Chris and Matt take a peak behind the curtain at Guru Community dynamics in the Web 2.0 era in an extended interview with Dan Gilbert, a self described 'Discord creature'. Dan provides insights from his long term participation in Eric Weinstein's 'Unofficial Portal' Discord and reveals the mystery behind the 'mentally unstable' community member!If you ever wanted to learn about the intricate distinctions between Geometric Unity, and Geometric Marginalism or the ill fated outcome of Eric's 'Experts only' forum... now is your chance.We will be back next week with our regular episode on Contrapoints.Dan's apology song to EricFollow Dan on Twitter (@thebadstats)Episode Art used with permission of Michael M. AKA Pineapplemikel
Welcome to this special edition of Decoding the Gurus.
Listeners, I got a call on the bright red emergency guru's phone from my colleague Christopher, letting me know that there was an important interview that we needed to do.
It's with a fellow named Dan Gilbert who got in touch with us because he wanted to share his experiences on the unofficial portal Discord server.
That is the portal associated with Eric Weinstein.
God, is it Weinstein or Weinstein?
We get this constantly wrong.
It's Weinstein, like Einstein.
Einstein, yeah.
So I had it right.
Hi, Chris.
Welcome.
How are you?
I'm doing all right, as usual.
And I noticed you called me Christopher, which means that this is definitely serious.
I don't think I've ever heard you call me Christopher before.
Yeah, yeah.
Christopher Cook, isn't your name?
Is it Christopher Cook?
No, it's Kavanagh.
Of course, it's Kavanagh, isn't it?
What is this, Mark?
What's this?
Liam shaming.
Is this a retaliation?
Listeners, you may not be aware if you don't follow Chris fanatically that he was interviewed on another podcast and it was nice.
He gave a shout out to this podcast and mentioned me, which was nice, I thought.
But then he dropped the ball pretty badly by getting my name wrong, listeners.
Getting it wrong.
What did you call me?
Temporarily.
Temporarily wrong.
Matthew Smith, you described me as.
Now, that's the bit I don't understand, Chris, because, you know, Smith doesn't sound anything like Brown.
Like, very different names.
How did you get those two mixed up?
Yes, so I admit I did make a slight error in...
Misnaming you.
I was going to say dead naming you, but that's the wrong term.
That's not the right term.
That's incorrect.
Yes, so glad I didn't say that.
I'll point that out.
So, Matthew Brown, it's fair to say, I think, is a slightly generic name.
And Matthew Smith, although it doesn't sound similar, It has the same generic quality.
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
No, I get it.
You're saying my name is so boring that it's easy to get mixed up with other boring names.
I get it.
Chris, you know, I figured all that out within five seconds of you making that mistake.
But thanks for explaining it again.
Let me just confirm.
So this was for anyone interested to give a plug.
It's Embrace the Void.
And Matthew already cheated with me on that podcast.
So this was just a retaliation, really.
And I'm not even sure if he gave a shout out to me or the podcast on that.
Maybe you must have done because you were introduced as it.
But I don't remember you mispronouncing my name.
So maybe you kind of, right?
This is a bad line of argument to go down.
Maybe I did.
I'm terribly sorry for that.
And I think the Christopher Cook shot was a...
A sufficient retaliation, because I don't like that.
Are you saying we should let them at a risk now, shouldn't we?
We should let it go.
Yes, that's right.
This isn't the normal episode, Matt.
We can't just ramble on for hours and hours.
People are expecting concise to the point, why are you interrupting my feed a week early?
Yes, I'll be...
I know.
People's time is valuable.
And we've got to show our listeners respect by getting straight to the point.
No mucking around.
Yeah.
We were weak late with the last delivery due to Scott Adams being terrible and my schedule being horrible at that time as well.
So this will be an episode that comes out this week.
And then lucky listeners will hopefully have an extra episode or the normal scheduled episode.
Next week.
And we haven't announced who we're covering, at least not on the feed.
We have on Twitter.
So...
Do you want to...
That was drums.
Yes, we are covering ContraPoints, who is Natalie Wynn in real life.
So would you like to say a little bit about Natalie slash ContraPoints, Chris?
Yes, she's a YouTube.
who produces these quite high production videos touching on kind of culture war and political and philosophical issues unlike Scott Adams I actually enjoy her content and yeah it's fair to say that the announcement of covering her has led to Some mixed reactions.
She won the vote online of the person that people would like us to cover.
And lots of people have suggested her as a kind of...
She's significantly left-leaning and is also trans.
So she fits more on the genuinely left, not IDW left side of things and kind of inhabits around the bread tube community.
On YouTube, though, I think there's all sorts of internal conflicts there.
But yeah, so people were mixed in our announcement that we'll cover her.
Yeah.
I think that there's a couple of good discussions there because we, you know, we're kind of making this stuff up as we go along.
So it's not like we've got a manifesto or anything.
But it caused us to have a bit of a think about exactly what counts as a guru and what is the...
Because we can't just cover anybody.
We don't want just random politicians or talking heads covered or just someone we don't like or do like on Twitter.
Yes, I'm talking about you, Liam.
Yeah, look, I think it's fair just to note that lots of gurus are very annoying people, as you have probably recognized if you have listened to the previous episodes, but that isn't the defining characteristic of the people that we're interested in.
So we always fully intended, as we noted in the first episode, to cover people that we I agree with or even admire.
So, yeah, this is not a hit cast, despite what some people may think.
And I think it'll be more interesting if it isn't just always people that make us depressed and miserable.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's understandable people could have gotten that impression because we have...
You know, we haven't liked probably the majority of the people we've covered a great deal.
But, you know, I think on one hand, what we try to do in the podcast is to, I guess, focus on those methods of persuasion and those rhetorical tricks and, I guess, the less savoury side of communication or guru-like activities.
But I'm curious as to what you think about this, Chris, because we haven't actually talked about this yet.
But, I mean, in my mind, Somebody being a bit of a guru or regarded as a guru isn't necessarily a bad thing.
It can be.
It often is.
But it's not necessarily so.
So someone like, I don't know, Noam Chomsky is kind of regarded as a genius who's sort of qualified to comment on almost anything and could be thought of as a guru.
It doesn't necessarily mean that they do.
The kind of naughty stuff that we like to criticize them for.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I agree.
I'm playing around with definitions here, but, you know, people can be stats gurus or can be maths gurus or that kind of thing.
And so I think that we're not using it exactly in that usage, that definitional usage.
But just to say that, like, guru doesn't automatically have negative connotations.
It often does.
Yeah.
Now, the other thing too, I guess, is that part of our motivation in thinking of ContraPoints to begin with too is wanting to get a bit of diversity in our cast.
So it would get a bit boring if we just continually focused on these IDW or centrist slash slightly right-leaning people and didn't look across the spectrum.
Although I hasten to add, I don't really think of us as having a political focus, but rather...
It's just nice to have a bit of diversity, ideological diversity, as well as getting a few women on as well.
That would be good.
Yeah, we've noticed that there is a heavily penis-shaped representation on the characters that we chose.
And I don't just mean personality-wise, I mean their...
Yeah, you know, we get it.
We get it, Chris.
This is such a terrible way to have said that there's too many men.
The issue is that I think there definitely is a gender skew in the online guru space, which is heavily male.
But not to say that there aren't females.
It's just we need to try to seek out a little bit more diversity also to give us a break.
So yeah, it's inevitable that we'll end up with lots of...
I don't want to say, like, old white man.
You know, I don't want to be Sarah John.
But, yeah, you know, middle-aged white men make up a fair proportion to the people that we are covering.
It's just a demographic fact.
Oh, those middle-aged white men.
Gee, they really get up my nose.
I know.
What will they do next?
They're such scamps.
I know.
It's a good thing we're not anywhere near that category or online Middle East white man with too many opinions.
Good thing we dodged that narrowly with our accents.
Well, this has probably gone on long enough, so shall we draw a line under that and talk a little bit more about our interview?
Yeah, so that was our really shortened version of that.
We'll have a longer version in the actual episode of ContraPoints, but yeah, maybe one of us will edit down our waffles.
In any case, so completely contradicting everything that we just said, we are again focusing on Eric Weinstein.
And why, listeners, and why are we doing that?
Because it makes Chris happy.
That's what we're doing.
