Bret and Eric Weinstein: Brothers in Fraudulence
Summary
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.
Takeaways
- 👥 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.
Timeline
- 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.
Mind Map
Video Q&A
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.
View more video summaries
- 00:00:00Hey everyone, as you all know I enjoy debunking charlatans more than just about anything else,
- 00:00:05and today we have a two-for-one. We will be looking at Bret and Eric Weinstein,
- 00:00:10the self-appointed leaders of the intellectual dark web. I’ve never debunked brothers before,
- 00:00:15so let’s have some fun with it. Again, in case you’ve never heard
- 00:00:19the term before, these guys are prominent members of the so-called intellectual dark web, the term
- 00:00:25actually having been coined by Eric himself. The group of people I’m increasingly hanging
- 00:00:29out with is the intellectual dark web, which is emerging.
- 00:00:33The dark web of course being the place where people hire hitmen and watch kiddy porn, so it’s
- 00:00:37not really the most sparkling connotation. But the deeper down the rabbit hole you go with these two,
- 00:00:42the seedier and more repulsive they seem, so it is quite fitting. Now if you’ve seen some of my
- 00:00:47recent debunks on Terrence Howard, you’ve heard me talk about Eric a bit already. Well there’s a lot
- 00:00:52more to discuss here today, including a special guest to help me debunk his theory of Geometric
- 00:00:57Unity. But let’s start with younger brother Bret and then pivot to big boy Eric after that.
- 00:01:02Bret has a doctorate in evolutionary biology and taught at Evergreen State College for 15
- 00:01:07years. He was catapulted to prominence in 2017 due to an incident on campus.
- 00:01:12Here’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
- 00:01:22a statement about racial issues. In 2017 it was requested that white students and faculty
- 00:01:27leave campus instead for that year’s Day of Absence. Bret vocally protested this idea,
- 00:01:33saying that you can’t force people off campus just for being white. As a result, liberal SJW
- 00:01:38students threatened Bret with baseball bats, the media erupted with a story about reverse racism,
- 00:01:44and Bret became a hero overnight by standing up for marginalized white people everywhere.
- 00:01:49Of course the reality is totally different. The Day of Absence had always been a voluntary
- 00:01:55activity where all students could attend workshops and discussions of their choosing,
- 00:02:00and this year was no different, it was simply that the locations of these discussions had changed,
- 00:02:04with the off campus site only able to accommodate 200 people, making it obvious that it was not
- 00:02:10expected for all white students to attend, nor had all of the minority students participated in the
- 00:02:15past. None of it had ever been school-sanctioned, nobody was coercing white people off campus or
- 00:02:21making them feel unwelcome, and nobody threatened Bret with baseball bats. Bret totally exaggerated
- 00:02:27these events in his own correspondence, distorted the context surrounding those
- 00:02:31who were protesting a full six weeks after the Day of Absence regarding separate campus events,
- 00:02:37and instead went on FOX News with Tucker Carlson to play the victim in a story that reeks of the
- 00:02:42exact same vibe as the “War on Christmas”. This year student activists demanded that all
- 00:02:47white people leave campus or else! Oh my gosh! This is like something out of another country!
- 00:02:54Because of the FOX piece, enraged neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen descended onto the campus,
- 00:03:01repeatedly driving by and shooting guns into the air, sending in bomb threats, and as a result
- 00:03:06the school’s graduation had to be moved off-site due to safety concerns. Bret sued the school for
- 00:03:113.8 million, settled for half a million and his resignation, and promptly began his career as a
- 00:03:18podcaster and darling of the right. I’m troubled by what this implies
- 00:03:22about the current state of the left. Well, ya think? Well, ya think? Well, ya think?
- 00:03:29Where else have we seen this story before? Ah yes, Jordan Peterson. Frustrated academic taking
- 00:03:35a stand against PC culture? Cartoonishly fabricating the implications of Bill C-16
- 00:03:42to manufacture some kind of authoritarianism to rage against? Leveraging the blowback and riding
- 00:03:48the conservative news cycle to launch himself towards a lucrative commentating career, hiding
- 00:03:53behind a false flag of free speech absolutism? It’s all here, beat for beat. Bret, like Jordan,
- 00:04:00played the reluctant martyr and victim of nasty liberal academia, knowing full well that he was
- 00:04:07distorting the facts, putting students and faculty in real physical danger, many of whom
- 00:04:12were targeted with harassment and death threats from white nationalists, and he did it all anyway.
- 00:04:18He allowed Tucker to state that white people were being forced off campus, which was a lie.
- 00:04:23The core demand is that all people of your skin color leave the campus.
- 00:04:28He pretended protests were all about a leaked email of his rather than about the treatment
- 00:04:33of two black students by campus police and other social issues, which was a lie,
- 00:04:38and he kept amplifying these lies on Twitter well after the interview. Thus begins the story
- 00:04:43of Bret Weinstein, a demagogue from the start, stoking the fires of anti-woke conservative hatred
- 00:04:50for personal gain with no remorse whatsoever. Now on to the actual science denial, since that’s
- 00:04:56the real focus here. During and shortly following his departure from academia, Bret gained notoriety
- 00:05:02through a series of appearances on, where the hell else, Joe Rogan’s podcast. Having his web presence
- 00:05:09sufficiently amplified by these appearances enabled him to monetize something of his own,
- 00:05:14so Bret began dishing out consistently garbage conspiratorial takes about everything under the
- 00:05:19sun on his own DarkHorse podcast that he hosts with his wife Heather Heying, who also taught
- 00:05:25biology at Evergreen. Much of their rhetoric capitalizes on a perceived intellectualization
- 00:05:31of baseless anti-establishment talking points, which we will highlight where relevant.
- 00:05:36So what are the main topics he needs to be exposed for? Here’s what’s on the menu
- 00:05:40for the Bret half of the video. First up, Bret’s attempt at revolutionizing all of medical science.
- 00:05:46According to Bret, and also his brother Eric, Bret had an astounding insight about telomeres
- 00:05:52that was stolen from him to win a Nobel prize. To get some context, let’s first briefly discuss what
- 00:05:58telomeres are. Telomeres are sections of DNA that cap every chromosome in almost all animal species.
- 00:06:05The evolutionary impetus for this is that every time DNA gets replicated prior to cell division,
- 00:06:11because of the way that replicative enzymes anneal to the template strand,
- 00:06:14the last few bases can’t be read. So the new complementary strand is necessarily a few dozen
- 00:06:21nucleotides shorter than the template strand. This poses an obvious problem, because as incredibly
- 00:06:26long as chromosomes are, with many millions of base pairs, thousands of cycles of replication
- 00:06:32and cell division would eventually result in important genetic information being lost, and
- 00:06:36therefore new cells that can’t survive. Evolution stumbled upon a solution in the form of telomeres,
- 00:06:42which are around 5 to 15 thousand base pairs long. The purpose of them is simply to act as
- 00:06:48long stretches of repetitive non-coding DNA at the ends of each chromosome so that nothing bad
- 00:06:54happens as the tips are continually eroded during replication, and an enzyme called telomerase,
- 00:06:59when expressed, is constantly at work adding more nucleotides to the ends of each strand,
- 00:07:05to keep the telomeres intact as long as possible. If the telomeres are lost completely,
- 00:07:10further replication can begin to erode actual coding DNA, all kinds of problems occur, and this
- 00:07:16is called senescence. Ok, so that’s what telomeres are. What’s Bret’s big groundbreaking discovery?
- 00:07:23We actually have a kind of concern about pharmaceuticals very generally. And this
- 00:07:28arises from the fact that in my graduate work, as many of you who are long time fans of the podcast
- 00:07:34will know, my graduate work, I happened onto what I believe is a flaw in the drug safety system.
- 00:07:41I published this flaw, and the flaw basically amounts to the mice that are often used for things
- 00:07:48like drug safety testing and other experiments having been accidentally evolutionarily modified
- 00:07:53by the breeding protocol that is used to produce them so that their telomeres, which are these
- 00:08:00repetitive sequences at the ends of chromosomes have been elongated tremendously. And this has
- 00:08:05potentially very large impacts, effectively these animals have a capacity to repair their tissues
- 00:08:10so that if you poison them but you don’t outright kill them, they actually have an extremely good
- 00:08:14capacity to fix themselves, whereas we have a limited capacity, so they’re bad models.
- 00:08:19Yep. Bret says that because lab mice have longer telomeres than wild mice,
- 00:08:24all the drug testing on them is invalid and all the drugs in the world are potentially dangerous.
- 00:08:30There is so much stupidity to unpack here. First, and the most glaringly obvious problem with this
- 00:08:36logic, is that all drugs go through clinical trials on human subjects before going to market.
- 00:08:42So it’s mice first, then other non-rodent animal species, then humans, prior to going to market,
- 00:08:50always. This fact alone renders this entire idea irrelevant and idiotic. We know what drugs do to
- 00:08:58people before people can buy them. So even if lab mice were somehow more resistant to some toxicity,
- 00:09:04we would catch it in other test subjects. Second, telomere length is just barely even
- 00:09:09relevant to what Bret is talking about. He’s talking about toxicity and tissue repair. All
- 00:09:14telomeres do is prolong the duration of time that cell division can occur prior
- 00:09:19to the onset of senescence, they aren’t some magic shield from every kind of deleterious
- 00:09:24biological process. Telomere shortening isn’t even the only cause of senescence.
