumé in physics is questioned, highlighting his reliance on podcast narratives and unsubstantiated scientific claims. His refusal to publish his theory academically is critiqued, as is his defensive strategy against criticism, portraying himself as oppressed by academia to maintain credibility with a non-expert audience.

  • 00:50:00 - 00:55:00

    Eric's physics 'breakthrough' is critiqued by Tim Nguyen, exposing its flawed math and lack of coherent structure. Eric's pseudo-scientific guise involves complex terminologies without sufficient academic evidence, reinforcing outsider perceptions. His refusal to engage with legitimate academic discourse weakens his credibility, aiming for fame over truth.

  • 00:55:00 - 01:00:00

    Eric's penchant for conspiracies extends to his wife's work in economics, which he claims was revolutionary yet suppressed. Nguyen exposes methodological flaws in her work, showcasing Eric's pattern of exaggerated, unsupported claims across domains. Eric's intellectual image conflicts with his reliance on conspiracy to explain the lack of recognition.

  • 01:00:00 - 01:05:00

    Eric uses narratives of persecution to rationalize non-recognition, suggesting academia blackballed his Nobel-worthy contributions for malicious reasons. This, coupled with public marketing of his theories, underscores his reliance on external validation. His performance is depicted as engineered drama for audience sympathy.

  • 01:05:00 - 01:10:00

    Eric's association with billionaire Peter Thiel fuels suspicion about his motives, suggesting a role in propagating misinformation for capital interests. Eric’s charm through articulate but convoluted language masks his scientific shortcomings. His role is portrayed as advocating pseudo-science disguised as intellectualism.

  • 01:10:00 - 01:15:00

    Eric mimics frauds like Terrence Howard by fabricating significant scientific achievements, seeking validation through anti-establishment narratives. This facade appeals to a public primed for distrust in academia, while critical examination reveals inconsistencies. The duo’s branding as misunderstood geniuses further fuels their victims complex.

  • 01:15:00 - 01:24:19

    The Weinsteins' formula—projecting anti-establishment sentiment, misconstruing scientific acceptance, and sensationalizing persecution—is a proven method for garnering public attention. Both brothers exploit consumer distrust and ignorance, manipulating narratives to fit their self-imposed status as martyrs while actual contributions remain unsubstantial.

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Carte mentale

Mind Map

Questions fréquemment posées

  • Who are Bret and Eric Weinstein?

    They are brothers known for being prominent figures in the "intellectual dark web."

  • What incident brought Bret Weinstein to prominence?

    Bret gained attention in 2017 due to his opposition to Evergreen State College's "Day of Absence."

  • What is Bret Weinstein accused of distorting?

    He is accused of exaggerating the events at Evergreen State College, leading to media frenzy.

  • What is Eric Weinstein's theory of everything called?

    His theory is named Geometric Unity.

  • Why is Bret Weinstein criticized for his views on COVID-19?

    He promoted Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment without evidence.

  • What stance does Eric Weinstein take on academic recognition?

    He believes his contributions are suppressed by academia.

  • What conspiracy does Eric Weinstein discuss about his wife's work?

    He claims that her economic theory was suppressed by Harvard.

  • Why are the Weinstein brothers labeled as 'scientific charlatans'?

    They share misleading scientific views and conspiracy theories without credible evidence.

  • What is Bret's opinion on the COVID vaccines?

    He spreads misinformation, suggesting the vaccines cause more harm than the virus.

  • Who critiqued Geometric Unity and why?

    Timothy Nguyen critiqued it for mathematical inconsistencies and lack of completeness.