No, Matt, that's not why, although that's partly why.
But the reason is that on the previous episodes where we've covered Eric, we hinted at some of the issues.
That we'd, or at least I'd observed, in his Discord community and the potentially unhealthy guru-ish community management techniques and manipulation, maybe,
or at least interaction that was going on there.
And we mentioned during that, Eric had labeled, he discussed kind of cryptically something about a mentally disturbed member of his community.
And after the episode...
The person that you will hear shortly that we interviewed, Dan Gilbert, reached out to introduce himself as probably the person that Eric was referring to.
And through our discussions and DMs, it turned out that he seemed entirely mentally stable.
He did.
He did.
He seemed entirely unmad.
And to have very interesting insights about the experiences in Eric's Discord communities.
And the kind of dynamics at play there.
So it seemed like an interesting opportunity to have a look at guru community management in the Web 2.0 space with a bit of a different format, interviewing someone who has been a long-term member.
And probably worth flagging that Matt and I are not expert interviewers.
And so the interview that you're about to hear is slightly meandering in the logical structure.
But hopefully you get something useful out of it.
And yeah, and Dan was a really interesting guy to interview, and I think he had a lot useful to say.
Okay, good.
All right.
Just a note for anyone interested.
We launched the Patreon.
It's going much better, I think, than either of us had hoped.
Not hoped, expected.
We currently have 27. Which is really great.
And we're going to be covering costs and we'll start giving shoutouts from the next episode.
And we're already kind of posting up some content there.
But yeah, just a short thing to say, like, thanks for everyone signing up.
We genuinely really appreciate it.
It's very validating.
Yeah, yeah, no, it really has been.
So thanks, everyone.
We really didn't know whether...
Whether people would care at all.
And we're still slightly shocked that anybody's listening.
So people are not only listening, but also liking it enough to chip in and helping it not cost money for us.
So thank you.
Wonderful.
So more news to come regarding that kind of thing.
And this episode will have an edited version of the interview to try and cut down our waffle.
But the full version will be posted up on the Patreon.
If people want to hear the complete unedited waffle, then you can join the Patreon and see
This is like a punishment for subscribing.
This is the initiation ritual for the patrons.
They get the full waffle.
Okay, so here we are with Dan Gilbert, who has joined us to discuss the goings-on in Eric's Discord communities, of which there are several.
And Dan was infamously introduced to us because on the podcast looking at Eric's intro...
He mentioned that there was a mentally unstable member of the community that he claimed he was having issues with.
I had some speculations who that might be, but Dan helpfully reached out to me via DM on Twitter and said, actually, I think that's me.
And we can get into why you were labelled the...
Mentally unstable member of Eric's Discord community.
But Dan, maybe a good start would be just to introduce your background and how you came to be a member of Eric's Discord.
Cool, yeah.
So I'm here to speak for the mentally unstable, I guess.
Give the mentally unstable side of the story.
Basically, I'm just sort of like a Discord creature.
So I used to be...
Really obsessed with watching everything that Jordan Peterson made and getting angry about it.
And then I guess the fun thing to do is then go talk to his fans because it's the most satisfying way to be angry about a public intellectual is to argue with the people who are really devoted to them.
I feel like I'm talking to my shadow.
I think we might suffer from some of the same complex.
Jordan Peterson sort of went by the wayside for a couple years because of health issues.
So I'm really excited to see whether he makes a comeback or not.
Because to me, he's sort of the apotheosis of guru public intellectual.
But in the meantime, I've been following Eric Weinstein.
And I just kind of view him as someone who is popular for, I think, a lot of the same reasons as Jordan Peterson.
And he does...
Some similar things where he sort of occupies this political niche, which is really frustratingly hard to pin him on.
He's just sort of like a political contrarian who denies having any kind of political affiliations or positions because actually everything is in service of some sort of larger philosophy.
And the way he talks about everything, it's like a sort of entrancing way of talking, where he cloaks everything in three layers of analogies.
And so everything sounds ten times more profound than it actually is.
And then when you drill down and you say, okay, what argument is he actually making?
What is he actually saying?
It's either just extremely inane, just some trivial, obvious statement, or it's just wrong and indefensible.
You're a man after our own hearts.
Yeah, you're definitely preaching to the choir here, Dan.
We're on the same page with you there.
So I'm on Eric's Discord, at least one or two of them.
But I only pop in and out on occasion.
And somebody mentioned that he was talking about us once and it might be worth popping in.
And due to my lack of experience with Discord, I didn't actually hear that.
I only heard the aftermath of him detailing low-quality criticism and some...
Guru-ish community management techniques that we will probably get into.
So maybe it's just worth mentioning to people that Discords are a little bit like personal message board forums with channels to discuss specific topics or people can DM people.
And they also allow you to do audio, like mass group chats or smaller group chats.
So that's my view about what a Discord is.
Given that you are much more familiar with the Discord world, is that accurate?
And also, how many Discords does Eric actually have?
So, Discord is basic.
It's just a chat client, but it's sort of sectioned into servers.
So, people hang out in different servers related to different subject matters.
And it's great because you form little communities around these servers for whatever the topic of the server is.
Usually, it's very often the most popular ones are based around people.
So, there's like a Destiny, the streamer Discord that's big.
There's some Discords that are for just discussing politics in general, which are filled with all the loveliest people that you might imagine.
What happened is, this guy named Phil, he started a Discord that was basically just like a fan Discord for Eric Weinstein, because there was no Discord that Eric had for his portal community or whatever.
So, you know, a few people joined, trickled in or whatever, nothing much.
And then one day, Eric Weinstein himself joined Phil's Discord.
So this was never like an official portal Discord.
It's called the unofficial portal Discord.
And then one day Eric joined it, which caused it to effectively become an official Discord, even though it wasn't.
And then people just started flooding into the server.
So now there's thousands of people in that server.
And it was really exciting because basically that server came up around the time when Eric had finished episode 19, which I think is an episode that you've talked about, where Eric and Brett are talking about...
How Brett was mistreated in his academic history.
And they sort of just weave a whole story about how Brett's idea was stolen from him.
And it was one of the most profound ideas in biological history.
It's an idea that has enormous ramifications when it comes to medical testing.
And because this idea was ignored and shoved aside because of the nefarious practices of people in academia who are trying to suppress it, people are literally...
Probably just dying en masse due to side effects from drugs that weren't properly tested, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
We have covered in detail on the first episode, for anyone interested, that particular revelation.
And it's fair to say we probably share your skepticism regarding if it is as revolutionary as claimed.
Right.
So it was really a salacious podcast and people came on the discord because part, partly their culture around there was just like, we got to, you know, man together and fix this problem.
Like he made this claim that there's this huge problem.
Here we are, we're ready to, you know, fix it.
And yeah.
Disk means distributed idea suppression complex.
A lot of the things that he says have a nature of just being kind of like a calls to action.
So people on the Discord were very motivated to sort of not just hang out and talk about Eric, but they wanted to do projects.
They wanted to learn all kinds of math and physics and stuff so they could understand Eric's ideas, which he had led them to believe were changing, revolutionary, and nobody would listen to him.
And so Discord community full of people who were super...
Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear about that reaction from his fans to be supportive about dealing with this purported injustice that was done.
I came across Eric's Discord, and there seemed to be a lot of people, at least in the early stages, who were genuinely well-qualified and well-educated and were enthusiastic about the project.
And at the time, I was already fairly skeptical about Eric, so I was slightly dismayed that he seemed to be attracting a community of well-educated, intelligent people.
Around what I would have regarded as fairly insubstantial and ridiculous claims.
But then, as I dipped in and out of the server over the coming months, I noticed a shift from the earlier days when I was seeing lots of people introducing themselves with their PhD credentials or whatever, to more what Eric has leaned into,
the kind of anti-establishment, conspiratorial stuff.
and much less technical expertise being a parent.
But does that reflect my bias or misperception?
Or is that reflective of your experience?
I don't actually remember there being a very large concentration of people who were particularly qualified in math or physics on the server.
I think the people on that server probably are more educated than average, but a lot of the people on the server are programmers.
And people who maybe studied something in school and felt that school was a waste of their time or that things didn't go well in their studies.
I feel like there were a lot of grad students that dropped out of grad school.
And so they had in common with Eric this kind of like, oh, academia isn't a good place and should be changed to be more amenable to the way that I would have liked to learn or do projects or that kind of thing.