- 00:09:29Telomere length also does not correlate linearly with lifespan, mice have longer telomeres than
- 00:09:34humans do and we live way longer than them. And lab mice don’t have uniquely long telomeres in
- 00:09:40the first place, other species have longer ones. But most importantly, as any biologist knows,
- 00:09:45tissue degradation occurs via so many different mechanisms, given that there are so many types of
- 00:09:51tissues, from neural tissue to muscular tissue and so forth, all of this having indeed very little
- 00:09:57to do with telomeres. Telomere length does not have any impact on gene expression, its products,
- 00:10:03or its regulation, nor how toxic agents interact with the products of gene expression. A toxin
- 00:10:09that inhibits enzymatic function is not magically neutralized by telomeres. Telomeres are relevant
- 00:10:16to studies on aging, and also certain kinds of cancers, but that’s about it. This whole
- 00:10:20thing is just an erroneous observation extrapolated to something totally baseless,
- 00:10:25drenched in anti-pharma sentiment. It gets much worse, though. Bret pretends
- 00:10:30this absolute nothingburger of a scientific claim was so astonishing that it was suppressed by the
- 00:10:36establishment and then subsequently stolen by a prominent researcher who used it to earn her Nobel
- 00:10:42prize. Bret likes to retain a façade of humility whenever possible so he needs his big brother to
- 00:10:47take the reigns with this accusation, as well as generally painting Bret as some kind of mythical
- 00:10:52hero genius, and Eric does not disappoint. In Bret’s case you probably know him if you
- 00:10:57know him at all, as the heroic professor who stood up against what can only be described,
- 00:11:02and I swear I’m not making this up, as a Maoist insurrection at an American college in the
- 00:11:06Pacific Northwest, the Evergreen State College. Yes, he swears he’s not making up the dumb thing
- 00:11:12he made up. A Maoist insurrection. Maoism of course being a form of communism marked by armed
- 00:11:20insurgency. The students at Evergreen were total Maoists, with the way they had to hide in their
- 00:11:25dorms from actually armed neo-Nazis that Bret invited to their campus with his Tucker Carlson
- 00:11:32appearance. Good god what a pretentious douchebag. Part of what happened is that you are now
- 00:11:38distorting the history of science. You have a place in the history of science that you
- 00:11:43are not taking up, you are not advocating for, there’s something you don’t like about this.
- 00:11:49Well that’s laughable. Bret has published two papers. He’s contributed essentially nothing
- 00:11:54to the field of biology. He was a teacher. But this is Eric’s favorite story to tell,
- 00:11:59about his brother and himself, the revolutionary geniuses who got unfairly swept under the rug.
- 00:12:06I know that it happened and I know that it got buried. And I know that it’s part of what I’m
- 00:12:11calling the distributed idea suppression complex because quite frankly, you are not
- 00:12:16the only person who’s a part of this story. Gee, can you guess who else Eric is referring
- 00:12:21to? These two are absolutely shameless. Speaking of which, here comes the shameless accusation.
- 00:12:27For context, Carol Greider is a molecular biologist who discovered telomerase as a grad
- 00:12:33student in the 80s, and in general pioneered much of the early research on telomeres.
- 00:12:38Carol, we are stunned to find that our paper was turned away without review from Nature.
- 00:12:45Without review. Without review. We need your help. Can
- 00:12:49I send you the paper and have you look at it? And she says yes. And I send her the paper. And she
- 00:12:57sends back the paper with an unbelievable number of intense criticisms that are not sensible.
- 00:13:08Not sensible, which is code for Carol explaining to Bret how his paper sucks and him not wanting to
- 00:13:14accept reality. You can see for yourself on his paper, published in 2002, where he asserts that
- 00:13:20telomere shortening is responsible for all tissue degradation, ignoring that there are hundreds of
- 00:13:26tissue types each with their own aging dynamic. This is why when Experimental Gerontology sent the
- 00:13:32paper to Carol to review she panned it again. She was in line for a Nobel prize. That was
- 00:13:37well understood. I didn’t want to accuse a leading light in the field.
- 00:13:41Ok this is exactly why I got angry at you at the beginning of the podcast, ya moron. No,
- 00:13:45no offense. You were in line for a Nobel prize. Does Eric think they give away Nobel prizes like
- 00:13:51class participation trophies? The guy is beyond delusional. Carol discovered telomerase and is the
- 00:13:59primary pioneer of telomere research in general. Bret is a nobody who did
- 00:14:04nothing. “Oh what if this thing in mice” is not something you get a Nobel for, and it has nothing
- 00:14:10to do with what Carol got hers for. Insanity. I contact her, and I discover through talking to
- 00:14:18her that she and Mike are about to publish their paper on the long telomeres of laboratory mice.
- 00:14:25So this is the delta between wild type and laboratory mice.
- 00:14:30Yeah. And I’m shocked because she’s told me they’re keeping it in house. I’m disturbed,
- 00:14:37this was my hypothesis that you were testing. I should probably be an author on this paper.
- 00:14:44But at the very least I need to be an acknowledgement in this paper so that
- 00:14:48I can go back and point to it and say that was… It changes everything, that it was a prediction,
- 00:14:52it wasn’t something that was stumbled upon. Absolutely.
- 00:14:56Yes, Bret is accusing Carol of stealing his work. His work that was published in 2002,
- 00:15:02when in fact Carol published a paper on varying telomere length in mice in 2000, and even alluded
- 00:15:08to it in another paper in 1995. Whoops. Awarded the Nobel prize. Carol Greider,
- 00:15:14Elizabeth Blackburn, and Szostak. What Carol Greider does with her Nobel lecture, alright,
- 00:15:20Nobel lecture being the biggest lecture a scientist will ever give, the lecture.
- 00:15:25And filmed. And filmed. Is she delivers a paper
- 00:15:29in which she very oddly has now embraced my entire set of hypotheses about the effects. She has come
- 00:15:39over from the comparison between the paper of mine that she panned and said didn’t make any sense,
- 00:15:45she is now a total convert to the idea that senescence across the body is being caused by
- 00:15:50Hayflick limits that are telomere-based… Ok and...
- 00:15:53Bret outs himself here. He backpedals from tissue degradation and all kinds of other unfounded
- 00:15:58claims to connections between telomeres and senescence, which nobody disputes and were already
- 00:16:04well known. This is what frauds do, they make bold, sweeping claims, using specific keywords,
- 00:16:10and then they reign in these claims to reference established science with the same keywords,
- 00:16:15in order to pretend that it vindicates them. The Electric Universe grifters use this playbook,
- 00:16:20when they make up bullshit about electricity powering the galaxy,
- 00:16:23and then point at Birkeland currents as though they substantiate any of the bullshit they spew.
- 00:16:28As anyone can plainly see, this narrative attracts the people that it attracts because of
- 00:16:33the anti-establishment sentiment. These podcast episodes are littered with comments from people
- 00:16:39praising Bret for his unparalleled brilliance, just because he says a bunch of words they don’t
- 00:16:45understand. It’s ridiculous. Do they look for interviews with actual accomplished scientists
- 00:16:50and dish out the same type of praise? Were they dropping praise on Carol Greider when she got
- 00:16:54the Nobel? Of course not. They have no interest in following scientific research, and they have
- 00:17:00no idea what Bret is saying when he references scientific concepts. The allure is not any kind
- 00:17:04of alleged scientific achievement. It’s the story of the underdog, the one who got screwed over by
- 00:17:10the system, and the corrupt bureaucracies behind it all. That’s why people are here, and that’s
- 00:17:15the only story the Weinsteins know how to tell. This tale continues for Bret, as it did for most
- 00:17:22of the science-denying charlatans who are popular today, with the onset of the COVID
- 00:17:26pandemic. There are three primary narratives he pushed relentlessly in this realm. The
- 00:17:31first was a cartoonish level of confidence in the lab leak hypothesis with absolutely
- 00:17:36zero evidence. The second was being one of the main players in pushing Ivermectin as some kind
- 00:17:41of preventive measure for COVID, again with zero basis. And the third was jumping on the
- 00:17:46bandwagon of fabricating millions of deaths from COVID vaccines. Let’s take these one at a time.
- 00:17:52Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus from China in 2019, plenty of conspiracy theories have
- 00:17:57circulated as to its origin, contradicting the widely proposed zoonotic origin, meaning
- 00:18:02arising naturally in animal populations. In this case bats, and developing virulence in humans
- 00:18:08through natural evolutionary processes, likely after passing through some intermediate species,
- 00:18:13such as pangolins. The more outlandish of these ideas involved the notion that China deliberately
- 00:18:18created SARS coronavirus-2 as a bioweapon and released it on the world intentionally,
- 00:18:24something that has been quite thoroughly refuted via genomic analysis, which would
- 00:18:28require a whole video unto itself to explain. Far less conspiratorial was the notion that the
- 00:18:33virus accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan. As early as June 2020, Bret was on the record
- 00:18:39saying he was 90% sure this was the case. And that theory was demonized at first,
- 00:18:44that oh it can’t, c’mon that’s conspiracy thinking. That it started in a lab. But
- 00:18:50it certainly is a 50/50, would you say that? Oh it’s far more likely than that. As a matter of
- 00:18:55fact I said I think in June that the chances that it came from the lab looked to me to be about 90%.
- 00:19:02This is already ridiculous. 90% sure based on what? A hunch? His spidey-sense? He offers
- 00:19:09absolutely nothing to substantiate this. But it gets so much worse. As time passed,
- 00:19:15he began to reject any data regarding zoonotic origin as a conspiracy from the
- 00:19:20virology community. When any such papers were released, he would pretend they were government
- 00:19:25lies sent to squash the lab leak truth while people were distracted by the war in Ukraine.
- 00:19:30In conversation with Joe Rogan he has said even crazier things, like that pandemics emerging
- 00:19:36from nature are nothing to worry about, fatality during the Spanish flu of a century ago was due
- 00:19:42to overprescription of Aspirin, he thinks polio is actually due to pesticides, and implies that
- 00:19:48most viruses are lab leaks, claiming that monkeypox shows signs of gain of function
- 00:19:53research. He is just completely off his rocker. There was a enthusiasm for prescribing aspirin
- 00:20:03for people who came in with flu symptoms, and they were prescribed aspirin in doses
- 00:20:07that are now known to be deadly. Is something like an epidemic of
- 00:20:11polio that’s not really an epidemic of polio. You have an epidemic of gypsy moths
- 00:20:16that are being sprayed for with these toxic pesticides. Right, it’s a crazy, crazy story.