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Défilement automatique:
  • 00:00:00
    Hey everyone, as you all know I enjoy debunking  charlatans more than just about anything else,
  • 00:00:05
    and today we have a two-for-one. We will  be looking at Bret and Eric Weinstein,
  • 00:00:10
    the self-appointed leaders of the intellectual  dark web. I’ve never debunked brothers before,
  • 00:00:15
    so let’s have some fun with it. Again, in case you’ve never heard
  • 00:00:19
    the term before, these guys are prominent members  of the so-called intellectual dark web, the term
  • 00:00:25
    actually having been coined by Eric himself. The group of people I’m increasingly hanging
  • 00:00:29
    out with is the intellectual  dark web, which is emerging.
  • 00:00:33
    The dark web of course being the place where  people hire hitmen and watch kiddy porn, so it’s
  • 00:00:37
    not really the most sparkling connotation. But the  deeper down the rabbit hole you go with these two,
  • 00:00:42
    the seedier and more repulsive they seem, so it  is quite fitting. Now if you’ve seen some of my
  • 00:00:47
    recent debunks on Terrence Howard, you’ve heard me  talk about Eric a bit already. Well there’s a lot
  • 00:00:52
    more to discuss here today, including a special  guest to help me debunk his theory of Geometric
  • 00:00:57
    Unity. But let’s start with younger brother  Bret and then pivot to big boy Eric after that.
  • 00:01:02
    Bret has a doctorate in evolutionary biology  and taught at Evergreen State College for 15
  • 00:01:07
    years. He was catapulted to prominence  in 2017 due to an incident on campus.
  • 00:01:12
    Here’s the popular version of the story.  A protest had been held every year called
  • 00:01:17
    “Day of Absence” where minority students  and faculty stayed off campus to make
  • 00:01:22
    a statement about racial issues. In 2017 it  was requested that white students and faculty
  • 00:01:27
    leave campus instead for that year’s Day of  Absence. Bret vocally protested this idea,
  • 00:01:33
    saying that you can’t force people off campus  just for being white. As a result, liberal SJW
  • 00:01:38
    students threatened Bret with baseball bats, the  media erupted with a story about reverse racism,
  • 00:01:44
    and Bret became a hero overnight by standing  up for marginalized white people everywhere.
  • 00:01:49
    Of course the reality is totally different.  The Day of Absence had always been a voluntary
  • 00:01:55
    activity where all students could attend  workshops and discussions of their choosing,
  • 00:02:00
    and this year was no different, it was simply that  the locations of these discussions had changed,
  • 00:02:04
    with the off campus site only able to accommodate  200 people, making it obvious that it was not
  • 00:02:10
    expected for all white students to attend, nor had  all of the minority students participated in the
  • 00:02:15
    past. None of it had ever been school-sanctioned,  nobody was coercing white people off campus or
  • 00:02:21
    making them feel unwelcome, and nobody threatened  Bret with baseball bats. Bret totally exaggerated
  • 00:02:27
    these events in his own correspondence,  distorted the context surrounding those
  • 00:02:31
    who were protesting a full six weeks after the  Day of Absence regarding separate campus events,
  • 00:02:37
    and instead went on FOX News with Tucker Carlson  to play the victim in a story that reeks of the
  • 00:02:42
    exact same vibe as the “War on Christmas”. This year student activists demanded that all
  • 00:02:47
    white people leave campus or else! Oh my gosh!  This is like something out of another country!
  • 00:02:54
    Because of the FOX piece, enraged neo-Nazi  group Atomwaffen descended onto the campus,
  • 00:03:01
    repeatedly driving by and shooting guns into the  air, sending in bomb threats, and as a result
  • 00:03:06
    the school’s graduation had to be moved off-site  due to safety concerns. Bret sued the school for
  • 00:03:11
    3.8 million, settled for half a million and his  resignation, and promptly began his career as a
  • 00:03:18
    podcaster and darling of the right. I’m troubled by what this implies
  • 00:03:22
    about the current state of the left. Well, ya think? Well, ya think? Well, ya think?
  • 00:03:29
    Where else have we seen this story before? Ah  yes, Jordan Peterson. Frustrated academic taking
  • 00:03:35
    a stand against PC culture? Cartoonishly  fabricating the implications of Bill C-16
  • 00:03:42
    to manufacture some kind of authoritarianism to  rage against? Leveraging the blowback and riding
  • 00:03:48
    the conservative news cycle to launch himself  towards a lucrative commentating career, hiding
  • 00:03:53
    behind a false flag of free speech absolutism?  It’s all here, beat for beat. Bret, like Jordan,
  • 00:04:00
    played the reluctant martyr and victim of nasty  liberal academia, knowing full well that he was
  • 00:04:07
    distorting the facts, putting students and  faculty in real physical danger, many of whom
  • 00:04:12
    were targeted with harassment and death threats  from white nationalists, and he did it all anyway.
  • 00:04:18
    He allowed Tucker to state that white people  were being forced off campus, which was a lie.
  • 00:04:23
    The core demand is that all people  of your skin color leave the campus.
  • 00:04:28
    He pretended protests were all about a leaked  email of his rather than about the treatment
  • 00:04:33
    of two black students by campus police  and other social issues, which was a lie,
  • 00:04:38
    and he kept amplifying these lies on Twitter  well after the interview. Thus begins the story
  • 00:04:43
    of Bret Weinstein, a demagogue from the start,  stoking the fires of anti-woke conservative hatred
  • 00:04:50
    for personal gain with no remorse whatsoever. Now on to the actual science denial, since that’s
  • 00:04:56
    the real focus here. During and shortly following  his departure from academia, Bret gained notoriety
  • 00:05:02
    through a series of appearances on, where the hell  else, Joe Rogan’s podcast. Having his web presence
  • 00:05:09
    sufficiently amplified by these appearances  enabled him to monetize something of his own,
  • 00:05:14
    so Bret began dishing out consistently garbage  conspiratorial takes about everything under the
  • 00:05:19
    sun on his own DarkHorse podcast that he hosts  with his wife Heather Heying, who also taught
  • 00:05:25
    biology at Evergreen. Much of their rhetoric  capitalizes on a perceived intellectualization
  • 00:05:31
    of baseless anti-establishment talking points,  which we will highlight where relevant.
  • 00:05:36
    So what are the main topics he needs to  be exposed for? Here’s what’s on the menu
  • 00:05:40
    for the Bret half of the video. First up, Bret’s  attempt at revolutionizing all of medical science.
  • 00:05:46
    According to Bret, and also his brother Eric,  Bret had an astounding insight about telomeres
  • 00:05:52
    that was stolen from him to win a Nobel prize. To  get some context, let’s first briefly discuss what
  • 00:05:58
    telomeres are. Telomeres are sections of DNA that  cap every chromosome in almost all animal species.
  • 00:06:05
    The evolutionary impetus for this is that every  time DNA gets replicated prior to cell division,
  • 00:06:11
    because of the way that replicative  enzymes anneal to the template strand,
  • 00:06:14
    the last few bases can’t be read. So the new  complementary strand is necessarily a few dozen
  • 00:06:21
    nucleotides shorter than the template strand. This  poses an obvious problem, because as incredibly
  • 00:06:26
    long as chromosomes are, with many millions of  base pairs, thousands of cycles of replication
  • 00:06:32
    and cell division would eventually result in  important genetic information being lost, and
  • 00:06:36
    therefore new cells that can’t survive. Evolution  stumbled upon a solution in the form of telomeres,
  • 00:06:42
    which are around 5 to 15 thousand base pairs  long. The purpose of them is simply to act as
  • 00:06:48
    long stretches of repetitive non-coding DNA at  the ends of each chromosome so that nothing bad
  • 00:06:54
    happens as the tips are continually eroded during  replication, and an enzyme called telomerase,
  • 00:06:59
    when expressed, is constantly at work adding  more nucleotides to the ends of each strand,
  • 00:07:05
    to keep the telomeres intact as long as  possible. If the telomeres are lost completely,
  • 00:07:10
    further replication can begin to erode actual  coding DNA, all kinds of problems occur, and this
  • 00:07:16
    is called senescence. Ok, so that’s what telomeres  are. What’s Bret’s big groundbreaking discovery?
  • 00:07:23
    We actually have a kind of concern about  pharmaceuticals very generally. And this
  • 00:07:28
    arises from the fact that in my graduate work, as  many of you who are long time fans of the podcast
  • 00:07:34
    will know, my graduate work, I happened onto what  I believe is a flaw in the drug safety system.
  • 00:07:41
    I published this flaw, and the flaw basically  amounts to the mice that are often used for things
  • 00:07:48
    like drug safety testing and other experiments  having been accidentally evolutionarily modified
  • 00:07:53
    by the breeding protocol that is used to produce  them so that their telomeres, which are these
  • 00:08:00
    repetitive sequences at the ends of chromosomes  have been elongated tremendously. And this has
  • 00:08:05
    potentially very large impacts, effectively these  animals have a capacity to repair their tissues
  • 00:08:10
    so that if you poison them but you don’t outright  kill them, they actually have an extremely good
  • 00:08:14
    capacity to fix themselves, whereas we have  a limited capacity, so they’re bad models.
  • 00:08:19
    Yep. Bret says that because lab mice  have longer telomeres than wild mice,
  • 00:08:24
    all the drug testing on them is invalid and all  the drugs in the world are potentially dangerous.
  • 00:08:30
    There is so much stupidity to unpack here. First,  and the most glaringly obvious problem with this
  • 00:08:36
    logic, is that all drugs go through clinical  trials on human subjects before going to market.
  • 00:08:42
    So it’s mice first, then other non-rodent animal  species, then humans, prior to going to market,
  • 00:08:50
    always. This fact alone renders this entire idea  irrelevant and idiotic. We know what drugs do to
  • 00:08:58
    people before people can buy them. So even if lab  mice were somehow more resistant to some toxicity,
  • 00:09:04
    we would catch it in other test subjects. Second, telomere length is just barely even
  • 00:09:09
    relevant to what Bret is talking about. He’s  talking about toxicity and tissue repair. All
  • 00:09:14
    telomeres do is prolong the duration of  time that cell division can occur prior
  • 00:09:19
    to the onset of senescence, they aren’t some  magic shield from every kind of deleterious
  • 00:09:24
    biological process. Telomere shortening  isn’t even the only cause of senescence.
  • 00:09:29
    Telomere length also does not correlate linearly  with lifespan, mice have longer telomeres than
  • 00:09:34
    humans do and we live way longer than them. And  lab mice don’t have uniquely long telomeres in
  • 00:09:40
    the first place, other species have longer ones.  But most importantly, as any biologist knows,
  • 00:09:45
    tissue degradation occurs via so many different  mechanisms, given that there are so many types of
  • 00:09:51
    tissues, from neural tissue to muscular tissue and  so forth, all of this having indeed very little
  • 00:09:57
    to do with telomeres. Telomere length does not  have any impact on gene expression, its products,
  • 00:10:03
    or its regulation, nor how toxic agents interact  with the products of gene expression. A toxin
  • 00:10:09
    that inhibits enzymatic function is not magically  neutralized by telomeres. Telomeres are relevant
  • 00:10:16
    to studies on aging, and also certain kinds  of cancers, but that’s about it. This whole
  • 00:10:20
    thing is just an erroneous observation  extrapolated to something totally baseless,
  • 00:10:25
    drenched in anti-pharma sentiment. It gets much worse, though. Bret pretends
  • 00:10:30
    this absolute nothingburger of a scientific claim  was so astonishing that it was suppressed by the
  • 00:10:36
    establishment and then subsequently stolen by a  prominent researcher who used it to earn her Nobel
  • 00:10:42
    prize. Bret likes to retain a façade of humility  whenever possible so he needs his big brother to
  • 00:10:47
    take the reigns with this accusation, as well as  generally painting Bret as some kind of mythical
  • 00:10:52
    hero genius, and Eric does not disappoint. In Bret’s case you probably know him if you
  • 00:10:57
    know him at all, as the heroic professor who  stood up against what can only be described,
  • 00:11:02
    and I swear I’m not making this up, as a Maoist  insurrection at an American college in the
  • 00:11:06
    Pacific Northwest, the Evergreen State College. Yes, he swears he’s not making up the dumb thing
  • 00:11:12
    he made up. A Maoist insurrection. Maoism of  course being a form of communism marked by armed
  • 00:11:20
    insurgency. The students at Evergreen were total  Maoists, with the way they had to hide in their
  • 00:11:25
    dorms from actually armed neo-Nazis that Bret  invited to their campus with his Tucker Carlson
  • 00:11:32