But over time...
There are certainly notable examples of people who are extremely qualified to interface with Eric on the subject matter of geometric unity, which is his main intellectual contribution that he's been promising to everybody.
And I think everyone who's been in a position that's qualified to actually try to understand it has given up.
Well, I can get into the reasons why.
Yeah, so that just with the little I know or have heard about the expert commentary of Eric's geometric unity theory, essentially the impression I got from people who knew about this stuff was that the ideas were perhaps interesting but not fully fleshed out and rather vague.
Ultimately, a bit of a nothing burger.
Would that be right, Chris?
Yeah, so my impression from speaking to people that are much more qualified in me in the relevant areas is there's nothing much there for them to grapple with.
There's the presentation he gave, which is not very easy for people to follow.
It might have interesting ideas, possibly.
The reaction at the time seemed to be, okay, well, you're making a lot of really big claims, so let's see the brass tacks, right?
Show us the equations in the paper and then we can talk.
And actually people suggesting that they would be willing to do some of the straightforward tests that could do the low-level bullshit test.
I can't remember who it was.
Somebody brought it up in the Q&A after his talk.
But in any case...
The general consensus from the people I spoke to was until he publishes something, there's nothing that they can look at.
And it has all of the hallmarks of the usual pseudoscience conspiracy claims of a theory of everything that will revolutionize physics and whatnot.
Yeah, so I can give sort of the history of geometric unity on the Discord server.
Okay.
In March, he was teasing often when he would come on that he was thinking about releasing Geometric Unity, that he was going to release some information about it.
And then come April Fool's Day, he finally released it for days, just being like, oh, I don't know if I'm going to release it, I don't think I can release it, or I'm going to really plan out something.
So he released it one day, and then it's so hard to communicate the audacity of the claims that he made the week after that he...
Basically, he came on Discord and just with the giddy excitement of everybody on Discord and himself, he would say things like, this is going to just fundamentally change the world.
With basically no uncertainty, he was talking about how this is it.
You are experiencing history right now.
We're going to wake up tomorrow and the world is going to be a different place.
We're living through one of the most exciting eras in history because I just released this and I don't even know what's going to happen.
And that persisted, by the way.
To this day, just whenever he talks about geometric unity, he says things like, I'm more afraid that it's true than that it's false.
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, Dave, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just want to support this by recollecting that he was darkly hinting that he could not release the details of the geometric unity theory because it could lead to such...
technologies of such unimaginable power that it would be almost irresponsible He doesn't trust the powers that be.
Those people are the disks.
Those people are lying to us all the time.
Everybody in the government is lying to us.
They have these conspiracies.
The CIA is up to this and that.
There's no way he's going to put this theory in their hands that has the power to destroy humanity, destroy the universe, get us to different planets, bend space-time, that kind of thing.
Because his theory has 14 dimensions in it, which means that we can just go around the first three dimensions.
We can do whatever we want.
Yeah, it's like it's taking four-dimensional chess to the nth level.
Yeah, I also remember, Matt, where he had hinted in an interview that geometric unity could be used to create a doomsday device.
That's why, Dan, when you mentioned that, he fairly frequently mentions this in the Discord or these kind of grandiose claims.
I mean, it's not like...
Eric is, in general, a wilting flower when it comes to making grand claims.
But he seems to let himself go more in the Discord.
I just remember somebody asked him about the Plandemic video on Twitter.
And he said something like, you know, I'm not going to talk about that, but I'm going to go on a walk in a couple of hours so you can join me on, I think it was Instagram.
He pointed that one.
But I didn't see that video.
But I heard from...
All the people who did see the video, that he didn't endorse Plandemic, but he went with the usual, you know, it's not all bad, it's not all good, there's stuff that's reasonable there and stuff that isn't.
But he also warned the people watching that he couldn't talk about these kind of things on his main channel and people shouldn't ask.
So that led me to believe that on the Discord, maybe on the Instagrams that he doesn't keep recorded, that he was more forthcoming about his views.
So it sounds like that's...
True.
He's more willing to be just as hyperbolic as possible about how important he is.
He's more restrained on his podcast when he's talking about situating himself in human history.
He tries to make it more about a political message, about how we need to fight the disc and that kind of thing, and how here's what the disc is up to.
But when he's on the Discord, everything is about his historical situation.
As like, you know, maybe the next Einstein.
There was Einstein, and he gave us this universal speed limit, and then there's Weinstein, and we're going to be able to get out of the prison that Einstein left for us now.
He always talks about how geometric marginalism, his...
Economics theory with PIA is the most important economics discovery of the last 25 years, and everyone's ignoring it, and that it literally would revolutionize everything about economics.
The reason that we have basically any of the economic problems that we have now, where the government is able to have some control over social security, that kind of thing, that's just a symptom of the fact that our economics right now is bad, and in the future we're going to have geometric marginalism.
So just to clarify, this means that Eric has a grand theory of everything for physics, right?
Which is geometric unity.
And with his wife, he also has a revolutionary theory of economics, which is geometric marginalism.
Is that right?
Yeah, it's almost like he did his PhD in geometry.
He has a hammer and everything he sees is a nail.
This also gets us to...
Geometric marginalism and the conspiracies attached to it.
So...
I'll step back a bit and I'll talk a bit more about geometric unity and then afterwards we can talk about the economic stuff.
Yeah, so he released that paper and basically everyone was like, okay, we're here.
This is amazing.
We're ready for geometric unity to become a thing.
And he told...
The Discord, after he released the video, that he was going to start working on Geometric Unity full-time.
He wouldn't be able to come on the Discord as much because he was just going to hunker down and he was just going to work on it.
And then, nothing ever came of that.
It seems like he sort of stopped working on that.
He never came back.
He didn't come back to the server to, like, say, oh, I've, you know, basically, he initially seemed to be saying, I've released this video.
You know, now I'm going to work on actually releasing a paper and fleshing everything out and that kind of thing.
But he never did that.
And so people would often ask him, like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So when's this paper coming?
You know, everyone, all these other scientists are saying that they can't make much of this lecture, so you should write a paper.
And, you know, where's this paper coming from?
And so he has just, like, a litany of excuses that change over time as to why he can't release a paper about it.
Oh, let's say some of the excuses.
That sounds good.
So, they contradict each other.
So, okay, so here's one excuse.
Everything is already in the video, and if academics want to understand it, they can, but they just refuse to because they're being disky.
Like, if they just watch the video, they would understand, but they, you know, they don't want to understand because they're afraid of this idea.
Well, regarding that excuse, it does beg the question why all physicists don't release their findings via YouTube.
It would save a lot of effort.
It would save a lot of trouble.
Yeah, I was mucking around in LaTeX.
Yeah.
Anyway, let's go on.
So I can't assess, you know, the contents of the video or everything.
And yeah, you guys have talked about it on my podcast, but basically all the physicists that I have talked to, or one physicist in particular, and the sense that I get from other physicists that I see online is that basically, yeah, I mean, the lecture is not just like, you know, he wrote down all of the derivations and stuff from a paper.
The lecture is kind of philosophical.
It's kind of poetic.
He spends a long time talking about hands drawing hands.
You know, that's like his main concern is sort of contextualizing it in terms of how profound it is philosophically before actually going on to give details of the math.
The video ends with him writing down on the board, like, swervature equals dysplasian, or something like that, which I don't think is anything.
So it's like an introduction to an idea.
I don't think that there's enough specificity to it that any kind of physicist could take it and then flesh out the ideas into a full theory.
Especially since they're all ideas that are, I think, really unique to his particular area of study.
So he seems to have taken all of his favorite.
Geometric ideas and woven it into what he thinks is a theory of everything.
Okay, so what were some of the other excuses?
Another excuse is that he tried submitting his paper to Archive in the past, but he couldn't because he wasn't affiliated with an institution.
Most people did not take this excuse too seriously because they were like, well, you know, I'm a part of an institution.
I'll just upload it for you.
Surprisingly, he did not take them up on that offer.
Perhaps for the following reasons, one of which is...
Academics don't deserve a paper after the way they've treated him.
He's been so mistreated by academia that he was going to give them his paper that he's totally written, but now he can't because they don't deserve it.
Maybe they'll be irresponsible with it or they'll try to steal it from him.