- 00:20:24Next up, the Ivermectin debacle. This incident is particularly fascinating
- 00:20:28to me. Once COVID vaccines began rolling out, anti-vaxxers were desperately looking for ways
- 00:20:33to criticize the operation and bypass the vaccines. Some suggested that Ivermectin,
- 00:20:38an anti-parasitic drug, was miraculous in not just killing SARS coronavirus-2, but also in preventing
- 00:20:45infection. There is no clinical basis for this assertion. But the most hilarious aspect of this
- 00:20:51story is that it was adopted by those eager to denigrate the pharmaceutical industry for rolling
- 00:20:56out what they baselessly decided were ineffective or even harmful vaccines meant only to make money,
- 00:21:02when Ivermectin is itself a pharmaceutical drug, developed initially by Merck, one of the largest
- 00:21:08pharmaceutical companies in the world. So there was not even any consistency to the
- 00:21:12narrative. Those pushing Ivermectin wanted to stick it to the pharmaceutical industry
- 00:21:17by boycotting their vaccines and throwing their money at a random pharmaceutical drug.
- 00:21:23When medical professionals caught wind of the situation and tried to communicate to the
- 00:21:27public how there is no basis for presuming that Ivermectin has any utility whatsoever in curing
- 00:21:33COVID or preventing its transmission, including Merck themselves who issued this very statement,
- 00:21:38they were instantly labeled pharma shills trying to shut down the story to maintain pharma profits,
- 00:21:45by people who don’t even exercise their own logic to its obvious conclusion. Anyone could make the
- 00:21:50same argument for those trying to push Ivermectin, a drug that would earn pharma lots of money if the
- 00:21:56whole world started taking it. It’s a breathtaking example of the hypocrisy of science deniers.
- 00:22:02Never one to miss out on some good old science-based charlatanry,
- 00:22:06Joe Rogan held an “emergency podcast” with Bret to get the word out on Ivermectin,
- 00:22:11and he continued to push it relentlessly on his own with the help of various other fraudulent
- 00:22:16guests. Bret and his wife, who if you recall are “highly skeptical about pharmaceutical drugs”
- 00:22:22because of the mouse telomere thing, took Ivermectin on the air on their own podcast.
- 00:22:27And we are a bit skeptical of pills. A lot skeptical.
- 00:22:31A lot skeptical of pills. Once again, there is no evidence of any kind to
- 00:22:35suggest that this drug has any utility in curing or preventing COVID. There is also no basis to
- 00:22:41suggest that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, the excuse for why Ivermectin was being
- 00:22:46promoted as an alternative. Bret will use garbage fake studies like this Carvallo paper riddled with
- 00:22:52typos which claimed 100% efficacy, and when he gets called out for it, instead of admitting it’s
- 00:22:58garbage he just says it’s a little sloppy. There is another large study which had to be retracted
- 00:23:03due to plagiarism and problems with the raw data. The same can be said for any other such papers,
- 00:23:08which again would require a video unto itself to elucidate, but I’ll link to some resources in the
- 00:23:13description. He also still promotes a website called ivmmeta.com which pretends to have a
- 00:23:19meta-analysis of ivermectin studies that shows it is overwhelmingly effective. In reality it did
- 00:23:24things like multiplying together the p-values of every study, including fraudulent studies,
- 00:23:29cherrypicking endpoints, and so forth. And of course, a meta-analysis of garbage papers
- 00:23:35will provide garbage insight. It’s as simple as that. Bad studies do not suddenly become
- 00:23:40sound when placed next to a bunch of other bad studies. The plural of garbage is not evidence.
- 00:23:46In general, Bret’s narrative had long been “why aren’t they running trials on this”,
- 00:23:51and once large clinical trials were being done on ivermectin, proving that it isn’t effective,
- 00:23:56he just came up with conspiratorial reasons to dismiss every single one of them. But dodging
- 00:24:01and lying about clinical data aside, the things Bret says to justify his
- 00:24:05position from the standpoint of biology are just laughably stupid. On his podcast he says this.
- 00:24:11The fact that the drug in question, ivermectin, comes from soil bacteria,
- 00:24:16it’s not a completely synthetic molecule, means that it is likely to be similar to things that
- 00:24:22one’s ancestors have encountered before, and there is therefore a good chance that the body has a
- 00:24:27reasonably elegant way of dealing with it rather than using some mechanism that’s not so great.
- 00:24:34Bret is clearly just taking advantage of negative connotations among the public surrounding the word
- 00:24:39synthetic. Whether a drug is synthetic or naturally occurring is totally meaningless.
- 00:24:44Soil bacteria produce toxins that can kill thousands of humans per milligram. Anthrax,
- 00:24:51the Clostridium tetani toxin which causes tetanus, or the Clostridium botulinum toxin
- 00:24:57which is the single most toxic compound known to mankind. Only the science illiterate sector
- 00:25:02of the public thinks that natural equals good and synthetic equals bad, any scientist knows better,
- 00:25:08but Bret isn’t a scientist and he’s deliberately manipulating the public, so this is what he goes
- 00:25:13with. That a molecule never existed until humans made it does not tell us anything about toxicity.
- 00:25:19And naturally occurring compounds can be made synthetically and they are indistinguishable.
- 00:25:24In the end, this is all just clickbait for anti-vaxxers, which exacerbates vaccine hesitancy,
- 00:25:29which in turn gets people killed. Lots of people who listened to Bret avoided getting
- 00:25:34vaccinated and died of COVID. This includes one very public case of a guy named Leslie Lawrenson,
- 00:25:41who was extremely vocal about avoiding the vaccine, repeatedly citing Bret’s content as
- 00:25:46the basis for his reasoning. But undoubtedly there were countless more. This is the point,
- 00:25:51Bret’s combination of incompetence and confidence results in measurable deaths.
- 00:25:56It could be considered criminal behavior. He is not just responsible for the deaths that can be
- 00:26:01directly attributed to his rhetoric, but for so many others that resulted from new strains that
- 00:26:06were able to emerge because of the enormous host pool available to the novel coronavirus
- 00:26:11due to having access to so many unvaccinated people. This alone makes Bret a garbage person.
- 00:26:18Why do so many people fall for these lies? It’s about the way they’re packaged. He knows how to
- 00:26:22dish out the conspiratorial overtones people are looking for while simultaneously shielding
- 00:26:27himself from all reasonable criticism. He can’t argue with the fact that all research
- 00:26:32on Ivermectin shows no efficacy on COVID, so clinical trials must have been fake!
- 00:26:37Something is engineering the appearance of X, Y, and Z. In other words there’s a
- 00:26:41price point. If you want something to be a fact, ivermectin doesn’t work. You want
- 00:26:45that to be a fact? That’s gonna cost ya. It can be a fact. But it’s gonna cost ya.
- 00:26:50Ivermectin was suppressed so Pfizer could make money!
- 00:26:54By not doing the relevant large scale clinical studies on ivermectin,
- 00:27:00and thus it not being approved by the FDA for use in COVID, that opens the door for EUAs,
- 00:27:08for emergency use authorization for the vaccines that we are now all living with and among.
- 00:27:15There is zero epistemological consistency to any of this. When Bret wants to pretend his
- 00:27:20conjecture is supported by data, he references any study he wants and distorts it to pretend it
- 00:27:25supports the things he says, as well as any bogus pseudo-study. Or, when published data clearly
- 00:27:31contradicts what he has said, he invents threads of corruption to pretend the data is invalid. He
- 00:27:36just sculpts reality to be whatever he wants it to be in order for him to always be right and the
- 00:27:41medical establishment always wrong. All he has to do is say “government bad” or “pharma bad”
- 00:27:47and those who are susceptible to this rhetoric will swallow any ludicrous accusation he makes,
- 00:27:52like that the government mandated COVID vaccines for the military in order to murder
- 00:27:58them, weed out free thinkers, and reduce military readiness, possibly having been paid
- 00:28:04off by China to do so. Yes, he actually said this. We’re interested in degrading military readiness,
- 00:28:12then the mandates might persist in the military while they are withdrawn in
- 00:28:18advance of midterm elections or something like that in the civilian population.
- 00:28:24He has also claimed that the vaccines were a net negative for everyone and had zero efficacy,
- 00:28:30despite saving millions of lives. He claims the vaccines themselves created most of the
- 00:28:35COVID variants, something which doesn’t even mean anything mechanistically. And of course,
- 00:28:39the fabrication of all the deaths. He’s brought this up on Rogan. And more recently with Tucker
- 00:28:44Carlson, he discusses the estimate by Denis Rancourt, a full on virus denier,
- 00:28:49of 17 million dead worldwide from the vaccine, and refers to it as “careful analysis”.
- 00:28:56I saw a credible estimate of something like 17 million deaths globally from this technology. So…
- 00:29:0417 million deaths from the COVID vax? Well you know when you scale up to billions,
- 00:29:11it’s not hard to reach a number like that with a technology this dangerous.
- 00:29:16Unfortunately, with regards to COVID vaccines and the lie that they were excessively harmful and
- 00:29:20caused so many issues, we have gotten to a point where so many charlatans have repeated this lie,
- 00:29:26over and over and over again, that a huge proportion of the public are simply impenetrable.
- 00:29:32They absolutely can’t be convinced that they were duped. There were not substantially more adverse
- 00:29:44reactions to COVID vaccines, proportionally speaking, than any other vaccine that was
- 00:29:49ever this widely distributed. Nearly all of these claims of cardiac events and deaths
- 00:29:54were completely fabricated. But because of the relentless repetition from hucksters cashing in
- 00:29:59on the paranoia, it has become reality for millions of people, and rehabilitating the
- 00:30:04public on this issue is going to take decades. Let’s hit one more talking point for Bret,
- 00:30:10which is without a doubt the most ridiculous of them all. As of late Bret has gone on the
- 00:30:15record supporting HIV denialism. He thinks that AIDS is not caused by a virus. It’s
- 00:30:22hard to decide whether this is more idiotic than it is downright offensive or vice versa,
- 00:30:27but let’s hear his justification. Was that actually the argument against
- 00:30:31HIV being causal, was a lot higher quality than I understood. That it being a real virus,
- 00:30:40a fellow traveler of a disease that was chemically triggered, that is at least a
- 00:30:46highly plausible hypothesis. And with Anthony Fauci playing his role, that was inconvenient
- 00:30:54for what he was trying to accomplish. There’s also ignoring a very important
- 00:30:58factor in AIDS, which is party drugs. That is the competing hypothesis,
- 00:31:04and for those who think that this is a preposterous allegation, you should
- 00:31:11look at this evidence. The evidence is suprisingly compelling. And if your mind resists that, realize
- 00:31:19that Luc Montagnier who got a Nobel prize for the discovery of HIV, later in life became convinced
- 00:31:26that the thing for which he got the Nobel prize was not nearly as important as he had imagined.