    appearance. Good god what a pretentious douchebag. Part of what happened is that you are now
  • 00:11:38
    distorting the history of science. You have  a place in the history of science that you
  • 00:11:43
    are not taking up, you are not advocating for,  there’s something you don’t like about this.
  • 00:11:49
    Well that’s laughable. Bret has published two  papers. He’s contributed essentially nothing
  • 00:11:54
    to the field of biology. He was a teacher.  But this is Eric’s favorite story to tell,
  • 00:11:59
    about his brother and himself, the revolutionary  geniuses who got unfairly swept under the rug.
  • 00:12:06
    I know that it happened and I know that it got  buried. And I know that it’s part of what I’m
  • 00:12:11
    calling the distributed idea suppression  complex because quite frankly, you are not
  • 00:12:16
    the only person who’s a part of this story. Gee, can you guess who else Eric is referring
  • 00:12:21
    to? These two are absolutely shameless. Speaking  of which, here comes the shameless accusation.
  • 00:12:27
    For context, Carol Greider is a molecular  biologist who discovered telomerase as a grad
  • 00:12:33
    student in the 80s, and in general pioneered  much of the early research on telomeres.
  • 00:12:38
    Carol, we are stunned to find that our paper  was turned away without review from Nature.
  • 00:12:45
    Without review. Without review. We need your help. Can
  • 00:12:49
    I send you the paper and have you look at it? And  she says yes. And I send her the paper. And she
  • 00:12:57
    sends back the paper with an unbelievable number  of intense criticisms that are not sensible.
  • 00:13:08
    Not sensible, which is code for Carol explaining  to Bret how his paper sucks and him not wanting to
  • 00:13:14
    accept reality. You can see for yourself on his  paper, published in 2002, where he asserts that
  • 00:13:20
    telomere shortening is responsible for all tissue  degradation, ignoring that there are hundreds of
  • 00:13:26
    tissue types each with their own aging dynamic.  This is why when Experimental Gerontology sent the
  • 00:13:32
    paper to Carol to review she panned it again. She was in line for a Nobel prize. That was
  • 00:13:37
    well understood. I didn’t want to  accuse a leading light in the field.
  • 00:13:41
    Ok this is exactly why I got angry at you at  the beginning of the podcast, ya moron. No,
  • 00:13:45
    no offense. You were in line for a Nobel prize. Does Eric think they give away Nobel prizes like
  • 00:13:51
    class participation trophies? The guy is beyond  delusional. Carol discovered telomerase and is the
  • 00:13:59
    primary pioneer of telomere research  in general. Bret is a nobody who did
  • 00:14:04
    nothing. “Oh what if this thing in mice” is not  something you get a Nobel for, and it has nothing
  • 00:14:10
    to do with what Carol got hers for. Insanity. I contact her, and I discover through talking to
  • 00:14:18
    her that she and Mike are about to publish their  paper on the long telomeres of laboratory mice.
  • 00:14:25
    So this is the delta between  wild type and laboratory mice.
  • 00:14:30
    Yeah. And I’m shocked because she’s told me  they’re keeping it in house. I’m disturbed,
  • 00:14:37
    this was my hypothesis that you were testing.  I should probably be an author on this paper.
  • 00:14:44
    But at the very least I need to be an  acknowledgement in this paper so that
  • 00:14:48
    I can go back and point to it and say that was… It changes everything, that it was a prediction,
  • 00:14:52
    it wasn’t something that was stumbled upon. Absolutely.
  • 00:14:56
    Yes, Bret is accusing Carol of stealing his  work. His work that was published in 2002,
  • 00:15:02
    when in fact Carol published a paper on varying  telomere length in mice in 2000, and even alluded
  • 00:15:08
    to it in another paper in 1995. Whoops. Awarded the Nobel prize. Carol Greider,
  • 00:15:14
    Elizabeth Blackburn, and Szostak. What Carol  Greider does with her Nobel lecture, alright,
  • 00:15:20
    Nobel lecture being the biggest lecture  a scientist will ever give, the lecture.
  • 00:15:25
    And filmed. And filmed. Is she delivers a paper
  • 00:15:29
    in which she very oddly has now embraced my entire  set of hypotheses about the effects. She has come
  • 00:15:39
    over from the comparison between the paper of mine  that she panned and said didn’t make any sense,
  • 00:15:45
    she is now a total convert to the idea that  senescence across the body is being caused by
  • 00:15:50
    Hayflick limits that are telomere-based… Ok and...
  • 00:15:53
    Bret outs himself here. He backpedals from tissue  degradation and all kinds of other unfounded
  • 00:15:58
    claims to connections between telomeres and  senescence, which nobody disputes and were already
  • 00:16:04
    well known. This is what frauds do, they make  bold, sweeping claims, using specific keywords,
  • 00:16:10
    and then they reign in these claims to reference  established science with the same keywords,
  • 00:16:15
    in order to pretend that it vindicates them. The  Electric Universe grifters use this playbook,
  • 00:16:20
    when they make up bullshit about  electricity powering the galaxy,
  • 00:16:23
    and then point at Birkeland currents as though  they substantiate any of the bullshit they spew.
  • 00:16:28
    As anyone can plainly see, this narrative  attracts the people that it attracts because of
  • 00:16:33
    the anti-establishment sentiment. These podcast  episodes are littered with comments from people
  • 00:16:39
    praising Bret for his unparalleled brilliance,  just because he says a bunch of words they don’t
  • 00:16:45
    understand. It’s ridiculous. Do they look for  interviews with actual accomplished scientists
  • 00:16:50
    and dish out the same type of praise? Were they  dropping praise on Carol Greider when she got
  • 00:16:54
    the Nobel? Of course not. They have no interest  in following scientific research, and they have
  • 00:17:00
    no idea what Bret is saying when he references  scientific concepts. The allure is not any kind
  • 00:17:04
    of alleged scientific achievement. It’s the story  of the underdog, the one who got screwed over by
  • 00:17:10
    the system, and the corrupt bureaucracies behind  it all. That’s why people are here, and that’s
  • 00:17:15
    the only story the Weinsteins know how to tell. This tale continues for Bret, as it did for most
  • 00:17:22
    of the science-denying charlatans who are  popular today, with the onset of the COVID
  • 00:17:26
    pandemic. There are three primary narratives  he pushed relentlessly in this realm. The
  • 00:17:31
    first was a cartoonish level of confidence  in the lab leak hypothesis with absolutely
  • 00:17:36
    zero evidence. The second was being one of the  main players in pushing Ivermectin as some kind
  • 00:17:41
    of preventive measure for COVID, again with  zero basis. And the third was jumping on the
  • 00:17:46
    bandwagon of fabricating millions of deaths from  COVID vaccines. Let’s take these one at a time.
  • 00:17:52
    Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus from  China in 2019, plenty of conspiracy theories have
  • 00:17:57
    circulated as to its origin, contradicting  the widely proposed zoonotic origin, meaning
  • 00:18:02
    arising naturally in animal populations. In this  case bats, and developing virulence in humans
  • 00:18:08
    through natural evolutionary processes, likely  after passing through some intermediate species,
  • 00:18:13
    such as pangolins. The more outlandish of these  ideas involved the notion that China deliberately
  • 00:18:18
    created SARS coronavirus-2 as a bioweapon  and released it on the world intentionally,
  • 00:18:24
    something that has been quite thoroughly  refuted via genomic analysis, which would
  • 00:18:28
    require a whole video unto itself to explain.  Far less conspiratorial was the notion that the
  • 00:18:33
    virus accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan.  As early as June 2020, Bret was on the record
  • 00:18:39
    saying he was 90% sure this was the case. And that theory was demonized at first,
  • 00:18:44
    that oh it can’t, c’mon that’s conspiracy  thinking. That it started in a lab. But
  • 00:18:50
    it certainly is a 50/50, would you say that? Oh it’s far more likely than that. As a matter of
  • 00:18:55
    fact I said I think in June that the chances that  it came from the lab looked to me to be about 90%.
  • 00:19:02
    This is already ridiculous. 90% sure based  on what? A hunch? His spidey-sense? He offers
  • 00:19:09
    absolutely nothing to substantiate this.  But it gets so much worse. As time passed,
  • 00:19:15
    he began to reject any data regarding  zoonotic origin as a conspiracy from the
  • 00:19:20
    virology community. When any such papers were  released, he would pretend they were government
  • 00:19:25
    lies sent to squash the lab leak truth while  people were distracted by the war in Ukraine.
  • 00:19:30
    In conversation with Joe Rogan he has said even  crazier things, like that pandemics emerging
  • 00:19:36
    from nature are nothing to worry about, fatality  during the Spanish flu of a century ago was due
  • 00:19:42
    to overprescription of Aspirin, he thinks polio  is actually due to pesticides, and implies that
  • 00:19:48
    most viruses are lab leaks, claiming that  monkeypox shows signs of gain of function
  • 00:19:53
    research. He is just completely off his rocker. There was a enthusiasm for prescribing aspirin
  • 00:20:03
    for people who came in with flu symptoms,  and they were prescribed aspirin in doses
  • 00:20:07
    that are now known to be deadly. Is something like an epidemic of
  • 00:20:11
    polio that’s not really an epidemic of  polio. You have an epidemic of gypsy moths
  • 00:20:16
    that are being sprayed for with these toxic  pesticides. Right, it’s a crazy, crazy story.
  • 00:20:24
    Next up, the Ivermectin debacle. This  incident is particularly fascinating
  • 00:20:28
    to me. Once COVID vaccines began rolling out,  anti-vaxxers were desperately looking for ways
  • 00:20:33
    to criticize the operation and bypass the  vaccines. Some suggested that Ivermectin,
  • 00:20:38
    an anti-parasitic drug, was miraculous in not just  killing SARS coronavirus-2, but also in preventing
  • 00:20:45
    infection. There is no clinical basis for this  assertion. But the most hilarious aspect of this
  • 00:20:51
    story is that it was adopted by those eager to  denigrate the pharmaceutical industry for rolling
  • 00:20:56
    out what they baselessly decided were ineffective  or even harmful vaccines meant only to make money,
  • 00:21:02
    when Ivermectin is itself a pharmaceutical drug,  developed initially by Merck, one of the largest
  • 00:21:08
    pharmaceutical companies in the world. So  there was not even any consistency to the
  • 00:21:12
    narrative. Those pushing Ivermectin wanted  to stick it to the pharmaceutical industry
  • 00:21:17
    by boycotting their vaccines and throwing  their money at a random pharmaceutical drug.
  • 00:21:23
    When medical professionals caught wind of  the situation and tried to communicate to the
  • 00:21:27
    public how there is no basis for presuming that  Ivermectin has any utility whatsoever in curing
  • 00:21:33
    COVID or preventing its transmission, including  Merck themselves who issued this very statement,
  • 00:21:38
    they were instantly labeled pharma shills trying  to shut down the story to maintain pharma profits,
  • 00:21:45
    by people who don’t even exercise their own logic  to its obvious conclusion. Anyone could make the
  • 00:21:50
    same argument for those trying to push Ivermectin,  a drug that would earn pharma lots of money if the
  • 00:21:56
    whole world started taking it. It’s a breathtaking  example of the hypocrisy of science deniers.
  • 00:22:02
    Never one to miss out on some good  old science-based charlatanry,
  • 00:22:06
    Joe Rogan held an “emergency podcast” with  Bret to get the word out on Ivermectin,
  • 00:22:11
    and he continued to push it relentlessly on his  own with the help of various other fraudulent
  • 00:22:16
    guests. Bret and his wife, who if you recall are  “highly skeptical about pharmaceutical drugs”
  • 00:22:22
    because of the mouse telomere thing, took  Ivermectin on the air on their own podcast.
  • 00:22:27
    And we are a bit skeptical of pills. A lot skeptical.
  • 00:22:31
    A lot skeptical of pills. Once again, there is no evidence of any kind to
  • 00:22:35
    suggest that this drug has any utility in curing  or preventing COVID. There is also no basis to
  • 00:22:41
    suggest that the vaccines are more dangerous than  the virus, the excuse for why Ivermectin was being
  • 00:22:46
    promoted as an alternative. Bret will use garbage  fake studies like this Carvallo paper riddled with
  • 00:22:52
    typos which claimed 100% efficacy, and when he  gets called out for it, instead of admitting it’s
  • 00:22:58
    garbage he just says it’s a little sloppy. There  is another large study which had to be retracted
  • 00:23:03
    due to plagiarism and problems with the raw data.  The same can be said for any other such papers,
  • 00:23:08
    which again would require a video unto itself to  elucidate, but I’ll link to some resources in the
  • 00:23:13
    description. He also still promotes a website  called ivmmeta.com which pretends to have a
  • 00:23:19
    meta-analysis of ivermectin studies that shows  it is overwhelmingly effective. In reality it did
  • 00:23:24