So that's another thing.
If he releases his paper, then they'll steal his ideas.
We haven't even got to the Doomsday device yet, but yeah.
It makes no sense that if he released a paper, then they would steal his ideas, because currently he's in the most vulnerable possible situation for people stealing his ideas, which is that he's released a video of it, but he doesn't have on record him writing down as a paper what he did.
The reason that you publish a paper on archive, a preprint on archive, is so that you get credit for having originated that idea in case somebody writes something similar in the meantime, right?
That's true, Dan.
That's very true.
That's a good observation.
So another reason that he can't do it is because he can't publish because he's too traumatized by academia.
He would publish, but to the experience that he had at Harvard...
He's too traumatized.
Another one is that he intentionally doesn't want to publish because his H-index is currently zero.
H-index is like the maximum number of papers that you've published that have a certain minimum number of citations.
So he has an H-index of zero, and he wants to keep it that way.
So as an F-U to academia, he wants to keep his H-index of zero.
That's why he can't publish his paper.
Understandable.
Another one is that...
He can't release his Geometric Unity paper because first he needs to revolutionize academia and make a new institution in its place probably made out of people from his Discord.
He's always sort of framed the Discord as if this is our grassroots thing that we're starting that is ultimately going to become the new institution.
We are the beginning of the future.
We're basically going to overturn all of academia.
And from now on, like research and learning is going to happen like this in, I guess, a discord or something like that.
But most importantly, with Eric at the helm of it.
uh Okay.
Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah, it's quite an exciting mission, isn't it?
I'm trying to put myself in the place of the audience that you're describing, which is perhaps people who have some technical background and maybe didn't get as much out of education as they'd like or didn't go as far in higher education or research as they would have liked.
Yeah, and it was a lot of people who were interested in learning in a non-academic environment.
They had finished school or something, and they were older now, and they were interested in going back and studying something again.
So that part of it was nice, is that there were a lot of people who were genuinely just interested in doing some kind of like...
I remember after the audio interaction I did hear on Eric's Discord, after he left, some members of the community started talking about alternative systems of education.
I think it was to learn physics.
And they were essentially saying, you know, all the points you would expect that the university system is not fit for purpose.
We need alternatives.
But the thing that struck me was, one, the level of optimism, because there was kind of genuine commitment that they would be able to organize a replacement for universities for physics education,
despite none of the people in that conversation having any relevant expertise or just basic things about who would teach it or these kind of courses.
But it was a very...
Passionate discussion amongst people about what this alternative system would do.
And thinking about the implications of once it exists, how the universities will be redundant and whatnot.
But to be fair, it was only a couple of people on the Discord discussing it.
A very common type of person, I want to say, back in those days on the server was the person who either had never learned any calculus, or maybe they just knew a little bit of calculus or something, who wanted to immediately go into learning gauge theory, which is something that Eric mentions a lot and I guess is underpinning some of his theories and is important in theoretical physics.
They all felt the whole way undergrad and grad school makes you go through all these other classes before you can get there is just part of their hopeless traditionalism.
They're just wasting your time, taking your money.
And really, you should be able to just, if you know a little calculus, or maybe even if you don't, you can just sort of jump into gauge theory.
And very often, they'd ask Eric questions of that manner.
I don't know any calculus.
Can you explain gauge theory to me, Eric?
Yeah, I guess the dynamics of it would be...
I'm trying to say this in a polite way, be supportive of Eric's impression of himself in the sense of having relatively naive or unqualified people to go to him and to be the teacher and to sort of help them.
I don't know.
I can see the appeal.
Especially people at that stage of life going back to learning or who don't want to invest tons of money in the university system and whatnot.
And I understand that.
And I also get that they might have the feeling that academics are just sneering at them and dismissing them.
But the thing that strikes me about all of these discussions is it kind of ignores the existence of MOOCs and all of the freely available Undergraduate and graduate level courses that you can access fairly easily now.
Like I've took stats courses on Coursera and the level of learning is great.
So there's never been a better time to be an independent learner.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I've got a similar impression that I have a bit of a fascination with...
Physics and astronomy, and even though I'm totally naive about it, I listen to a podcast called the Titanium Physicist Podcast, and they are a couple of physicists, and they have working researchers as guests on their podcast who talk about...
their research, for instance, in detecting neutrinos or something like that and the implications of what they're doing.
It's pretty technical stuff, but they really make an effort to explain it to naive people like myself.
And it's absolutely fantastic stuff.
So if you enjoy learning about these topics, it's a fantastic time to be alive.
But that seems to be very different from what's happening in a group like Eric's.
Can you come up with that?
Yeah, I think I have a personal sort of...
Bias against the idea of self-learning.
I think maybe there's other people who can pull it off, but in my experience, the structure that's imposed on you by having a course where you have to do homework and you have to get problems graded, you're forced to show up.
To me, that kind of structure was essential in actually being able to go in depth into learning something.
And I think a lot of times when people feel that they could just self-teach something, very often by just watching
Yeah, I think that's a really important point because there's a distinction between some sort of genuinely informative Content or knowledge versus this Sats version,
which gives you the impression.
Of getting knowledge.
So the kind of thing that I'm describing, they really make an effort, even though the content might last for two hours, you know, that's as long as a pretty long lecture, for instance.
They're very realistic about what their audience doesn't know.
So they do, you know, try to give you a sense of what they're doing and what it means and why it's important.
But they're very much aware of what they can't teach us in a mirror.
Whereas part of the deal with gurus, I guess, is to give the impression that you can dive straight in and grapple with the really deep and highly technical aspects of the material.
Yeah, one of my favorite things that would happen on the server, especially early on, is...
So Eric would come on the server in order to sort of be regaled by his followers.
They would ask him questions.
He would get interviewed.
And people would ask him the question, I want to learn gauge theory.
How do I learn gauge theory?
And I think any reasonable person would say...
Okay, well, if you want to learn gauge theory, first you need to learn calculus and analysis and algebra and that kind of thing.
There's all these prerequisites that you need to build up, both your prerequisites and your math sophistication in order to be able to get to the point where you can actually do the math of gauge theory.
Also, it's sort of a physics thing, so there'll be a lot of physics involved.
But instead, the way he answers that question is by literally just starting to explain gauge theory to them.
Like, I'm going to teach you right now what gauge theory is in the, you know, two minutes that this answer is going to...
And so he gives some extremely metaphorical explanation of gauge theory, or he's sort of describing objects in space.
He's describing maybe a cool object that's related to gauge theory or something like that.
And then he'll finish with his explanation, which teaches nobody anything about what gauge theory is.
That's not what doing math or physics is.
It's a real analytical component.
But then the person who asked the question is like, okay, I think I get it.
It seems very performative, doesn't it?
Yeah, I think they feel like they're sort of learning physics through osmosis, like by talking to people who know physics and asking them questions about it, that they're just sort of like learning physics.
Okay, yeah, so there's one more reason why he said that he couldn't release his paper, and I think this is like the most disturbing one, and this one's much more recent.
So he said he was going to tell us about geometric unity, but he won't now because the community has let him down.
The main reason being is that they have failed to...
Get rid of the unbelievers.
They've failed to excise the community of untrustworthy people, so he feels like he can't trust the community, so he can't release a paper to us.
I think you would probably count as one of these individuals, Dan.
There's reason to believe that my continued existence on the server is one of the reasons that he said that.
But it is just kind of disturbing to me that he's telling his fans that they haven't done a good enough job creating an environment in which his ideas can be sufficiently private, and they're failing to usher in The new age that he's been asking us to usher in.
Yeah, this gets to one of the reasons we wanted to do this interview was that when I was on the Discord hearing Eric talk that one time when he was complaining about us and all our low-quality criticism people, I got a really quite...
Pleasant vibe based on the kind of the dynamic that you're talking about, where he was expressing disappointment.
I think at that time it was somebody had recorded audio and released it, but it was very much in the view of you guys.
I'm giving you something very precious here.
I'm interacting and I don't want to, but I might have to pull back if I can't trust you.
One part of that can be related to releasing audio, which he wants to keep private.
But the more disturbing side of it was in this low-quality versus high-quality criticism dichotomy.
And the impression I got was that he put into low-quality criticism any form of criticism that would suggest that he is veering close to pseudoscience or that would not take his fundamental premises for granted was low-quality criticism.