- 00:31:32That’s right, party drugs, a thinly veiled reference towards the gay lifestyle. Great work,
- 00:31:37guys. By the way, Bret is constantly referencing Luc Montagnier, who got a Nobel simply for
- 00:31:42isolating HIV, and who subsequently became a full-fledged crank and a half, pushing bullshit
- 00:31:48like structured water, homeopathy, and other blatant pseudoscience. This is a fraud referencing
- 00:31:54another fraud to appear credible, nothing more. This AIDS denialism bullshit perfectly
- 00:31:59encapsulates the problem with Bret. Our understanding of HIV from the standpoint of
- 00:32:04virology is profound. We have an all-encompassing comprehension of the precise mechanism by which
- 00:32:11the virus infects T-cells and damages the immune system. We have designed anti-viral drugs which
- 00:32:17disrupt this mechanism to the point where we can now control the disease. Why do you think AIDS,
- 00:32:23while still serious, is no longer anywhere near as urgent an issue as it was
- 00:32:28a few decades ago? Because of the incredible science we’ve done to understand the virus
- 00:32:33and develop treatments for it. But all of this science is meaningless to Bret,
- 00:32:38because he read some bullshit in a crappy book, or RFK Jr. said something stupid that he liked.
- 00:32:44What Luc Montagnier had said, and I read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci.
- 00:32:50Bret is nothing more than the clueless guy at the bar regurgitating the crap he fell
- 00:32:55for on Facebook, he just knows how to use fancy words to trick the listeners into thinking that
- 00:33:00he used some kind of scientific reasoning to reach these conclusions. It’s a farce.
- 00:33:05To be clear, everything we’ve covered so far is just the tip of the iceberg. We could continue
- 00:33:10for hours and hours, as Bret’s podcast is a treasure trove of paranoid insanity. Everyone
- 00:33:17is out to get him. Nobody can refute anything he says, and when people regularly refute everything
- 00:33:23he says he just refuses to engage with them. This has happened countless times with science
- 00:33:28communicators confronting him on claims regarding vaccines, myocarditis, and so forth. He feigns
- 00:33:34openness and then runs away like a coward at every turn, just like Eric does, as we will
- 00:33:39see in a moment. But the way he postures as an expert in a field he has made no contribution to,
- 00:33:45continually downplaying, insulting, and running away from experts in that field, is nauseating.
- 00:33:51He is an absolute nobody even in evolutionary biology, the field he studied, so on biomedical
- 00:33:58topics, he really is just totally clueless, which is why he hides from the backlash of his laughable
- 00:34:04and dangerous statements. Reality has caught up with him as of late, and he’s quite a bit
- 00:34:08less influential than he was a couple years ago, which is why he continues to pivot to ridiculous
- 00:34:13topics that are even farther outside of his area of expertise, topics that just happen to fulfill
- 00:34:19the ultra-right wing wishlist. Here’s a very recent interview. The obligatory wokeness rant,
- 00:34:26AI, UBI, Fauci, parenting, the dangers of pornography? And what’s this, the inversion
- 00:34:34of the magnetic poles and disaster scenarios? He’s pretending to understand geophysics now?
- 00:34:40Tremendously vulnerable to the EMP effects that will come with a major solar impact. The
- 00:34:47north pole isn’t always where the north pole currently is. And that sometimes these things
- 00:34:52flip. We are in the midst of what’s called a polar excursion. And that pole flip threatens chaos.
- 00:35:00Well that all sounds pretty familiar. Where have I heard that before? Oh right,
- 00:35:04Ben Davidson, the scientist cosplayer, con man, and cult leader of Suspicious0bservers,
- 00:35:10who I exposed the hell out of a few years back. Do you think Bret is a fan of Ben’s?
- 00:35:16Ben, I’ve been following you for quite some time, and I’m very pleased to finally be
- 00:35:21sitting down with you and I’m also thrilled that you would join me for this when there’s
- 00:35:29so much going on. So welcome to DarkHorse. It would appear so! I wonder if Bret will
- 00:35:34make it out to Ben’s apocalypse camp anytime soon. If you haven’t seen me expose this clown,
- 00:35:40definitely give that video a watch, as it’s some of my finest work. In the meantime,
- 00:35:45just marvel about the fact that there are people who can’t tell that Ben’s a complete
- 00:35:49psychopath just by looking directly in his eyes for three seconds. He is the stuff of nightmares.
- 00:35:56Anyway, that’s a quick introduction to everything that’s wrong with Bret Weinstein. Now we’re going
- 00:36:00to pivot over to big boy Eric. But first I have to tell you about a very important application.
- 00:36:06We all want a reliable method of finding accurate information on the internet, especially when it
- 00:36:10comes to science. Google searches turn up a combination of fact and SEO-driven fiction,
- 00:36:16leaving us with more questions than answers. Direct scientific literature searches with Google
- 00:36:20Scholar or PubMed connect you to research papers, but they can be very hard to read,
- 00:36:25with many behind a paywall. Thus enters: Consensus. Consensus is a new wave academic
- 00:36:30search engine that leverages AI and vector search to find and synthesize the best science for you.
- 00:36:36Consensus searches across 200 million scientific papers from the highest quality journals,
- 00:36:41and presents referenced information to you in easily digestible fashion. Just ask it
- 00:36:46any question, like, oh I don’t know, does Ivermectin cure COVID-19? Well look at that,
- 00:36:52the science has spoken, a resounding no! Somebody should tell Bret Weinstein. But that’s not the
- 00:36:57end of the investigation. Consensus pulls up the literature that is most relevant to the question,
- 00:37:02extracts key insights from each paper, and gives you a study snapshot which summarizes experimental
- 00:37:09data, methodology, and relevant outcomes. You can do this with any question you have,
- 00:37:13you don’t even need to know the precise keywords because of how vector searches work. Just talk
- 00:37:17to it like it’s your friend. And you can even give specific instructions for how you would
- 00:37:21like your answers to be provided for you. Give it specific prompts combined with your
- 00:37:25search. Ask for the mechanisms of action, or how two concepts correlate with each other,
- 00:37:30or to explain a topic in simple language. Whatever you need, in truly any area of academic study,
- 00:37:36from economics to anthropology. Is the gut microbiome linked to depression? What’s the best
- 00:37:42treatment for acne? How does a cricket chirp? Whether you’re a PhD candidate in theoretical
- 00:37:48physics or just a curious Jack or Jill trying to make sense of today’s news, Consensus is for you.
- 00:37:54Join over two million people who have already switched to smarter, faster, and more reliable
- 00:37:58information sourcing. Try Consensus for free, no credit card, no forms. Go to consensus.app/search
- 00:38:06and jump straight into your first search today. Now back to the debunking. Eric Weinstein rode
- 00:38:12the coattails of his little brother during Bret’s rise to fame from the Evergreen incident, using
- 00:38:17it as an opportunity to shoe-horn his face into the broader conversation, having his voice then
- 00:38:22amplified by, who the hell else, Joe Rogan. And boy does he have a lot to say. Just look at the
- 00:38:29thumbnails for some of these conversations. This is why war and conflict is rising! We are losing
- 00:38:36control! Break free from the matrix! Eric is such a wise Renaissance man and elder statesman, isn’t
- 00:38:43he? Look at this one, he says we need a scientific revolution! That’s pretty hilarious coming from a
- 00:38:49guy who has never made any meaningful contribution to science. You see, much like Bret, Eric has a
- 00:38:55doctorate, his being in mathematical physics, but he was never a scientist. Bret managed to publish
- 00:39:00two papers and then taught biology for a while. Eric has published nothing scientific whatsoever,
- 00:39:05and has never worked with physics in any capacity. He’s famous exclusively for
- 00:39:10saying things to sound smart on podcasts. Much like Bret, he spews paranoid conspiratorial
- 00:39:16anti-establishment tripe and complains about being overlooked by academia despite never
- 00:39:21having done anything worthy of being recognized. Of course he continually pretends he has done
- 00:39:26something worthy of being recognized. Something revolutionary, in fact. He says he has a theory
- 00:39:32of everything, which he calls Geometric Unity. He first unveiled this theory when he was invited by
- 00:39:37an old grad school buddy to give a public talk at Oxford in 2013. He didn’t attempt to publish
- 00:39:43anything about it, and then began complaining about how scientists wouldn’t review it or take
- 00:39:47it seriously, as though scientists are in the habit of watching two hour long YouTube videos
- 00:39:52instead of reading papers. When pressed as to why he refused to publish a paper about his work,
- 00:39:58he always gave one of several mutually exclusive reasons. If he published, people would steal his
- 00:40:03ideas. He can’t publish because Arxiv only accepts academic email addresses and he doesn’t have one.
- 00:40:09Academia doesn’t deserve his amazing ideas. He doesn’t need to publish anything, the lecture was
- 00:40:14recorded and people can just watch the video. Not to have his rightful place as the next
- 00:40:19Einstein taken from him, Eric took to creating his own version of academia on Discord,
- 00:40:24a place where he could cultivate an inner circle of blind devotees. Soon he had a community with
- 00:40:30hundreds of members spreading his gospel all over the internet. Once this had some momentum,
- 00:40:34Eric eventually did finally put Geometric Unity into written form,
- 00:40:38releasing it on April Fool’s day 2021, with the disclaimer that he is not a physicist but
- 00:40:44rather a podcaster, and it is merely a work of entertainment. If you ask him why he did this,
- 00:40:50he pretends that he did it to protect himself. There are no protections inside of science
- 00:40:56for taking somebody else’s work and putting another person’s name on it.
- 00:41:01This was a good protection. Well, and I put something saying that I choose
- 00:41:05to be an entertainer rather than a scientist, and therefore it has copyright protection.