    things like multiplying together the p-values  of every study, including fraudulent studies,
  • 00:23:29
    cherrypicking endpoints, and so forth. And  of course, a meta-analysis of garbage papers
  • 00:23:35
    will provide garbage insight. It’s as simple  as that. Bad studies do not suddenly become
  • 00:23:40
    sound when placed next to a bunch of other bad  studies. The plural of garbage is not evidence.
  • 00:23:46
    In general, Bret’s narrative had long been  “why aren’t they running trials on this”,
  • 00:23:51
    and once large clinical trials were being done  on ivermectin, proving that it isn’t effective,
  • 00:23:56
    he just came up with conspiratorial reasons to  dismiss every single one of them. But dodging
  • 00:24:01
    and lying about clinical data aside,  the things Bret says to justify his
  • 00:24:05
    position from the standpoint of biology are just  laughably stupid. On his podcast he says this.
  • 00:24:11
    The fact that the drug in question,  ivermectin, comes from soil bacteria,
  • 00:24:16
    it’s not a completely synthetic molecule, means  that it is likely to be similar to things that
  • 00:24:22
    one’s ancestors have encountered before, and there  is therefore a good chance that the body has a
  • 00:24:27
    reasonably elegant way of dealing with it rather  than using some mechanism that’s not so great.
  • 00:24:34
    Bret is clearly just taking advantage of negative  connotations among the public surrounding the word
  • 00:24:39
    synthetic. Whether a drug is synthetic or  naturally occurring is totally meaningless.
  • 00:24:44
    Soil bacteria produce toxins that can kill  thousands of humans per milligram. Anthrax,
  • 00:24:51
    the Clostridium tetani toxin which causes  tetanus, or the Clostridium botulinum toxin
  • 00:24:57
    which is the single most toxic compound known  to mankind. Only the science illiterate sector
  • 00:25:02
    of the public thinks that natural equals good and  synthetic equals bad, any scientist knows better,
  • 00:25:08
    but Bret isn’t a scientist and he’s deliberately  manipulating the public, so this is what he goes
  • 00:25:13
    with. That a molecule never existed until humans  made it does not tell us anything about toxicity.
  • 00:25:19
    And naturally occurring compounds can be made  synthetically and they are indistinguishable.
  • 00:25:24
    In the end, this is all just clickbait for  anti-vaxxers, which exacerbates vaccine hesitancy,
  • 00:25:29
    which in turn gets people killed. Lots of  people who listened to Bret avoided getting
  • 00:25:34
    vaccinated and died of COVID. This includes one  very public case of a guy named Leslie Lawrenson,
  • 00:25:41
    who was extremely vocal about avoiding the  vaccine, repeatedly citing Bret’s content as
  • 00:25:46
    the basis for his reasoning. But undoubtedly  there were countless more. This is the point,
  • 00:25:51
    Bret’s combination of incompetence and  confidence results in measurable deaths.
  • 00:25:56
    It could be considered criminal behavior. He is  not just responsible for the deaths that can be
  • 00:26:01
    directly attributed to his rhetoric, but for so  many others that resulted from new strains that
  • 00:26:06
    were able to emerge because of the enormous  host pool available to the novel coronavirus
  • 00:26:11
    due to having access to so many unvaccinated  people. This alone makes Bret a garbage person.
  • 00:26:18
    Why do so many people fall for these lies? It’s  about the way they’re packaged. He knows how to
  • 00:26:22
    dish out the conspiratorial overtones people  are looking for while simultaneously shielding
  • 00:26:27
    himself from all reasonable criticism. He  can’t argue with the fact that all research
  • 00:26:32
    on Ivermectin shows no efficacy on COVID,  so clinical trials must have been fake!
  • 00:26:37
    Something is engineering the appearance  of X, Y, and Z. In other words there’s a
  • 00:26:41
    price point. If you want something to be  a fact, ivermectin doesn’t work. You want
  • 00:26:45
    that to be a fact? That’s gonna cost ya.  It can be a fact. But it’s gonna cost ya.
  • 00:26:50
    Ivermectin was suppressed  so Pfizer could make money!
  • 00:26:54
    By not doing the relevant large  scale clinical studies on ivermectin,
  • 00:27:00
    and thus it not being approved by the FDA for  use in COVID, that opens the door for EUAs,
  • 00:27:08
    for emergency use authorization for the vaccines  that we are now all living with and among.
  • 00:27:15
    There is zero epistemological consistency to  any of this. When Bret wants to pretend his
  • 00:27:20
    conjecture is supported by data, he references  any study he wants and distorts it to pretend it
  • 00:27:25
    supports the things he says, as well as any bogus  pseudo-study. Or, when published data clearly
  • 00:27:31
    contradicts what he has said, he invents threads  of corruption to pretend the data is invalid. He
  • 00:27:36
    just sculpts reality to be whatever he wants it  to be in order for him to always be right and the
  • 00:27:41
    medical establishment always wrong. All he has  to do is say “government bad” or “pharma bad”
  • 00:27:47
    and those who are susceptible to this rhetoric  will swallow any ludicrous accusation he makes,
  • 00:27:52
    like that the government mandated COVID  vaccines for the military in order to murder
  • 00:27:58
    them, weed out free thinkers, and reduce  military readiness, possibly having been paid
  • 00:28:04
    off by China to do so. Yes, he actually said this. We’re interested in degrading military readiness,
  • 00:28:12
    then the mandates might persist in the  military while they are withdrawn in
  • 00:28:18
    advance of midterm elections or something  like that in the civilian population.
  • 00:28:24
    He has also claimed that the vaccines were a  net negative for everyone and had zero efficacy,
  • 00:28:30
    despite saving millions of lives. He claims  the vaccines themselves created most of the
  • 00:28:35
    COVID variants, something which doesn’t even  mean anything mechanistically. And of course,
  • 00:28:39
    the fabrication of all the deaths. He’s brought  this up on Rogan. And more recently with Tucker
  • 00:28:44
    Carlson, he discusses the estimate by  Denis Rancourt, a full on virus denier,
  • 00:28:49
    of 17 million dead worldwide from the vaccine,  and refers to it as “careful analysis”.
  • 00:28:56
    I saw a credible estimate of something like 17  million deaths globally from this technology. So…
  • 00:29:04
    17 million deaths from the COVID vax? Well you know when you scale up to billions,
  • 00:29:11
    it’s not hard to reach a number like  that with a technology this dangerous.
  • 00:29:16
    Unfortunately, with regards to COVID vaccines and  the lie that they were excessively harmful and
  • 00:29:20
    caused so many issues, we have gotten to a point  where so many charlatans have repeated this lie,
  • 00:29:26
    over and over and over again, that a huge  proportion of the public are simply impenetrable.
  • 00:29:32
    They absolutely can’t be convinced that they were  duped. There were not substantially more adverse
  • 00:29:44
    reactions to COVID vaccines, proportionally  speaking, than any other vaccine that was
  • 00:29:49
    ever this widely distributed. Nearly all of  these claims of cardiac events and deaths
  • 00:29:54
    were completely fabricated. But because of the  relentless repetition from hucksters cashing in
  • 00:29:59
    on the paranoia, it has become reality for  millions of people, and rehabilitating the
  • 00:30:04
    public on this issue is going to take decades. Let’s hit one more talking point for Bret,
  • 00:30:10
    which is without a doubt the most ridiculous  of them all. As of late Bret has gone on the
  • 00:30:15
    record supporting HIV denialism. He thinks  that AIDS is not caused by a virus. It’s
  • 00:30:22
    hard to decide whether this is more idiotic  than it is downright offensive or vice versa,
  • 00:30:27
    but let’s hear his justification. Was that actually the argument against
  • 00:30:31
    HIV being causal, was a lot higher quality  than I understood. That it being a real virus,
  • 00:30:40
    a fellow traveler of a disease that was  chemically triggered, that is at least a
  • 00:30:46
    highly plausible hypothesis. And with Anthony  Fauci playing his role, that was inconvenient
  • 00:30:54
    for what he was trying to accomplish. There’s also ignoring a very important
  • 00:30:58
    factor in AIDS, which is party drugs. That is the competing hypothesis,
  • 00:31:04
    and for those who think that this is  a preposterous allegation, you should
  • 00:31:11
    look at this evidence. The evidence is suprisingly  compelling. And if your mind resists that, realize
  • 00:31:19
    that Luc Montagnier who got a Nobel prize for the  discovery of HIV, later in life became convinced
  • 00:31:26
    that the thing for which he got the Nobel prize  was not nearly as important as he had imagined.
  • 00:31:32
    That’s right, party drugs, a thinly veiled  reference towards the gay lifestyle. Great work,
  • 00:31:37
    guys. By the way, Bret is constantly referencing  Luc Montagnier, who got a Nobel simply for
  • 00:31:42
    isolating HIV, and who subsequently became a  full-fledged crank and a half, pushing bullshit
  • 00:31:48
    like structured water, homeopathy, and other  blatant pseudoscience. This is a fraud referencing
  • 00:31:54
    another fraud to appear credible, nothing more. This AIDS denialism bullshit perfectly
  • 00:31:59
    encapsulates the problem with Bret. Our  understanding of HIV from the standpoint of
  • 00:32:04
    virology is profound. We have an all-encompassing  comprehension of the precise mechanism by which
  • 00:32:11
    the virus infects T-cells and damages the immune  system. We have designed anti-viral drugs which
  • 00:32:17
    disrupt this mechanism to the point where we can  now control the disease. Why do you think AIDS,
  • 00:32:23
    while still serious, is no longer  anywhere near as urgent an issue as it was
  • 00:32:28
    a few decades ago? Because of the incredible  science we’ve done to understand the virus
  • 00:32:33
    and develop treatments for it. But all  of this science is meaningless to Bret,
  • 00:32:38
    because he read some bullshit in a crappy book,  or RFK Jr. said something stupid that he liked.
  • 00:32:44
    What Luc Montagnier had said, and I  read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci.
  • 00:32:50
    Bret is nothing more than the clueless guy  at the bar regurgitating the crap he fell
  • 00:32:55
    for on Facebook, he just knows how to use fancy  words to trick the listeners into thinking that
  • 00:33:00
    he used some kind of scientific reasoning  to reach these conclusions. It’s a farce.
  • 00:33:05
    To be clear, everything we’ve covered so far is  just the tip of the iceberg. We could continue
  • 00:33:10
    for hours and hours, as Bret’s podcast is a  treasure trove of paranoid insanity. Everyone
  • 00:33:17
    is out to get him. Nobody can refute anything he  says, and when people regularly refute everything
  • 00:33:23
    he says he just refuses to engage with them.  This has happened countless times with science
  • 00:33:28
    communicators confronting him on claims regarding  vaccines, myocarditis, and so forth. He feigns
  • 00:33:34
    openness and then runs away like a coward at  every turn, just like Eric does, as we will
  • 00:33:39
    see in a moment. But the way he postures as an  expert in a field he has made no contribution to,
  • 00:33:45
    continually downplaying, insulting, and running  away from experts in that field, is nauseating.
  • 00:33:51
    He is an absolute nobody even in evolutionary  biology, the field he studied, so on biomedical
  • 00:33:58
    topics, he really is just totally clueless, which  is why he hides from the backlash of his laughable
  • 00:34:04
    and dangerous statements. Reality has caught  up with him as of late, and he’s quite a bit
  • 00:34:08
    less influential than he was a couple years ago,  which is why he continues to pivot to ridiculous
  • 00:34:13
    topics that are even farther outside of his area  of expertise, topics that just happen to fulfill
  • 00:34:19
    the ultra-right wing wishlist. Here’s a very  recent interview. The obligatory wokeness rant,
  • 00:34:26
    AI, UBI, Fauci, parenting, the dangers of  pornography? And what’s this, the inversion
  • 00:34:34
    of the magnetic poles and disaster scenarios?  He’s pretending to understand geophysics now?
  • 00:34:40
    Tremendously vulnerable to the EMP effects  that will come with a major solar impact. The
  • 00:34:47
    north pole isn’t always where the north pole  currently is. And that sometimes these things
  • 00:34:52
    flip. We are in the midst of what’s called a polar  excursion. And that pole flip threatens chaos.
  • 00:35:00
    Well that all sounds pretty familiar.  Where have I heard that before? Oh right,
  • 00:35:04
    Ben Davidson, the scientist cosplayer, con  man, and cult leader of Suspicious0bservers,
  • 00:35:10
    who I exposed the hell out of a few years  back. Do you think Bret is a fan of Ben’s?
  • 00:35:16
    Ben, I’ve been following you for quite some  time, and I’m very pleased to finally be
  • 00:35:21
    sitting down with you and I’m also thrilled  that you would join me for this when there’s
  • 00:35:29
    so much going on. So welcome to DarkHorse. It would appear so! I wonder if Bret will
  • 00:35:34
    make it out to Ben’s apocalypse camp anytime  soon. If you haven’t seen me expose this clown,