And it came across as like, I don't want to say cult leader, because I don't think it's that extreme, but it was the same dynamic of chastising the community for lacking faith.
And it was clear from some of the responses that some of the people in the community had a genuine emotional commitment to Eric, and so were taking the potential for him to leave or withdraw.
as a serious threat that they needed to do something.
And that whole dynamic just struck me as like really
It was kind of bizarre because what happened is some random person who was there for when he was talking about his Harvard story on the Discord leaked the audio onto YouTube.
It wasn't me.
And he...
He said he was acting as if it was the Discord community's fault at large, and he kept saying things like, I just don't know if I can trust you.
I've really been let down here.
He never said, I know that it's impossible for you to make sure that nobody ever does something like that, so I know it's not your fault.
Instead, he just kept saying, I don't think I can trust the community anymore.
As if it was the community at large, their faltering trust in him had allowed this random incident to happen.
It was very bizarre.
Yeah.
In some sense, you may end up being the nail on the coffin for community interaction.
So speaking of low-quality criticism, an example of what he considers low-quality criticism is there is one person on the server who has a PhD in theoretical physics.
And that person has, on a few occasions, talked to Eric about geometric unity.
And he's asked him the questions that he thinks he needs to ask in order to get to figure out if geometric unity is a thing or not, basically.
And he asked Eric, you know, can you produce or have you produced a Lagrangian for your theory?
According to this guy, he figured that Eric probably already had a Lagrangian because it would be one of the basic things that you would do when you create a theory of everything in order to, like, connect the theory to the actual physics and being able to predict anything about reality, right?
So he asked Eric, you know, do you have a Lagrangian?
If you have a Lagrangian and you can provide it, then basically I could assess, you know, whether your theory...
You know, is working out or not.
And Eric sort of answered in a sort of roundabout, sort of poetic way about the Lagrangian.
You know, he went back to talking about hands drawing hands, which is one of his favorite things to do when people ask him a little bit too detailed questions about geometric unity.
So a few days later...
Or weeks later, he was on Brian Keating's podcast, and he went on a little rant on Brian Keating's podcast about how when physicists see my theory, they just ask if I can provide a Lagrangian, because they just want to shut down my theory as fast as possible.
They just want a Lagrangian so they can throw it out.
So in his mind, even theoretical physics PhD asking him questions about what could make this theory verifiable, he considers to be low-quality criticism.
Yes.
I mean, it's understandable that we get lumped into low-quality criticism, but that seems slightly unfair.
Dan, I hate to ask you this because of its self-indulgent nature, but I can't resist.
Like, I've never actually heard Eric discuss us.
You know, we've had run-ins on Twitter and whatnot.
But is it just...
We just don't get it and we're just fixated on his hair.
Our criticisms are just, you know, superficial and not getting to it.
Yeah, I mean, so basically he is...
He's obsessed with everything everybody says about him online.
He name searches himself, and what he has said multiple times, he comes on the server and he reports to us everywhere that somebody has said something bad about him.
So one of the things he says is, he was giving us a little lecture about what good versus bad quality criticism is.
He knows every podcast where people have talked about him in a negative light, and so this is one of them.
So he said...
If you want to hear bad quality criticism, look up the Decoding the Guru's podcast.
And so he directed us to the podcast so that we could listen to, understand what kind of bad quality criticism is.
And he didn't say much about it.
He just sort of said that, yeah, basically you guys just have a pathological obsession with tearing him down because you're not interested in real rigorous math or science or whatever.
You're just jealous or something.
I'm kind of surprised, though, that he did point people to the episode.
His take is that he knows that he's doing a good job because when people are criticizing him, the criticism is so low quality that if he was really doing something wrong, then the criticism would be a better quality, right?
And he's always talking about how he's...
He really is interested in criticism.
He wants high-quality criticism.
He's seeking out criticism because he wants to better himself, so any criticism he's interested in.
But of course, not low-quality criticism, right?
Yeah.
So it doesn't sound like he's ever gotten any high-quality criticism.
It's weird how rare this high-quality criticism is.
I'm sure if you asked him for examples of high-quality criticism, he would give some bizarre esoteric example of something that isn't really even criticism.
Okay, so I think we would...
Going to turn now to a little bit about the story which sort of led you personally to be singled out perhaps a little bit.
The short version of the story is that he came on the server and he talked about something which he has also talked about on his podcasts, which is a conspiracy theory that he has about something called the Boskin Commission.
And it involves certain people from Harvard who he talks about by name as having colluded, fraudulently messed with Social Security by their solution to the...
Index price problem.
And so after I talked to him, I emailed somebody who was involved in the story and asked them for their comment on it.
I was just like, so Eric says this is what happened at Harvard.
And this was a person who was Pia's advisor, but it's one of the people he mentions by name in the story as having been a part of the problem.
And they just responded.
They said, we can't answer questions about former students.
And then they forwarded that email to Pia, Eric's wife.
And then Pia showed Eric.
And so somehow from that email, which had my real name attached, Eric knows who I am.
He has somehow linked together my screen name and my real name.
And he just like knows who I am and is not a fan.
I sort of like this because in the worlds of internet forums and discords and stuff, inter-community drama is just a fact of life, right?
Like as it is on Twitter.
But in this case...
What often causes problems in forums and communities is when real life intrudes on the dynamics.
And so I kind of like this, not in a nefarious way, just in the way that it sounds like Eric was weaving a rather strong conspiracy theory involving his wife and her supervisor on the Discord.
That alleges serious wrongdoing, as we'll probably get into.
When somebody then fact-checked that claim, right, by just reaching out to someone and saying, hey, is this true?
It then returned, it got back to his wife, right, and the supervisor and burst the bubble of, oh, I can talk about whatever I want on the Discord without it having any impact.
And I think this relates to me the way that Eric and Brett completely trashed Carol Greeter.
On their episode.
And Eric's fans went after her on social media, essentially accusing her of suppressing Brett and not giving him due credit.
And I feel like, in some respect, it's a case of his own medicine.
Am I taking too much joy in this?
That if you make conspiracy theories and you allege people do bad things...
It's not unreasonable that somebody might ask one of the people, did you do that bad thing?
But I can see why it would cause a lot of trouble for you interpersonally.
Yeah, I mean, I get the sense that maybe his fame is catching up to him, and he never really, like, to him, he can sort of say things to his fans, and it doesn't really interface with real life that much.
But he's become famous enough that if he makes claims about people that actually exist that he knows, where he basically accuses them of having committed fraud or something, then...
He can't just go around doing that and expect it's going to be just some private thing that he told his friends or something.
I don't think he's afraid of relatively baselessly speculating about things.
And so I think it's catching up to him now that when he accuses people of having engaged in some kind of coordinated evil...
People are actually going to be interested enough to follow up on that and see if it's actually true.
I say it's the same dynamic as outlining for two hours how nefarious and evil Carol Greeter is and how her suppression of Brett's insight may be costing millions of lives from the lack of safety checks.
But then ending by saying, you know...
Well, we're not sure.
Like, this is all just speculation, and we'd be happy to discuss it in detail.
We're not saying anybody is actually a bad person.
It's quite a remarkable, powerful disclaimer he has.
Related to that, Dan, so I'm probably doing this completely in the wrong order, but your interaction there relates to the geometric marginalization, right?
And the disk suppressing it through kind of Eric's wife and her dissertation.
So maybe it makes sense to outline geometric marginalization and how it comes into things.
Yeah, geometric marginalism.
Oh, marginalism.
Sorry.
Okay, so he and his wife wrote this chapter or worked on this theory when she was in grad school.
I think he was like a postdoc at MIT at the time.
They lived near each other.
And they were also not married yet.
This was like part of their courting ritual.
This is sort of how they met and fall in love.
While she was doing her PhD at Harvard in economics.
And there's a chapter in the book, The Physics of Wall Street, about Eric Weinstein.
It's just solely about Eric Weinstein and geometric marginalism and this conspiracy theory that he has, which makes me think that the author of this book must have just interviewed him and just written down what he said about it.
So you can read all about this story, basically, in the last chapter of that book, The Physics of Wall Street.
I've read...
The chapters of her dissertation, that is basically all they've actually produced about geometric marginalism so far.
And basically, he's applying gauge theory to economics.