- 00:41:10This is insane. You can’t just steal the published work of any scientist, that’s called plagiarism.
- 00:41:16Publishing research in respected journals is how every single scientist in the world does science.
- 00:41:23This is just his attempt to play both sides so he can appear humble towards real scientists or just
- 00:41:29stay under their radar completely, while appearing clever and resourceful towards his real audience,
- 00:41:34random people on the internet. His pseudo-paper is not intended for an academic audience at all.
- 00:41:40Why would he expect to be taken seriously by the scientific community when he is
- 00:41:44specifically telling everyone that he shouldn’t be taken seriously? Indeed,
- 00:41:49nobody in the physics community cared at all, or acknowledged him in the slightest,
- 00:41:52which Eric then pretended to be enraged about, like a little play for his fans. For years he
- 00:41:58had been baselessly complaining about how string theory has a mafia-like stranglehold on funding in
- 00:42:03the field and aggressively shuts out alternative ideas. Especially his, which is so revolutionary,
- 00:42:10he regularly claims, that it is the key to achieving faster than light travel and making us
- 00:42:16a space colonizing multiplanetary species. Yeah. Cause you’re saying we could get off this planet.
- 00:42:23What are you talking about in terms of the actual implementation of this theory of yours.
- 00:42:29Despite his disclaimers, the dialogue Eric had been pretending to yearn for suddenly
- 00:42:34came. Two people from within the Discord server, a mathematician and a physicist, decided to dig into
- 00:42:40Eric’s work. They published a paper discrediting it more than a month before Eric even put out
- 00:42:45his pretend paper, based on the Oxford video. These two were Timothy Nguyen and someone going
- 00:42:50by the pseudonym Theo Polya. Eric didn’t like this one bit, as it ruined his whole façade,
- 00:42:56so he began to attack anyone who acknowledged this paper, accusing them of backstabbing him,
- 00:43:01and then eliminated his critics all together by cutting the discord in half, banning many members,
- 00:43:07and maintaining correspondence only with his remaining acolytes, thereby enacting the precise
- 00:43:12brand of suppression he falsely accuses academia of doing. You can see just how volatile Eric would
- 00:43:19get when pressed about this paper by listening to this conversation on Clubhouse. Somebody is
- 00:43:24asking when Eric will address the criticism head on, and this is how he decided to handle it.
- 00:43:30When will we hear like a debate with you and Theo and Timothy about GU.
- 00:43:37Sorry who’s Theo? Uh Timothy and Theo they put out their retort to…
- 00:43:42Sorry, who’s Theo? Uh Theo Polya and Timothy Nguyen?
- 00:43:46I’m not aware of Theo Polya, where does… who’s Theo Polya?
- 00:43:53Do you know Timothy Nguyen is? Let’s talk about Theo Polya, who’s Theo Polya?
- 00:43:57He’s the coauthor from the paper… Who is he? Yeah who is he? I don’t know.
- 00:44:03That wasn’t the question though, right? No, that is the question.
- 00:44:06No the question was… No, that is the question.
- 00:44:09No you’re not understanding. You can’t just bully me.
- 00:44:11You’re not understanding me. I’ve never heard in the history of physics anybody expecting
- 00:44:17to be taken seriously as an anonymous critic. As you can see, Eric fixates on the identity
- 00:44:25of Theo Polya, cutting off the person speaking repeatedly as a way of derailing the conversation.
- 00:44:31It’s irrelevant who Theo is. If there is substance to the criticism, it doesn’t matter
- 00:44:36who is providing it, just like his insistence that it doesn’t matter that his grand theory is coming
- 00:44:41from someone totally outside of academia. Eric should engage with the criticism, especially since
- 00:44:47the other author is not anonymous. Tim Nguyen is a mathematician with a doctorate in gauge theory,
- 00:44:53the exact same field as Eric, and he is desperately hiding from this fact. Apart
- 00:44:58from flat out muting the person asking him about this paper, he pulls out every other excuse in
- 00:45:03the book to run away from it, from pretending it doesn’t exist, to making up stories about
- 00:45:08the authors being internet trolls who harassed his family, and everything else imaginable.
- 00:45:13Behavior of those gentlemen, however many there are, two or more, including various misogynistic
- 00:45:21comments against my colleagues, disrespecting Sabine Hossenfelder, while she may be a critic is
- 00:45:31also a friend of mine, I’m fucking sick of these two people. Assuming it is two people. Maybe it’s…
- 00:45:38but we don’t know what Theo Polya is. Great, so characters aside…
- 00:45:45No, no… There is a paper that was
- 00:45:47put out rebutting geometric unity. Right? No there wasn’t a paper that was put out
- 00:45:52rebutting geometric unity. There was an attempt to publish something on the Arxiv
- 00:45:57which was rejected that attempted to get in front of the draft that I put out, specifically
- 00:46:05looking at the text messages that were found on the server that supports these people to
- 00:46:12quote “make me cry” close quote. What I’m talking about is a phenomenon where people are trying to
- 00:46:17exploit a situation in order to make a name for themselves. And you’ll notice that many people
- 00:46:23from that Discord server are trying to get people like you to react to me to name these names.
- 00:46:31Well… no… You’re not, I’m going to mute
- 00:46:34you if you don’t keep it up. Alright. You’re muted now. I think you’re not hearing what I’m saying.
- 00:46:40We don’t allow people in general to go around making a name for themselves by being obnoxious,
- 00:46:49misogynistic, manipulative, it’s fucking enough. You know, the Arxiv meets 4chan.
- 00:46:56He calls them Arxiv meets 4chan, as though he isn’t dealing with academics far more
- 00:47:01credentialed than himself, and when the caller tries again to speak up and point this out,
- 00:47:06Eric says he has to go walk his dog. May I jump in real quick, please?
- 00:47:11Actually I’m kind of irritated. I understand.
- 00:47:16Yeah, but like I don’t wanna be subjected to this. Ok, can I just say a couple
- 00:47:21things really fast though please? Yeah but I’m about to go walk my dog, so…
- 00:47:26The caller persists, continually saying it’s about the math, and Eric just obfuscates every time.
- 00:47:33Misogyny, rape jokes, fixating on random people from Discord as a transparent way of evading the
- 00:47:39real criticism from real experts in the field. And I’m not saying that it’s them
- 00:47:45in particular, I don’t care about… Who’s Theo Polya? No, you’re not understanding
- 00:47:48me. I’m not putting up with misogyny. I’m talking about the math, Eric.
- 00:47:53I’m not putting up with threats against my family. You shouldn’t.
- 00:47:56I’m not putting up with any of the stupid shit that server engages in. Capisce?
- 00:48:01Great. Am I clear?
- 00:48:02I’m talking strictly about the math. No I’m talking strictly, and I said something
- 00:48:06to you. Rape jokes aren’t funny. Are we clear? Who thinks they’re funny? I agree.
- 00:48:11That server. He tweeted endlessly about
- 00:48:14this for months, all as a method of distraction so he could ignore his critics. Then his buddy Brian
- 00:48:20Keating comes to the rescue, saying this room is for physics, not petty squabbles!
- 00:48:25Yeah and I’m [???]. Actually the title of the room is let’s talk about physics. So I really
- 00:48:33wanna stick to physics and I wanna make sure that we do have enough time to get to questions
- 00:48:38about physics, so let’s move into that domain and stop talking about squabbles and so forth.
- 00:48:45Of course this person was trying to get more insight on Eric’s physics, so it’s
- 00:48:50just transparent redirection on Eric’s behalf. Brian even spinelessly defends Eric’s assertion
- 00:48:56that criticism is invalid when it comes from an anonymous source, and just generally shifts
- 00:49:01discussion away from pressing Eric to acknowledge the paper that invalidates his work. In fact,
- 00:49:07it’s worth taking a brief aside to mention that Brian is something of a joke himself. He gets
- 00:49:12points for being an actual working scientist, and he has debunked some pseudoscience,
- 00:49:17but he’s been desperately trying to join the ranks of the intellectual dark web for quite some time,
- 00:49:22promoting Eric every chance he gets, and he is endlessly sympathetic to certain types of
- 00:49:27anti-science propaganda, especially Discovery Institute, who he is always charitable towards,
- 00:49:33promoting them and leaving favorable comments on their videos, even very recently. I would bet he
- 00:49:38receives some kind of compensation from them, and he even deleted a conversation he had with me on
- 00:49:44his podcast, presumably because I shat all over the DI in it. All of this apart from writing an
- 00:49:50entire book whining about a Nobel prize he didn’t get and never deserved. Long story short, Brian
- 00:49:55should not be taken seriously. Now back to Eric. So let’s get down to brass tacks. What is
- 00:50:01Geometric Unity all about, and why does nobody in physics care about it? Admittedly, the specifics
- 00:50:07of this are beyond my pay grade. Fortunately we have none other than Tim Nguyen himself to walk us
- 00:50:12through the nitty gritty. To offer some preemptive context, many of the early objections had centered
- 00:50:18around 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
- 00:50:26in college, and he’s pretty sure it worked but now he can’t remember it. It does not incorporate
- 00:50:31quantum theory, which any theory of everything would absolutely have to do, it is mathematically
- 00:50:35inconsistent, and there are numerous other glaring omissions that make his work both incomplete and
- 00:50:40invalid. But let’s hear all this from Tim. Tim thanks so much for joining us, we’re
- 00:50:44ready to take a little bit of an in depth look at geometric unity, so take it away.
- 00:50:51Great, yeah, glad to be here Dave. So yeah, what I have here on the white board is a display of
- 00:50:59the two papers in question, there’s Eric’s paper on the left, his geometric unity paper that he
- 00:51:05released on April 1st of 2021. And there’s my response paper which I wrote with Theo Polya,
- 00:51:12my anonymous coauthor, back in 2021. It predates the geometric unity paper ‘cause it was based
- 00:51:18on his lecture that was on YouTube that was recorded in 2013. Nevertheless it contained all
- 00:51:26the essential details, but just for the sake of history that was what the material of the response
- 00:51:32paper was based upon. Yeah, anyway, let’s just go ahead and dive in with that context. So let me,
- 00:51:40before I go into the details, let me first just give a quick overview of what a theory
- 00:51:45of everything is, because remember Eric’s theory claims to be a theory of everything, so I thought
- 00:51:49I should at least clarify what exactly that means before I show what’s wrong with it.