  • 00:35:40
    definitely give that video a watch, as it’s  some of my finest work. In the meantime,
  • 00:35:45
    just marvel about the fact that there are  people who can’t tell that Ben’s a complete
  • 00:35:49
    psychopath just by looking directly in his eyes  for three seconds. He is the stuff of nightmares.
  • 00:35:56
    Anyway, that’s a quick introduction to everything  that’s wrong with Bret Weinstein. Now we’re going
  • 00:36:00
    to pivot over to big boy Eric. But first I have  to tell you about a very important application.
  • 00:36:06
    We all want a reliable method of finding accurate  information on the internet, especially when it
  • 00:36:10
    comes to science. Google searches turn up a  combination of fact and SEO-driven fiction,
  • 00:36:16
    leaving us with more questions than answers.  Direct scientific literature searches with Google
  • 00:36:20
    Scholar or PubMed connect you to research  papers, but they can be very hard to read,
  • 00:36:25
    with many behind a paywall. Thus enters:  Consensus. Consensus is a new wave academic
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    search engine that leverages AI and vector search  to find and synthesize the best science for you.
  • 00:36:36
    Consensus searches across 200 million scientific  papers from the highest quality journals,
  • 00:36:41
    and presents referenced information to you  in easily digestible fashion. Just ask it
  • 00:36:46
    any question, like, oh I don’t know, does  Ivermectin cure COVID-19? Well look at that,
  • 00:36:52
    the science has spoken, a resounding no! Somebody  should tell Bret Weinstein. But that’s not the
  • 00:36:57
    end of the investigation. Consensus pulls up the  literature that is most relevant to the question,
  • 00:37:02
    extracts key insights from each paper, and gives  you a study snapshot which summarizes experimental
  • 00:37:09
    data, methodology, and relevant outcomes. You can do this with any question you have,
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    you don’t even need to know the precise keywords  because of how vector searches work. Just talk
  • 00:37:17
    to it like it’s your friend. And you can even  give specific instructions for how you would
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    like your answers to be provided for you.  Give it specific prompts combined with your
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    search. Ask for the mechanisms of action, or  how two concepts correlate with each other,
  • 00:37:30
    or to explain a topic in simple language. Whatever  you need, in truly any area of academic study,
  • 00:37:36
    from economics to anthropology. Is the gut  microbiome linked to depression? What’s the best
  • 00:37:42
    treatment for acne? How does a cricket chirp? Whether you’re a PhD candidate in theoretical
  • 00:37:48
    physics or just a curious Jack or Jill trying to  make sense of today’s news, Consensus is for you.
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    Join over two million people who have already  switched to smarter, faster, and more reliable
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    information sourcing. Try Consensus for free, no  credit card, no forms. Go to consensus.app/search
  • 00:38:06
    and jump straight into your first search today. Now back to the debunking. Eric Weinstein rode
  • 00:38:12
    the coattails of his little brother during Bret’s  rise to fame from the Evergreen incident, using
  • 00:38:17
    it as an opportunity to shoe-horn his face into  the broader conversation, having his voice then
  • 00:38:22
    amplified by, who the hell else, Joe Rogan. And  boy does he have a lot to say. Just look at the
  • 00:38:29
    thumbnails for some of these conversations. This  is why war and conflict is rising! We are losing
  • 00:38:36
    control! Break free from the matrix! Eric is such  a wise Renaissance man and elder statesman, isn’t
  • 00:38:43
    he? Look at this one, he says we need a scientific  revolution! That’s pretty hilarious coming from a
  • 00:38:49
    guy who has never made any meaningful contribution  to science. You see, much like Bret, Eric has a
  • 00:38:55
    doctorate, his being in mathematical physics, but  he was never a scientist. Bret managed to publish
  • 00:39:00
    two papers and then taught biology for a while.  Eric has published nothing scientific whatsoever,
  • 00:39:05
    and has never worked with physics in any  capacity. He’s famous exclusively for
  • 00:39:10
    saying things to sound smart on podcasts. Much  like Bret, he spews paranoid conspiratorial
  • 00:39:16
    anti-establishment tripe and complains about  being overlooked by academia despite never
  • 00:39:21
    having done anything worthy of being recognized. Of course he continually pretends he has done
  • 00:39:26
    something worthy of being recognized. Something  revolutionary, in fact. He says he has a theory
  • 00:39:32
    of everything, which he calls Geometric Unity. He  first unveiled this theory when he was invited by
  • 00:39:37
    an old grad school buddy to give a public talk  at Oxford in 2013. He didn’t attempt to publish
  • 00:39:43
    anything about it, and then began complaining  about how scientists wouldn’t review it or take
  • 00:39:47
    it seriously, as though scientists are in the  habit of watching two hour long YouTube videos
  • 00:39:52
    instead of reading papers. When pressed as to  why he refused to publish a paper about his work,
  • 00:39:58
    he always gave one of several mutually exclusive  reasons. If he published, people would steal his
  • 00:40:03
    ideas. He can’t publish because Arxiv only accepts  academic email addresses and he doesn’t have one.
  • 00:40:09
    Academia doesn’t deserve his amazing ideas. He  doesn’t need to publish anything, the lecture was
  • 00:40:14
    recorded and people can just watch the video. Not to have his rightful place as the next
  • 00:40:19
    Einstein taken from him, Eric took to creating  his own version of academia on Discord,
  • 00:40:24
    a place where he could cultivate an inner circle  of blind devotees. Soon he had a community with
  • 00:40:30
    hundreds of members spreading his gospel all  over the internet. Once this had some momentum,
  • 00:40:34
    Eric eventually did finally put  Geometric Unity into written form,
  • 00:40:38
    releasing it on April Fool’s day 2021, with  the disclaimer that he is not a physicist but
  • 00:40:44
    rather a podcaster, and it is merely a work of  entertainment. If you ask him why he did this,
  • 00:40:50
    he pretends that he did it to protect himself. There are no protections inside of science
  • 00:40:56
    for taking somebody else’s work and  putting another person’s name on it.
  • 00:41:01
    This was a good protection. Well, and I put something saying that I choose
  • 00:41:05
    to be an entertainer rather than a scientist,  and therefore it has copyright protection.
  • 00:41:10
    This is insane. You can’t just steal the published  work of any scientist, that’s called plagiarism.
  • 00:41:16
    Publishing research in respected journals is how  every single scientist in the world does science.
  • 00:41:23
    This is just his attempt to play both sides so he  can appear humble towards real scientists or just
  • 00:41:29
    stay under their radar completely, while appearing  clever and resourceful towards his real audience,
  • 00:41:34
    random people on the internet. His pseudo-paper  is not intended for an academic audience at all.
  • 00:41:40
    Why would he expect to be taken seriously  by the scientific community when he is
  • 00:41:44
    specifically telling everyone that he  shouldn’t be taken seriously? Indeed,
  • 00:41:49
    nobody in the physics community cared at  all, or acknowledged him in the slightest,
  • 00:41:52
    which Eric then pretended to be enraged about,  like a little play for his fans. For years he
  • 00:41:58
    had been baselessly complaining about how string  theory has a mafia-like stranglehold on funding in
  • 00:42:03
    the field and aggressively shuts out alternative  ideas. Especially his, which is so revolutionary,
  • 00:42:10
    he regularly claims, that it is the key to  achieving faster than light travel and making us
  • 00:42:16
    a space colonizing multiplanetary species. Yeah. Cause you’re saying we could get off this planet.
  • 00:42:23
    What are you talking about in terms of the  actual implementation of this theory of yours.
  • 00:42:29
    Despite his disclaimers, the dialogue Eric  had been pretending to yearn for suddenly
  • 00:42:34
    came. Two people from within the Discord server, a  mathematician and a physicist, decided to dig into
  • 00:42:40
    Eric’s work. They published a paper discrediting  it more than a month before Eric even put out
  • 00:42:45
    his pretend paper, based on the Oxford video.  These two were Timothy Nguyen and someone going
  • 00:42:50
    by the pseudonym Theo Polya. Eric didn’t like  this one bit, as it ruined his whole façade,
  • 00:42:56
    so he began to attack anyone who acknowledged  this paper, accusing them of backstabbing him,
  • 00:43:01
    and then eliminated his critics all together by  cutting the discord in half, banning many members,
  • 00:43:07
    and maintaining correspondence only with his  remaining acolytes, thereby enacting the precise
  • 00:43:12
    brand of suppression he falsely accuses academia  of doing. You can see just how volatile Eric would
  • 00:43:19
    get when pressed about this paper by listening  to this conversation on Clubhouse. Somebody is
  • 00:43:24
    asking when Eric will address the criticism head  on, and this is how he decided to handle it.
  • 00:43:30
    When will we hear like a debate with  you and Theo and Timothy about GU.
  • 00:43:37
    Sorry who’s Theo? Uh Timothy and Theo they put out their retort to…
  • 00:43:42
    Sorry, who’s Theo? Uh Theo Polya and Timothy Nguyen?
  • 00:43:46
    I’m not aware of Theo Polya,  where does… who’s Theo Polya?
  • 00:43:53
    Do you know Timothy Nguyen is? Let’s talk about Theo Polya, who’s Theo Polya?
  • 00:43:57
    He’s the coauthor from the paper… Who is he? Yeah who is he? I don’t know.
  • 00:44:03
    That wasn’t the question though, right? No, that is the question.
  • 00:44:06
    No the question was… No, that is the question.
  • 00:44:09
    No you’re not understanding. You can’t just bully me.
  • 00:44:11
    You’re not understanding me. I’ve never heard  in the history of physics anybody expecting
  • 00:44:17
    to be taken seriously as an anonymous critic. As you can see, Eric fixates on the identity
  • 00:44:25
    of Theo Polya, cutting off the person speaking  repeatedly as a way of derailing the conversation.
  • 00:44:31
    It’s irrelevant who Theo is. If there is  substance to the criticism, it doesn’t matter
  • 00:44:36
    who is providing it, just like his insistence that  it doesn’t matter that his grand theory is coming
  • 00:44:41
    from someone totally outside of academia. Eric  should engage with the criticism, especially since
  • 00:44:47
    the other author is not anonymous. Tim Nguyen is  a mathematician with a doctorate in gauge theory,
  • 00:44:53
    the exact same field as Eric, and he is  desperately hiding from this fact. Apart
  • 00:44:58
    from flat out muting the person asking him about  this paper, he pulls out every other excuse in
  • 00:45:03
    the book to run away from it, from pretending  it doesn’t exist, to making up stories about
  • 00:45:08
    the authors being internet trolls who harassed  his family, and everything else imaginable.
  • 00:45:13
    Behavior of those gentlemen, however many there  are, two or more, including various misogynistic
  • 00:45:21
    comments against my colleagues, disrespecting  Sabine Hossenfelder, while she may be a critic is
  • 00:45:31
    also a friend of mine, I’m fucking sick of these  two people. Assuming it is two people. Maybe it’s…
  • 00:45:38
    but we don’t know what Theo Polya is. Great, so characters aside…
  • 00:45:45
    No, no… There is a paper that was
  • 00:45:47
    put out rebutting geometric unity. Right? No there wasn’t a paper that was put out
  • 00:45:52
    rebutting geometric unity. There was an  attempt to publish something on the Arxiv
  • 00:45:57
    which was rejected that attempted to get in  front of the draft that I put out, specifically
  • 00:46:05
    looking at the text messages that were found  on the server that supports these people to
  • 00:46:12
    quote “make me cry” close quote. What I’m talking  about is a phenomenon where people are trying to
  • 00:46:17
    exploit a situation in order to make a name for  themselves. And you’ll notice that many people
  • 00:46:23
    from that Discord server are trying to get people  like you to react to me to name these names.
  • 00:46:31
    Well… no… You’re not, I’m going to mute
  • 00:46:34
    you if you don’t keep it up. Alright. You’re muted  now. I think you’re not hearing what I’m saying.
  • 00:46:40
    We don’t allow people in general to go around  making a name for themselves by being obnoxious,
  • 00:46:49
    misogynistic, manipulative, it’s fucking  enough. You know, the Arxiv meets 4chan.
  • 00:46:56
    He calls them Arxiv meets 4chan, as though  he isn’t dealing with academics far more
  • 00:47:01
    credentialed than himself, and when the caller  tries again to speak up and point this out,
  • 00:47:06
    Eric says he has to go walk his dog. May I jump in real quick, please?
  • 00:47:11
    Actually I’m kind of irritated. I understand.
  • 00:47:16