More specifically, he's applying gauge theory to the index number problem.
So he's the most extreme version I've ever seen of math undergrad syndrome, which is when people do math and they just view every other subject as being...
Like a more trivial version of math or just applied math.
And so if you understand math, the most fundamental, you know, study, the hardest, the most rigorous study, then every other subject is basically trivial.
And the only reason other people do those subjects instead of math is because they're less intelligent.
And they're all just kind of incompetent and sitting around and like twiddling their thumbs until a mathematician comes and like saves them by showing them fancy math that will blow their mind and revolutionizes their subject matter.
This sounds very familiar.
He's working with Pia, and he's telling Pia, economists have no idea what they're doing.
They don't even understand math.
They're pathetic.
And then, you know, she was trying to convince him, oh, no, there's some real stuff going on in economics.
But anyway, so their project together was basically applying a very fancy kind of math, which is like some gauge theory, to the index number problem.
And the chapter is written in such a way that they're deriving, deriving, deriving this thing in a kind of interesting...
A mathematical kind of impressive way.
It's very interesting.
And then right at the end of the chapter, they're like, okay, so what we did was we re-derived a solution to the index number problem, which has existed for 100 years.
We just sort of like gave a new interpretation to it using differential geometry.
Dan, just to interrupt you, what is the index number problem?
I'm not the right person to explain this because I'm not an economist, but basically the index number problem is if you want to calculate the amount of inflation, for instance, then you would take a basket of goods at a certain time and look at the price, and then you would look at the basket of goods at a later point in time and look at the price.
The most naive way to calculate.
Inflation is just by, like, taking the price of the basket later in time, comparing it to the price of the basket earlier in time.
But that has some problems because, like, depending on whether you use the prices as a reference point at the beginning of that time period or the end of that time period, you get different results.
So, like, in practice, there is some kind of, it's ambiguous, like, what is the best solution to the index number problem?
And I think in practice, what people tend to do, not 100% sure about this, is...
There exists sort of like indexes, which are sort of like averages of those other indexes.
They take like multiple time points and they just sort of like average index numbers that you get from like fixing on certain time points.
And that ends up being a bit of like an approximation to what the Divisia index is, which the Divisia index is basically just like a continuous time or it's a solution to the index number problem, which like takes into account.
Continuous time changes into price and quantity.
So if you know the functional form or the mathematical form of these changes in price and quantity, then you can solve a system of differential equations in order to be able to derive this index number.
But because in real life we don't have functional forms for the prices and quantities of goods, we just have observations at discrete point in time, ultimately what we end up using is basically approximations to the Divisia index, which take the form of these other index numbers.
So, correct me if I'm wrong here, Dan, but I can see how this is just a neat little problem, an interesting challenge to estimate inflation when the basket of available goods and services is constantly changing.
But it does seem like the kind of technical problem that isn't nothing, but it doesn't sound how even a new solution to that problem would revolutionise economics.
Is there something we're missing?
Yeah, he introduces...
Nothing new except maybe a new perspective on something that already exists, which is totally fine.
There are lots of papers like that.
But the way that he presents what he's done in economics, first of all, he repeatedly refers to it as the most important breakthrough in economics in the last 25 years, at least.
Mostly on the Discord server, rarely on his podcast does he say things like that.
But basically, he believes, much like geometric unity is going to be a profound historical breakthrough in physics, geometric marginalism, to the extent that they did it, was...
An enormous breakthrough in economics, except for the fact that it was ignored by the economics community, because they're afraid of new ideas, and more importantly, they don't understand math.
They're just not smart enough to understand it.
This is a common theme, isn't it?
Right.
We've covered physics with geometric unity, biology with telomeres, and now economics with the index price problem.
In each case, it's a situation in which the entire field purportedly Well,
there's another reason why geometric marginalism was overlooked or disked, and it's much more nefarious.
Oh.
So, Eric Weinstein has this conspiracy theory about what's called the Boskin Commission.
The United States government is in the business of calculating an index number, like the Consumer Price Index.
And it's important because they actually adjust Social Security payouts based on the Consumer Price Index.
So depending on how they calculate inflation, they're going to pay out more or less for Social Security.
If you just calculate inflation in a relatively naive way, you'll tend to overestimate the amount of inflation because of substitution effects and goods becoming archaic.
And there's different economic effects that make it hard to estimate.
Economists at the time, generally, and still generally believe that the Consumer Price Index was being overestimated.
And so they formed this commission called the Boskin Commission, which is, I think there were only like six people in it, and some of them were from Harvard, professors of economics, where Pia was.
And they basically tasked them with estimating how much they were overestimating the Consumer Price Index.
And so this commission met a few times, and there was some criticism of the commission and how good a job they did on this, just like I imagine there would be for any kind of economic decision-making like this.
But they convened, and they ultimately came up with, okay, we believe that the Consumer Price Index is biased upwards by 1.1%, so we should adjust the yearly inflation that we're estimating downwards by 1.1% of what we had been estimating before.
So Eric believes that the government basically did this as a way to reduce social security payouts in a way that would never be politically feasible.
They did it so that they could do it in secret.
And basically, they just put together this commission of willing patsies from the Harvard Economics Department.
The Harvard Economics Department is full of these willing patsies.
They're just at the beck and call of the government will do whatever nefarious thing the government tells them to do.
So they put together this commission of these six people who...
They coordinated in order to be able to come up with the number 1.1%, which would result in about a trillion dollars over 10 years.
So it's like a very intentional number that they came up with because they were tasked with just reducing Social Security payouts by a certain amount.
Now, one of the people on the Boskin Commission named Dale Jorgensen was a very senior professor at Harvard.
And Eric claims that...
He and Pia were working on her dissertation.
It was going amazing.
These ideas were deeply profound.
It was incredible.
They were revolutionizing economics.
And then basically one day they go in and Pia's thesis advisor says, no more gauge theory.
No more of this geometric marginalism, which is not what it was called at the time.
But you stop writing.
Stop writing dissertations about gauge theory.
And so their project was thwarted, basically.
And the first chapter remains intact, but the second chapter wasn't as gauge theory-like as he wanted it to be.
Pia's advisor, Eric Maskin, forced her to write it using just sort of like regular calculus so that it would be more understandable to economists.
And then the third chapter of her dissertation is about something else entirely, because essentially they had to scrap their work on geometric marginalism because Eric Maskin, her advisor, told them that they had to stop.
And the reason they told them they had to stop is because Dale Jorgensen told Eric Maskin that what they were doing was a threat to the Boskin Commission and what the Boskin Commission was trying to pull.
That if this new revolutionary way of calculating the index number problem came to light, then the Boskin Commission wouldn't be able to get away with their nefarious wrongdoings anymore because there would finally be a correct way to solve the index number problem instead of the nonsense that they were trying to pull.
Fact-checking email comes in, right?
Right.
After that conversation.
But to be fair, everything that he said in the server about that conspiracy theory, he has also said on his podcasts or on his appearances on other people's podcasts.
So this isn't like he let us know the name of this person that he wouldn't have let us know otherwise.
So I sent a message to Eric Mask and be like, you know, like Eric Weinstein, I don't know if you know who that is, is going around basically saying that you were told...
You had to shut down Pia's research on gauge theory and economics.
Is this true?
What's your take on this?
My main wrongdoing is that I did describe Eric's claims as incendiary and evidence-less.
So many of the denizens of the portal server found my actions to be really low because I described...
What Eric was doing as being, like, evidence-less and incendiary.
That is a mortal sin.
I suspect your appearance on this podcast will not go down particularly well either.
But the thing that is quite striking about that is that, again, it's similar to geometric unity, right, in that the whole economic system in the U.S. is hanging in the balance of Pia's,
like, PhD thesis.
Quite an achievement for a doctorate student.
The other aspect of it too is that the absence of something is explained by nefarious forces.
In the case of the thesis, it's the absence of going ahead and presenting something on this.
With geometric unity, it's the absence of an actual mathematically fleshed out, properly reported theory.
Yeah, there's usually a big explanation for the lack of something substantial.
So it doesn't really make sense what he's claiming about how the Boskin Commission would be so scared of this discovery.
Because, like I said, this discovery is just...
They didn't create any new index numbers or anything like that.
They just gave some additional perspective or insight into one particular way of solving the index number problem.