- 00:51:54So very quick crash course here, so let’s recall that in physics we have four forces
- 00:52:03in nature. We have the electromagnetic force, the weak, the strong, and also gravity. So
- 00:52:10I’ve written these four forces over here. And what does it mean to be a theory of everything,
- 00:52:17well you want to be able to unify all these forces. And unfortunately right now, that’s
- 00:52:21not the case. Right now we have a unification of the first three, electromagnetism, weak,
- 00:52:27and strong. And those are unified in what’s called the standard model. And that’s what’s here on the
- 00:52:32left. And the standard model is quite intricate, it has all these particles which you can see there
- 00:52:37on display, but famously it doesn’t include gravity. And so part of the problem is finding
- 00:52:43a way, finding a model that would incorporate all four. And the other piece of the puzzle is
- 00:52:49that you also have to include quantum theory. And that’s also very difficult. The standard model is
- 00:52:55a quantum field theory, so we don’t have a problem there. But unfortunately we don’t know how to
- 00:53:00combine gravitation with quantum theory. Gravity is described by Einstein’s general relativity,
- 00:53:09which is a classical theory, but we don’t know how to combine it with quantum theory. So we
- 00:53:13don’t even have a satisfactory quantum theory of gravity, so solving that and combining it with the
- 00:53:19three other forces is going to be very difficult. But that’s just to illustrate the challenge.
- 00:53:22Just to clarify for the viewer, right, when we’re talking about combining these, like for example,
- 00:53:27electromagnetism and the weak force, they have electroweak, and then they predicted particles,
- 00:53:32and they went to the particle accelerator and they found, what was it, the W and Z bosons and stuff,
- 00:53:36so it’s not like just “oh, I think”, it’s not like a flight of fancy, we’re talking
- 00:53:40about actual real empirical science unifying these forces to get closer and closer to earliest epochs
- 00:53:46of the universe, like that kind of thing, right? Yeah, I mean of course the standard model is one
- 00:53:51of these very well tested and validated models, of course it’s not complete,
- 00:53:56there are still some mysteries, it doesn’t include you know, dark matter and things like
- 00:54:03that. But yeah, it’s been empirically validated. We are trying to extend what we have with these
- 00:54:10three to that last fourth one basically. Yeah that’s right. So right now we have
- 00:54:14sort of two separate theories, or models let’s say, which is the standard model and
- 00:54:21Einstein’s general relativity. And the standard model is already a quantum field theory and uh,
- 00:54:29but general relativity is not. So that’s sort of the lay of the land.
- 00:54:34Yep, and maybe just one last ingredient which is that the standard model is what’s called
- 00:54:39a gauge theory, gauge theory basically means there’s a gauge group lurking in the background,
- 00:54:46and a gauge group is a symmetry group. And in physics symmetry is very important, it basically
- 00:54:52in this case describes how the internal states of particles have certain symmetries, and so that’s
- 00:54:59just a very kind of important mathematical aspect of these theories, and that’s why you have a gauge
- 00:55:05theory, because these particles have symmetries. And so, well, Eric and myself we’re both trained
- 00:55:12as mathematical gauge theorists, well this is how the gauge theory occurs in the physics, because
- 00:55:18the standard model is itself a gauge theory. Got it.
- 00:55:22Yep, well let’s go ahead and dive right in. So, well we have in my paper stated
- 00:55:30four objections to Eric’s theory. So Eric’s theory claims to be a theory of everything,
- 00:55:34and it’s also a gauge theory. So that’s how it relates to the previous slide. But I’ll just go
- 00:55:37ahead and quickly state what the objections are. The first objection, in some sense the most fatal,
- 00:55:45as it were, is that there is no SHIAB operator. So in Eric’s work he introduces this SHIAB operator,
- 00:55:52and SHIAB is an acronym for ship in a bottle, and it’s an operator that appears in his equations of
- 00:55:58motion. So in physics we have equations of motion. Like in high school physics you studied Newton’s
- 00:56:04laws, and the second law is the statement that F=ma. That’s an equation of motion. And as you
- 00:56:10progress through physics you have more and more sophisticated equations of motion. And this SHIAB
- 00:56:16operator is the one that occurs in Eric’s work, and the objection here is that, well,
- 00:56:21Eric claims that there is this SHIAB operator, and I was able to show that the definition he tried
- 00:56:27to invoke to show that it exists doesn’t hold. So basically he can’t construct this operator,
- 00:56:34if you can’t construct the operator then your equations of motion doesn’t make any sense,
- 00:56:37so basically his whole theory collapses because he doesn’t even have this equation.
- 00:56:41It’s just a magical thing that he references but isn’t actually real. Got it.
- 00:56:47That’s right. And for those who want to go into more mathematical detail,
- 00:56:51I have this long two hour lecture on the Eigenbros podcast which you can find on YouTube,
- 00:56:56where I go into pretty concrete detail. I’ll definitely link to that, yeah,
- 00:57:00I’ll let everyone know. It’s actually quite, well,
- 00:57:05it’s, I made it concrete in that I explain the essential details of why this fails in terms
- 00:57:11of 2x2 matrices. So there’s a simplifcation in terms of that. So if people can understand 2x2
- 00:57:16matrices then maybe they’ll appreciate the lecture. Anyways, so that’s that.
- 00:57:25Ok, so objection 2 is that there is a gauge anomaly. So when we quantize the theory,
- 00:57:36that is when we take a theory that’s classical and try to convert it to a quantum theory, that’s what
- 00:57:40quantizing means, we have to show that certain anomalies vanish. So that’s just something you,
- 00:57:48well, typically wanna show that these things called anomalies vanish, and in the case of a
- 00:57:52gauge anomaly, the reason you want the gauge anomaly to vanish is that if it doesn’t then
- 00:57:57you lose gauge invariance, the symmetry that I said was very important. And, well what we
- 00:58:03show in our paper is that GU has a gauge anomaly due to the choice of gauge group that Eric makes,
- 00:58:12and that leads him into this fatal situation where you have this non-vanishing gauge anomaly
- 00:58:17and so you don’t have a quantum theory. So that’s the second objection that we have.
- 00:58:24The third objection that we have goes under the heading of dimensionality and supersymmetry
- 00:58:31constraints, and the way you can think of that is that GU specifies incompatible structures. So
- 00:58:38Eric’s theory lives in a 14 dimensional space, he claims to have various supersymmetric extensions,
- 00:58:44so supersymmetry is this extra structure you can have that relates fermions and bosons,
- 00:58:49it’s quite intricate. But anyways, at a high level, when you specify these structures, you have
- 00:58:55to have certain particles, you also have to have an infinite dimensional gauge group in this case,
- 00:59:00and all of these extra structures are contrary to what Eric set out in his work. So basically
- 00:59:08he sets up structures that are not compatible. And that’s the third objection that we have.
- 00:59:15And finally there are numerous omissions in the work. That was already evident in the lecture
- 00:59:22itself, and, well, the unfortunate thing is that in the write up that he had, he makes it also very
- 00:59:33evident that there are lots of missing details. Here are just two representative quotes that you
- 00:59:39can find in his work, and I highlighted the part where he blatantly admits that he doesn’t have the
- 00:59:45notes anymore for the claims that he’s made. I thought of it but I forgot,
- 00:59:51but it totally worked, trust me, bro. Yeah exactly. So going around, asking
- 00:59:58everyone to follow his work, but then finally when asked to provide concrete details, he can’t
- 01:00:05provide them. So quite unfortunate. Ok, so that’s the gist of our rebuttal for geometric unity.
- 01:00:14Awesome, cool. So to summarize, would we say that it is… doesn’t qualify as a theory,
- 01:00:21or it does but is merely unsubstantive, or would we say it is flat out wrong, or all of the above,
- 01:00:27how would we, in a sentence, qualify this? Yeah I mean, it’s basically not even competent
- 01:00:33work, right? I mean, there, I mean his GU paper is 69 pages, there are lots of constructions and
- 01:00:43mathematical fragments, but because there are so many missing details, and because of the
- 01:00:49problem that I already elucidated, it’s hard to see what value there really is.
- 01:00:56It’s just a very incomplete work to say the least. Perhaps we’ll call it whimsy based on mathematical
- 01:01:05competence. Something like that. Exactly.
- 01:01:09Very cool, thank you for that. That is definitely an eye opener.
- 01:01:14Well, there you have it. GU is junk. This is the primary lens with which we can view Eric
- 01:01:19Weinstein. He wants to be the next Einstein. Despite the similar last name, he isn’t. But
- 01:01:25to him, it’s enough to be perceived as such by the public. So what does he do? He avoids
- 01:01:31publishing anything for a decade to shield himself from criticism. He knew it would never pass peer
- 01:01:35review, so he simply attacks the concept of peer review every chance he gets. When he eventually
- 01:01:41does put something out after immense pressure, and legitimate criticism is immediately provided,
- 01:01:47he ignores it, lashing out at anyone who mentions it, inventing elaborate narratives of harassment
- 01:01:52and unsavory behavior as though that would invalidate the math even if it were true.
- 01:01:57Eric knows his reputation can’t rely on GU alone, so he frequently props himself up as an internet
- 01:02:03guru, making bullshit claims about having predicted important events and technologies.
- 01:02:08He 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,
- 01:02:19like cryptocurrency, without any basis whatsoever. He wrote a run-of-the-mill finance paper in 2002
- 01:02:25and uses it to pretend that he predicted the 2008 crash. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
- 01:02:31Because Eric can’t bear to face a reality where he isn’t actually the world’s premiere intellectual,
- 01:02:36but rather just some guy with a doctorate and a decent intellect, he regularly resorts to
- 01:02:41paranoia and conspiracy. Here he is talking about the government being out to get him.
- 01:02:46You know that the first person outside of me to get a look at geometric unity was Jeffrey Epstein?