    Yeah, but like I don’t wanna be subjected to this. Ok, can I just say a couple
  • 00:47:21
    things really fast though please? Yeah but I’m about to go walk my dog, so…
  • 00:47:26
    The caller persists, continually saying it’s about  the math, and Eric just obfuscates every time.
  • 00:47:33
    Misogyny, rape jokes, fixating on random people  from Discord as a transparent way of evading the
  • 00:47:39
    real criticism from real experts in the field. And I’m not saying that it’s them
  • 00:47:45
    in particular, I don’t care about… Who’s Theo Polya? No, you’re not understanding
  • 00:47:48
    me. I’m not putting up with misogyny. I’m talking about the math, Eric.
  • 00:47:53
    I’m not putting up with threats against my family. You shouldn’t.
  • 00:47:56
    I’m not putting up with any of the stupid  shit that server engages in. Capisce?
  • 00:48:01
    Great. Am I clear?
  • 00:48:02
    I’m talking strictly about the math. No I’m talking strictly, and I said something
  • 00:48:06
    to you. Rape jokes aren’t funny. Are we clear? Who thinks they’re funny? I agree.
  • 00:48:11
    That server. He tweeted endlessly about
  • 00:48:14
    this for months, all as a method of distraction so  he could ignore his critics. Then his buddy Brian
  • 00:48:20
    Keating comes to the rescue, saying this  room is for physics, not petty squabbles!
  • 00:48:25
    Yeah and I’m [???]. Actually the title of the  room is let’s talk about physics. So I really
  • 00:48:33
    wanna stick to physics and I wanna make sure  that we do have enough time to get to questions
  • 00:48:38
    about physics, so let’s move into that domain  and stop talking about squabbles and so forth.
  • 00:48:45
    Of course this person was trying to get  more insight on Eric’s physics, so it’s
  • 00:48:50
    just transparent redirection on Eric’s behalf.  Brian even spinelessly defends Eric’s assertion
  • 00:48:56
    that criticism is invalid when it comes from  an anonymous source, and just generally shifts
  • 00:49:01
    discussion away from pressing Eric to acknowledge  the paper that invalidates his work. In fact,
  • 00:49:07
    it’s worth taking a brief aside to mention that  Brian is something of a joke himself. He gets
  • 00:49:12
    points for being an actual working scientist,  and he has debunked some pseudoscience,
  • 00:49:17
    but he’s been desperately trying to join the ranks  of the intellectual dark web for quite some time,
  • 00:49:22
    promoting Eric every chance he gets, and he  is endlessly sympathetic to certain types of
  • 00:49:27
    anti-science propaganda, especially Discovery  Institute, who he is always charitable towards,
  • 00:49:33
    promoting them and leaving favorable comments on  their videos, even very recently. I would bet he
  • 00:49:38
    receives some kind of compensation from them, and  he even deleted a conversation he had with me on
  • 00:49:44
    his podcast, presumably because I shat all over  the DI in it. All of this apart from writing an
  • 00:49:50
    entire book whining about a Nobel prize he didn’t  get and never deserved. Long story short, Brian
  • 00:49:55
    should not be taken seriously. Now back to Eric. So let’s get down to brass tacks. What is
  • 00:50:01
    Geometric Unity all about, and why does nobody in  physics care about it? Admittedly, the specifics
  • 00:50:07
    of this are beyond my pay grade. Fortunately we  have none other than Tim Nguyen himself to walk us
  • 00:50:12
    through the nitty gritty. To offer some preemptive  context, many of the early objections had centered
  • 00:50:18
    around how it’s not actually a complete theory.  It’s all centered around something called the
  • 00:50:22
    “SHIAB Operator” which he does not rigorously  define, claiming that it was written on his notes
  • 00:50:26
    in college, and he’s pretty sure it worked but  now he can’t remember it. It does not incorporate
  • 00:50:31
    quantum theory, which any theory of everything  would absolutely have to do, it is mathematically
  • 00:50:35
    inconsistent, and there are numerous other glaring  omissions that make his work both incomplete and
  • 00:50:40
    invalid. But let’s hear all this from Tim. Tim thanks so much for joining us, we’re
  • 00:50:44
    ready to take a little bit of an in depth  look at geometric unity, so take it away.
  • 00:50:51
    Great, yeah, glad to be here Dave. So yeah, what  I have here on the white board is a display of
  • 00:50:59
    the two papers in question, there’s Eric’s paper  on the left, his geometric unity paper that he
  • 00:51:05
    released on April 1st of 2021. And there’s my  response paper which I wrote with Theo Polya,
  • 00:51:12
    my anonymous coauthor, back in 2021. It predates  the geometric unity paper ‘cause it was based
  • 00:51:18
    on his lecture that was on YouTube that was  recorded in 2013. Nevertheless it contained all
  • 00:51:26
    the essential details, but just for the sake of  history that was what the material of the response
  • 00:51:32
    paper was based upon. Yeah, anyway, let’s just go  ahead and dive in with that context. So let me,
  • 00:51:40
    before I go into the details, let me first  just give a quick overview of what a theory
  • 00:51:45
    of everything is, because remember Eric’s theory  claims to be a theory of everything, so I thought
  • 00:51:49
    I should at least clarify what exactly that  means before I show what’s wrong with it.
  • 00:51:54
    So very quick crash course here, so let’s  recall that in physics we have four forces
  • 00:52:03
    in nature. We have the electromagnetic force,  the weak, the strong, and also gravity. So
  • 00:52:10
    I’ve written these four forces over here. And  what does it mean to be a theory of everything,
  • 00:52:17
    well you want to be able to unify all these  forces. And unfortunately right now, that’s
  • 00:52:21
    not the case. Right now we have a unification  of the first three, electromagnetism, weak,
  • 00:52:27
    and strong. And those are unified in what’s called  the standard model. And that’s what’s here on the
  • 00:52:32
    left. And the standard model is quite intricate,  it has all these particles which you can see there
  • 00:52:37
    on display, but famously it doesn’t include  gravity. And so part of the problem is finding
  • 00:52:43
    a way, finding a model that would incorporate  all four. And the other piece of the puzzle is
  • 00:52:49
    that you also have to include quantum theory. And  that’s also very difficult. The standard model is
  • 00:52:55
    a quantum field theory, so we don’t have a problem  there. But unfortunately we don’t know how to
  • 00:53:00
    combine gravitation with quantum theory. Gravity  is described by Einstein’s general relativity,
  • 00:53:09
    which is a classical theory, but we don’t know  how to combine it with quantum theory. So we
  • 00:53:13
    don’t even have a satisfactory quantum theory of  gravity, so solving that and combining it with the
  • 00:53:19
    three other forces is going to be very difficult.  But that’s just to illustrate the challenge.
  • 00:53:22
    Just to clarify for the viewer, right, when we’re  talking about combining these, like for example,
  • 00:53:27
    electromagnetism and the weak force, they have  electroweak, and then they predicted particles,
  • 00:53:32
    and they went to the particle accelerator and they  found, what was it, the W and Z bosons and stuff,
  • 00:53:36
    so it’s not like just “oh, I think”, it’s  not like a flight of fancy, we’re talking
  • 00:53:40
    about actual real empirical science unifying these  forces to get closer and closer to earliest epochs
  • 00:53:46
    of the universe, like that kind of thing, right? Yeah, I mean of course the standard model is one
  • 00:53:51
    of these very well tested and validated  models, of course it’s not complete,
  • 00:53:56
    there are still some mysteries, it doesn’t  include you know, dark matter and things like
  • 00:54:03
    that. But yeah, it’s been empirically validated. We are trying to extend what we have with these
  • 00:54:10
    three to that last fourth one basically. Yeah that’s right. So right now we have
  • 00:54:14
    sort of two separate theories, or models  let’s say, which is the standard model and
  • 00:54:21
    Einstein’s general relativity. And the standard  model is already a quantum field theory and uh,
  • 00:54:29
    but general relativity is not. So  that’s sort of the lay of the land.
  • 00:54:34
    Yep, and maybe just one last ingredient which  is that the standard model is what’s called
  • 00:54:39
    a gauge theory, gauge theory basically means  there’s a gauge group lurking in the background,
  • 00:54:46
    and a gauge group is a symmetry group. And in  physics symmetry is very important, it basically
  • 00:54:52
    in this case describes how the internal states of  particles have certain symmetries, and so that’s
  • 00:54:59
    just a very kind of important mathematical aspect  of these theories, and that’s why you have a gauge
  • 00:55:05
    theory, because these particles have symmetries.  And so, well, Eric and myself we’re both trained
  • 00:55:12
    as mathematical gauge theorists, well this is how  the gauge theory occurs in the physics, because
  • 00:55:18
    the standard model is itself a gauge theory. Got it.
  • 00:55:22
    Yep, well let’s go ahead and dive right  in. So, well we have in my paper stated
  • 00:55:30
    four objections to Eric’s theory. So Eric’s  theory claims to be a theory of everything,
  • 00:55:34
    and it’s also a gauge theory. So that’s how it  relates to the previous slide. But I’ll just go
  • 00:55:37
    ahead and quickly state what the objections are.  The first objection, in some sense the most fatal,
  • 00:55:45
    as it were, is that there is no SHIAB operator. So  in Eric’s work he introduces this SHIAB operator,
  • 00:55:52
    and SHIAB is an acronym for ship in a bottle, and  it’s an operator that appears in his equations of
  • 00:55:58
    motion. So in physics we have equations of motion.  Like in high school physics you studied Newton’s
  • 00:56:04
    laws, and the second law is the statement that  F=ma. That’s an equation of motion. And as you
  • 00:56:10
    progress through physics you have more and more  sophisticated equations of motion. And this SHIAB
  • 00:56:16
    operator is the one that occurs in Eric’s  work, and the objection here is that, well,
  • 00:56:21
    Eric claims that there is this SHIAB operator, and  I was able to show that the definition he tried
  • 00:56:27
    to invoke to show that it exists doesn’t hold.  So basically he can’t construct this operator,
  • 00:56:34
    if you can’t construct the operator then your  equations of motion doesn’t make any sense,
  • 00:56:37
    so basically his whole theory collapses  because he doesn’t even have this equation.
  • 00:56:41
    It’s just a magical thing that he  references but isn’t actually real. Got it.
  • 00:56:47
    That’s right. And for those who want  to go into more mathematical detail,
  • 00:56:51
    I have this long two hour lecture on the  Eigenbros podcast which you can find on YouTube,
  • 00:56:56
    where I go into pretty concrete detail. I’ll definitely link to that, yeah,
  • 00:57:00
    I’ll let everyone know. It’s actually quite, well,
  • 00:57:05
    it’s, I made it concrete in that I explain the  essential details of why this fails in terms
  • 00:57:11
    of 2x2 matrices. So there’s a simplifcation in  terms of that. So if people can understand 2x2
  • 00:57:16
    matrices then maybe they’ll appreciate  the lecture. Anyways, so that’s that.
  • 00:57:25
    Ok, so objection 2 is that there is a gauge  anomaly. So when we quantize the theory,
  • 00:57:36
    that is when we take a theory that’s classical and  try to convert it to a quantum theory, that’s what
  • 00:57:40
    quantizing means, we have to show that certain  anomalies vanish. So that’s just something you,
  • 00:57:48
    well, typically wanna show that these things  called anomalies vanish, and in the case of a
  • 00:57:52
    gauge anomaly, the reason you want the gauge  anomaly to vanish is that if it doesn’t then
  • 00:57:57
    you lose gauge invariance, the symmetry that  I said was very important. And, well what we
  • 00:58:03
    show in our paper is that GU has a gauge anomaly  due to the choice of gauge group that Eric makes,
  • 00:58:12
    and that leads him into this fatal situation  where you have this non-vanishing gauge anomaly
  • 00:58:17
    and so you don’t have a quantum theory. So  that’s the second objection that we have.
  • 00:58:24
    The third objection that we have goes under  the heading of dimensionality and supersymmetry
  • 00:58:31
    constraints, and the way you can think of that  is that GU specifies incompatible structures. So
  • 00:58:38
    Eric’s theory lives in a 14 dimensional space, he  claims to have various supersymmetric extensions,
  • 00:58:44
    so supersymmetry is this extra structure you  can have that relates fermions and bosons,
  • 00:58:49
    it’s quite intricate. But anyways, at a high  level, when you specify these structures, you have
  • 00:58:55
    to have certain particles, you also have to have  an infinite dimensional gauge group in this case,
  • 00:59:00
    and all of these extra structures are contrary  to what Eric set out in his work. So basically
  • 00:59:08
    he sets up structures that are not compatible.  And that’s the third objection that we have.
  • 00:59:15
    And finally there are numerous omissions in the  work. That was already evident in the lecture
  • 00:59:22
    itself, and, well, the unfortunate thing is that  in the write up that he had, he makes it also very