And so I asked him that.
I said, you know, why do you say that, like, why did the Boskin Commission have to shut down your research when you were re-deriving the Divizia index, which already existed?
And then his answer to that, he gave two different answers.
One is that Dale Jorgensen just didn't understand gauge theory, and so he saw it and just didn't know what to make of it, and so he just saw that it was about the index number problem, so he just wanted to shut down any possible threat, even though he didn't understand it.
And then another answer that he gave is that Later, when pressed on it more, it's just like, well, you know, what we're doing is in the direction of making things more concrete, so that there's less wiggle room.
So, you know, if everyone just used this index number because we gave this perspective on why it's good, then the Boskin Commission wouldn't be able to have wiggle room in order to, you know, pull this nefarious scheme.
Which is also not true, because even if you use the Divisia Index in all of its continuity in order to solve this problem, there's still other things that you had to adjust for that the Boskin Commission was working on adjusting.
That also doesn't make sense.
In general, it doesn't make sense because a paper by a world-renowned economics expert would not necessarily overturn a commission's finding, right?
Even from somebody with really high standing, there can be multiple perspectives on economics or scientific issues.
And it strikes me as semi-delusional.
It's just imagining that specific papers, In this case, a graduate thesis has the power to undo so much.
If it's anything like $99.9% graduate thesis, nobody would read it except for the supervisor and the student.
Well, this is different because, again, he has the secret juice, which is math.
Most economics is absolutely nonsense because they don't use the specific math that he studied in grad school.
He was asked, okay, so you were working on this during grad school.
I guess this maybe was shut down by the professors at the grad school.
They didn't want you working on too much gauge theory stuff.
They thought it was too complicated for economics, or maybe this Boston Commission stuff is true, whatever.
But your wife now works at an economics think tank, which I believe that she has some control over, and you are Eric Weinstein.
So why don't you guys...
You're constantly talking about how revolutionary this set of ideas is, some of which you've exposed in the Consumer Price Index problem, but some of which have yet to be revealed.
It was shut down before you could write about them by the Harvard staff.
So why don't you just write about it now?
Why don't you just put it out now?
And you can imagine what his answer to this question is.
It's exactly the same answers he gives about why he can't release his Geometric Unity paper.
He's traumatized by academia.
He doesn't trust them with it, that kind of thing.
They don't deserve it now because of the way that they treated him.
That's convenient.
These kind of responses, don't they lend themselves?
I know from seeing people online that there are people who completely buy into his shtick, but it also feels like some of it must become a little bit transparent if you spend a significant amount of time invested on it.
It feels like there's only so many times someone can say, I would show you that, but you're not ready yet before you kind of start doubting if there's anything actually there.
I would say there's a little bit of a split in the community about the reactions to this.
So I think there are a good number of people in the community who do sort of see, oh, he said he was going to release a paper about geometric unity, and then he didn't, and then he's making all these excuses why he can't, but why doesn't he just do it?
He should really put up or shut up.
There are some people in the community who have that position.
I would like to think that some of that is due to me going around and screaming at everyone about it, but I think most of them would come to that conclusion on their own anyway.
There's also just, like, I'm constantly amazed that there's a significant number of people, especially in the more, like, devoted, I would say, like, cultish sect of the people who are on that server, who just literally believe him.
They just say, like, well, you heard him.
He's traumatized by academia.
Have you heard the way they treated him?
Or they'll often, they're just like, well, he's working on it.
He's going to release it.
He's working on it.
Which is not what he says.
But that's their sort of rationalization.
I think related to this, Dan, you mentioned in the DMs for me that there was at one point a separate Discord set up just for experts, right?
Or people with relevant expertise.
But it didn't go the way it was supposed to.
Yeah.
So I guess...
So Eric likes to talk about how...
You know, he wants people to ask more technical questions.
So oftentimes on podcasts that he's on, like if there's people super chatting in the questions, people ask a bunch of sort of fluffy questions about life or something.
And then sometimes he'll very aggressively say, you know, come on, I want to get some real questions.
Why don't we get some technical questions about geometric unity?
And then...
Almost nobody listening has any kind of technical expertise that would allow them to ask an intelligent question about it.
So they're just like, tell us more about the dimensions, Eric.
And then he loves that.
His favorite thing to do is to give fluffy, layman-esque, but kind of metaphorical answers to questions about what's going on with geometric unity.
So that's his favorite thing to do.
But he's always talking about how what he's really looking for is someone who really knows what they're talking about to ask him really technical questions because he wants to go and dig into the details.
I don't know why a podcast would ever be the right...
A podcast for general audience would ever be the right menu for that.
How dare you, Dan?
How dare you discourage podcasts and their ability to...
True.
Well, we're going to get...
On this podcast, we're going to get into the real nitty-gritty details of my theory of everything.
So he started this server that was for experts only, which I guess is more of a move than I would expect towards him actually trying to get expert feedback.
So it makes me think that he really does think that what he wants is expert feedback, but I don't believe that's what he really wants.
So he started this server.
So one of the people on this server was the PhD theoretical physics guy.
And one of the people on this server was...
I think right now he's a postdoc.
No, sorry.
He has a PhD in math.
And it's on a subject...
That is very intimately related to something that Eric Weinstein claims.
Eric Weinstein claims that he discovered the Cyberg-Witten equations when he was a PhD student in math, but that his professors told him to stop working on that because it wasn't interesting.
And then, of course, later it became a big thing.
The thing that I find interesting is there seems to be a contradiction there.
He says that he's really interested in technical questions to be dealing with the actual hard stuff.
At the same time, he won't write stuff down, won't publish papers, and when a physicist, as you said, actually does ask him for some technical details, for instance, the Lagrangian associated with his theory, then he completely dismisses it and rebuts it.
So there seems to be a contradiction there.
There is a problem that Eric encounters a lot, that he makes grandiose discoveries that are then suppressed by him and his immediate family seem to have...
A very unfortunate time of meeting these suppression indexes.
It's odd.
Right.
So this guy who has a PhD in math, you know, he came on the server.
He was kind of an Eric fan.
He was interested.
Like, he wasn't an Eric skeptic, really, I don't think, when he first came on.
But he came on the server basically to ask Eric questions about this Cyborg-Witten thing because he had done his thesis on the Cyborg-Witten equations.
So, you know, Eric is in the chat answering questions.
And then this guy, he asked him...
Like, question about how he discovered the Cyborg-Witten equations.
Eric gives a sort of poetic answer, lots of metaphors, doesn't really say anything.
And then he asks a question that's something like, you know, how did you discover the flipped sign in the Cyborg-Witten equations?
It's something that, I guess, anyone who studied the Cyborg-Witten equations would know that it has this sort of interesting nuance that's kind of counterintuitive.
So he asked Eric, you know, like, when you were discovering the Cyborg-Witten equations, how did you discover this interesting aspect of it?
The answer that Eric gave convinced him that he didn't really have any idea what this mathematician was talking about.
Eric just kind of waffled in response and again gave kind of a poetic answer that didn't really touch on it at all.
So he at that point was kind of convinced that Eric's claim is almost certainly not true as stated.
And then after Eric got offline that night...
This mathematician was just excoriated by the community for having said things like, well, I think our default position should be that we're skeptical that geometric unity is true, so we should first not believe it and then see if there's evidence to believe it.
And the community did not like that approach.
They were saying, you know, that's ridiculous.
Why would you think that Eric would lie about this?
Eric doesn't lie.
That kind of thing.
So basically, he created this server with the more expert people on it, and I think he went on it at most twice.
Basically, the perception of both the mathematician and the physicist is that Eric will not be in a room with them anymore.
Whenever they're on the server, Eric leaves, and Eric will not come on the server when they're there.
And they've tried to have conversations with Eric since then, and they're just not able to.
So they both believe Eric is essentially avoiding them.
On his own Discord.
There's something kind of funny about that.
This is all terribly...
Suggestive, isn't it?
Very suggestive.
Yeah, so given your involvement with the Discord and Eric's community and your kind of contrarian role there, self-admitted, which I respect for various reasons, how do you view Eric in terms of,
Is he someone to be concerned about or is he a harmless person peddling a little bit of silly conspiracy theories?
Do you think there's actually any harm that he does or it's all, you know, esoteric mathematical exaggerations and whatnot?