- 01:02:56How did he know I was working on this? I don’t know. I wasn’t really talking about this stuff
- 01:03:01until, you know, even my close friends didn’t really know what I was up to. It’s really weird
- 01:03:07when the government is actually out to get you. When they actually send a spy, when they actually
- 01:03:12engage in disinformation campaigns. When they smear you. I’ll tell you why I built my channel.
- 01:03:18It’s gonna be a lot harder to roll me this time. In an alley. I got rolled multiple times, and my
- 01:03:25point is, I didn’t wanna become a celebrity. I didn’t wanna become well know. But it’s a lot
- 01:03:31harder to roll somebody who’s getting, you know I think I’m, I don’t know if this is mistaken,
- 01:03:39but I think I’m the math PhD with the largest number of followers on Twitter. Assume that I
- 01:03:43get banned on social media because somebody wants to make sure that my message doesn’t
- 01:03:48interfere with the dominant narrative. My favorite is the part where he claims
- 01:03:52he never sought fame, when that’s literally the only thing he’s ever really sought. That’s why
- 01:03:57he goes on podcasts instead of doing physics. That’s why he puts more effort into crafting
- 01:04:03his persona and fabricating aspects of his origin story than actually doing anything
- 01:04:08productive. He makes claims that the FBI has followed his family. He makes up stories
- 01:04:13about Jeffrey Epstein. Here he is on Rogan complaining about Harvard “burying his work”.
- 01:04:19Harvard university told me to remain in good standing with this program you cannot live
- 01:04:25in Massachusetts. Harvard has a program for how it gets rid of people it wants to get rid of who
- 01:04:31are in good standing. It makes them move.
- 01:04:35It makes them move so they can’t complete their thesis. I had effectively gotten on
- 01:04:40the wrong side, I proposed some equations that I was told were insufficiently non-linear,
- 01:04:45never mind what that means. The story of a guy who is not allowed to attend his own
- 01:04:49thesis defense. To any academician, you hear it like, what do you mean you weren’t allowed to,
- 01:04:54you present your thesis! No no no. I was not allowed in the room of my own thesis defense.
- 01:04:59So this is why Harvard wanted you to move out of state.
- 01:05:02Another victim of evil academia, just like baby brother Bret! The claims here are
- 01:05:07endless. He says that he was prevented from presenting his own thesis defense, something
- 01:05:12never done in the history of the world, when in reality it was just reviewed as a committee,
- 01:05:16the usual practice of the Harvard math department. This paranoia extends to his wife, Pia Malaney,
- 01:05:23as well. Eric cowrote two chapters of Pia’s doctoral thesis in economics by essentially
- 01:05:28just applying gauge theory to a problem in economics, thereby re-deriving an inflation index
- 01:05:33that already exists. He routinely refers to this work as “revolutionary”, even though absolutely
- 01:05:39nobody cares about it, which is confirmed by the practically non-existent citations.
- 01:05:44Pia Malaney’s thesis revolutionized all of economic theory, and it hasn’t been
- 01:05:49understood. If you want to do something revolutionary I promise you, that’s been,
- 01:05:56it’s an arbitrage I can share it with the world, nobody will do anything with it, because
- 01:06:02the world decided to stand in the way of that progress. That’s an incontrovertible fact to me.
- 01:06:08Fortunately our friend Tim has debunked this claim as well, so why don’t we check in with him for
- 01:06:13another tidy refutation of Eric’s inflated claims? Ok so we’re back with Tim, and now let’s take a
- 01:06:19look at some of this economics work as well. Take it away again Tim.
- 01:06:24Yeah, so also in 2021, Eric went out on a limb to promote his work on economics and gauge theory,
- 01:06:34that’s sort of the short title here of this somewhat long title of this paper. He gave a
- 01:06:42talk at the University of Chicago in November of 2021, sort of under the same pretext as with his
- 01:06:50physics lecture. Basically other scientists don’t know what they’re doing, if only they understood
- 01:06:56this gauge theory you know, yoga, that I know and nobody else knows, they would have their
- 01:07:02eyes open to this revolution. And this work is also joint with his wife Pia Malaney who wrote
- 01:07:08her dissertation back in ‘96 at Harvard, where she combined gauge theoretic ideas into her, well her
- 01:07:17economics PhD thinking about economic indices and inflation and all that. Anyway so this is
- 01:07:23sort of like a reboot of that program. So in this case he actually wrote a paper, and so I was able
- 01:07:31to actually write a proper response, because there was an actual paper this time, rather than just a
- 01:07:36video. And yeah, this paper is now on the Arxiv, and yeah, so people can also download it, and
- 01:07:44being on the Arxiv makes it even more official. Yeah, cause it was, the Arxiv is moderated, and
- 01:07:51this paper did go through that moderation process. Yeah, it’s a legitimate source of information.
- 01:07:56That’s right. Ok, in this case it’s also just by me, there’s no anonymous coauthor. Ok, anyways,
- 01:08:01so let me kind of also just kind of summarize some of the problems with Eric and his wife’s
- 01:08:08work. So let me just start off real basic, which is that the work makes a lot of very
- 01:08:14simplistic assumptions, which is quite unfortunate if you’re going to make this claim that it’s going
- 01:08:20to revolutionize economics. And in this case Eric went on Brian Keating’s podcast and said that this
- 01:08:26work was the most important work in mathematical finance or economics in the last 25 to 50 years,
- 01:08:31right? So when you make so many simplifying assumptions it kind of, really dilutes that
- 01:08:36claim. And let me just give you one representative such assumption. So here on the right here,
- 01:08:41I have what’s called an indifference curve. And that’s a curve that economists use to describe
- 01:08:47what an agent, a person, might consider equivalent sets of goods. That’s why they’re indifferent to
- 01:08:53which they obtain. So in this case if there’s two goods, good one on the X-axis, say apples,
- 01:08:59and good two on the Y-axis, say oranges, then you know maybe this point is (1,1), so that’s a
- 01:09:07basket of one apple and one orange, and over here is maybe a quarter of an apple and four oranges.
- 01:09:15So maybe for this person they value one apple and one orange the same way they would value a quarter
- 01:09:21of an apple and four oranges. Same with other points on this, you know, hyperbola. Anyways,
- 01:09:29so one of the things that Eric assumes in his paper is what’s called completeness. So he assumes
- 01:09:35these indifference curves are complete. Meaning that they can’t just abruptly end. So these curves
- 01:09:41have to go off to infinity. And if you translate that directly into, what is this really saying,
- 01:09:47one of the consequences is that it’s impossible to value zero of a good. Because this curve shoots up
- 01:09:53to infinity, this hyperbola shoots up to infinity if you let say good one go to zero. So I can’t
- 01:09:59value, I can’t have a basket of, I refuse to have zero apples. If I have zero apples I have to an
- 01:10:05infinite number of oranges to compensate. Which is also impossible.
- 01:10:09Exactly, right. So maybe this is nice for mathematics, but somehow in real life,
- 01:10:13you’re forbidden to have zero of something, which seems, you know,
- 01:10:17a little bit drastic. Anyway so that’s kind of just one representative simplistic assumption.
- 01:10:21But ok, let’s just roll with it, but anyways, I thought that this was sufficiently concrete that
- 01:10:25it would good to at least have this example. So anyways, this slide is just a snapshot of these
- 01:10:33two conjectures that Eric has in his paper, and they’re very technical so we’re not going to go
- 01:10:41and try to unpack them, but the point is that in my response I show what’s wrong with them
- 01:10:47essentially, so for example this conjecture 1 here, what I show is that it’s actually false,
- 01:10:53and it’s false in a very simple way. Basically he sets up all this structure as you can see
- 01:10:59there from all the notation, and what I showed is basically the simplest thing you can write down,
- 01:11:04what’s called the trivial, it’s called the trivial connection, this thing in gauge theory,
- 01:11:12that satisfies his list of properties. So it’s sort of like the simplest thing you can write
- 01:11:17down actually satisfies it. So it’s kind of strange that he would state this conjecture
- 01:11:22if the simplest thing you can think of once you know the setup also satisfies it. So basically,
- 01:11:28it’s sort of obfuscation, right? And then the second thing that I have here, I show
- 01:11:35that it’s a tautology, and that this conjecture basically says two things are equal, but how
- 01:11:45do I say it, if you know enough gauge theory you’ll see that they’re equal, and he basically
- 01:11:52spent all this time setting up all this notation obscuring the simple ideas, and so it’s sort of,
- 01:12:01all the work that goes into unpacking what he did, at the end of the day, once you actually
- 01:12:07unravel all the terms and the notation, the thing that he’s actually claiming is essentially a well
- 01:12:12known fact. It’s basically, you know, writing 1+1=2 in the most complicated way possible.
- 01:12:18Long winded superfluous obscure verbiage from Eric Weinstein? I don’t believe you.
- 01:12:23Right what a surprise, right? So anyways that’s basically the content of my paper.
- 01:12:29Got it. So it sounds like, you said November 2021, it sounds like in the wake of geometric
- 01:12:35unity flopping completely he said why don’t I pivot over to this new thing,
- 01:12:41where economists don’t know gauge theory, and I can see if I can trick them, pretty much.
- 01:12:48That’s right. Well great, thank you, I think both of
- 01:12:51these segments are, have been very elucidating, I will definitely encourage viewers to go check
- 01:12:57out your longer lectures on these topics if they wanna get more into the nitty gritty of the math,
- 01:13:03but I think this is very helpful for the average viewer, and is pretty self-explanatory.
- 01:13:11Great, thank you. Yeah.