  • 00:59:33
    evident that there are lots of missing details.  Here are just two representative quotes that you
  • 00:59:39
    can find in his work, and I highlighted the part  where he blatantly admits that he doesn’t have the
  • 00:59:45
    notes anymore for the claims that he’s made. I thought of it but I forgot,
  • 00:59:51
    but it totally worked, trust me, bro. Yeah exactly. So going around, asking
  • 00:59:58
    everyone to follow his work, but then finally  when asked to provide concrete details, he can’t
  • 01:00:05
    provide them. So quite unfortunate. Ok, so that’s  the gist of our rebuttal for geometric unity.
  • 01:00:14
    Awesome, cool. So to summarize, would we  say that it is… doesn’t qualify as a theory,
  • 01:00:21
    or it does but is merely unsubstantive, or would  we say it is flat out wrong, or all of the above,
  • 01:00:27
    how would we, in a sentence, qualify this? Yeah I mean, it’s basically not even competent
  • 01:00:33
    work, right? I mean, there, I mean his GU paper  is 69 pages, there are lots of constructions and
  • 01:00:43
    mathematical fragments, but because there are  so many missing details, and because of the
  • 01:00:49
    problem that I already elucidated, it’s  hard to see what value there really is.
  • 01:00:56
    It’s just a very incomplete work to say the least. Perhaps we’ll call it whimsy based on mathematical
  • 01:01:05
    competence. Something like that. Exactly.
  • 01:01:09
    Very cool, thank you for that.  That is definitely an eye opener.
  • 01:01:14
    Well, there you have it. GU is junk. This is  the primary lens with which we can view Eric
  • 01:01:19
    Weinstein. He wants to be the next Einstein.  Despite the similar last name, he isn’t. But
  • 01:01:25
    to him, it’s enough to be perceived as such  by the public. So what does he do? He avoids
  • 01:01:31
    publishing anything for a decade to shield himself  from criticism. He knew it would never pass peer
  • 01:01:35
    review, so he simply attacks the concept of peer  review every chance he gets. When he eventually
  • 01:01:41
    does put something out after immense pressure,  and legitimate criticism is immediately provided,
  • 01:01:47
    he ignores it, lashing out at anyone who mentions  it, inventing elaborate narratives of harassment
  • 01:01:52
    and unsavory behavior as though that would  invalidate the math even if it were true.
  • 01:01:57
    Eric knows his reputation can’t rely on GU alone,  so he frequently props himself up as an internet
  • 01:02:03
    guru, making bullshit claims about having  predicted important events and technologies.
  • 01:02:08
    He wrote a short blog post in 2010 called “Go  Virtual Young Man” which can be summarized as
  • 01:02:13
    “the internet is cool”. He references this blog  post to pretend he predicted any number of things,
  • 01:02:19
    like cryptocurrency, without any basis whatsoever.  He wrote a run-of-the-mill finance paper in 2002
  • 01:02:25
    and uses it to pretend that he predicted  the 2008 crash. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
  • 01:02:31
    Because Eric can’t bear to face a reality where he  isn’t actually the world’s premiere intellectual,
  • 01:02:36
    but rather just some guy with a doctorate and  a decent intellect, he regularly resorts to
  • 01:02:41
    paranoia and conspiracy. Here he is talking  about the government being out to get him.
  • 01:02:46
    You know that the first person outside of me to  get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein?
  • 01:02:56
    How did he know I was working on this? I don’t  know. I wasn’t really talking about this stuff
  • 01:03:01
    until, you know, even my close friends didn’t  really know what I was up to. It’s really weird
  • 01:03:07
    when the government is actually out to get you.  When they actually send a spy, when they actually
  • 01:03:12
    engage in disinformation campaigns. When they  smear you. I’ll tell you why I built my channel.
  • 01:03:18
    It’s gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time.  In an alley. I got rolled multiple times, and my
  • 01:03:25
    point is, I didn’t wanna become a celebrity. I  didn’t wanna become well know. But it’s a lot
  • 01:03:31
    harder to roll somebody who’s getting, you know  I think I’m, I don’t know if this is mistaken,
  • 01:03:39
    but I think I’m the math PhD with the largest  number of followers on Twitter. Assume that I
  • 01:03:43
    get banned on social media because somebody  wants to make sure that my message doesn’t
  • 01:03:48
    interfere with the dominant narrative. My favorite is the part where he claims
  • 01:03:52
    he never sought fame, when that’s literally the  only thing he’s ever really sought. That’s why
  • 01:03:57
    he goes on podcasts instead of doing physics.  That’s why he puts more effort into crafting
  • 01:04:03
    his persona and fabricating aspects of his  origin story than actually doing anything
  • 01:04:08
    productive. He makes claims that the FBI  has followed his family. He makes up stories
  • 01:04:13
    about Jeffrey Epstein. Here he is on Rogan  complaining about Harvard “burying his work”.
  • 01:04:19
    Harvard university told me to remain in good  standing with this program you cannot live
  • 01:04:25
    in Massachusetts. Harvard has a program for how  it gets rid of people it wants to get rid of who
  • 01:04:31
    are in good standing. It makes them move.
  • 01:04:35
    It makes them move so they can’t complete  their thesis. I had effectively gotten on
  • 01:04:40
    the wrong side, I proposed some equations that  I was told were insufficiently non-linear,
  • 01:04:45
    never mind what that means. The story of  a guy who is not allowed to attend his own
  • 01:04:49
    thesis defense. To any academician, you hear it  like, what do you mean you weren’t allowed to,
  • 01:04:54
    you present your thesis! No no no. I was not  allowed in the room of my own thesis defense.
  • 01:04:59
    So this is why Harvard wanted  you to move out of state.
  • 01:05:02
    Another victim of evil academia, just like  baby brother Bret! The claims here are
  • 01:05:07
    endless. He says that he was prevented from  presenting his own thesis defense, something
  • 01:05:12
    never done in the history of the world, when  in reality it was just reviewed as a committee,
  • 01:05:16
    the usual practice of the Harvard math department.  This paranoia extends to his wife, Pia Malaney,
  • 01:05:23
    as well. Eric cowrote two chapters of Pia’s  doctoral thesis in economics by essentially
  • 01:05:28
    just applying gauge theory to a problem in  economics, thereby re-deriving an inflation index
  • 01:05:33
    that already exists. He routinely refers to this  work as “revolutionary”, even though absolutely
  • 01:05:39
    nobody cares about it, which is confirmed  by the practically non-existent citations.
  • 01:05:44
    Pia Malaney’s thesis revolutionized all  of economic theory, and it hasn’t been
  • 01:05:49
    understood. If you want to do something  revolutionary I promise you, that’s been,
  • 01:05:56
    it’s an arbitrage I can share it with the  world, nobody will do anything with it, because
  • 01:06:02
    the world decided to stand in the way of that  progress. That’s an incontrovertible fact to me.
  • 01:06:08
    Fortunately our friend Tim has debunked this claim  as well, so why don’t we check in with him for
  • 01:06:13
    another tidy refutation of Eric’s inflated claims? Ok so we’re back with Tim, and now let’s take a
  • 01:06:19
    look at some of this economics work  as well. Take it away again Tim.
  • 01:06:24
    Yeah, so also in 2021, Eric went out on a limb to  promote his work on economics and gauge theory,
  • 01:06:34
    that’s sort of the short title here of this  somewhat long title of this paper. He gave a
  • 01:06:42
    talk at the University of Chicago in November of  2021, sort of under the same pretext as with his
  • 01:06:50
    physics lecture. Basically other scientists don’t  know what they’re doing, if only they understood
  • 01:06:56
    this gauge theory you know, yoga, that I know  and nobody else knows, they would have their
  • 01:07:02
    eyes open to this revolution. And this work is  also joint with his wife Pia Malaney who wrote
  • 01:07:08
    her dissertation back in ‘96 at Harvard, where she  combined gauge theoretic ideas into her, well her
  • 01:07:17
    economics PhD thinking about economic indices  and inflation and all that. Anyway so this is
  • 01:07:23
    sort of like a reboot of that program. So in this  case he actually wrote a paper, and so I was able
  • 01:07:31
    to actually write a proper response, because there  was an actual paper this time, rather than just a
  • 01:07:36
    video. And yeah, this paper is now on the Arxiv,  and yeah, so people can also download it, and
  • 01:07:44
    being on the Arxiv makes it even more official.  Yeah, cause it was, the Arxiv is moderated, and
  • 01:07:51
    this paper did go through that moderation process. Yeah, it’s a legitimate source of information.
  • 01:07:56
    That’s right. Ok, in this case it’s also just by  me, there’s no anonymous coauthor. Ok, anyways,
  • 01:08:01
    so let me kind of also just kind of summarize  some of the problems with Eric and his wife’s
  • 01:08:08
    work. So let me just start off real basic,  which is that the work makes a lot of very
  • 01:08:14
    simplistic assumptions, which is quite unfortunate  if you’re going to make this claim that it’s going
  • 01:08:20
    to revolutionize economics. And in this case Eric  went on Brian Keating’s podcast and said that this
  • 01:08:26
    work was the most important work in mathematical  finance or economics in the last 25 to 50 years,
  • 01:08:31
    right? So when you make so many simplifying  assumptions it kind of, really dilutes that
  • 01:08:36
    claim. And let me just give you one representative  such assumption. So here on the right here,
  • 01:08:41
    I have what’s called an indifference curve. And  that’s a curve that economists use to describe
  • 01:08:47
    what an agent, a person, might consider equivalent  sets of goods. That’s why they’re indifferent to
  • 01:08:53
    which they obtain. So in this case if there’s  two goods, good one on the X-axis, say apples,
  • 01:08:59
    and good two on the Y-axis, say oranges, then  you know maybe this point is (1,1), so that’s a
  • 01:09:07
    basket of one apple and one orange, and over here  is maybe a quarter of an apple and four oranges.
  • 01:09:15
    So maybe for this person they value one apple and  one orange the same way they would value a quarter
  • 01:09:21
    of an apple and four oranges. Same with other  points on this, you know, hyperbola. Anyways,
  • 01:09:29
    so one of the things that Eric assumes in his  paper is what’s called completeness. So he assumes
  • 01:09:35
    these indifference curves are complete. Meaning  that they can’t just abruptly end. So these curves
  • 01:09:41
    have to go off to infinity. And if you translate  that directly into, what is this really saying,
  • 01:09:47
    one of the consequences is that it’s impossible to  value zero of a good. Because this curve shoots up
  • 01:09:53
    to infinity, this hyperbola shoots up to infinity  if you let say good one go to zero. So I can’t
  • 01:09:59
    value, I can’t have a basket of, I refuse to have  zero apples. If I have zero apples I have to an
  • 01:10:05
    infinite number of oranges to compensate. Which is also impossible.
  • 01:10:09
    Exactly, right. So maybe this is nice for  mathematics, but somehow in real life,
  • 01:10:13
    you’re forbidden to have zero of  something, which seems, you know,
  • 01:10:17
    a little bit drastic. Anyway so that’s kind of  just one representative simplistic assumption.
  • 01:10:21
    But ok, let’s just roll with it, but anyways, I  thought that this was sufficiently concrete that
  • 01:10:25
    it would good to at least have this example. So  anyways, this slide is just a snapshot of these
  • 01:10:33
    two conjectures that Eric has in his paper, and  they’re very technical so we’re not going to go
  • 01:10:41
    and try to unpack them, but the point is that  in my response I show what’s wrong with them
  • 01:10:47
    essentially, so for example this conjecture 1  here, what I show is that it’s actually false,
  • 01:10:53
    and it’s false in a very simple way. Basically  he sets up all this structure as you can see
  • 01:10:59
    there from all the notation, and what I showed is  basically the simplest thing you can write down,
  • 01:11:04
    what’s called the trivial, it’s called the  trivial connection, this thing in gauge theory,
  • 01:11:12
    that satisfies his list of properties. So it’s  sort of like the simplest thing you can write
  • 01:11:17
    down actually satisfies it. So it’s kind of  strange that he would state this conjecture
  • 01:11:22
    if the simplest thing you can think of once you  know the setup also satisfies it. So basically,
  • 01:11:28
    it’s sort of obfuscation, right? And then  the second thing that I have here, I show
  • 01:11:35
    that it’s a tautology, and that this conjecture  basically says two things are equal, but how
  • 01:11:45
    do I say it, if you know enough gauge theory  you’ll see that they’re equal, and he basically
  • 01:11:52
    spent all this time setting up all this notation  obscuring the simple ideas, and so it’s sort of,
  • 01:12:01
    all the work that goes into unpacking what he  did, at the end of the day, once you actually
  • 01:12:07