So, I think with Jordan Peterson, I felt more like there was a real problem.
I felt what Jordan Peterson was doing was dressing up bigotry against trans people in particular in a grand narrative about his way of seeing the world.
He had these really, really passionate followers because he was able to talk in a way that sounded so profound.
It was such a deeply interesting, new, profound way of viewing the world.
To me, that's just irritating.
I feel like they're so full of crap.
But with Jordan Peterson, I felt like it was bad because he also had, I think, a pretty harmful political message going along with it.
With Eric, his political messages are this diffuse conspiratorial anti-establishmentism, which I just think is not particularly harmful because it's so unfocused.
Political positions are just about why he has deeper insight into how the system works than everybody else.
His political take on everything is just about how everything is really about the way that these two sides are fighting.
But actually, I have the deeper insight, which is that all of this is part of a larger problem, which is Eric's anti-disc stuff.
But in terms of his actual bewitching of his followers, I...
I don't know.
I haven't seen any followers who are so possessed that I feel like it's particularly harming their lives.
And if anything, it just sort of encourages people to take up a very short-term hobby in trying to learn theoretical physics and then give it up after a week.
Yeah, that doesn't sound too bad, does it?
No, and it echoes, Matt, the kind of point you made.
From your perspective, the main thing that Eric wants to communicate with, even with his kind of political conspiracies and whatnot, is how insightful he is.
Roller, any specific position which you might hold matter in.
Yeah, exactly.
I said something similar, Dan, which was that his main agenda is about him, that the politics or the social impacts is kind of all over the place.
And as you said quite well, I think if there's harm involved, it's really just promoting a general conspiratorial worldview, which endorsing one conspiracy theory kind of leads to another one and another one.
It's a bit of a domino effect.
So, yeah.
It's like the real point of Brett Weinstein conspiracy with Carol Greider is not that medical testing is deeply compromised.
It's that Brett is a genius.
That's really the point of that story.
It's not like, oh, you guys need to go out now and fix the pharmaceutical industry.
It's just like, oh, you guys should know that Brett is a super genius.
When it comes to his tweets that are sort of political, that are like, this is wrong with the establishment, his politics are so unfocused and non-specific that it's never really about the political issue that he's talking about, because he doesn't have any proposed solutions or actual policy desires.
It's really just about him.
And being smart and how the problems with the world are all related to bad things that happened to him in his life and how he was rejected from academia.
Yeah, and I would say I share both of your views about the relative impact for most people.
Eric is just a podcaster they listen to, right?
And maybe some people have a slightly too much of an interest in his ideas or too much of an investment, but it's not that big of a deal.
The only part that maybe I'm a little bit more concerned about is that Eric has a big audience, right?
I'm not talking about the people on the Discord.
I just mean in general, he's got like a popular podcast and, you know, half a million followers or whatever.
He does have a habit of promoting or potentially laundering some people that I would consider more harmful, like Mike Cernovich or what's his name?
James O 'Keefe?
Yeah, James.
James O 'Keefe.
He had James O 'Keefe on his podcast, and the entire podcast was about how he's going to have a really contentious conversation with James O 'Keefe.
And his whole issue with James O 'Keefe is that he thinks James O 'Keefe is too mean because his videos cause people to get fired.
It's not about that James O 'Keefe is like...
I don't understand the point of doing that unless you're trying to launder James O 'Keefe's ideas.
Why?
Yeah, I mean, Peter Thiel certainly sees something in Eric.
That's why he's hired him.
And Thiel is somebody, I think, of a much more nefarious, openly nefarious agenda.
But that interview with O 'Keefe, to me, was a really good example that if you just editorialize yourself as doing a hard-hinting interview, like if we were doing this interview and we kept saying, look, Dan, you know...
I know we're pushing you hard here, but I think it's important that people get these kind of critical engagements with people with different opinions.
That's the kind of thing he says while he's agreeing almost entirely.
I've never heard something presented as a hard-hitting interview where they called the other person heroic so many times.
I mean, the most hard-hitting interviews he's had is with Agnes Callard, who...
Derek would suggest that she didn't think what happened to his brother was such a big deal.
That really pissed him off.
That was like the worst.
So my last question for you, Dan, is stepping back a bit and looking at your experience with the Jordan Peterson community and also Eric Weinstein's community.
Just wondering if you could...
Comment on what your sense is of those social dynamics.
There were some hints of emotional manipulation or emotional control.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I just want to ask you, how would you describe the common features of those social dynamics between the group and the leader?
With Jordan Peterson, I felt like there was much more people really felt like he was changing their lives, that he had given them new purpose, and that they felt that they're sort of I don't know.
I don't think it was particularly parasocial, but that their relationship with him and their absorbing his content was really making a difference for them, and that was a fundamental part of their lives.
And it seemed like they were forming their identity around it a little bit.
Which, to me, I don't think is indicative of dangerously cult-like behavior.
I just think it just makes them into annoying people who go around, and when you talk to them, you can tell that they're Jordan Peterson fans, because they have their Jordan Peterson-isms and stuff.
With Eric, I don't think many people fashion their lives in a way that they feel like is deeply, you know, because Eric, like Eric Weinstein has shown them a new
They both, I think, are super attractive to people, almost exclusively because of the way that they talk.
They both have a way of talking that's just enrapturing and is fascinating, and I think it's just so interesting to me.
I wish that I could emulate it, not because I want to build a cult following or anything, but just because they both have different techniques for doing it.
And I do think Eric is
good at speaking in a sort of metaphorical way, using analogies, and roping in a ton of concepts into the things that he says.
It makes me think that he sits around it.
Every time he encounters a new concept in life and he's kind of a curious person, he thinks about that concept and he puts it in the bank as something he can use as a metaphor later.
And he's not even that repetitive with the metaphors that he uses.
He'll always surprise us with new things.
this is like someone learning to play the guitar, and this is like someone drafting on a bicycle, and this is like, or do you know about the concept of, and he draws from all of these different areas of science and stuff that he has a cursory understanding of, but the main use that it has
I think it just has this effect of making everything that you say sound really profound.
Everything you say isn't just a factoid or an opinion.
It's just kind of like...
It's a concept that really brings different concepts in life together.
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting reflection because in psychology, we distinguish between intuitive styles of thinking, which is metaphorical, and work through making those connections between diverse ideas.
Intuitive thinking is very satisfying because it doesn't take a lot of effort to...
To grasp a concept that's been intuitively communicated in those ways you're describing, whereas analytical thinking is a lot more work and a lot less satisfying.
So, you know, obviously that style of speaking, and both JBP and Eric Weinstein are excellent speakers.
Yeah, so yeah, I really think that's an interesting reflection about those commonalities.
Yeah, and Dan, I could continue.
Talking to you all day about this, because I think you genuinely also have actual, aside from your experience in the community, you've got good insight on the kind of guru figures that we cover, because a lot of the points you're saying are very similar to things that we observe week in and week out.
One last point to make, since time is...
Yeah, I was having a conversation with Eric on the server that time that I was asking him about geometric marginalism.
And he kept, you know, he could tell that I was asking him kind of You know, probing questions.
And I was trying to get at something maybe he had done wrong or claimed too much about.
So every time I would ask a question, he would pause and he would respond by saying, thank you for honoring me with that question.
And then he would continue to go on to try to answer it.
So I made a song called Thank You For Honoring Me, where afterwards, you know, he was refusing to come on the server.
And he, you know, he, you know, all the other members of the server, many of whom I'm friends with, were asking me to apologize to him.
So I made an apology video so I can link it to you guys.
I will say it's very good.
Like, I enjoyed the song.
I don't know if you listened to it, Matt, but we'll put it in the link.
But you're actually, you know, good.
Yeah, I did listen to it.
I enjoyed it a lot.
So, yeah, we'll definitely link to that.
Enjoy the song, everybody.
Dan, thank you very much for coming on and having this long conversation.
Sorry, I need to cut short because of work commitments and those kind of annoying things.
But yeah, thanks for coming on a lot.
Yeah, anytime.
I'm hoping to find more thought leaders too.
Yeah, you might want to rethink some of your life choices there, Dad, because I think I'm spending too much of my life doing the same.
But yeah, no, thanks again.
I completely disagree with Matt.
Keep doing what you're doing and fight the good side.