- 01:13:13Well that was even worse than GU. How does Eric keep a straight face when he calls this work
- 01:13:18revolutionary? But not just revolutionary. He claims that it is Nobel-worthy. That’s right,
- 01:13:25according to Eric, he and his brother and his wife all deserve Nobels! But they’ll
- 01:13:32never get them because of various big bad evil something or other. Pretty incredible coincidence,
- 01:13:38don’t you think? In this case, according to Eric, his wife’s Nobel-worthy work was
- 01:13:43suppressed by Harvard because it posed a threat to something called the Boskin commission,
- 01:13:48which was conspiring to come up with a fake adjustment to the government’s methodology
- 01:13:52for calculating the price index in order to subvert democracy and save money on Social
- 01:13:57Security payoffs against the will of the people. Was that the Boskin commission in 1996 tried to
- 01:14:04figure out how to cut social security and raise taxes without getting caught. Because that’s the
- 01:14:11third rail of politics. And what they said is, if we change the CPI, the consumer price index,
- 01:14:16the way we measure inflation, because tax brackets are indexed, and because entitlement payments for
- 01:14:21social security and medicare payments are indexed, if we claim that social security,
- 01:14:26sorry if we claim that inflation is overstated by 1.1 percentage points,
- 01:14:31we will gain a trillion dollars in savings. But that’s not all! Apart from being suppressed
- 01:14:36it was also stolen! By physicist Juan Maldacena. Juan Maldacena, you will find only one podcast
- 01:14:43that he’s ever been on, and that is the Into the Impossible podcast, if you look up gauge theory,
- 01:14:51an intuitive way to understand gauge theory, something like that, you’ll come up with this
- 01:14:56really brilliant economic analogy that sounds like, you know, Eric has copied
- 01:15:02from Juan Maldacena. This is Eric’s work. This gauge theory applied to economic transactions…
- 01:15:10Eric and Pia. Eric and Pia. Yeah, Pia Malaney, yeah Pia Malaney, of course…
- 01:15:14Juan knew that he had gotten this, knew about Pia Malaney.
- 01:15:20Funny how an idea can be both suppressed and plagiarized at the same time, huh? The old hide
- 01:15:26away but also steal and show! Seems like the script of choice for both Weinstein boys. So
- 01:15:32to reiterate, Eric deserves the Nobel! His wife deserves the Nobel! Bret deserves the Nobel! Even
- 01:15:40Brian Keating deserves the Nobel! But all of them were horribly betrayed and shortchanged by evil
- 01:15:46academia because of blah blah blah shoot me in the face. This persecution complex is something
- 01:15:53that all false prophets have in common. If Eric’s work was worth anything, professionals would care
- 01:15:59about it, and expand upon it, so to undercut this obvious logic, he pretends he is being suppressed.
- 01:16:05He invents concepts and cute acronyms, like the Intellectual Dark Web and the Distributed Idea
- 01:16:12Suppression Complex to manufacture an identity of the brave truthteller fighting the establishment,
- 01:16:19the hero battling against dark forces trying to neutralize his genius at every turn. He is nothing
- 01:16:26but a fame junkie spewing anti-establishment tropes the public wants to hear, manipulating
- 01:16:31a cabal of podcast hosts to promote himself and aid in suppressing any dissent from his dogma,
- 01:16:38ironically the thing he pretends to criticize academia for. He really is no different from
- 01:16:43Terrence Howard in spirit. Both pretend to have revolutionized physics, and see themselves as
- 01:16:49the most brilliant person alive. Eric may be closer to that than Terry, but they’re both
- 01:16:55still completely full of shit. Eric is much more dangerous though, because he has a better ability
- 01:17:01to appear credible, and thus his lies on topics relevant to the public gain more traction. Like
- 01:17:07Bret, he has a host of garbage takes on COVID and vaccines. He denies the genocide in Gaza. And his
- 01:17:13endless rhetoric railing against the university system, peer review, and established physics, goes
- 01:17:19a long way in fostering anti-science sentiment. Is there anything Eric is actually good at? It
- 01:17:26seems like he’s good with money. From 2013 to 2022 he was a managing director for Peter Thiel,
- 01:17:32which is not the same as a hedge fund manager and is more or less an empty title, but he had to have
- 01:17:37offered some kind of value to be on the payroll. Although perhaps even this is a façade? Perhaps
- 01:17:43his sole function for Thiel was being the internet bullshit artist that he is. Thiel is a highly
- 01:17:50prominent insanely wealthy anarcho-capitalist who actively seeks to undermine established academic
- 01:17:56and federal institutions. Eric is someone who relentessly manufactures uncertainty and
- 01:18:01instability in these institutions on social media. Is this what Eric was paid by Peter
- 01:18:07to do? Wage Peter’s culture war while he sits in the shadows? Eric has the resume for the job. He
- 01:18:13does understand math and physics, which gives him the ability to describe standard graduate
- 01:18:18level math and physics textbook information to sound intelligent, and then sprinkle in whatever
- 01:18:23anti-establishment rhetoric he desires to give the illusion of being a purveyor of hidden knowledge.
- 01:18:29This is genuinely all that Eric does. He’s not an academic. He doesn’t do research. He doesn’t
- 01:18:37publish. He doesn’t teach. He talks. And boy does he talk. He uses as many big words as possible but
- 01:18:45says very little. He uses podcast appearances to explain concepts in as convoluted a way as humanly
- 01:18:52possible, appealing to props and analogies that make no sense whatsoever, and then pats himself
- 01:18:58on the back for his explanatory ability. He talks to Terrance Howard for four hours and
- 01:19:03fails to explain how Terry is wrong in a way that the listener can understand even a single
- 01:19:08time. This is the essence of Eric Weinstein. Circling back now to the brothers as a pair,
- 01:19:14they really do have a lot in common. They use the same general formula. Academia bad. I got degrees
- 01:19:22from bad academia but I am good. I’m a genius in my field even though I don’t actually do research
- 01:19:28or publish anything, having zero accolades or respect among scientists in my field. But
- 01:19:33that’s because they’re jealous of my brilliance so they try to suppress my work and also steal it,
- 01:19:39which are the precise opposite of each other. All the nothing I’ve done should have earned
- 01:19:43me a Nobel prize, and if you disagree you’re just an establishment shill.
- 01:19:47Sadly, this formula does work on a lot of people. That’s why figures like the Weinsteins become so
- 01:19:53popular. They trigger something psychologically in a certain type of person. There are those who are
- 01:19:58hostile towards knowledge and academic success, so seeing an allegedly knowledgable person share
- 01:20:04their disdain for institutions of knowledge can feel validating. Whatever the case may be,
- 01:20:09there are a few obvious threads of logic that sorely need to weave their way into the collective
- 01:20:14consciousness, or we will forever be falling for frauds like these. First, when Weinstein-like
- 01:20:20figures present their narratives, they should be met with intense skepticism. It’s not that nobody
- 01:20:27outside of academia could ever possibly contribute to scientific progress, but it is exceedingly rare
- 01:20:33in the 21st century, and almost every single such person who claims to have done so is full
- 01:20:39of shit. People outside of science who claim to have revolutionized science have a very bad
- 01:20:46track record of being lying manipulative frauds. This goes even more so for those who spend most
- 01:20:52of their time amassing a following and talking on podcasts. They avoid engaging with researchers who
- 01:20:58they claim are their peers, and instead engage with the general public, who have no shot in
- 01:21:03hell at understanding what they are talking about. This is the second point that must be understood.
- 01:21:08If you are not well-versed in a particular academic subject, at least at the level of
- 01:21:13a bachelor’s degree, you will not be equipped to gauge the veracity or the relevance of what
- 01:21:19these figures are talking about. This is by deliberate design. They will convince you that
- 01:21:24they are explaining it so masterfully that you are suddenly comprehending frontier theoretical
- 01:21:30physics as well as experts in the field, but you aren’t. It’s like pretending that you can
- 01:21:36suddenly know an entire foreign language from watching a three minute YouTube video. It just
- 01:21:42doesn’t work that way. These figures say things they know that 99.9% of the people listening do
- 01:21:48not understand, and they say them with extreme confidence, to project an air of legitimacy and
- 01:21:54intellectual superiority. This resonates with a large proportion of people, as ultimately we
- 01:22:00are all in a way still primitive primates roaming the savanna looking for a strong leader to guide
- 01:22:06the tribe. We find peace and satisfaction in relinquishing our critical thinking skills
- 01:22:11and letting the strong loud alpha male do our thinking for us. Demagogues and cult leaders are
- 01:22:17tapping directly into this phenomenon when they preach. So when they present their realities,
- 01:22:23be skeptical. Be skeptical of everything. It’s ok to be skeptical of the government, and of
- 01:22:28large corporations, or anything else. But also be skeptical of individuals who present themselves
- 01:22:35as heroic whistleblowers and Luke Skywalkers. Governments can lie. Individuals can lie too.
- 01:22:42And the person or group that is contradicting well-understood and well-established science is
- 01:22:48far more likely to be the one who is lying. It’s very easy to spin an anti-establishment narrative
- 01:22:54that sounds cohesive, because people are primed to distrust institutions. Everyone needs to be
- 01:23:00similarly primed to distrust individuals who make these outlandish claims. Everyone in academia is
- 01:23:07corrupt? Really? Every last academic in the entire world? Or maybe the singular person spinning that
- 01:23:14narrative is a lying fraud shielding themselves from criticism by anyone with relevant expertise?
- 01:23:21Weigh for yourself what is more likely. It’s almost always the latter, and these people
- 01:23:26must be exposed, so that their toxic influence on society can be neutralized. Their followers
- 01:23:27must see the truth, such that they will stop defending them, stop amplifying their rhetoric,
- 01:23:32stop supporting them on Patreon, because only then will they slowly fade away. There are so
- 01:23:38many more figures like the Weinsteins that need to be similarly exposed, and perhaps I’ll get around
- 01:23:43to a few of them. Perhaps I’ll even circle back on these two, since there is so much that we didn’t
- 01:23:49sufficiently expand upon in this video in the interest of time. But hopefully, for anyone who
- 01:23:54made it through this video, if you previously had a soft spot for either of these guys,
- 01:23:59that has now congealed into the appropriate sentiment, which is disgust and contempt.
- 01:24:05So that’s it for the Weinstein brothers and their adorable Nobel aspirations. I had been
- 01:24:10promising this one for a while, so let me know in the comments if you enjoyed it,
- 01:24:14and if there are other similar figures you think I should tackle next. I’ll see you next time.
- Weinstein Brothers
- Intellectual Dark Web
- COVID-19
- Geometric Unity
- Scientific Conspiracy
- Evergreen State College
- Ivermectin
- Academia
- Scientific Misrepresentation
- Conspiracy Theories