    unravel all the terms and the notation, the thing  that he’s actually claiming is essentially a well
  • 01:12:12
    known fact. It’s basically, you know, writing  1+1=2 in the most complicated way possible.
  • 01:12:18
    Long winded superfluous obscure verbiage  from Eric Weinstein? I don’t believe you.
  • 01:12:23
    Right what a surprise, right? So anyways  that’s basically the content of my paper.
  • 01:12:29
    Got it. So it sounds like, you said November  2021, it sounds like in the wake of geometric
  • 01:12:35
    unity flopping completely he said why  don’t I pivot over to this new thing,
  • 01:12:41
    where economists don’t know gauge theory, and  I can see if I can trick them, pretty much.
  • 01:12:48
    That’s right. Well great, thank you, I think both of
  • 01:12:51
    these segments are, have been very elucidating,  I will definitely encourage viewers to go check
  • 01:12:57
    out your longer lectures on these topics if they  wanna get more into the nitty gritty of the math,
  • 01:13:03
    but I think this is very helpful for the  average viewer, and is pretty self-explanatory.
  • 01:13:11
    Great, thank you. Yeah.
  • 01:13:13
    Well that was even worse than GU. How does Eric  keep a straight face when he calls this work
  • 01:13:18
    revolutionary? But not just revolutionary. He  claims that it is Nobel-worthy. That’s right,
  • 01:13:25
    according to Eric, he and his brother and  his wife all deserve Nobels! But they’ll
  • 01:13:32
    never get them because of various big bad evil  something or other. Pretty incredible coincidence,
  • 01:13:38
    don’t you think? In this case, according  to Eric, his wife’s Nobel-worthy work was
  • 01:13:43
    suppressed by Harvard because it posed a threat  to something called the Boskin commission,
  • 01:13:48
    which was conspiring to come up with a fake  adjustment to the government’s methodology
  • 01:13:52
    for calculating the price index in order to  subvert democracy and save money on Social
  • 01:13:57
    Security payoffs against the will of the people. Was that the Boskin commission in 1996 tried to
  • 01:14:04
    figure out how to cut social security and raise  taxes without getting caught. Because that’s the
  • 01:14:11
    third rail of politics. And what they said is,  if we change the CPI, the consumer price index,
  • 01:14:16
    the way we measure inflation, because tax brackets  are indexed, and because entitlement payments for
  • 01:14:21
    social security and medicare payments are  indexed, if we claim that social security,
  • 01:14:26
    sorry if we claim that inflation is  overstated by 1.1 percentage points,
  • 01:14:31
    we will gain a trillion dollars in savings. But that’s not all! Apart from being suppressed
  • 01:14:36
    it was also stolen! By physicist Juan Maldacena. Juan Maldacena, you will find only one podcast
  • 01:14:43
    that he’s ever been on, and that is the Into the  Impossible podcast, if you look up gauge theory,
  • 01:14:51
    an intuitive way to understand gauge theory,  something like that, you’ll come up with this
  • 01:14:56
    really brilliant economic analogy that  sounds like, you know, Eric has copied
  • 01:15:02
    from Juan Maldacena. This is Eric’s work. This  gauge theory applied to economic transactions…
  • 01:15:10
    Eric and Pia. Eric and Pia. Yeah, Pia Malaney, yeah Pia Malaney, of course…
  • 01:15:14
    Juan knew that he had gotten  this, knew about Pia Malaney.
  • 01:15:20
    Funny how an idea can be both suppressed and  plagiarized at the same time, huh? The old hide
  • 01:15:26
    away but also steal and show! Seems like the  script of choice for both Weinstein boys. So
  • 01:15:32
    to reiterate, Eric deserves the Nobel! His wife  deserves the Nobel! Bret deserves the Nobel! Even
  • 01:15:40
    Brian Keating deserves the Nobel! But all of them  were horribly betrayed and shortchanged by evil
  • 01:15:46
    academia because of blah blah blah shoot me in  the face. This persecution complex is something
  • 01:15:53
    that all false prophets have in common. If Eric’s  work was worth anything, professionals would care
  • 01:15:59
    about it, and expand upon it, so to undercut this  obvious logic, he pretends he is being suppressed.
  • 01:16:05
    He invents concepts and cute acronyms, like the  Intellectual Dark Web and the Distributed Idea
  • 01:16:12
    Suppression Complex to manufacture an identity of  the brave truthteller fighting the establishment,
  • 01:16:19
    the hero battling against dark forces trying to  neutralize his genius at every turn. He is nothing
  • 01:16:26
    but a fame junkie spewing anti-establishment  tropes the public wants to hear, manipulating
  • 01:16:31
    a cabal of podcast hosts to promote himself and  aid in suppressing any dissent from his dogma,
  • 01:16:38
    ironically the thing he pretends to criticize  academia for. He really is no different from
  • 01:16:43
    Terrence Howard in spirit. Both pretend to have  revolutionized physics, and see themselves as
  • 01:16:49
    the most brilliant person alive. Eric may be  closer to that than Terry, but they’re both
  • 01:16:55
    still completely full of shit. Eric is much more  dangerous though, because he has a better ability
  • 01:17:01
    to appear credible, and thus his lies on topics  relevant to the public gain more traction. Like
  • 01:17:07
    Bret, he has a host of garbage takes on COVID and  vaccines. He denies the genocide in Gaza. And his
  • 01:17:13
    endless rhetoric railing against the university  system, peer review, and established physics, goes
  • 01:17:19
    a long way in fostering anti-science sentiment. Is there anything Eric is actually good at? It
  • 01:17:26
    seems like he’s good with money. From 2013 to  2022 he was a managing director for Peter Thiel,
  • 01:17:32
    which is not the same as a hedge fund manager and  is more or less an empty title, but he had to have
  • 01:17:37
    offered some kind of value to be on the payroll.  Although perhaps even this is a façade? Perhaps
  • 01:17:43
    his sole function for Thiel was being the internet  bullshit artist that he is. Thiel is a highly
  • 01:17:50
    prominent insanely wealthy anarcho-capitalist who  actively seeks to undermine established academic
  • 01:17:56
    and federal institutions. Eric is someone  who relentessly manufactures uncertainty and
  • 01:18:01
    instability in these institutions on social  media. Is this what Eric was paid by Peter
  • 01:18:07
    to do? Wage Peter’s culture war while he sits in  the shadows? Eric has the resume for the job. He
  • 01:18:13
    does understand math and physics, which gives  him the ability to describe standard graduate
  • 01:18:18
    level math and physics textbook information to  sound intelligent, and then sprinkle in whatever
  • 01:18:23
    anti-establishment rhetoric he desires to give the  illusion of being a purveyor of hidden knowledge.
  • 01:18:29
    This is genuinely all that Eric does. He’s not  an academic. He doesn’t do research. He doesn’t
  • 01:18:37
    publish. He doesn’t teach. He talks. And boy does  he talk. He uses as many big words as possible but
  • 01:18:45
    says very little. He uses podcast appearances to  explain concepts in as convoluted a way as humanly
  • 01:18:52
    possible, appealing to props and analogies that  make no sense whatsoever, and then pats himself
  • 01:18:58
    on the back for his explanatory ability. He  talks to Terrance Howard for four hours and
  • 01:19:03
    fails to explain how Terry is wrong in a way  that the listener can understand even a single
  • 01:19:08
    time. This is the essence of Eric Weinstein. Circling back now to the brothers as a pair,
  • 01:19:14
    they really do have a lot in common. They use the  same general formula. Academia bad. I got degrees
  • 01:19:22
    from bad academia but I am good. I’m a genius in  my field even though I don’t actually do research
  • 01:19:28
    or publish anything, having zero accolades  or respect among scientists in my field. But
  • 01:19:33
    that’s because they’re jealous of my brilliance  so they try to suppress my work and also steal it,
  • 01:19:39
    which are the precise opposite of each other.  All the nothing I’ve done should have earned
  • 01:19:43
    me a Nobel prize, and if you disagree  you’re just an establishment shill.
  • 01:19:47
    Sadly, this formula does work on a lot of people.  That’s why figures like the Weinsteins become so
  • 01:19:53
    popular. They trigger something psychologically in  a certain type of person. There are those who are
  • 01:19:58
    hostile towards knowledge and academic success,  so seeing an allegedly knowledgable person share
  • 01:20:04
    their disdain for institutions of knowledge  can feel validating. Whatever the case may be,
  • 01:20:09
    there are a few obvious threads of logic that  sorely need to weave their way into the collective
  • 01:20:14
    consciousness, or we will forever be falling for  frauds like these. First, when Weinstein-like
  • 01:20:20
    figures present their narratives, they should be  met with intense skepticism. It’s not that nobody
  • 01:20:27
    outside of academia could ever possibly contribute  to scientific progress, but it is exceedingly rare
  • 01:20:33
    in the 21st century, and almost every single  such person who claims to have done so is full
  • 01:20:39
    of shit. People outside of science who claim  to have revolutionized science have a very bad
  • 01:20:46
    track record of being lying manipulative frauds.  This goes even more so for those who spend most
  • 01:20:52
    of their time amassing a following and talking on  podcasts. They avoid engaging with researchers who
  • 01:20:58
    they claim are their peers, and instead engage  with the general public, who have no shot in
  • 01:21:03
    hell at understanding what they are talking about. This is the second point that must be understood.
  • 01:21:08
    If you are not well-versed in a particular  academic subject, at least at the level of
  • 01:21:13
    a bachelor’s degree, you will not be equipped  to gauge the veracity or the relevance of what
  • 01:21:19
    these figures are talking about. This is by  deliberate design. They will convince you that
  • 01:21:24
    they are explaining it so masterfully that you  are suddenly comprehending frontier theoretical
  • 01:21:30
    physics as well as experts in the field, but  you aren’t. It’s like pretending that you can
  • 01:21:36
    suddenly know an entire foreign language from  watching a three minute YouTube video. It just
  • 01:21:42
    doesn’t work that way. These figures say things  they know that 99.9% of the people listening do
  • 01:21:48
    not understand, and they say them with extreme  confidence, to project an air of legitimacy and
  • 01:21:54
    intellectual superiority. This resonates with  a large proportion of people, as ultimately we
  • 01:22:00
    are all in a way still primitive primates roaming  the savanna looking for a strong leader to guide
  • 01:22:06
    the tribe. We find peace and satisfaction in  relinquishing our critical thinking skills
  • 01:22:11
    and letting the strong loud alpha male do our  thinking for us. Demagogues and cult leaders are
  • 01:22:17
    tapping directly into this phenomenon when they  preach. So when they present their realities,
  • 01:22:23
    be skeptical. Be skeptical of everything. It’s  ok to be skeptical of the government, and of
  • 01:22:28
    large corporations, or anything else. But also be  skeptical of individuals who present themselves
  • 01:22:35
    as heroic whistleblowers and Luke Skywalkers.  Governments can lie. Individuals can lie too.
  • 01:22:42
    And the person or group that is contradicting  well-understood and well-established science is
  • 01:22:48
    far more likely to be the one who is lying. It’s  very easy to spin an anti-establishment narrative
  • 01:22:54
    that sounds cohesive, because people are primed  to distrust institutions. Everyone needs to be
  • 01:23:00
    similarly primed to distrust individuals who make  these outlandish claims. Everyone in academia is
  • 01:23:07
    corrupt? Really? Every last academic in the entire  world? Or maybe the singular person spinning that
  • 01:23:14
    narrative is a lying fraud shielding themselves  from criticism by anyone with relevant expertise?
  • 01:23:21
    Weigh for yourself what is more likely. It’s  almost always the latter, and these people
  • 01:23:26
    must be exposed, so that their toxic influence  on society can be neutralized. Their followers
  • 01:23:27
    must see the truth, such that they will stop  defending them, stop amplifying their rhetoric,
  • 01:23:32
    stop supporting them on Patreon, because only  then will they slowly fade away. There are so
  • 01:23:38
    many more figures like the Weinsteins that need to  be similarly exposed, and perhaps I’ll get around
  • 01:23:43
    to a few of them. Perhaps I’ll even circle back on  these two, since there is so much that we didn’t
  • 01:23:49
    sufficiently expand upon in this video in the  interest of time. But hopefully, for anyone who
  • 01:23:54
    made it through this video, if you previously  had a soft spot for either of these guys,
  • 01:23:59
    that has now congealed into the appropriate  sentiment, which is disgust and contempt.
  • 01:24:05
    So that’s it for the Weinstein brothers and  their adorable Nobel aspirations. I had been
  • 01:24:10
    promising this one for a while, so let me  know in the comments if you enjoyed it,
  • 01:24:14
    and if there are other similar figures you think  I should tackle next. I’ll see you next time.
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